Judah Benjamin

• Born: August 6, 1811
• Birthplace: Saint Croix, Virgin Islands (now United States Virgin Islands)
• Died: May 6, 1884
• Place of death: Paris, France

Lawyer and statesman

Benjamin was a lawyer, a planter, and a U.S. senator. He served the Confederacy as an attorney general, a secretary of war, and a secretary of state. After the Confederate collapse, he escaped to England and succeeded at the British bar.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics; law

Early Life

Born on August 6, 1811, on Saint Croix, Judah Benjamin (JEW-duh BEHN-juh-mihn) was the oldest surviving son of Philip and Rebecca de Mendes Benjamin, both with Sephardic ancestry. The family moved to North Carolina when Judah Benjamin was a toddler; in 1821, they moved to South Carolina, where they settled in Charleston, barely making a living by running a fruit stand. Benjamin attended a Jewish school in Charleston and, probably through the generosity of a merchant who appreciated the boy’s studiousness, entered Yale College when he was fourteen. His career at Yale strangely ended when he was seventeen, perhaps because he had lost money at card games. Soon after leaving Yale, Benjamin traveled with a cousin to New Orleans, hoping for a new beginning.

It was there that Benjamin began to earn a fortune. He studied law and, in 1832, gained admission to the bar. He also studied French, made friends, and, in 1833, married Natalie St. Martin, a sixteen-year-old from a prominent Catholic family. Early in the marriage, the couple lived with the bride’s parents and cared for her baby brother, Jules, who became a surrogate son to Benjamin and even lived with him in Richmond during the Civil War. Trouble soon arrived, however, in the marriage. Benjamin’s devotion to commercial law brought him money to support his stylish wife, but his long hours of work kept him away from her. Natalie’s insistence on calling him “Philippe,” his middle name in French, suggests that, despite his not joining a synagogue, his not converting to Catholicism kept him in her mind at a distance. In the 1840’s, he bought 140 slaves and a sugar plantation near New Orleans, hoping that being a planter would boost his political career and improve his relationship with his wife, who might enjoy being a landed socialite. Natalie, however, remained discontented. In 1845, about two years after she had borne a daughter, Ninette, she took the child to Paris and never returned to America, except for a brief stay in Washington in the late 1850’s, where gossip hinted that Benjamin was not Ninette’s father.

Life’s Work

Being ethnically Jewish did not stop Benjamin in Louisiana politics. With the friendship of the powerful politician John Slidell and a reputation as a smart, eloquent attorney, Benjamin was elected as a Whig in 1842 to the Louisiana House of Representatives. In 1852, he won a seat in the Louisiana Senate. Later, when a vacancy occurred for Louisiana in the U.S. Senate, Benjamin won election to that position. Before Benjamin had even taken his oath as a U.S. senator, President Millard Fillmore offered to nominate Benjamin to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he declined. Although he sold his plantation and ceased to hold slaves, Benjamin defended slavery and supported its spread into the territories. While the Whig Party disintegrated over slavery, he became a Democrat in 1856 and won reelection in 1858. Nevertheless, he defied his new party in 1860 by supporting the return of unlawfully seized Africans to their home continent. Meanwhile, during his senatorial career, he still had time to argue cases as an attorney and to visit Natalie and Ninette on several occasions in France.

Benjamin was slow to support secession, but in the Senate on December 31, 1860, he dramatically asked his Northern colleagues to let the South leave peacefully and declared that, were war to devastate the seceding states, even then Northerners would never make Southerners their slaves. When the Confederacy formed, President Jefferson Davis named Benjamin attorney general, despite a brief but serious clash they had had in 1858 in the Senate. The first cabinet position Benjamin held would have suited him perfectly, but there was too little work for him. When a vacancy developed in September, 1861, Davis named Benjamin the acting secretary of war, and the Confederate Congress later confirmed him. Benjamin’s lack of military experience did not appear to be a serious handicap, because Davis himself wanted to work unofficially as his own secretary of war. Benjamin, however, came into conflict with several generals, and, despite his organizational skills and attention to detail, he could not supply the men and the matériel the Confederacy needed. When the Confederates lost battles west of the Appalachians and, in February, 1862, surrendered Roanoke Island in North Carolina, Benjamin took the blame and did not disclose the critical shortages the war department faced. Leaving his second cabinet position, Benjamin acquired his third one, that of secretary of state, in March, 1862, and served in that capacity for the rest of the Confederacy’s short life.

When the Confederacy collapsed, Benjamin fled Richmond with Davis and other high civilian officials. On May 3, 1865, soon after the presidential party entered Georgia, he respectfully left Davis and, disguising himself, made his way to southwest Florida, where Confederate loyalists found two sailors to take him to British territory in the Bahamas. Benjamin’s flight from arrest involved weeks of adventures and cheerfully endured hardships, but eventually it proved successful. Arriving in England on August 30, Benjamin again started over, restudying law, writing A Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property (1868), and establishing another lucrative practice. Upon his retirement from the British bar in 1883, its prominent members lauded him. He then moved to an elegant house in Paris, where he succumbed to diabetes and heart disease on May 6, 1884. As her husband was dying, Natalie had a priest administer the last rites of the Catholic Church.

Significance

The first openly Jewish U.S. senator, Benjamin believed that slavery, though ethically wrong, was necessary in the antebellum South, and he defended the ideas of the majority of Louisiana voters. In Davis’s cabinet, he worked tirelessly for the good of the Confederate president and the survival of the South. When the South fell, he escaped to England and there again achieved riches and fame. Nevertheless, he wanted privacy, even after death. Benjamin long had a practice of destroying letters he had received, and he also destroyed his papers near the end of his life, asked Davis to leave him out of memoirs, and discouraged the writing of his biography. Benjamin’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris gave no clue to his eminence, until, in 1938, the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed a plaque there to honor a brilliant Confederate statesman.

Bibliography

Butler, Pierce. Judah P. Benjamin. Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1907. The first full-length biography of Benjamin includes input from Jefferson Davis’s wife and Benjamin’s nephew, Ernest Benjamin Kruttschnitt.

Evans, Eli N. Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate. New York: Free Press, 1988. Investigates Benjamin’s personality, career, and relationships, including with the Davises, in the context of his Jewishness.

Hanna, A. J. Flight into Oblivion. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Includes Benjamin’s escape in this story of what happened to the Confederate president, vice president, and cabinet members as their government collapsed.

Meade, Robert Douthat. Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. Portrays Benjamin as a resilient, gifted man who often triumphed over political and personal adversity.

Robbins, Peggy. “Jefferson Davis and the Jews.” Civil War Times Illustrated 39, no. 1 (March, 2000): 52-57. Recounts the effort by Confederate congressman Henry S. Foote, Davis’s political enemy, to destroy Davis by making anti-Jewish slurs against Benjamin.

Rosen, Robert N. The Jewish Confederates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Discusses Southern Jews loyal to the Confederacy, devoting much attention to Benjamin.