John Avery Benton: The Life of a Civil War Veteran Transformed by the Greatness of His Time

By Nicholas F. Benton

This is the remarkable story of John Avery Benton (1831-1886), a Wisconsin farmer who enlisted in the Union Army in August 1862 to fight for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery, and who fought for three years with the 32nd Wisconsin regiment, coming under General Sherman’s leadership during the siege of Atlanta, the March to the Sea and the march north through the Carolinas before the final Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Virginia in 1865. His vital task throughout the war was to coordinate the supply lines to his regiment.

He was part of the Grand Review march up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in May 1865. Returning to his farm, he soon realized that the terrible on-going ravages of the Civil War on widows, orphans and maimed soldiers lacked the kind of social safety nets that we have today and relied on voluntary religious service.

So he entered the ministry, serving a mission of a Presbyterian Church in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, as a chaplain of the Waupun State Prison and then of a church he founded himself in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan before his maverick ministry was rejected by a formal body of the Presbyterian Church in Michigan.

He succumbed to a tuberculosis infection he contracted during the war and died at age 56 in 1886.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicholas F. Benton
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005295431

Nicholas F. Benton

Nicholas F. Benton is a 1969 graduate of the Pacific School of Religion who became an activist in the early gay liberation movement, Benton has been since 1990 the founder, owner, editor and national affairs commentator of the weekly Falls Church News-Press (fcnp.com), widely recognized as the most progressive general interest newspaper in Virginia located inside the D.C. Beltway—coincidentally on grounds traversed by his great-great grandfather during the Civil War.

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Introduction to this New Edition

September 2020

This new edition of the biography I originally researched and wrote in 1985 is being published in the extraordinary year of 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic, a highly-contentious U.S. presidential election and threat of insurrection against democratic institutions, and in the wake of a series of high-profile cases of police violence the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. These developments make the publication of this new edition about my great great grandfather’s life and times more poignant and relevant than ever as it recalls another era of when America faced an insurrection and ended the heinous practice of slavery. Then, it took the prosecution of a terrible Civil War to end the rebellion and most egregious oppression of Black people. As of this writing, we remain unsure of what it will take to preserve and move democracy and equality forward in this present era.

There has been so much new genealogical information overall provided in the years since 1985 when the first edition of this was completed that can fill out so much more than I was able to include in that first edition. But it is not the purpose of this work to present a complete genealogy but to recognize and fill out the life of one person. Needless to say, I am eager to learn more information about John Avery Benton and the lives he touched from any and all who have contributed to and mined more recent historical research.

I include as an Appendix in this edition the latest of my weekly columns, entitled, The Civil War, Then and Now, published in my newspaper, the Falls Church News-Press, September 24, 2020, for further context.

• •

How Solemn As One by One

by Walt Whitman

(Washington, D.C. 1865)

How solemn as one by one

As the ranks returning worn and sweaty, as the men file by where I stand,

As the faces the marks appear, as I glance at the faces studying the marks,

(As I glance upward out of this page studying you, dear friend, whoever you are.)

How solemn the thought of my whispering soul to each in the ranks, and to you.

I see behind each mark that wonder a kindred soul,

O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,

Not the bayonet stab what you really are,

The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,

Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,

Nor the bayonet stab, O friend.

So, the great poet Walt Whitman saw my great great grandfather’s kindred soul (and mine and ours now), as he marched at the end of the Civil War, worn and sweaty, in the Grand Review of the Armies of returning Union soldiers up Pennsylvania Avenue on May 23, 1865, just over a month after the April 9th surrender of the Confederate forces at Appomattox, Virginia and the April 13th assassination of President Lincoln. John Avery Benton (1835-1885), my great-great grandfather, was part of Union Gen. William Sherman’s Army of Georgia that conducted the siege of Atlanta and the March to the Sea to Savannah prior to turning north through the Carolinas. For four years of the Civil War to preserve the Union, after enlisting, he served as the cook for the 33rd Wisconsin regiment that remained intact for the whole war.

After the war, in an era when almost no social safety nets save for church and other private charitable causes existed for the widows, children and maimed surviving soldiers of the war that claimed over 600,000 lives, John Avery Benton was called to the service of his fellows in that enormously trying time, untrained but providing a mission outpost in the area of the farm he and his family ran before the war, and then becoming a chaplain at the Waupun State Prison, before moving in his last years to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to found his own church, the Benton Presbyterian Church, before dying at age 56 of tuberculosis contracted in the war.

He was my father’s great grandfather, yet growing up neither my father nor I knew almost anything about him. It was only because of my own research, begun in earnest when I moved