Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Underwood, Benjamin Franklin

UNDERWOOD, Benjamin Franklin, free-thinker, b. in New York, 6 July, 1839, and received a common-school education. He served in the civil war as a private, being captured at Ball's Bluff in 1861; exchanged the following year, and commissioned lieutenant and adjutant of a Rhode Island artillery regiment. Since the close of the war he has been known as a representative of free thought, lecturing throughout the United States on that subject. Before the Evangelical alliance he opened a discussion in Boston in 1873 on evolution and evangelical theology, in which President Chadbourne and Prof. Asa Gray were the disputants. Mr. Underwood has been the business manager and editor of the “Boston Index” and the “Open Court,” of Chicago, both organs of free religious thought; has also edited other periodicals, and has been a contributor to the “Arena,” Boston, the “Free Thought Magazine,” and the “Metaphysical Magazine.” He was chairman of the physical science congress, and is the author of “Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy” (New York, 1879) and “Christianity and Civilization” (1883).