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| Image courtesy of Library of Congress
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WHITTEMORE, Benjamin Franklin, a Representative from South Carolina; born in Malden, Middlesex
County, Mass., May 18, 1824; attended the public schools of Worcester, Mass.;
received an academic education at Amherst; engaged in mercantile pursuits until
1859; studied theology and became a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church
of the New England Conference in 1859; during the Civil War served as chaplain
of the Fifty-third Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, and later with the
Thirtieth Regiment, Veteran Volunteers; after the war settled in Darlington,
S.C.; delegate to the South Carolina state constitutional convention in 1867;
elected president of the Republican South Carolina state executive board in
1867; founded the New Era in Darlington; member of the South Carolina state
senate in 1868; delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1868; upon
the readmission of South Carolina to the Union, elected as a Republican to the
Fortieth and succeeding Congress, served until resignation (July 18,
1868-February 24, 1870); censured by the U.S. House of Representatives on
February 24, 1870, for selling an appointment to the United States Naval
Academy; presented credentials for a special election to the Forty-first
Congress on June 18, 1870, but the House declined to allow him to take his
seat; again a member of the South Carolina state senate in 1877; resigned from
the South Carolina state senate and returned to Massachusetts, settling in
Woburn; became a publisher; died on January 25, 1894, in Montvale, Mass.;
interment in the Salem Street Cemetery, Woburn, Mass.
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