Born in 1840 in Georgetown, South Carolina, Benjamin Alston grew up enslaved on an Alston family plantation, where his parents, James and Hannah Alston, also lived and labored. His father, born about 1810, worked for William Allan Alston, son of Joseph and Mary Alston, while his mother served on the Bellevue (Red Hill) plantation under the Fraser family. Both parents experienced enslavement, emancipation, and the difficult transition to freedom, with Freedmen’s Bureau contracts showing them continuing as farm laborers in McClellanville, Charleston County, and Beaufort through the 1860s.
By the early 1860s, Ben was a young laborer in Georgetown, likely still bound to the Alston estate. Around 1863, he was working for William Allan Alston. The Civil War soon gave him a chance at freedom and service. On April 12, 1864, at Mount Edisto, South Carolina, he enlisted in the Union Army for three years, joining the U.S. Colored Troops, Battery G, 2nd Regiment U.S. Colored Light Artillery. He was mustered in at Hilton Head on May 24, 1864, appointed Corporal on May 31, and later reduced to the ranks that August. Records place him at Daufuskie Island and Hilton Head, and he was cited in Special Orders No. 119 from the Department of the South. Earlier that year, he had been wounded near “Fleming” but returned to duty.
After the war, Ben’s name appears repeatedly in Freedmen’s Bureau records (1866–1868) under variant spellings showing him working in Georgetown and receiving treatment for rheumatism and catarrh at the Georgetown Freedmen’s Hospital in Beaufort. These records align with soldiers on detached duty assisting Bureau operations before formal discharge, marking a transition from military to civilian life.
Ben married Lucy Reed of Beaufort in 1864, during or shortly after his service. They built a family through the turbulent Reconstruction years, raising five children: Lucy, Bessie, Albert, Mary, and Anna. By 1870, the Alstons were farming in St. Peters Parish (Hardeeville, Jasper County), where Ben was listed as a farmer and registered to vote in 1871—a significant mark of Black citizenship during Reconstruction.
By the 1880s, Ben and his family lived in nearby Lawton, Hampton County, where he continued farming. After Lucy’s death around 1890, Ben relocated to Savannah, Georgia, where he worked as a laborer and farmhand through the 1890, 1900, and 1910 censuses. Illiterate but self-sufficient, he spent his final years in Chatham County, still laboring into old age.
Benjamin Alston died in August, 1918, at Mills Memorial Home in Savannah, and was buried in Laurel Grove South Cemetery. From enslavement on the rice plantations of Georgetown to soldiering for the Union and rebuilding life through freedom, Ben Alston’s life traces the full arc of African American perseverance from bondage to citizenship in the nineteenth-century South.
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