Benjamin Franklin Youngs- Hero of the American Civil War

In May 2010 Canadian Benjamin Franklin Youngs was honoured for bravery exhibited about 150 years before. He distinguished himself when at only 19 he left the family farm west of Toronto in 1863 and enlisted with the Michigan Sharpshooters.  He had  aspired to be a carpenter until he felt the pull toward enlistment. Youngs was awarded the Medal of Honor — the highest military decoration in the U.S. — for his battlefield bravery the next year.During a pivotal push through Confederate Virginia in 1864, Youngs led a Union advance through enemy lines near the city of Petersburg and captured the flag of a surprised North Carolina regiment. He was “promoted to sergeant on the spot,” according to family biography, and was later presented a medal that only 1,500 other soldiers received during the Civil War, and fewer than 3,500 in all of U.S. history.The May 15 event in Los Angeles was organized by the California Medal of Honour Project, a group led by veterans’ advocate Debbie Peevyhouse that locates the burial sites of forgotten war heroes and erects special grave markers to which Medal of Honor recipients are entitled under U.S. law. After his daring action at Petersburg, B.F. Youngs fought several more Civil War battles before being wounded and sent home to Canada. A record-keeping error listed him as being dishonourably discharged at the time — a mistake finally corrected when the U.S. Congress passed a special resolution restoring Youngs’ good name in 1925. By then, he was an elderly man who’d moved from Ontario to live with relatives in California. He died at the Old Soldiers Nursing Home in Los Angeles in 1927 at the age of 82.And there he was buried, without fanfare, beneath a footstone that recorded only his name and the years he had lived. Youngs was one of thousands of Canadians who volunteered to fight across the border when the fight over slavery and states’ rights tore America apart in the 1800s. IN the ceremony a new memorial stone  was unvieled— flanked by wreaths from the Canadian government and the Woodstock, Ont.-area township of Zorra, where he grew up.