Family Connections
Benton was related by marriage or blood to a number of 19th Century luminaries. Two of his nephews—Confederate Colonel and posthumous Brigadier General Samuel Benton of Mississippi and Union Colonel and Brevet Brigadier General Thomas H. Benton, Jr. of Iowa—fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. He was brother-in-law of Senator/Governor James McDowell of Virginia; father-in-law of explorer, Union Major General, and presidential candidate John C. Frémont; and cousin-in-law of Senators Henry Clay and James Brown, both of whom married cousins of Benton. His nephew was Congressman Maecenas Eason Benton, the father of painter Thomas Hart Benton.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Hart Benton (politician)
Famous quotes containing the words family and/or connections:
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
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“Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it—by spreading over it all the associations and connections of family life.”
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