Yancey, Benjamin C. (Benjamin Cudworth), 1817-1891

Planter, lawyer, journalist, legislator, diplomat, and Confederate Army officer, of Charleston, S.C.

Planter, lawyer, antebellum Alabama newspaper editor, Democratic state legislator in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia; U.S. minister to Argentina; Confederate officer in Virginia, 1861, and Georgia militia officer in the Atlanta Campaign, 1864; publisher of postwar agricultural journals and promoter of agricultural societies, business, and industry in Georgia; and brother of William Lowndes Yancey.

Benjamin Cudworth Yancey was born in Charleston, S.C., on 27 April 1817, the younger of two sons of Caroline Bird and Benjamin Cudworth Yancey. His father was a prominent South Carolina lawyer and political figure while his mother was the daughter of William Bird of Warren County, Ga. When his father died in 1817, his mother moved to Georgia where Yancey received his education at the Mount Zion Academy in Hancock County, under the tutelage of Reverend Nathan Sidney Smith Beman, later the leader of the New School Presbyterians and an ardent abolitionist. Caroline Bird Yancey married Beman in 1821 and the family moved to Troy, N.Y., where Yancey attended the Academy School. He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1836 and from Yale Law School in the winter of 1838.

Yancey began his practice in Cahaba, Ala., edited the local Democrat paper, and, in 1840, joined his brother, William L. Yancey, as co-owner and co-editor of the Wetumpka Argus. In 1841, he moved to Hamburg, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga. He married Laura Hines of Hancock County, Ga., in 1842, and they had one daughter, Caroline. Three years after Laura died in 1844, he married Sarah Hamilton, daughter of Thomas N. Hamilton of Athens, Ga., with whom he had Hamilton and Mary Louisa. Yancey practiced law in Hamburg until 1850, serving several times in the South Carolina legislature. In 1850, he left South Carolina for a plantation home in the Coosa River in Cherokee County, Ala.

Yancey was elected to the Alabama legislature and served as presiding officer of that body. In 1858, he accepted an appointment to the post of Minister Resident of the United States to the Argentine Confederation, serving there until the winter of 1859 when he returned to the United States to look after his private affairs following the death of his father-in-law. While serving as United States minister to the Argentine Confederation, he attempted to mediate a dispute between the Confederation and the then independent state of Buenos Aires, but was unable to avert war. Upon his return to the United States, he was offered other diplomatic positions by President Buchanan, but declined them.

During the American Civil War, Yancey served in Virginia as an officer in the Fulton Dragoons of Cobb's Georgia Legion, and also participated actively in the defense of Atlanta in 1864 as a colonel in the Georgia militia. After the war, Yancey resided in Georgia where he practiced law in Athens and undertook various other business interests and planting ventures in several localities. He served in the Georgia legislature, was a trustee of the University of Georgia, edited an agricultural journal, and was president of the Georgia State Agricultural Society. He remained actively interested in business and agricultural affairs until shortly before his death in 1891.