Service honors Confederate soldier

A Confederate soldier who rests in Clarendon’s Citizens Cemetery was honored Monday during special Memorial Day services.

Members of the Plemons-Shelby Camp 464 of The Sons of the Confederate Veterans, dressed in authentic uniforms and arms and recognized the service of the late Peru Hardy Benson during the War Between the States.

Camp Commander Mike Moore of Amarillo addressed those in attendance and gave a short history of the causes of session and factors leading to the downfall of the South. He noted that slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War and drew attention to unfair taxes levied on the South by the Northern controlled Congress.

Moore also discussed the different heritages of Confederate soldiers, including those of Mexican, Nova Scotian, and Cherokee descent, and he said the South and the nation had come a long ways in terms of people getting along with each other.

Moore himself said he is a liberal Democrat who believes Barack Obama to be the smartest US president behind only Thomas Jefferson. He noted that the Sons of the Confederate Veterans is gaining black members who, through intermarriage are descended from Confederate soldiers, and later said that the Plemons-Shelby Camp has about 30 members which includes three Democrats, an atheist, and an agnostic.

Benson was a Prisoner of War who spent two years in Yankee prisons and was among a group of Confederates who became known as the “Immortal Six Hundred” because of the number who survived deliberate starvation, exposure to freezing weather, lack of sanitation, lack of medical care, physical abuse by the guards, and imprisonment in the line of fire.

Moore said in his memoirs, Benson wrote that he and his fellow captives were fed mush with worms in it and that a friend once counted more than 70 worms in a half pint of mush before he quit counting and started eating before the worms got it all.

“Mr. Benson was brave and literate and a credit to his community and the South,” Moore said.

Following the war, Benson settled in Hall County where he died on October 14, 1906. His family still owns some of property he settled near Brice, and his grandson, C.L. Benson, lives in Clarendon.

Moore said many former Confederates settled in the southeast Panhandle and joint reunions with Rebels and Yankees were common in Clarendon and Memphis for many years before they were moved to Amarillo in 1950s.

Monday’s service was closed with a 21-gun salute from the muskets of the Confederate descendants.

Earlier in the day, the Plemons-Shelby Camp attended a Memorial Day service hosted by the American Legion Post in Hedley, which was scheduled to be in Rowe Cemetery but was moved to the Lions Club building due to high winds. A separate Memorial Day service was held at the same time in Clarendon at the Donley County War Memorial by members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post.