Dusty Bookshelf – Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate

Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate. New York: The Free Press, 1988. 469 pp.

This account of Judah Benjamin – Louisiana lawyer, U. S. Senator, Confederate official and British barrister – remains fascinating reading today, as it did 37 years ago.

Eli N. Evans, the author, was a philanthropy executive and a chronicler of Jews in the South; he grew up in Durham, North Carolina as the son of my hometown’s first Jewish mayor.

Judah P. Benjamin had a few things in common with his biographer. Like Evans, Benjamin went to Yale, though Benjamin left in contested circumstances in 1827, whereas Evans graduated from the university’s law school. They both grew up in the South, though Evans left for New York while Benjamin continued his career in the South until his hasty departure at the end of the Civil War. These commonalities give Evans a personal interest and sympathy in his subject, interspersing the narrative with informed speculation about Benjamin’s thoughts and reactions to his ever-fluctuating career. For example, Evans discusses Benjamin’s card-playing in Richmond’s illegal gambling halls, giving an almost Kenny Rogers-esque riff on Benjamin’s attitude toward high-stakes gambling in cards and in life.

Evans is particularly interested in the role that Benjamin’s Jewishness played in his career. Evans also seems nearly as fascinated with Benjamin’s relationship with Jefferson Davis, which Evans sees as a connected subject. Benjamin served as arguably Davis’ closest advisor during the Civil War, in a role Evans compares to that of a European “court Jew,” and Evans even detours from the narrative of Benjamin’s life to give biographical passages and whole chapters about Davis.

The term “court Jew” refers to highly skilled and experienced Jewish advisors who sometimes helped Gentile European kings run their kingdoms. The king (and, by analogy, Davis) could rely on the “court Jew” to be fully loyal, since the advisor had no independent power base and relied on the king’s protection to shield himself from jealous, anti-Jewish rivals in the kingdom – which in Evans’ Confederate analogy meant people like anti-Semitic Congressional leader Henry “Hangman” Foote of Mississippi.

The metaphor of the “court Jew” is not perfect, since Benjamin had built up a power base in the form of a legal and political career before the war, all independent of Davis. The son of a prestigious but poor Jewish family, born in the British West Indies and growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, Benjamin made his legal career after moving to New Orleans, achieving major success and buying a plantation with numerous slaves. He married into the Creole elite (New Orleans Gentiles of French descent). His wife left America for Parisian life, and he had only intermittent contact with her and their daughter until near the end of his career. Apparently, his contact with his religion was also intermittent: he was not immersed in Jewish communal life, and he ate forbidden foods like ham.

Acting as a lawyer, Benjamin denounced the cruelties of the coastal slave trade for the sake of an insurance-company client in the Creole case. But as a U. S. Senator, Benjamin was a full-on defender of slavery, under the political sponsorship of Louisiana’s John Slidell, whom Benjamin later made Confederate emissary to France.

In wartime Richmond, Benjamin achieved his chief fame. For most of the war, he held the position of Confederate secretary of state. As such, he tried to build financial and political ties with France and England in order to get these countries on the Confederacy’s side. Formal recognition was never forthcoming, and cultivating political and financial support was a complicated business.

Davis used Benjamin as his key advisor, most famously by letting Benjamin make a last-minute initiative to get slaves into the Confederate army in exchange for freedom, an effort which was watered down by politicians and fizzled out, despite support from Robert E. Lee.

Like its Northern counterpart, the Confederate State Department was responsible for espionage and covert action. Here is where Benjamin remains most controversial. The covert-action team he directed to work out of Canada near the end of the war attempted many quixotic and envelope-pushing moves to bring the war into the North.

Some Confederate operatives were involved in the Lincoln assassination. Evans follows the consensus view that these were rogue operatives, pursuing a mad plan independent of Benjamin and Davis. But Benjamin feared an antisemitic judicial lynching, under the antisemitic President Andrew Johnson, when the public might be looking for a Jewish scapegoat for the death of the Christ-like Lincoln. In a dramatic escape filled with disguise and adventure, Benjamin evaded his Union pursuers and ended up in England.

Invoking what we would call birthright citizenship (due to his birth in a British colony), Benjamin was recognized as a British subject and became a barrister, specializing in important high-paying commercial cases in Britain’s highest tribunals. A learned book on commercial law anchored Benjamin’s reputation. He could afford to move to Paris and to settle his family and himself in comfort before he died. His various gambles had brought him better fortune than befell the character in the Kenny Rogers song. Though Benjamin received a Catholic burial in Paris, Evans attributes this to undue zeal from Benjamin’s Catholic family and not to a deathbed conversion.

This remains a valuable and indeed riveting book, though apparently it didn’t settle the Lincoln assassination controversy.