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

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.