Benjamin was born on October 3, 1823 on a farm in Wayne County, Illinois, United States, one of the eleven children of James Stephenson, a native of South Carolina, and Margaret (Clinton) Stephenson. The family early moved to a farm in Sangamon County, where Benjamin grew to manhood.
He had had only the advantages of education in the local schools when he went to study medicine with an older brother at Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Later he attended lectures at Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1850.
From 1855 to 1857 Stephenson was lecturer on general, special, and surgical anatomy in the medical department of the State University of Iowa at Keokuk.
In June 1861 he went to Jacksonville where the 14th Illinois Volunteers was being organized and was appointed surgeon of the regiment. He served three years in the western armies of Grant and Sherman, reached the grade of major, and was mustered out with the regiment on June 24, 1864.
He is credited with having been a capable surgeon, held in high confidence by the regiment which he served.
After his release from the army he joined a drug firm in Springfield, but the next year he formed a partnership with one of the leading physicians of the city. During his war service he and the regimental chaplain, W. J. Rutledge, of Petersburg, had frequently discussed the project of forming a national association of Union veterans and he now commenced developing it.
He originated the name and wrote the ritual and the constitution with some help from his old regimental friend. Though the early work of organization was done at Springfield, Stephenson's plans met with little favor there, and it was at Decatur, Illinois, that Post No. 1 of the Grand Army of the Republic was formed on April 6, 1866.
Here the name, ritual, and constitution were adopted, and Stephenson mustered in the newly elected officers and gave the post a charter, signing himself commander of the department of Illinois. He was grievously disappointed when the representatives of the new society met in Springfield in July 1866 to form a department organization and selected another for the honor of department commander.
As organizer of the order he had assumed the title of commander-in-chief and in this capacity he issued the call for a national convention to meet at Indianapolis on November 20, 1866. A second disappointment awaited him when Stephen A. Hurlbut was chosen as commander and he was given the subordinate place of adjutant-general.
At the second national convention at Philadelphia on January 15, 1868, he failed of election to any office. Though he had conceived and launched the new order it was generally realized that he was not one to make of it a great success.
An enthusiast in a new enterprise, he lacked steadiness of purpose and had a distaste for routine duties and responsibilities. His administration as national adjutant-general was notably inefficient. Through these years the Grand Army had occupied his thoughts to the detriment of everything else. His usefulness as a physician had become seriously impaired without bringing him any substantial return for his sacrifices.
Impoverished, and broken in health and spirit by repeated slights, he moved his family in the winter of 1870-71 to Rock Creek where he died.
Benjamin Franklin Stephenson was the founder of the Grand Army of the Republic organization of Union Army veterans and served as it's first Commander-in-Chief. After a decline in the 1870s, it was reorganized and revised, and eventually grew to a peak of 490, 000 veteran members in the 1890. Doctor Stephenson's organization lasted until 1956, when Albert Woolson, the last living Union veteran, passed away.
On March 30, 1855, he was married at Springfield to Barbara B. Moore.
