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- His parents came to Texas about 1832 to Old Jefferson (now Bridge City), on Cow Bayou. On November 12, 1835, Ben Johnson joined Captain Willis Landrum's company of Sabine County frontiersmen, who were marching to the relief of San Antonio de Bexar, where Mexican General Perfecto de Cos' army of 1,200 men were in garrison and threatening to subdue an army of revolting Texans. On December 6-9, 1835, Ben followed Colonel Ben Milam into San Antonio, and following three days of bitter fighting, saw the Mexican general surrender his army, and Colonel Milam killed by a sniper bullet. He was soon discharged at the Alamo.
Three months later, Ben Johnson enlisted once more in Captain Gillaspie's company, Colonel Sidney Sherman's Second Regiment of Texas Volunteers, who on April 21, 1836, stormed into General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana's ranks at the Battle of San Jacinto. At the end of eighteen minutes of fighting, the Texans, eager to avenge the Alamo and Goliad massacres, killed 600 Mexicans, wounded 200 more, and captured 600, while destroying the army of Mexico's "Napoleon of the West." Johnson enlisted for a third time and was not finally discharged from the Texas Army until May, 1837.
Ben Johnson's marriage to Rachel Garner, a daughter of Mr.and Mrs. Bradley Garner, Sr. of Big Woods, La. and Cow Bayou, Orange County, on April 24, 1838, is one of the first marriages recorded in Jefferson County. Because of that marriage to her great grandmother, Rachel Garner Johnson, Mrs. Nellie Belle Ryder is also a great grand neice (some of them by marriage) of an entire host of Texas Revolutionary figures, among them Claiborne West, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence; John McGaffey, the father of Sabine Pass, whose original letters can be found in the Stephen F. Austin Papers; and Captain David Garner, Jacob H. Garner, and Isaac Garner, the latter three brothers having also fought at the Battle of San Antonio in 1835.
In 1838, Ben and Rachel Johnson settled at Sabine Pass on the league of land issued to her brother-in-law, John McGaffey. They were the parents of eleven sons and two daughters, the next to youngest of whom was Ben Johnson, Jr., born at Sabine Pass in 1849. On January 2, 1871, Ben, Jr. married Caroline Townsend, a native of Sabine Pass and daughter of two English immigrants, William and Sarah Townsend. On September 21, 1883, their son, Andrew Johnson, was born, but he was to know his mother only briefly since Caroline Johnson died in 1885. Ben Johnson, Jr. was Sabine Pass' leading Democrat politician throughout his lifetime, serving thirty years as that precinct's county commissioner, and beaten out by only a handful of votes in a hotly-contested race for county judge in 1892.
(excerpted from W.T. Block's "A HISTORY OF THE ANDREW JOHNSON AND MAC SAUNDERS RYDER FAMILIES; The Memoirs of Nellie Belle Ryder")
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1815 - 1872 (57 years)
