He is arguably the most famous unknown man in Augusta.
Berry Benson was an ordinary man who lived a extraordinary life, and while he never sought fame, he remains famous in Augusta even if most people today could not draw his name out of a photo lineup.
Benson not only survived most of the infamous battles of the Civil War, he returned to Augusta to become a champion of civil rights and is credited with exposing international con-man Carlos Ponzi, known as the father of the infamous “Ponzi Scheme.”
Benson’s story begins with his birth in 1843 across the Savannah in Hamburg, S.C. Aside from following his father on a journey west during the Gold Rush, a trip that would not pan out for the elder Benson, Berry Benson spent most of his childhood there.
It is important to note that Hamburg at the time, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was a free Black city and most of Benson’s childhood friends, if not all of them, would have been Black. These associations would have an impact on him later in adulthood.
When Berry was a lad of 17, South Carolina seceded from the Union. Benson traveled to Charleston with friends, armed with his journal, intent on watching and recording the events that were quickly unfolding. Benson was on hand to watch the bombardment of Fort Sumter and ended up manning one of the weapons in the opening battle of the Civil War.
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Much like the soldiers depicted in the movie All Quiet On The Western Front, Benson and his youthful pals were caught up in the zeal and excitement of action and joined up for what they were told would be a short war against the “aggressive North.”
Like the European soldiers in World War I, young Benson didn’t really understand the politics that led to the war and, instead, thought of it as just an adventure. Benson made it very clear throughout his life that he was not fighting to preserve slavery but rather fighting on behalf of his homeland.
At 18, Benson was made a corporal in the Confederate Army and was used as both a scout and sharpshooter, or in modern terminology a sniper. He also kept his journal nearby and recorded the events he witnessed in his downtime.
According to his book, “Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter,” Benson seemed to always find himself in the thick of the action.
Benson was present at the Seven Days Battles, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg and Antietam.
At Chancellorsville, Benson was there when Confederate troops mistook General Stonewall Jackson’s party for Union troops and fired on the unit, fatally wounding the famous general. Benson dutifully recorded the event in his journal.
As the Confederates moved to secure a concise victory at Chancellorsville the next day, Benson was shot in the leg, taking him out of action temporarily.
After convalescing in Augusta, Benson returned to the field. At Spotsylvania, Benson was captured while on a scouting mission; however, he would not be in captivity long. Two days after his capture, Benson waited until his guards weren’t looking, dove into the Chesapeake River and swam two miles to freedom.
Freedom wouldn’t last long as Benson was captured again shortly thereafter and again, he wouldn’t be in captivity for long even though he was housed at the newly built POW camp at Elmira. Benson and his fellow prisoners managed to dig a 65-foot-long tunnel and escaped.
Somehow, Benson managed to hang onto his journal that later became the basis of his book.
One reason Benson’s book became so famous is because it starts with all of the rabid enthusiasm of a teenage soldier and chronicles the metamorphosis from the boy to a battle-hardened man.
Benson was keen to describe not only the rush of victory, but the suffering and death he witnessed.
Like modern kids who play violent video games, the war was but an adventure at first for Benson, but he describes the struggle within himself when he put his sniper skills to the test on a real human being, writing on page 28:
“I shall never cease to regret the eagerness on our part that did not spare such a brave man – although I still believe it was the duty of everyone of us to kill that particular man (for he was the most tremendous enemy we had).”
Benson found himself in a position where he had to kill or be killed himself.
Thousands of soldiers from both sides of the war were felled not by bullets, but by disease and malnutrition. Most common soldiers subsisted on something called “hardtack,” a thin cracker made from flour, water and salt. Hardtack had a tendency to grow moldy and attract insects, leading the troops to call the nasty rations “worm castles.”
Benson recorded outbreaks of measles and mumps, the constant fight against body lice and an unknown ailment he called “Camp-itch” that nearly drove the men mad.
After the war, Benson settled back in Augusta where he became an accountant, got married and fathered six children.
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Benson might have thought that his days of glory were over, but they were not by far.
After the success of his book, the Ladies Memorial Association used Benson’s likeness as the figure on top of the Confederate Memorial in Augusta which was erected in 1878. Benson was chosen because he had come to represent the common man.
Benson found himself quite adept at numbers, patenting his “Zero System” which sold nationally, according to the Georgia Encyclopedia.
While working as an accountant for the local mills, Benson took particular interest in the welfare of the workers, arbitrating on their behalf and siding with them during the textile strike of 1898, according to the late Augusta historian Ed Cashin.
The Georgia Encyclopedia also notes that Benson tried to aid poor black families. Not only did he give them his time and money, he also experimented with growing different species of mushrooms that could be cultivated easily and eaten when other food supplies were low.
Benson used his notoriety to argue the case in favor of freeing Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta convicted of murdering a 13 year-old worker. Benson wrote op-eds in newspapers across the nation decrying antisemitism and arguing that Frank was convicted based upon the lies of a janitor.
Despite the sentence being commuted from death to life imprisonment, Frank was kidnapped from his Marietta, Ga. cell in 1915 by an armed mob and murdered in what would be known as one of the worst lynchings in the country until the nation was shocked and horrified at the murder of Emmitt Till decades later.
Yet, that is still not the end of Benson’s story. Always looking to crack a code even in his elderly years, the crafty numbers cruncher alerted the federal government that varying exchange rates between currencies could be manipulated to conduct fraud.
According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he “adopted” five French orphans at the end of World War I
“In exchanging dollars for francs during these proceedings he noticed that a person could buy francs cheaply in France and sell them at the official rate in the United States. In November 1919 he informed the U.S. attorney general that unscrupulous persons might take advantage of this discrepancy but was assured that such a thing would not happen. The following month, however, Carlos Ponzi, an Italian immigrant with a criminal record, began to exploit the difference in exchange rates by opening a bank in Boston, Massachusetts, and attracting millions of dollars from depositors hoping to get rich quickly,” the encyclopedia reported.
Benson responded to the rebuff by providing evidence against Carlos Ponzi, a banker in Massachusetts. Ponzi, now known as the “father of the Ponzi Scheme,” was arrested and convicted using evidence provided by Benson. Augusta newspapers credited him with providing the initial information that solved the first “Ponzi scheme.”
…And that is something you might not have known
