Georgia W. Benton is an American schoolteacher, businesswoman, and historian. In 2013, she became the first African-American member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Georgia.
Benton was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia. She grew up during racial segregation. [1] Her great-grandfather, George W. Washington, was an enslaved man from Sumter, South Carolina who served as a body servant to his enslaver's son, Lieutenant William Alexander McQueen, from 1862 to the last days of the American Civil War, [2] seeing the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the Siege of Petersburg. [2] As a child, she paid annual visits to her great-grandfather's gravesite, a four-foot high obelisk in Walker Cemetery. [2] [1]
As a young woman, she was involved in the Civil rights movement in Port Wentworth, Georgia. [3]
Benton worked as a mathematics teacher in the Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools System. [2] She taught in Chatham and Effingham County schools for over thirty years. [4] After retiring from teaching, she opened a tax and accounting service. [2]
Benton is a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children. [4] She is also the historian for First Bryan Baptist Church. [5]
In 2013, Benton applied to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a lineage society that promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause narrative, submitting proof of her lineage to Washington and proof of his military service using her family bible, his gravestone, birth records, marriage records, death records, and census records. [2] [6] Her application was accepted in October 2013, making her the first African-American member of the Savannah Chapter and the only African-American member in the Georgia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. [2] [1] She was inducted into the organization's Second Savannah Chapter by the chapter's president, Elizabeth Piechocinski, on December 14, 2013, during a Christmas luncheon. [3] [7]
Benton lives in Savannah, Georgia and has five children. [4] She is Baptist and attends First Bryan Baptist Church. [5]
The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 5, 1865. The Confederacy was composed of eleven U.S. states that declared secession; South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina; they warred against the United States during the American Civil War.
The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a patriot of the American Revolutionary War. A non-profit group, the organization promotes education and patriotism. Its membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of soldiers or others of the American Revolution era who aided the revolution and its subsequent war. Applicants must be at least 18 years of age and have a birth certificate indicating that their gender is female. DAR has over 190,000 current members in the United States and other countries. The organization's motto is "God, Home, and Country".
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
CSS Nashville was a brig-rigged, side-paddle-wheel passenger steamer that served with the Confederate Navy during the Civil War.
Francis S. Bartow was a licensed attorney turned politician, who served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and became a political leader of the Confederate States of America. Bartow was also a colonel in the Georgia Militia commanding the 21st Oglethorpe Light Infantry during the early months of the American Civil War. Bartow was a delegate from Georgia's 1st congressional district to the Southern Convention in Montgomery, Alabama becoming an inaugurating member of the Confederate Provisional Congress—leading efforts to prepare local forces in the aftermath of secession, protracting into The American Civil War of 1861–65.
The Cornerstone Speech, also known as the Cornerstone Address, was an oration given by Alexander H. Stephens, acting Vice President of the Confederate States of America, at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861.
Susie King Taylor was an American nurse, educator and memoirist. She is known for being the first African-American nurse during the American Civil War. Beyond just her aptitude in nursing the wounded of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Taylor was the first Black woman to self-publish her memoirs. She was the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers. She was also an educator to formerly bonded Black people in the Reconstruction-era South by opening various schools in Georgia. Taylor would also be a part of organizing the 67 Corps of the Women's Relief Corps in 1886.
The Southern Cross of Honor was a commemorative medal established in 1899 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to honor Confederate veterans.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, and was one of the founding member states of the Confederacy in February 1861. The bombardment of the beleaguered U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, is generally recognized as the first military engagement of the war. The retaking of Charleston in February 1865, and raising the flag again at Fort Sumter, was used for the Union symbol of victory.
Mary Richards, also known as Mary Jane Richards Garvin and possibly Mary Bowser, was a Union spy during the Civil War. She was possibly born enslaved from birth in Virginia, but there is no documentation of where she was born or who her parents were. By the age of seven, she was enslaved by the household of Elizabeth "Bet" Van Lew, in Richmond, Virginia. The Van Lew family sent Richards to school somewhere in the north, and then to Liberia through the American Colonization Society. Richards returned to Richmond shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, where she was one of many black and white Richmond residents who collected and delivered military information to the United States Army under the leadership of Elizabeth Van Lew.
Andrew Bryan (1737–1812) founded Bryan Street African Baptist Church, affectionately called the Mother Church of Black Baptists, and First African Baptist Church of Savannah in Savannah, Georgia, the first black Baptist churches to be established in America. Bryan was formerly enslaved by Jonathan Bryan.
Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, born Sara Agnes Rice, was an American writer and community activist in New York City. Born and reared in Virginia, she moved north after the American Civil War with her husband and family to rebuild their life. He was a former politician and Confederate general; together, they became influential in New York society, which included numerous "Confederate carpetbaggers" after the war. After settling in New York, she and her husband renounced the Confederacy.
Mary Ann Harris Gay was an American writer and poet from Decatur, Georgia, known for her memoir Life in Dixie During the War (1897) about her life in Atlanta during the American Civil War. Author Margaret Mitchell said Gay's memoir inspired some passages in her novel Gone with the Wind (1936). Gay also published a book of poetry in 1858, which she republished after the war to raise money to help support her mother and sister.
Anna Mitchell Davenport Raines was an American philanthropist and founding Vice President of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She later served as the organization's Honorary President General and as the Custodian of the Southern Cross of Honor.
Lucy Barrow McIntire, also called Miss Lucy, was an American suffragist, activist, preservationist, actor, and poet.
Garrison Frazier was an African-American Baptist minister and public figure during the U.S. Civil War. He acted as spokesman for twenty African-American Baptist and Methodist ministers who met on January 12, 1865 with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, of the Union Army's Military Division of the Mississippi, and with U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, at General Sherman's headquarters in Savannah, Georgia. This meeting is commonly known as the "Savannah Colloquy" or the "Forty acres and a mule" meeting.
Alexander Harris (1818–1909) was an African-American deacon, trustee, interim pastor of the First Bryan Baptist Church and one of the most powerful African-American religious and civil leaders in Savannah, Georgia during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
Karen Batchelor, formerly Karen Batchelor Farmer, is an American lawyer, community activist, and genealogist. In 1977, she became the first-known African American member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. As a genealogist, she co-founded the Fred Hart Williams Genealogical Society, which researches and preserves African-American family history. Batchelor is also a member of the Winthrop Society, the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, the National Society of New England Women, and the Association of Professional Genealogists.
Mattie Clyburn Rice was an African-American member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. As the daughter of a Confederate Veteran, she is considered a "Real Daughter of the Confederacy" by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and is the second African-American woman to be recognized as such. At the time of her induction into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she was one of twenty-three women who were living daughters of Confederate veterans. Rice successfully campaigned for her father and nine other African-American men, one freedman and eight enslaved, to be recognized for their Civil War service with a historical marker in Monroe, North Carolina.
Margaret O'Connor Wilson was an American civic leader and philanthropist. Prominent in civic and patriotic organizations in Atlanta for many years, she was also known also for her religious and philanthropic work. Among the many positions that she held, Wilson served as President General of the Confederated Southern Memorial Association (CSMA).