Benjamin Cowens (Cowen; Cowans) was born around 1839 in Albemarle County, Virginia. During the antebellum era, he was an enslaved farmer owned by Benjamin Foster in Jackson County, Mississippi. Cownes married his first wife Phoebe sometime before the Civil War. Because southern law did not recognize slave marriages, however, the couple married again on December 5, 1864, in a ceremony performed by the Freedman's Bureau. They had fourteen children by 1864, including a boy named Serliner, who was born in 1854.

On August 27, 1863, at the age of 24, Cowens enlisted in the Union army in Natchez, Mississippi. He mustered in four days later, on August 31. His service record describes him as 5 feet, 8 inches tall, with black hair, black eyes, and black complexion. He served in Company I of the 58th USCT Infantry Regiment, which performed garrison duty in Natchez for almost the entirety of the war. Cowens spent a brief time sick in the hospital there. He mustered out as a private on April 30, 1866, in Vicksburg.

Following the war, Cowens returned to the home of his former master and worked as a sharecropper. His first wife Phoebe died in 1871, and he married Martha Jackson on December 16, 1880, near Church Hill in Jefferson County. Cowens suffered from general debility in the years after the war. Around 1896, he began receiving a pension due to the pain in his shoulders and head. Cowens died in Natchez on February 4, 1898, due to complications from inflammation of the brain. His widow Martha began receiving a pension of $8 a month in July 16, 1898. She probably died in early 1900, and the government dropped her name from the pension list on March 31, 1900.