The Brains of the Confederacy
Judah Philip Benjamin was born in the British West Indies in 1811, the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from London. His family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and then young Judah made his way to New Orleans, where he became one of the most brilliant lawyers in America, one of the first Jewish members of the United States Senate, and — in the Confederacy's darkest chapter — the man Jefferson Davis relied on more than any other to keep the rebel government functioning.
The Lawyer
Benjamin arrived in New Orleans as a young man and immediately established himself as a legal prodigy. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar, built a wildly successful practice, and became one of the wealthiest attorneys in the South. He owned a sugar plantation in Plaquemines Parish — complete with enslaved laborers — and moved in the highest circles of New Orleans Creole society, which accepted him despite his Jewish faith in a way that was unusual for the nineteenth-century South.
His legal writings were so respected that his "Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property" became a standard legal text used on both sides of the Atlantic. He was offered a seat on the United States Supreme Court by President Millard Fillmore in 1853 and declined — one of the very few people in American history to turn down that appointment.
The Senator
Benjamin served as one of Louisiana's two United States Senators from 1853 to 1861, becoming the first openly Jewish senator in American history. He was a skilled orator, a shrewd political operator, and a slaveholder who defended the institution of slavery with the same intellectual rigor he brought to his legal practice. When Louisiana seceded from the Union in 1861, Benjamin resigned his Senate seat and joined the Confederate cause.
The Confederate Cabinet
Jefferson Davis appointed Benjamin to three different Cabinet positions during the war — Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. He was the only person to hold three different Cabinet posts in the Confederate government, and his influence on Davis was enormous. Critics called him "the brains of the Confederacy," and the label was not inaccurate. Benjamin managed Confederate diplomacy, attempting to secure recognition from Britain and France, and he was one of the few Confederate leaders pragmatic enough to propose arming enslaved people to fight for the South — a radical suggestion that was eventually adopted, too late to matter.
The Escape
When the Confederacy collapsed in April 1865, most of the Confederate leadership was captured. Benjamin was not. He fled south through Florida, disguised himself as a French farmer, crossed to the Bahamas in a small boat, and eventually reached England. It was one of the most dramatic escapes in American history — a fugitive Cabinet member threading through Union lines and disappearing across the Atlantic.
In England, Benjamin reinvented himself yet again. He was called to the English bar, built a successful practice in London, and published legal treatises that became influential in British commercial law. He became a Queen's Counsel — one of the highest honors in the English legal profession — and lived comfortably in Paris and London until his death in 1884.
The Complicated Legacy
Judah Benjamin was a man of extraordinary talent who used that talent in the service of an indefensible cause. He was a Jewish immigrant who became a slaveholder, a legal genius who defended secession, a cosmopolitan intellectual who served a government founded on white supremacy. He was also, undeniably, one of the most remarkable people New Orleans ever produced — a man who reinvented himself three times, on three continents, and succeeded spectacularly each time. His story is as contradictory and as impossible to simplify as New Orleans itself.
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