The Green Bag.
JUDAH P. BENJAMIN.
FEW lives have been more full of romance and incident than that of the distinguished lawyer and statesman, Judah P. Benjamin.
He was born at St. Croix, W. I., Aug. 11, 1811, of Jewish parents, who had sailed from England to settle in New Orleans. The mouth of the Mississippi being blockaded by the British fleet, they landed at St. Croix, where young Judah was born. When he was four years of age his parents emigrated to Wilmington, N. C. Of his boyhood we have but little record; but in 1825 young Benjamin entered Yale College. He did not, however, complete the college course; and in 1831 he settled in New Orleans and began the study of the law. While pursuing his studies, he supported himself by teaching school.
In 1833 he was admitted to the Louisiana Bar. After a life of steady struggle upwards, he became a lawyer of world-wide reputation, whom clients went far to seek, and paid any fee to retain. It is said that on one occasion the enormous amount of fifty thousand dollars was paid him to go to California.
In politics he was originally a Whig. In 1852 he was elected to the Senate of the United States, where he was immediately recognized as one of the keenest debaters and the most finished orator in that body. While in the Senate, he allied himself with the Democratic party, by whom he was re-elected in 1858. On the 31st of December, 1860, he announced his adhesion to the South, and withdrew from the Senate, of which he had been for eight years a member.
He then joined the Cabinet of Jefferson Davis as Attorney-General, and was afterward appointed Secretary of War. In this position his career was brilliant, until the disaster which befell the Confederate Cause at Roanoke Island, which was attributed to incompetency, and he was censured by a Congressional Committee of Inquiry. He resigned the position of Secretary of War in February, 1862. His services were, however, too valuable to be lost, and he was appointed by Mr. Davis to fill the place of Mr. Hunter, Secretary of State, which position he held until the fall of the Confederacy.
After the overthrow of the Confederacy he fortunately succeeded in escaping the pursuit of the Northern troops, and made his way to Key West, where he embarked for Nassau in a small sail-boat. After much suffering, he, and two men who were in the boat with him, landed on one of the Bahama Islands; from there he found his way to England. He immediately entered Lincoln's Inn, and applied himself vigorously to the study of English law. Through the instrumentality and good offices of Lord Cairns, he was called to the English Bar in 1866, after one year's probation,—a concession most generously, though exceptionally, accorded to one who had gone through so many interesting and romantic vicissitudes of fortune.
It is difficult to imagine a position more apparently hopeless than his. At the comparatively advanced age of fifty-five, he had to adapt himself to an entirely new state of things. He had a great deal to learn, and, what was almost as trying, a great deal to
