Judah P. Benjamin, the "Beaconsfield of the Confederacy," was born
at St. Croix in the West Indies, where his parents, a family of
English-Jews, on their way to settle in New Orleans, were delayed by
the American measures against intercourse with England. In 1816 his
parents brought him to Wilmington, North Carolina, where, and at
Yale College, he was educated. Not until after he was ready to
begin life at the bar, did he reach New Orleans, the destination for
which his parents had set out before he was born. In New Orleans,
after a severe struggle, he rose to eminence as a lawyer, and his
firm, of which Mr. Slidell was a partner, was the leading law firm
of the State. He was elected to the United States Senate as a Whig
in 1852 and re-elected as a Democrat in 1859. With Mr. Slidell, who
was serving with him in the Senate, he withdrew in 1861 and became
Attorney-General in the Confederate cabinet. He was afterwards made
Secretary of War, but as the Confederate congress censured him in
that position he resigned it and Mr. Davis immediately appointed him
Secretary of State. After the close of the war, when pursuit after
members of the Confederate cabinet was active, he left the coast of
Florida in an open boat and landed at the Bahamas, taking passage
thence to London where he rose to great eminence as a lawyer. He
was made Queen's Counsel, and on his retirement from practice,
because of ill health, in 1883, a farewell banquet was given him by
the bar in the hall of the Inner Temple, probably the most notable
compliment paid in England to any orator since the banquet to
Berryer. He died in 1884.
Benjamin was called the "brains of the Confederacy" and in acuteness
of intellect he probably surpassed most men of his time. He
resembled Disraeli in this as well as in being a thorough-going
believer in an aristocratic method of government rather than in one
based on universal suffrage and the will of the masses determined by
majority vote.