History

Taller Than the City He Loved

Berry Benson was considered the ideal icon for Victorian Augusta - a good citizen, businessman, literary figure. But in the latter part of his life, the Civil War hero's personal philosophy took a rather interesting turn.

by David Foster

If Victorian Augusta had an icon, a person the whole community could pretty much agree personified their positive view of the area and its culture, one could easily bet Berry Benson was that icon.

By the time of his death in 1923, Benson had achieved just about everything for which a Victorian could hope: a good reputation as citizen and businessman, national literary recognition, some wealth, a grand family and 80 years of generally healthy life. And none of that includes being a genuine, one-hundred-percent war hero and an enemy of Augusta's big businessmen in favor of striking mill workers.

Or as one wag put it: "Berry Benson is scared of neither battle nor poem." Some others, however, might claimÑwere he not so popular for his war experiencesÑthat he was a bit, uh, eccentric, especially during his last 30 years when he made an about face on religion and social causes. Not only did he change his opinions, but he also both preached and practiced his newfound enlightenment. More on that later.

Of all Augusta's historic icons, Benson is certainly the most visible. That's his likeness at the zenith of the Confederate Monument on Broad Street. He was chosen in 1873 to pose for the place of honor (notice the four generals, including the venerated Robert E. Lee, are positioned below him) to represent all the enlisted men from Richmond County who fought during the Civil War, most especially those who died.

Berry Benson was born in 1843 in the village of Hamburg just across the 5th Street Bridge in South Carolina. He was raised in a God-fearing family, spent his serious time at his studies, doing best in spelling and mathematics. When not in school he and his chums would roam the river bottoms and upland fields hunting and fishing, if they weren't in Augusta or Hamburg enjoying the vicissitudes of schoolboy mischief-making while at the same time making a remarkable number of friends on both sides of the river.

He attended a private academy in Augusta, liked his primary teacher, enjoyed the academic part of his development years and generally stayed out of trouble, though he did have a wink or two for the young ladies and enjoyed their company. From the day Berry Benson was born, the big story in the United States was the differences between the North and South, primarily over, depending on your point of view, states rights and/or slavery. A curious young man, Benson kept abreast of the political currents that wove through not just the Augusta area, but the nation. He was, at age 17, on the eve of the great national conflict, a staunch Southern sympathizer. In January 1861, some three months before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, Benson and his younger brother, Blackwood, joined the South Carolina militia and marched off to Charleston where they would participate in the opening of the war.

They would march home during the early months of their fifth year as Confederate soldiers, having still not surrendered and still carrying their Confederate- issue muskets.

For the first decade following the war, Benson, like most other Confederate enlisted men, was busier building a new life and trying to forget losing the war than concerning himself with nostalgia for the campgrounds of yore. He married Miss Jeanie Oliver and she would ultimately bear him six children, four daughters and two sons.

To provide for his expanding family, Benson embarked on an accounting career, inventing what would become the wildly popular "Zero System of Automatic Detection and Arrest of Errors," a bookkeeping formula for checking accounting computations. He sold "the system" nationwide on the basis that each customer use it in secrecy so he could continue to sell it. Apparently most did.

By the mid-1870s, however, nostalgia for the war years was pulling on the conscience of the entire nation. Veterans north and south, officers and enlisted men, began writing voluminously about the old campaigns, some in the newspapers and magazines while others wrote books. Still others wrote war "diaries" for their children and in 1876 Berry Benson recorded his narrative for his children, entitled Berry Benson's Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter, which was published almost a century later by the University of Georgia Press in 1960 as part of the Civil War centennial observation.

But as you read his "war book," you quickly learn the 17-year-old recruit matured well beyond his physical years while serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. Much of that serviceÑand most of his fame as a heroÑcame from his time during 1864 as a prisoner of war, first at Point Lookout Prison in coastal Maryland and later in the hellhole of Elmira, N.Y., the "Andersonville of the North." He escaped from both prisons.

I leave it to Berry Benson's memoir to tell you the details of his captures and escapes. The book is well worth reading for any history buff. But what comes from his (literal) escapades is Berry Benson's almost incredible sense of honor and duty. True, he was certainly not alone in those feelings, but far from the majority even during an era when honor and duty were the watchwords of a man's reputation.

He swam away from Point Lookout alone; at Elmira, just over the New York line from Pennsylvania, he escaped through a hand-dug tunnel with 10 other prisoners. The other nine hightailed it for Canada. Berry Benson, as he had from Point Lookout, headed south, looking to rejoin his outfit and whip the Yankee scourge.

And in his mind, it was a scourge, indeed, worse than scourge, a pestilence. Or as he wrote to The Augusta Chronicle in 1898 to support the United States troops at Augusta's Camp McKenzie who had donated bread to striking mill workers: "I never wore a blue uniform in my life, not even when cold, clad in thin gray rags, carloads of new blue uniforms fell into our hands to be worn for the taking, but if big-hearted General Gobin (the commander at Camp McKenzie) will detail one of his men to lend me his cap I will put it on and salute him." The man who wrote that letter was, as Southerners might say, "a whole nother" Berry Benson.

By the 1890s, entire generations of young Augustans had come up with a John Wayne idea of Berry Benson, the city's most famous and accomplished warrior, hands down. During the war he had been a sharpshooter and scout (doing the latter is what got him captured), fought in many sanguinary battles, escaped alone from the most severe Yankee prison camps. He loved to hunt and fish and tramp the woods around Augusta.

Then one day Berry Benson became a theosophist. Pacifism, "moral" vegetarianism and reincarnation became the guideposts of his life. He would not knowingly harm any animal and became an animal rights activist almost a century before such thinking became vogue. On Sunday mornings he would take large numbers of young people on hikes in the "cathedral of nature" much to the chagrin of local ministers.

Such a lifestyle choice would raise eyebrows in 2004 Bible Belt Augusta, but in 1890 such behavior was the basest of radical. But nobody paid much mind to Berry Benson's new peculiar ways and beliefs. He was, after all, Berry Benson, war hero.

For several years he had been contributing his "Outlines" to the popular Century magazine, which was something like the Life magazine of the late 19th century. In those days, most articles were very long, but Berry Benson's were very short, often little life parables not more than five or six lines long. He wrote with the best of that era: Lew Wallace, Mark Twain, Sidney Lanier and Robert Browning, among many others. And even today you can do an Internet search of Berry Benson and find his "Outlines." Reading them will tell you what a wonderful mind this man had.

Reading The Augusta Chronicle will tell you the lengths he would reach to support a sense of fair play for any underdog, from a wild goose he suggested the finder set free (based on his own imprisonment), to the plight of the striking mill workers, to the injustice of the conviction and later lynching of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, an Atlanta pencil factory worker.

At his funeral, people spoke very kind words about Berry Benson, most playing up his war record and glossing over his theosophist beliefs.

There is no doubt Berry Benson was a genius and a good and decent man, perhaps a little bigger than provincial Augusta. One thing for sure, to this day, as he squints toward the east, forever captured in Italian marble, he certainly continues to tower over it.