Winter Along The Rappahannock River 1862-1863

A scene where Confederate and Union pickets meet on the frozen Rappahannock River just south
of the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia in the winter of 1862-1863.
My Friend The Enemy. Painting by American Artist Mort Kunstler (2008).

This is one of the most often repeated stories of goodwill between friendly pickets during the War Between The States (1861-1865).

During the Christmas season of 1862, Union and Confederate pickets across the Rappahannock River just outside of the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia was the scene of just such fraternization with their opposite numbers. The river was largely frozen over that winter and the gap between both banks was only a few hundred feet across in many places. The lines were so close on the Rappahannock during the winter of 1862-1863, that personal contact between the soldiers of both sides became commonplace.

While the officers usually discouraged such contact, the common soldiers would make their exchanges by small, hand-made boats that the soldiers called "fairy fleets." Using these toy boats, both sides would exchange goods with each other from across the Rappahannock River.

Other times, when the river froze over more, these men and boys would often met together on rocks, or small islands in the river where Confederate troops exchanged Southern tobacco for the coffee ration issued to Northern soldiers. Sometimes they even met to play cards, or just to exchange stories.

These sorts of encounters were reported many times by soldiers of both sides.

In the spirit of the Holiday Season, this writer would like to offer two stories of these encounters told from the point of view of two young men at the time who served on both sides of the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg that fateful Christmas and winter following the major battle that took place there in December of 1862. 

The following account was written by Private John Randolph Paxton (1843-1923), of Company G, 140th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a resident of Washington County, Pennsylvania, was originally published in Harper's Weekly, but was later reprinted in newspapers all over the country. After the war, Paxton became a Presbyterian minister. 

The snow still fell; the keen wind, raw and fierce cut to the bone. It was God's worst weather in God's forlornest, bleakest spot of ground, that Christmas day of '62 on the Rappahannock, a mile below the town of Fredericksburg. But come, pick up your prostrate pluck, you shivering private. Surely there is enough dampness around without adding to it your tears.​
"Let's laugh, boys."​
"Hello, Johnny!"​
"Hello yourself, Yank!"​
"Merry Christmas, Johnny!"​
"Same to you, Yank!"
"Say Johnny, got anything to trade?"​
"Parched corn and tobacco - the size of our Christmas, Yank."​
"All right. You shall have some of our coffee and sugar and pork. Boys, find the boats."​
Such boats! I see the children sailing them on the small lakes in our Central Park. Some Yankee, desperately hungry for tobacco, invented them for trading with the Johnnies. They were hid away under the banks of the river for successive relays of pickets.​
We got out the boats. An old handkerchief answered for a sail. We loaded them with coffee, sugar, pork, and set the sail, and watched them slowly creep to the other shore. And the Johnnies! To see them crowd the bank, and push and scramble to be the first to seize the boats, going into the water, and stretching out their long arms! Then when they pulled the boats ashore, and stood in a group over the cargo, and to hear their exclamations: "Hurrah for hog!" "Sat, that's not roasted rye, but genuine coffee. Smell it, you uns." "And sugar, too." Then they divided the consignment. They laughed and shouted, "Reckon you uns been good to we uns this Christmas Day, Yanks." Then they put parched corn, tobacco, and ripe persimmons into the boats, and sent them back to us. And we chewed the parched corn, smoked real Virginia leaf, ate persimmons, which if they weren't very filling, at least contracted our stomachs to the size of our Christmas dinner. And so the day passed.​
We shouted, "Merry Christmas, Johnny." They shouted, "Same to you, Yank." And we forgot the biting wind, the chilling cold; we forgot those men over there were our enemies, whom it might be our duty to shoot before evening.​
We had bridged the river - spanned the bloody chasm. We were brothers, not foes, waving salutations of good will in the name of the Babe of Bethlehem, on Christmas Day, in '62. At the very front of the opposing armies the Christ Child struck a truce for us -- broke down the wall of partition, became our peace. We exchanged gifts. We shouted greetings back and forth. We kept Christmas, and our hearts were lighted for it and our shivering bodies were not quite so cold.​

The second account is taken from the memoirs of Sergeant Berry G. Benson (1843-1923), of Company H, 1st South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a resident of North Augusta, South Carolina, talking about his remembrances from the winter of 1862-1863 when Benson's unit was assigned picket duty several miles downstream from the town of Fredericksburg.

"We picketed the Rappahannock at Moss Neck Church, one's turn to picket coming every few days, 24 hours being the term. We became quite friendly with the enemy's pickets posted on the opposite side, and used to talk with them and exchange newspapers. The exchange was made by taking a piece of board or bark, fixing a stick upright in it as a mast, with the paper attached to this as a sail. By setting the sail properly, the wind would carry it across from one side to the other, as it was wanted to go. Once a Federal band came down the river and played 'Dixie.' We cheered them vociferously, of course. Then it played 'Yankee Doodle,' and the enemy cheered. Then 'Home, Sweet Home,' and the cheer went up loud and long from both sides of the river."

