BENJAMIN, JUDAH PHILIP
THE NATION WHICH PRESENTS ITSELF WITH AN ORGANIZED GOVERNMENT AND . . . INSTITUTIONS CREATED BY THE FREE WILL OF THE CITIZENS . . . [MAY
Judah Philip Benjamin was attorney general of the Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis. Though described by many as a brilliant, self-made man, he was also characterized as the “dark prince of the Confederacy” in Robert W. Service’s poem “John Brown’s Body.”
Benjamin was born August 6, 1811, on St. Croix Island, in the British West Indies. His parents, Philip Benjamin and Rebecca de Mendes Benjamin, were Sephardic Jews who had immigrated to the West Indies from Spain. Hearing that Jews were tolerated and allowed to prosper in the U.S. Carolinas, the family moved to the United States in 1813, settling in Charleston, South Carolina. Young Benjamin attended the Fayetteville Academy, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and entered Yale in 1825 at the age of fourteen.
He was the top student in his class when he was expelled in 1827. He was charged with stealing from a fellow student, but the allegations were never proved. Though Benjamin was not an observant Jew, historians acknowledge that anti-Semitism was probably at the heart of the
charges and his dismissal from school.
Following his expulsion, Benjamin moved to
New Orleans, where he clerked in a commercial
house and studied law until he was admitted to
the bar in 1832. (A commercial house of the
early 1800s was usually involved in the financial
transactions around the movement of goods,
i.e., lending, bonding, insuring, fees for trans-
port, rent for storage, and contracts of sales.)
While studying, he supplemented his income by
giving English lessons to the French Creole aris-
tocracy. One of his pupils, Natalie St. Martin,
became his wife in a Roman Catholic ceremony
in 1833. Though his wife was extravagant and
notoriously promiscuous, Benjamin indulged
her. Many of his peers commented that Ben-
jamin’s wealth could be attributed more to the
demands of his wife than to his personal ambi-
tions. For her, he acquired the Belle Chase sugar
plantation and an elegant townhouse on Bour-
bon Street in New Orleans.
His real estate purchases were made possible
by a growing and successful law practice. By
1834 he had secured his place in the local legal
community through a joint publishing venture
with Thomas Slidell. Their Digest of the Reported
Decisions of the Superior Court of the Late Terri-
tory of Orleans and of the Supreme Court of
Louisiana was widely used. Benjamin’s national
reputation as a lawyer was established by his
participation in a case involving the brig Creole.
His brief – which reviewed the status of SLAVERY
under both INTERNATIONAL LAW and U.S.
domestic law – was printed as a pamphlet and
widely circulated. In this more liberal period of
his life, he believed and argued that slavery was
against the laws of humans and nature. He
would later reverse his position.
Benjamin began his political career in 1842
when he was elected as the Whig candidate to
the lower house of the Louisiana Legislature. He
attended the Louisiana Constitutional Conven-
tion from 1844 to 1845. Benjamin’s wife was not
supportive of his interest in politics, or tolerant
of his absences. In 1845, after eleven years of marriage, she moved to Paris. The couple rarely lived together again as HUSBAND AND WIFE, but
they never divorced—and Benjamin’s lifelong
devotion to his wife has been well documented.
After his wife’s departure, Benjamin
retreated to his plantation, from 1845 to 1848,
and began to experiment with sugar chemistry
and processing. Ultimately, he lost the plantation
when a friend defaulted on a note that Benjamin
had signed.
Despite his business reversals, Benjamin had
“great dreams about the future development of
American commerce” and found himself with a
renewed commitment to political service. He
shared a growing belief in the South that foreign
commerce would strengthen the region and
restore the balance of power lost by the COMPROMISE
OF 1850. In 1852 Benjamin ran as a
WHIG PARTY candidate for one of Louisiana’s
U.S. Senate seats.
His successful bid for office made him the
nation’s first Jewish U.S. senator. Also in 1852,
Benjamin was nominated to the U.S. Supreme
Court by President MILLARD FILLMORE. Preferring
to take his seat in the Senate, Benjamin
declined Fillmore’s offer and thereby missed the
opportunity to be the first Jewish Supreme
Court justice. Benjamin also turned down an
appointment as ambassador to Spain, in 1853.
Mindful of the escalating national conflict
between North and South, he wanted to stay in
the United States. In 1854 he wrote, “[A] gulf . . .
is already opened between the Northern and
Southern Whigs. . . . God knows what awaits us.
The future looks full of gloom to me.”
In 1856 Benjamin left the Whig party and
joined the more conservative southern Democrats.
He was reelected to the Senate and continued
to serve Louisiana there until the Civil War.
Following the election of ABRAHAM LINCOLN in
1860, Benjamin advised secession; he resigned
his Senate seat when Louisiana voted to leave the
Union.
Benjamin was named attorney general of the
Confederate States of America in early 1861. He
served as attorney general until November 21,
1861, when he became secretary of war. He
inherited a war department that was disorganized
and deeply in debt. Throughout 1862, the
Confederacy suffered both human resource and
equipment shortages, and severe casualties.
