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Benjamin Edwards Green was an American lawyer, diplomat, and promoter. He was an influential newspaper editor, industrialist, and friend of Abraham Lincoln.
Background
Benjamin Edwards Green was born on February 5, 1822, at Elkton, Kentucky. He was the son of Duff and Lucretia Maria (Edwards) Green.
His father, as editor of the United States Telegraph, settled in Washington in 1825, and there Benjamin grew up.
Education
Graduating from Georgetown College in 1838, Green studied law at the University of Virginia and began practice in New Orleans.
Career
On July 10, 1843, through the influence of Calhoun, Green was commissioned secretary of the legation in Mexico, and upon the withdrawal of Waddy Thompson, the minister, he became chargé d’affaires, which post he held until Wilson Shannon was appointed a minister.
In 1845, he returned to Washington, practiced law, and engaged in railroad enterprises, and, securing a contract to build the U. S. S. Powhatan and repair other ships, joined Simon Cameron and A. Mehaffey in the Gosport Iron Works.
In 1846, as “Democrat, ” he wrote on the Oregon question for the Washington Daily Union. After the Mexican War he was employed by the Mexican government to aid in arranging the indemnity payments promised by the United States.
In 1849, President Taylor sent him on a secret mission to the West Indies intended to be a preface to the purchase of Cuba. He was also provided with plenipotentiary powers to treat with the Dominican Republic for the establishment of a naval station on its coast, but except for securing from Hayti the recognition of United States consular officers without a reciprocal obligation on the part of the United States, his mission was unsuccessful.
Upon his return to the United States, he settled in Dalton, Georgia, organized the Dalton City Company (1850), and devoted himself to the industrial development of the state.
Among the enterprises in which he was interested were the Dalton & Morganton and the Dalton & Jacksonville railroads, the Central Transit Company, the Cherokee Iron Foundry, the Texas Land Company, and others in which his father was engaged.
During the Civil War, he was a manager of the Washington County Iron Works, under contract with the Confederate government. After the war, he became a solicitor and general manager of the American Industrial Agency, a company organized to provide Northern and European capital for the agricultural rehabilitation of the South, and after the failure of this venture, he organized a company to encourage immigration to the South from the northwestern states and Germany.
He was interested in a company for the construction of a canal across Florida connecting the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
He was secretary to the Crédit Mobilier of America and published its Prospectus (1873) and a history of the company in the New York Herald.
Deeply interested in finance and currency, he wrote a number of works on political economy. He published the Opinions of John C. Calhoun and Thomas Jefferson on the Subject of Paper Currency, and his own translation of B. A. G. de Cassagnac’s History of the Working and Burgher Classes (1871), adding a long introduction in which he discussed the economic causes of the Civil War.
He was an editorial writer for the Dalton Citizen and in 1868, he became editor of the People’s Weekly of Washington. In 1886, he contributed to the Southern Historical Society Papers “Calhoun-Nullification Explained, ” and in 1901 he published Shakespeare and Goethe on Gresham’s Law and the Single Gold Standard.
He died at his home, “Greenhurst, ” near Dalton, leaving a number of unpublished manuscripts.