Both Private Paxton and Sergeant Benson were 19 years old and far from their homes that winter along the Rappahannock River. For them, if only for all-too-brief a time, it was the war that was the real enemy, and not each other. The common bond of being Americans; the divine spark of humanity, for all to brief a period overcoming the darkness of human nature.

Both of these men would thankfully survive the war and go on to have productive and meaningful lives beyond the bloodshed.

Reverend John R. Paxton
Co. G, 140th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, USA.
(September 18,1843 - April 11, 1923).

Sergeant Berry G. Benson
Co. H, 1st South Carolina Infantry Regiment, CSA.
(February 19, 1843 - January 1, 1923).

Have a Happy Holiday Season, Y'all!

Sources for this article include the following:

Harper's Weekly Archives, Library of Congress online.
The Abbeville Press And Banner (Abbeville, South Carolina) Wednesday, December 21, 1887, Page 8.
Berry Benson's Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. 1991. Page 35.

This article was reposted on this site from December 2021.

The Life Of Sergeant Berry Benson C.S.A. (1843-1925) -- The Man On The Monument

Berry Benson as a private in the
1st South Carolina Infantry Regiment
taken in 1861.

The Augusta Confederate Monument currently located in the median of the 700 block of Broad Street in downtown Augusta, Georgia. Dedicated in 1878 to honor the Confederate dead, this Confederate monument soars seventy-six feet into the sky, and around the base of the monument are the life size statues of four Southern generals in the War Between The States: Thomas R. R. Cobb, William H. T. Walker, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and, of course, Robert E. Lee.

Towering above them all atop this memorial for the dead is another life-sized statue or a simple Confederate citizen soldier, the life's blood of the South's fight to maintain its fledgling independence.

Referred to as "the man on the monument" by local residence, the Confederate soldier that stands his post on top of the Augusta Confederate Monument is modeled after another local resident born across the Savannah River in South Carolina: Confederate Veteran First Sergeant Berry Benson, a man who had a very remarkable history both during the war and in the years after it.

Berry Greenwood Benson was born on Thursday, February 9, 1843 in Hamburg, Aiken County, South Carolina, just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia (near modern-day North Augusta, South Carolina).

Berry Benson was the son of Abraham Madison Benson and Nancy Harmon Benson.

In 1861, at age 17, Berry Benson enlisted with his brother, Blackwood Ketchum Benson (age 15) in the 1st South Carolina Regiment Infantry Sharpshooters under Colonel Maxcy Gregg. The next spring the two brothers witnessed the bombardment of then U.S. military-occupied Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on Friday, April 12, 1861, where the War Between The States began.

After the surrender of Fort Sumter, the 1st S.C. Sharpshooters were sent to the front in Virginia where the Benson brothers served in General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia under General A.P. Hill and General "Stonewall" Jackson. The unit served as part of Jackson's "foot cavalry" during the 1862 Valley Campaign and later fought in battles such as Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Sharpsburg. Benson was wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville and missed the Battle of Gettysburg, but he had recuperated by winter 1864 and returned to his unit where he was appointed as a scout and joined the regiment's sharpshooter corps.

May of 1864 would bring yet another Union offensive into The Wilderness.

After a confusing and bloody battle, Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac, attempted to get around the Confederate army and march on Richmond, Virginia, but was checked at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, one of the most terrible battles of the Civil War, in which the most severe action occurred at the "Bloody Angle," where Sergeant Benson fought.

By then the young soldier had won a reputation for scouting enemy positions. At Spotsylvania he spied on the Union camp and, on an impulse. stole a Yankee colonel's horse, leading it back to Confederate lines. 

 

It was on one of these reconnaissance missions that he was captured and imprisoned at the military prison in Point Lookout, Maryland. 

 

On the second day of his captivity, Benson slipped unseen into the waters of Chesapeake Bay and swam two miles to escape, but unfortunately for him he was recaptured in Union-occupied Virginia. He was then was sent first to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., then to the brutal Union prison camp at Elmira, New York. Once there he joined a group attempting to tunnel out but the effort was discovered and broken up. 

 

The prisoners tried again and on Friday, October 7, 1864 at four o'clock in the morning he and nine companions entered a tunnel sixty-six feet long which they had been digging for about two months. The earth extracted had been carried away in their haversacks and disposed of in the prison courtyard. On reaching the outside of the stockade the prisoners scattered in parties of two and three, Sergeant Benson going alone, since the companion he had intended to take with him failed to escape. 

 

He headed south and miraculously reached Confederate lines. Sergeant Benson, half a century later, still preserved the passes given him from New Market, Virginia, where he first reached General Jubal Early's army, to Richmond and the besieged city of Petersburg, where his regiment was serving. 

