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Judah P. Benjamin

American politician
Alternative Title: Judah Philip Benjamin
Judah P. Benjamin
American politician
Also known as
  • Judah Philip Benjamin

August 6, 1811

Saint Croix, United States Virgin Islands


May 6, 1884

Paris, France

Judah P. Benjamin, in full Judah Philip Benjamin (born August 6, 1811, St. Croix, Virgin Islands—died May 6, 1884, Paris, France) prominent lawyer in the United States before the American Civil War (1861–65) and in England after that conflict; he also held high offices in the government of the Confederate States of America. The first professing Jew elected to the U.S. Senate (1852; reelected 1858), he is said to have been the most prominent American Jew during the 19th century.

  • Judah Benjamin
    Judah Benjamin
    Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Born a British subject (St. Croix was then a part of the British Virgin Islands), Benjamin was taken to the United States in his early youth, settling in Charleston, South Carolina. For two years (1825–27) he studied law at Yale University, and he then settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1832, and his practice became extremely successful in the fields of commercial and insurance law. He also prospered for a time as a sugar planter, helped to organize the Illinois Central Railroad, and was elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1842. In the U.S. Senate he was noted for his proslavery speeches. After his state had seceded from the Union, he was appointed attorney general in the Confederate government (February 21, 1861). Later that year he was named secretary of war by his friend President Jefferson Davis. It was charged that his mismanagement of the war office led to several major military defeats, and he resigned, but Davis promptly named him secretary of state (February 7, 1862). Late in the war he enraged many white Southerners by urging that slaves be recruited into the Confederate Army and emancipated after their term of service.

At the end of the Civil War, Benjamin escaped to England, where he was called to the bar (June 1866) after only five months’ residence and where he achieved his greatest professional success. In 1872 he became a queen’s counsel. His Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property (1868) was the principal textbook on its subject for many years in England and the United States.

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Granite carving of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Stone Mountain, Ga.
in the American Civil War, the government of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860–61, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865.
former U.S. railroad founded in 1851 that expanded service from Illinois to much of the Midwest before merging with the Canadian National Railway Company (CN) in 1999.
Jefferson Davis
June 3, 1808 Christian county, Kentucky, U.S. December 6, 1889 New Orleans, Louisiana president of the Confederate States of America throughout its existence during the American Civil War (1861–65). After the war, he was imprisoned for two years and indicted for treason but never tried.
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American politician
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