A plan by Benjamin to build troop strength
by drafting slaves—with the promise of emancipation
for service—was prepared and sent to the
Confederate congress. Seeing the initiative as a
threat to the principle of slavery, the congress
failed to pass the measure. Benjamin was eventually
charged with inefficiency, and a motion to
remove him from his post was drafted.
President Davis, still confident in Benjamin’s
abilities, stepped in and appointed him SECRETARY
OF STATE on March 18, 1862. Benjamin
served in that capacity until the fall of the Confederacy,
but he never fully regained his popularity
with the Southern people. Viewed in a
historical context, Benjamin’s service and loyalty
to the Confederacy are extraordinary and commendable—
especially in light of the extreme
anti-Semitism and hatred that pervaded the
South throughout the war years.
After Robert E. Lee’s surrender to ULYSSES S.
GRANT at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9,
1865, U.S. agents targeted Benjamin for capture
because it was assumed, falsely, that he knew the
location of large sums of money. After a brief
stop in North Carolina, Benjamin headed south
to Florida. Garbed as a Frenchman and speaking
fluent French, he passed himself off as a journalist,
Monsieur Bonfals (which translates as Mr.
Good Disguise). Because Benjamin was too fat
to ride a horse, he traveled by cart in the company of a former Confederate officer from New
Orleans who pretended to be his interpreter.
On May 1, 1865, federal agents increased
their efforts to locate all Confederate fugitives,
and the New York Times called for Jefferson
Davis, Judah Benjamin, and Confederate secretary
of war John C. Breckenridge to die “the
most disgraceful death on the gallows.” The
price on Benjamin’s head was $40,000, dead or
alive. But by May, Benjamin had already made it
to Tampa.
With the help of Confederate sympathizers
and former Confederate soldiers, Benjamin
traveled from Tampa to the Gamble Mansion on
Florida’s southwest coast. En route, he presented
himself as Mr. Howard, a farmer and cattle
buyer. With federal troops closing in, he was
twice forced to hide in a canebrake near the
mansion to avoid capture. Eventually, Benjamin
was moved to Sarasota Bay, where he sailed
down the coast to Knight’s Key with Captain
Frederick Tresca, a former blockade runner, and
H. A. McLeod, an experienced sailor for hire.
The trio reached Knight’s Key on July 7, 1865.
From there, Benjamin boarded a boat for
Bimini, in the Bahamas. After this vessel was
shipwrecked, he was rescued and returned to
Florida, where he again faced capture by federal
agents. Benjamin eventually reached Bimini,
and then set sail for England. He arrived in England
on August 30, 1865, after almost five
months of dangerous and grueling travel.
Without funds, Benjamin made the necessary
arrangements to practice law in England.
He was admitted to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in
1866, and he was soon a respected member of
the British bar.Most of his cases focused on corporate
law.He also wrote about matters pertaining
to business and corporate law. His Treatise
on the Law and Sale of Personal Property: With
Special Reference to the American Decisions and
the French Code and Civil Law was published in
1868. Commonly known as Benjamin on Sales,
the book was a definitive source on commercial
matters on both sides of the Atlantic for the next
twenty-five years. In 1872, Benjamin was
selected Queen’s Counsel. He practiced law in
England until 1883, when he retired to France.
He is credited with making major contributions
to the British Empire’s dominance of world
trade in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Benjamin died May 6, 1884, in Paris. He was
buried at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery under a
headstone marked Philippe Benjamin.
FURTHER READINGS
“The Daring Escape of Judah P. Benjamin.” 1982. Tampa Bay
History 4, no. 1.
Detroit College of Law Review. 1991:1019.
“The Enigmatic Judah Benjamin.” 1978.Midstream 24, no. 8.
Evans, Eli N., and Robert Weinberg. 1988. Judah P. Benjamin:
The Jewish Confederate. New York: Free Press.
“From Benjamin to Brandeis to Breyer: Is There a Jewish
Seat?” 2002. Brandeis Law Journal 41 (winter): 229–36.
“Journey to Asylum.” 1987. Civil War Times Illustrated 26,
no. 8.
“Judah P. Benjamin’s Loyalty to Jefferson Davis.” 1966. Georgia
Review 20, no. 3.
Law and Contemporary Problems. 55:107.
“Meeting Mr. Benjamin.” 1986. Queen City Heritage 44,
no. 3.
Naresh, Suman. 1996. “Judah Philip Benjamin at the English
Bar.” Tulane Law Review 70 (June): 2487–514.
Patrick, Rembert W. The Opinions of the Confederate Attorneys
General, 1861–1865. Buffalo: Dennis.
“Some Legal and Political Views of Judah P. Benjamin.” 1956.
Historica Judaica (France) 18, no. 1.
“The Spectrum of Jewish Leadership in Ante-Bellum America.”
1982. Journal of American Ethnic History 1, no. 2.
“The Three Lives of Judah P. Benjamin.” 1967. History Today
17, no. 9.
“The Virginia Decision to Use Negro Soldiers in the Civil
War, 1864–1865.” 1975. Virginia Magazine of History
and Biography 82, no. 1.
Judah Philip Benjamin 1811–1884