Benson would continue to serve with the Army of Northern Virginia until the surrender at Appomattox Court House on Sunday, April 9, 1865. Benson and his brother, Blackwood, left carrying their rifles to go to North Carolina and join General Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee and continue fighting, but upon learning of the surrender of Johnston at Bennett Place, near Durham, North Carolina on Wednesday, April 26th, Benson and his brother walked home, arriving on Monday, May 15, 1865. 

 

Berry Benson never surrendered his rifle.

 

On Saturday, February 6, 1868, Benson married his wife Jeanie Oliver at Augusta's First Christian Church. The couple would have six children: Ida Jane, Olive, Pauline, Arthur, Charles, and Dorothy. He and his wife wrote poetry for publication, and his wife and daughters were all fine pianists. One of his daughters, Ida Jane "Jeanie" Benson, studied violin in New York and became a concert performer.

 

In 1878, Benson became an officer in the Confederate Survivors Association. That same year the Augusta Confederate Monument was dedicated. A committee appointed by the Augusta Ladies Memorial Association, consisting of former Confederate Colonel George W. Rains, Major Joseph B. Cummings, and Lewis D. Ford, choose Sergeant Berry Benson to represent the common citizen soldier of the South. The statue was modeled after Benson. 

 

In 1883, the Benson family moved to Texas, but returned to Augusta two years later.

 

Benson became an accountant for the local cotton mills and he developed and patented a fail-safe method for checking and correcting accounts that he called the Zero System. 

 

During that time, Benson showed a strong advocacy for the working class, both white and black.

 

In 1898, he became an advocate for striking cotton mill workers helping to end a strike where more than 30,000 textile workers walked off their jobs. He also worked on developing high-protein food crops for poor black sharecroppers.  

 

Benson also became a nationally known puzzle solver, breaking a secret French code known as the "Undecipherable Cipher" in 1896 on a challenge and informed the U.S. War Department that he had done so. 

 

During the Spanish-American War Benson offered his services to the United States Government, but the war ended before he could be of use.

 

He was perhaps best known for his role and private investigation into the case of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager accused of raping and murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan in 1913. 

 

Benson became involved in the case through his childhood friend, William Manning Smith, the defense attorney for James "Jim" Conley, who was also accused. Perceiving discrepancies in prosecution testimony Benson concluded Frank was innocent. His logical arguments helped persuade then Georgia Governor John M. Slaton that there was enough uncertainty in the case to commute Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. Unfortunately that did not prevent the subsequent lynching of Mr. Frank.

75 year old Sergeant Berry Benson with his rifle leading the United Confederate Veterans (UCV)
reunion parade in Washington D.C. in 1917.
Benson remained proud of his Confederate service till the day he died.

 

Sergeant Berry Benson at the
Washington D.C. Confederate Veterans
reunion parade 1917.
(Colorized Photograph)

Later Benson headed a campaign to support French war orphans in World War I. The Benson family "adopted" (fostered) at least five French orphans by agreeing to pay for their care until they were formally adopted. He convinced his friends and neighbors to adopt some of these orphans. The French ambassador sent him an official thanks for his efforts, which had benefited 160 orphans in all. 

Berry's involvement with French orphans got him involved in yet another adventure. In exchanging American dollars for French francs, he noticed discrepancies by the fall of the franc's value. He later advised the U.S. attorney general of the possibility of fraud involving European and American fiscal exchange rates before the world became aware of the criminal activities of Charles Ponzi. 

Even in advanced age Berry Benson remained fit and active, never losing his love for the outdoors. 

 

On Sunday, May 1, 1921, the local Boy Scout Troop based in Augusta's Sacred Heart Church announced plans for a fifteen mile hike led by Benson. As part of the outing, Berry and the boys camped overnight and Berry took an early-morning swim in cold water. At age 78, Berry was the youngest scout of all. 

In addition to serving as a scout leader, Berry Benson also attended United Confederate Veterans reunions and took part in parades wearing his old gray uniform and carrying the un-surrendered rifle he toted throughout the War. 

 

His last parade was on Thursday, June 22, 1922 in the Richmond, Virginia, where the aged Confederate sergeant led the Georgia battalion. He remained a proud Confederate Veteran till the end.

Berry Benson spend the last years of his life at his North Augusta residence with his daughters Ida Jane (Jeanie) and Olive -- neither of whom married -- and passed away on New Year's Day, Monday, January 1, 1923 at the age of 79. His wife Jeanie died in 1900. Both Benson and his wife are buried at Sunset Hill Cemetery in North Augusta, South Carolina. 

  

The Sgt. Berry Benson Camp #1672 Sons of Confederate Veterans in North Augusta bears his name. 

 

The grave and Confederate Cross of Honor
of Sergeant Berry Greenwood Benson
at Sunset Hill Cemetery in North
Augusta, South Carolina, USA.

His daughter-in-law, Susan William Benson, edited his memoirs which were published as Berry Benson's Civil War Book: Memoirs Of A Confederate Scout And Sharpshooter (Athens: The University of Georgia, 1962) ISBN-13:978-0-8203-2943-7 from which the information in this article was gleaned.