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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. Sigmund Freud |
Judah Philip Benjamin (August 6, 1811 – May 6, 1884) was an American politician and lawyer. Born a British subject in the West Indies, he moved to the United States with his parents and became a citizen. He later became a citizen of the Confederate States of America. After the collapse of the Confederacy, Benjamin moved to England, where he established a second legal career. In 1883 he retired and moved permanently to Paris, where his wife and daughter had lived for years. He died the following year.
During his career in U.S. politics, Benjamin was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives; in 1852 he was elected by the state legislature to the US Senate from Louisiana; the second Jewish senator in U.S. history. Following the formation of the Confederate States of America in 1861, he was appointed by President Jefferson Davis to three different Cabinet posts in his administration. Benjamin was the first Jewish appointee to a Cabinet position in a North American government, and the first Jewish American to be seriously considered for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court (he twice declined offers of nomination). Following his relocation to the United Kingdom, he became a distinguished barrister and was selected in 1872 as Queen's Counsel.
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Judah Philip Benjamin was born a British subject in 1811 in Saint Croix, to Phillip Benjamin, an English Sephardic Jew, and his wife, Rebecca de Mendes, a Sephardic Jew from Spain. This was during the period of the British occupation of the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands). His father was a first cousin and business partner of Moses Elias Levy, father of future Florida senator David Levy Yulee.
He emigrated with his parents to the U.S. several years later, where the family first lived in North Carolina. By 1824 they had moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where his father was among the founders with Isaac Harby of the first Reform congregation in the United States, the "Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit." The formation of the congregation was of such interest that it was covered by the North American Review, a national journal of the time.
As a youth, Benjamin attended Fayetteville Academy in North Carolina. At the age of fourteen, he entered Yale College. He left without completing the degree and read the law. In 1828 he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana to make his way, where he started clerking with a law firm as an alternative route to certification as an attorney. He studied law and learned French to qualify to practice in Louisiana. He was admitted to the bar in 1833 at the age of 21. He entered private practice as a commercial lawyer.
On February 16, 1833, the 22-year-old Benjamin married Natalie Bauché de St. Martin, the 16-year-old daughter of a prominent and wealthy New Orleans French Creole family. They were married in a Roman Catholic ceremony at the St. Louis Cathedral. He became a slaveholder and soon established a sugar cane plantation in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. His plantation and legal practice both prospered.
In 1842 the couple's only child, Ninette, was born. She was christened and raised as Catholic. In 1847 Natalie Benjamin took the girl and moved to Paris, where she remained for most of the rest of her life. Benjamin traveled each summer to France to see his wife and daughter.
In 1842, Benjamin was elected to the lower house of the Louisiana State Legislature as a Whig. In 1845 he served as a member of the state Constitutional Convention. In 1850 he sold his plantation and its 150 slaves.
By 1852, Benjamin's reputation as an eloquent speaker with a subtle legal mind was sufficient to win him selection by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate. He was the second Jewish senator after David L. Yulee of Florida, who was elected by his state legislature in 1845.
The outgoing President, Millard Fillmore of the Whig Party, offered to nominate Benjamin, a Southerner, to fill a Supreme Court vacancy after the Senate Democrats had defeated Fillmore's other nominees for the post. The New York Times reported (on February 15, 1853) that "if the President nominates Benjamin, the Democrats are determined to confirm him." He was the first Jewish-American to be formally offered a Supreme Court appointment. Benjamin declined to be nominated. He took office as Senator on March 4, 1853. During his first year, he challenged another young Senator, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, to a duel over a perceived insult on the Senate floor; Davis apologized, and the two began a close friendship.
Benjamin quickly gained a reputation as a great orator. In 1854 President Franklin Pierce offered him nomination to a seat on the Supreme Court, which he declined. He was a noted advocate of the interests of the South. According to the author Carl Sandburg, the abolitionist Benjamin Wade of Ohio said the Southern senator was "a Hebrew with Egyptian Principles", as he represented slaveholders. Benjamin replied, "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain."
By the next election, amid increasing regional tensions and divisions among Whigs over the issue of slavery, Benjamin had joined the Democratic Party; in the South the party was dominated by the planter slaveholding elite. He was elected by the state legislature in 1858 to serve as US Senator. During the 34th through 36th Congresses, he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Private Land Claims. Benjamin resigned his seat on February 4, 1861, after Louisiana seceded from the Union.
Davis appointed Benjamin to be the first Attorney General of the Confederacy on February 25, 1861, remarking later that he chose him because he "had a very high reputation as a lawyer, and my acquaintance with him in the Senate had impressed me with the lucidity of his intellect, his systematic habits, and capacity for labor." Benjamin has been referred to as "the Brains of the Confederacy."
In September 1861, he became the acting Secretary of War, and in November he was confirmed in the post. He became a lightning-rod for popular discontent with the Confederacy's military situation, and quarrelled with the Confederate Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson. He had strong disagreements with Davis about how to conduct the war.
