Queenie Bennett
---------------
c. 1846-1883
The most famous story of Queenie Bennett is the one about her lost
first love, a dashing Confederate lieutenant named George E. Dixon.
Few details of the story remain, but those that do elevate the story
to legend.
Before the war, Dixon is believed to have worked as an auxiliary
police officer and on steamboats. Bennett's father was a steamboat
pilot, and that may have been how the two met.
Dixon was several years older than she, but there was a powerful
connection, symbolized by a gold $20 coin that Bennett gave Dixon
when he enlisted in the Confederate Army in October 1861. He carried
the coin off to war in his left pants pocket.
On April 6, 1862, his company -- the 21st Alabama -- stormed the
battlefield at Shiloh in West Tennessee. Early in the fighting, Dixon
was shot in the leg. The coin deflected the bullet and saved his
life.
Dixon had it inscribed with the date and name of the battle. He
would carry the coin, and a limp, for the rest of his life.
Dixon was sent back to Mobile to convalesce, and there he spent more
time with Bennett throughout 1862 and the first half of 1863. By day,
he worked in a machine shop, where he helped build two odd
contraptions the engineers called submarine boats.
The first of the fish-boats (what the rest of the guys called the
subs) was lost in Mobile Bay; the second, christened the H.L. Hunley
after its financier, was shipped to Charleston for use against the
blockade.
After the Hunley sank twice on test runs, Dixon left Mobile and
Bennett for South Carolina. Here, he salvaged and refit the Hunley
and raised a third crew. All the while, he was writing letters home
to Bennett.
One day, however, the letters stopped coming.
On Feb. 17, 1864, Dixon and his crew made history when the Hunley
traveled four miles off Sullivan's Island and sank the USS
Housatonic, a 200-foot Union warship. It marked the first time a
submarine sank an enemy ship in battle, a feat that would not be
repeated for more than 50 years.
Dixon and the Hunley disappeared that night, lost until the submarine
was found and raised off the Atlantic floor in August 2000.
Seven years after Dixon disappeared, Queenie Bennett married another
Shiloh veteran, William Henry Walker Sr. They lived near Meridian,
Mississippi, and had nine children. She died in 1883 of complications
she suffered after giving birth to twins.
When the Hunley was raised from it's watery grave researchers found
inside the sub a bent gold coin engraved: "Shiloh, April, 6, 1862, My
Life Preserver."--the probable proof of a love affair destined by
fate to never be.
