(March 12, 2020) In the four-minute video below Shelby Foote reads from the reminisces of Private Berry Benson who joined the Confederate Army at age seventeen three months before Fort Sumter and served with Lee’s army through Appomattox. After the war he became a leading Augusta, Georgia citizen where he made social contributions ahead of his time and place. He also inspired the infantryman figure atop the city’s oldest Confederate monument. Presently Wikipedia editors and other critics falsely accuse the monument of being racially inspired and some want to tear it down.
Foote’s reading of Benson’s quote prompted me to search for other Civll War authors who referenced it. Unsurprisingly, academic historians ignore it, which was a sure sign that I needed to learn more about Benson. I discovered that he became a living legend during his time from 1843 to 1923, fully meriting the honor of all Americans.
He grew-up in Hamburg, South Carolina across the Savannah River from Augusta. Together with his fifteen-year-old brother, Blackwood, he mustered into the First South Carolina Regiment in Charleston. There Benson helped man a battery during the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. Afterward, the two boys accompanied the regiment to Virginia. They fought at the Seven Days Battles, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, and Fredericksburg. They participated in Jackson’s secret march at Chancellorsville that rolled-up the Union right flank on May 2, 1863 until darkness fell. The next morning Berry was crippled by a wound during attacks that completed the Confederate victory. He returned to Augusta to recuperate, causing him to miss the Battle of Gettysburg but enabling him to meet Jeannie Oliver, who would become his wife.
Berry rejoined Lee’s army in time for the Battle of the Wilderness and next fought in the “Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania. Although a skilled scout, he was captured on one mission and sent to military prison at Point Lookout, Maryland. The site is presently a Federal Park which has prohibited the display of Confederate symbols since 1998. Fortunately, Berry escaped by swimming two miles to Virginia across Chesapeake Bay. Recaptured in Union-occupied Virginia he was sent to a new prison camp at Elmira, New York. Together with other prisoners, Berry completed a sixty-five-foot-long tunnel to escape Elmira and eventually rejoin his regiment.
He was temporarily furloughed to Augusta in the fall of 1864 but returned to his regiment in Petersburg, Virginia in January 1865 where he was put into a sharpshooters unit. When Lee decided to surrender at Appomattox, he and brother Blackwood left to join General Joe Johnston in North Carolina. Since Johnston was planning to surrender when they arrived the youths went home still armed with their rifles.
Berry married Jeannie Oliver in 1868, and they had six children. After working several years as a cotton broker he became an Augusta accountant. His wife and daughters were all fine pianists. One daughter studied violin in New York and became a concert performer.
Although Benson audited books for the local mills, he was sympathetic to the needs of workers. In 1898 he served as an arbitrator to help end a local textile strike. In order to help find an inexpensive and available food supply for the poor black families he experimented with breeding mushrooms. Benson also loved solving puzzles and in 1896 solved a supposedly unbreakable French cypher code. That led to an offer to help the U. S Government break Spanish codes during the Spanish American War, which he declined. As explained in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he also fought anti-semitism in a high profile murder case dating from 1913.
Benson achieved national recognition with his defense of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, in one of Georgia’s most notorious instances of anti-Semitism. Frank was convicted, largely on the testimony of a janitor with a previous prison record, of murdering a thirteen-year-old factory worker in Atlanta. Benson noticed discrepancies in the janitor’s testimony and eventually convinced the janitor’s lawyer that his client had lied on the witness stand. Benson publicized his arguments in newspapers across the country and in a self-published pamphlet exonerating Frank. His findings were partially instrumental in persuading Governor John M. Slaton to commute Frank’s death sentence to life in prison. Tragically, however, Frank was lynched in 1915.
At age seventy-four Berry marched with his never-surrendered rifle together with the the Georgia Confederate Veterans Battalion in a 1917 review before President Woodrow Wilson, which was captured on newsreel. During World War I he adopted five European war-orphans and persuaded friends to adopt another 160. Berry remained active, dying unexpectedly and quickly at age seventy-nine in 1923.
Younger brother Blackwood became an author and wrote novels such as Who Goes There?
Although the usual suspects want to tear down Augusta’s Confederate monument partially inspired by Berry, it should be noted that among the contributors to the $21,000 fund raised to erect the 76-foot tall monument in 1877 was the all-black Colored Cotton States Minstrels who provided a benefit performance.
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The Confederacy at Flood Tide by Philip Leigh
Trading With the Enemy by Philip Leigh
Lee’s Lost Dispatch & Other Civil War Controversies by Philip Leigh
Southern Reconstruction by Philip Leigh
U. S. Grant’s Failed Presidency by Philip Leigh