Defence of the National Democracy Against the Attack of Judge Douglas-Constitutional Rights of the States: Speech of Hon. J. P. Benjamin, of La., ... United States, May 22, 1860
The African Slave Trade: The Secret Purpose of the Insurgents to Revive It. No Treaty Stipulations Against the Slave Trade to Be Extended Into with ... to L.Q. Lamar, Styled Commissioner, Etc
Judah Philip Benjamin was an American lawyer and politician. He became a leader of the Louisiana bar specializing in commercial cases. He also served as a member of the Louisiana legislature. He became widely known as an orator and conservative Southern leader. He became recognized as one of the foremost American lawyers.
Background
Ethnicity:
Judah's father was a poor English tradesman of Jewish descent, but through his mother, he inherited the long cultural tradition of the Sephardic, or Spanish-Portuguese, Jews.
Judah Philip Benjamin was born a British subject in St. Croix of the Danish West Indies (today the United States Virgin Islands) on the 11th of August 1811. After 1818 his parents lived in Charleston, South Carolina. He was the son of Sephardic Jews, Philip Benjamin, and the former Rebecca de Mendes.
Education
In Savannah, Judah was educated in the common schools. He attended Fayetteville Academy. From 1825 to 1827 Judah studied law at Yale University.
Benjamin, first, entered an attorney's office in New Orleans. He was admitted to the New Orleans bar in 1832. He compiled with his friend John Slidell a valuable digest of decisions of the superior courts of New Orleans and Louisiana; and as a partner in the firm, of Slidell, Benjamin and Conrad, he enjoyed a good practice. In 1848 he was admitted a councilor of the supreme court, and in 1852 he was elected a senator for Louisiana, and thereafter he took an active part in politics, declining to accept a judgeship of the supreme court. In 1861 he withdrew from the Senate, left Washington and actively espoused the Confederate cause. He joined Jefferson Davis's provisional government as attorney-general, becoming afterward his secretary for war (1861-1862), and chief secretary of state (1862-1865). Although at times subject to fierce criticism with regard to matters of administration and finance, he was recognized as one of the ablest men on the Confederate side, and he remained with Jefferson Davis to the last, sharing his flight after the surrender at Appomattox, and only leaving him shortly before his capture, because he found himself unable to go farther on horseback. He escaped from the coast of Florida in an open boat, and after many vicissitudes reached England, an exile. In 1866 his remaining property was lost in the banking failure of Overend and Gurney.
In London, Benjamin was able to earn a little money by journalism, and on the 13th of January 1866, he entered Lincoln's Inn. He received a hospitable welcome from the legal profession. The influence of English judges who knew his abilities and his circumstances enabled him to be called to the bar on the 6th of June 1866, dispensing with the usual three years as a student, and he acquired his first knowledge of the practice and methods of English courts as the pupil of Mr. С. E. Pollock. Pollock fully recognized his abilities and they became and remained firm friends. Benjamin was naturally an apt and useful pupil; for instance, the opinion of Mr. Pollock, which for long guided the London police in the exercise of their right to search prisoners, is mentioned by him as having been really composed by Benjamin while he was still his pupil. Benjamin joined the northern circuit, and a large proportion of his early practice came from solicitors at Liverpool who had correspondents in New Orleans. His business gradually increased, and having received a patent of precedence, he was on the 2nd of November 1872 called within the bar as a queen's counsel. In addition to his knowledge of the law and of commercial matters he had considerable eloquence, and power of marshaling facts and arguments that rendered him extremely effective, particularly before judges. He was less successful in addressing juries, and towards the close of his career did not take Nisi Prius work, but in the court of appeal and House of Lords and before the judicial committee of the privy council he enjoyed a very large practice, making for some time fully £15, 000 a year. The question of raising him to the bench was seriously considered by Lord Cairns, who, however, seems to have thought that the ungrudging hospitality and goodwill with which Benjamin had been received by the English legal profession had gone far enough.
Towards the close of his career, Benjamin was in ill health, and he suffered from the results of a fall from a tramcar. He retired in 1882 to a house in Paris which he had built and where he had been in the habit of passing his vacations with his wife, who was a Frenchwoman. He never returned to practice but came back to London to be entertained by the bench and bar of England at a banquet in the Inner Temple Hall on the 30th of June 1883.
Achievements
Judah Philip Benjamin was the first professing Jew elected to the United States Senate. He served as the Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State for the Confederacy. An early portrait of him is to be found in Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
His political history may be traced in that work, and in John W. Draper's American Civil War and von Holst's Constitutional History of the United States. Many allusions to his English career will be found in works describing English lawyers of his period, and there are some interesting reminiscences of him by Baron Pollock in the Fortnightly Review for March 1898. His "Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property with References to the American Decisions and to the French Code and Civil Law" - a bulky volume known to practitioners as "Benjamin on Sales" - is the principal textbook on its subject, and a fitting monument of the author's career at the English bar, of his industry and learning. Many of his American speeches have been published.
Benjamin was a member of the Whig Party but in May 1856, he joined the Democrats, stating they had the principles of the old-time Whig Party. He indicated, in a letter to constituents, that as Northern Whigs had failed to vote to uphold the rights granted to Southern states in the Constitution, the Whigs, as a national party, were no more.
Views
Quotations:
"What may be the fate of this horrible contest none can foretell; but this much I will say: the fortunes of war may be adverse to our arms; you may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and firebrand may set our cities in flames... you may do all this, and more, but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power; you never can degrade them to a servile and inferior race. Never! Never!"
"What is a slave? He is a human being. He has feelings and passion and intellect. His heart, like the heart of the white man, swells with love, burns with jealousy, aches with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort, boils with revenge, and ever cherishes the desire for liberty... Considering the character of the slave, and the peculiar passions which, generated by nature, are strengthened and stimulated by his condition, he is prone to revolt in the near future of things, and ever ready to conquer his liberty where a probable chance presents itself."
Personality
Edgar M. Kahn noted that Benjamin "is epitomized as a foremost orator, lawyer, and statesman, without a peer at the bars of two of the world's greatest nations."
Physical Characteristics:
Benjamin was thick-set and stout, with an expression of great shrewdness.
Quotes from others about the person
"We can easily prove that Benjamin was the only genius in the Confederate cabinet. We can demonstrate that his career, with its American and English phases, was more glamorous than that of any other prominent Confederate. But we are still confronted by one perplexing problem: Judah P. Benjamin was an enigmatic figure - the most incomprehensible of all the Confederate leaders. Lee, Jackson, even Jefferson Davis, are crystal clear in comparison with the Jewish lawyer and statesman. The acrimonious debate about his character began before the Civil War and has not ceased to this day." - Robert Meade
Connections
Benjamin married Natalie Bauché de St. Martin, who was Catholic and from a wealthy French Creole family. The marriage was not a success. By the 1840s, Natalie Benjamin was living in Paris with the couple's only child, Ninette, whom she raised as a Catholic. A romantic but tragic marriage doomed Benjamin to much loneliness since his wife chose to live most of the time in France.
