Benning’s speech at the Virginia Convention was the culmination of his decade-long fight to break apart the United States and create a southern slave republic. Benning told the Virginians that Georgia seceded for only one reason, “a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.” Virginia should be worried, even terrified that the “black Republican party of the North” embraced “a sentiment of hatred to slavery as extreme as hatred can exist.”