Worried about Confederate defenses in the West, Benjamin had urged foreign consuls in New Orleans to defend the city when attacked. He had no power to order them into Confederate military service. He ordered the seizure of fourteen privately owned steamers at New Orleans. The impressed vessels were strengthened with iron casings at the bow to be used as rams. The ships kept civilian crews. Each vessel had a single heavy gun to be used in the event it was attacked by the Union. The Confederacy allocated $300,000 to outfit these vessels.
The military issues were highlighted by the Confederate's loss of Roanoke Island to the Union "without a fight" in February 1862. Roanoke's commander, Brig. Gen. Henry A. Wise was in desperate need of reinforcements when he was informed of the imminent Federal attack. He begged for some of the 13,000 men he knew were idle under the control of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Huger in nearby Norfolk, Va, but his pleas to Huger and Benjamin went unheeded. The heavily outnumbered Confederate force of some 2,500 surrendered and were taken prisoner after losing nearly a hundred of their number. (See Battle of Roanoke Island). Benjamin was held responsible for the loss (although he was carrying out Davis' priorities), and the public was outraged. Rather than reveal the pressing shortage of military manpower that had led to the decision to concede Roanoke, Benjamin accepted Congressional censure for the action without protest and resigned.
As a reward for Benjamin's loyalty, Davis appointed him as Secretary of State in March 1862. Benjamin arranged the Erlanger loan from a Paris bank to the Confederacy in 1863, which was the only significant European loan of the war. In a round of "secondary diplomacy," he sent commercial agents to the Caribbean to negotiate opening ports in Bermuda, the West Indies, and Cuba to Confederate blockade-runners to maintain supplies, which the Union was trying to prevent. After mid-1863, the system was expanded and "brought rich rewards to investors, shipowners, and the Confederate Army."
Benjamin wanted to draw the United Kingdom into the war on the side of the Confederacy, but it had abolished slavery years before and public opinion was strongly divided on the war. In 1864, as the South's military position became increasingly desperate, he publicly advocated a plan to emancipate and induct into the military any slave willing to bear arms for the Confederacy. Such a policy would have the dual results of removing slavery as the greatest obstacle in British public opinion to an alliance with the Confederacy, and easing the shortage of soldiers that was crippling the South's military efforts. With Davis' approval, Benjamin proclaimed, "Let us say to every Negro who wishes to go into the ranks, 'Go and fight — you are free." Robert E. Lee supported the scheme as well, but it faced stiff opposition from conservatives. The Confederate Congress did not pass the measure until March 1865, by which time it was too late to salvage the Southern cause.
Benjamin is pictured on the CSA $2.00 bill.
After Robert E. Lee's surrender, Judah P. Benjamin fled south with Jefferson Davis and the rest of his cabinet, but he left the group shortly before they reached Washington, Georgia, where they held their last meeting. Benjamin is reported to have stayed in Ocala, Florida, with Solomon Benjamin, a relative, before continuing south to Gamble Mansion in Ellenton. From there, assisted by the blockade runner Captain Archibald McNeill, who owned the plantation, as well as William Whitaker, Benjamin made it by sea to the Bahamas and then to England. His escape from Florida to England was not without hardship. The small sponge-carrying vessel on which he left Bimini bound for Nassau exploded on the way, and he and the three crewmen had to be rescued by a British warship. His ship from the Bahamas to England caught fire on the way but managed to make it to port. He was the only high-ranking Confederate politician to flee the country to avoid treason charges.
In the immediate aftermath of the end of the war, Benjamin and Davis were rumored to have masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln through the Confederate intelligence apparatus. According to Benjamin's biographer, Eli Evans, no evidence for this assertion has been found by historians. Fearing that he could not receive a fair trial, Benjamin burned his papers, took brief refuge at Gamble Plantation on the west coast of southern Florida, and left for England under a false name. The historian Donald C. Simmons thinks that Benjamin may have considered joining his brother Joseph Benjamin, Colin J. McRae, the former Confederate Financial Agent in Europe, and other Confederates at New Richmond, British Honduras, in the Confederate settlements.
From London in late 1865, Benjamin provided considerable financial assistance to several friends in the former Confederacy. Joan Cashin, the biographer of Varina Howell Davis, said that Benjamin gave the Davis family a gift of $12,000. The gift supported not only the Davis extended family but many of their relatives and friends during the early years of the Reconstruction era.
In June 1866, Benjamin was called to the bar in England, the beginning of his successful and eventually lucrative second career as a barrister, working in corporate law. In 1868, he published his Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property, which came to be regarded as one of the classics of its field. The work's current edition remains authoritative under the name Benjamin's Sale of Goods. He was influential in commercial law that supported the rise of Great Britain as an imperial power. In 1872 he was selected as Queen's Counsel.
Benjamin retired in 1883 on his doctor's advice. He had earned $720,000 during his nearly two decades at the bar in London. He moved to Paris, where his daughter Ninette and three grandchildren lived. He died there on May 6, 1884. He was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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