Benaiah Hagadorn was an American abolitionist who lived in Munsons Corners, Cortland County, New York. The son of Jehoiada Hagadorn and the brother of Esther Hagadorn, he was raised in an evangelical Methodist family and became a Radical Republican. Nevertheless, during the American Civil War, he visited the Copperhead Abner Beech and volunteered to rescue his missing son Thomas Jefferson Beech, who had likely been captured after the American Civil War; despite Beech's estrangement from his son and opposition, Hagadorn caught a freight train from Albany to New York and a steamboat to the South. In Richmond, he presented Beech's Confederate captors with prisoner exchange papers and brought Thomas back to his family. However, he found the Beech family's farm burned down by his father and later found his father to have hanged himself, Jehoiada having mistakenly concluded that his daughter Esther died in the blaze. At his father's funeral, Benaiah gave a eulogy berating the Confederates for abusing Black slaves rather than loving their neighbors, and equally chastising the local Radicals for attempting to kill the Beeches rather than love their neighbor.
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