and South will regard him with dislike approaching to contempt. "The ability of Benjamin was undoubted," says Mr. Rhodes, expressing the mildest Northern view; "but he was by many considered untrustworthy."[1] And the same authority sees nothing in the secretary's career incompatible with complicity in the raid on St. Albans and the attempted burning of New York. A few Southern amenities may also be cited. "The oleaginous Mr. Benjamin," Wise calls him; "his keg-like form and over-deferential manner suggestive of a prosperous shop-keeper."[2] "The hated Jew," says Dodd, "whom the President had retained at his council table, despite the protests of the Southern people and press."[3] And Foote sums him up choicely as "Judas Iscariot Benjamin."[4]
It is our affair, from the mass of anecdote and recollection and especially from such scanty evidence as the gentleman himself could not avoid leaving us, to find out how far this attitude is justified.
To begin, then, with Benjamin's professional life; for he was first and last a lawyer, only by avocation a statesman. And to-day he is probably best, certainly most favorably, known as the author of the exhaustive work entitled "Benjamin on Sales." It is universally recognized that as a pleader in court he had few superiors. His power of direct, lucid statement was admirable, and no one knew better how to present every remote possibility of argument on either side of a case.[5] Even his admirers confess that he sometimes imposed on himself in this
