Ben Johnson was born into slavery around 1817. He was a Virginia native but spend most of his life in Louisiana. When he was in his early twenties, he was sold south through the domestic slave trade. Lezin and Josephine Becnel purchased Ben with the intention of using his labor in domestic service. Ben first appears in records in the 1842 inventory made after the death of Josephine Becnel. He was recorded as being 25 years old and appraised at $800, approximately $26,000 today.
Ben was the coachman and groom at Evergreen Plantation. He drove the Becnels in their carriage and tended to the horses. It is likely that he wore livery, a uniform slave owners required their coachmen to wear to show elevated status and emphasize their wealth. Enslaved people on Louisiana plantations referred to themselves as “field” workers or “yard” workers. On the eve of the Civil War, Ben was in his mid-forties and still in “yard,” tending to the horses and carriage near the big house. Lezin Becnel II had died, and just the like the house, the plantation mules, and the land, he had been passed down to Lezin and Michel, Lezin Becnel II’s sons. The same document that recorded all of the property on the plantation---the carriages, horses, mules, tools, equipment, and buildings---also included Ben, a stark reminder of the fact that although he was a human being he was considered property under the law.
After the Civil War, when many formerly enslaved workers chose to seek opportunities elsewhere, Ben remained at Evergreen. He lived in the domestic quarters near the big house and continued to work as a coachman for Michel Becnel, the surviving heir to the plantation. According to the 1870 census, Ben had saved up $100 in cash. He was among the list of men who were eligible to serve on a jury, a right of citizenship he had not been entitled to while enslaved. Ben Johnson died at Evergreen on November 7, 1873. His body was brought to St. John the Baptist Catholic Church and the priest said a funeral Mass for him. He was buried in the cemetery there, far away from the family and friends he had been forced to leave behind in Virginia forty years before.