Benjamin Franklin WHITTEMORE, Congress, SC (1824-1894)

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.

Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present