Herman, David Benjamin

Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Class of 1865
    Full name
    David Benjamin Herman
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Family
    Martin Herman (father), Elizabeth Wolford (mother), Martin Christian Herman (brother)
    Education
    Dickinson (Carlisle College)
    Occupation
    Attorney or Judge
    Businessman
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder

    David Benjamin Herman (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    David Benjamin Herman was born in Silver Spring Township in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania on December 29, 1844.  He entered Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle and graduated with the class of 1865.  While at the College, Herman had been active in the Belles Lettres Society and was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma.  He studied law in Carlisle with his elder brother, Michael Christian Herman of the Dickinson class of 1862, and was admitted to the Cumberland County bar in January 1867 although he left for the western territories that same spring.

    Herman quickly engaged himself in the cattle trade in Iowa and expanded his operations into Nebraska with the opening of the territory during those years.  The natives of the Plains did not submit without a fight, and in the climactic year of the wars that followed, 1876, David Herman was killed by hostile Lakota Sioux on the North Platte River on May 20, just a month before Crook's defeat at the Rosebud and Custer's disaster at the Little Big Horn.  Family information indicated that he was intending to end his business and return to Carlisle.  He was killed on December 29, 1876.  He was thirty-one years old.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “David Benjamin Herman,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/h/ed_hermanDB.htm.
    How to Cite This Page: "Herman, David Benjamin," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5881.