The Methvin-Cunningham-McManus-Swartz Family:Information about Judah P. Benjamin
Judah P. Benjamin (b. 06 Aug 1811, d. 06 May 1884)
Notes for Judah P. Benjamin:
Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) is my second cousin (4 times removed):his grandmother, Eva Levy, was the sister of my 4th great-grandmother, Miriam Levy, wife of Samuel Meyers Hyams, Sr.Samuel and Eva Levy Hyams had Sam Hyams, Jr., who married Mary Emily Prudhomme. They were the parents of Mary Rosaline Hyams, who married James Hamilton Hill.The latter couple were the parents of Samuel Hyams Hill, who married Lallah Prudhomme.They, of course, were the parents of my grandmother, Mildred Rosalind Hill.
Judah Benjamin was a Jew who has been called the "brains of the Confederacy."He served the Confederacy as Attorney General, February 25 to September 17, 1861; Secretary of War, September 17, 1861, to March 18, 1862; acting Secretary of War, March 18 to 23, 1862; and Secretary of State, March 18, 1862, until the end of the war. He twice declined a nomination to a seat on the U. S. Supreme Court, in 1853 and 1854.
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From Wikipedia (excerpt):"Judah Philip Benjamin (August 6, 1811 – May 6, 1884) was an American politician and lawyer, who served as a representative in the Louisiana state legislature, as U.S. Senator for Louisiana, in three successive Cabinet posts in the government of the Confederate States of America, and as a distinguished barrister and Queen's Counsel in England. He was the second Jew (after David Levy Yulee of Florida) to serve as a U.S. Senator and the first in the Cabinet of a North American government, and had the opportunity to be the first Jewish nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, though he declined the position.
Benjamin was born a British subject in Christiansted, Saint Croix, in the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands), to Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents, Phillip Benjamin and Rebecca de Mendes. He emigrated with his parents to the U.S. several years later and grew up in North and South Carolina. In 1824, his father was one of the founders of the "Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit" in Charleston, the first Reform congregation in the United States. He attended Fayetteville Academy in North Carolina, and at the age of fourteen he entered Yale Law School, though he left without a degree. In 1832 he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he continued his study of law, was admitted into the bar that same year, and entered private practice as a commercial lawyer.
In 1833 Benjamin made a strategic marriage to Natalie St. Martin, of a prominent New Orleans Creole family; the marriage does not seem to have been a happy one. He became a slave owner and established a sugar plantation in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, and both the plantation and his legal practice prospered. In 1842, his only child, Ninette, was born, and Natalie took the girl and moved to Paris, where she would remain for most of the remainder of her life. The same year, he was elected to the lower house of the Louisiana State Legislature as a Whig, and in 1845 he served as a member of the state Constitutional Convention. In 1850 he sold his plantation and its 150 slaves; he never again owned any slaves. * * *"
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"One of the most misunderstood figures in American Jewish history is Judah P. Benjamin, whom some historians have called "the brains of the Confederacy," even as others tried to blame him for the South’s defeat. Born in the West Indies in 1811 to observant Jewish parents, Benjamin was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. A brilliant child, at age 14 he attended Yale Law School and, on graduation, practiced law in New Orleans. A founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, a state legislator, a planter who owned 140 slaves until he sold his plantation in 1850, Judah Benjamin was elected to the United States Senate from Louisiana in 1852. When the slave states seceded in 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Benjamin as Attorney-General, making him the first Jew to hold a Cabinet-level office in an American government and the only Confederate Cabinet member who did not own slaves. Benjamin later served as the Confederacy’s Secretary of War, and then Secretary of State.
"For an individual of such prominence, Benjamin’s kept his personal life and views somewhat hidden. In her autobiography, Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, informs us that Benjamin spent twelve hours each day at her husband’s side, tirelessly shaping every important Confederate strategy and tactic. Yet, Benjamin never spoke publicly or wrote about his role and burned his personal papers before his death, allowing both his contemporaries and later historians to interpret Benjamin as they wished, usually unsympathetically.
"During the Civil War itself, many Southerners blamed Benjamin for their nation’s misfortunes. The Confederacy lacked the men and materials to match the Union armies and, when President Davis decided in 1862 to let Roanoke Island fall into Union hands without mounting a defense rather than letting the Union know the true weakness of Southern forces, Benjamin, as Davis’s loyal Secretary of War, took the blame and resigned. Anti-Semitism was a fact of life - North and South - during the Civil War years and Benjamin was falsely defamed as having weakened the Confederacy by transferring its funds to personal bank accounts in Europe.
"After Benjamin resigned as Confederate Secretary of War, Davis appointed him Secretary of State. Eli Evans, Benjamin’s most perceptive biographer, observed that 'Benjamin served Davis as his Sephardic ancestors had served the kings of Europe for hundreds of years, as a kind of court Jew to the Confederacy. An insecure President, [Davis] was able to trust him completely because, among other things, no Jew could ever challenge him for leadership of the Confederacy.'Near the end of the war, Benjamin privately persuaded Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military leaders that the South’s best chance was to emancipate any slave who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. When Benjamin repeated this proposal to an audience of 10,000 persons in Richmond in 1864, his remarks lit a firestorm. Georgian Howell Cobb observed, 'If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' Benjamin’s idea, however valuable, was rejected as politically impossible. As Evans observes, 'The South chose [instead] to go down in defeat with the institution of slavery intact.'
"When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln in 1865, Davis and Benjamin were suspected of having plotted the event and, as the martyred Lincoln was compared to Christ in the Northern press, Benjamin was pilloried as Judas. When the South was defeated, Benjamin -fearing that he could never receive a fair trial if charged with Lincoln’s murder, fled to England, where he lived out his life as a barrister, publishing a classic legal text on the sale of personal property. Evans speculates that, had Benjamin been captured by Union troops, the United States might have had its own Dreyfus Trial.
"A solitary man, estranged from his wife, Benjamin died alone in England, and his daughter arranged to have him buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Until 1938, when the Paris chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy provided an inscription with his American name, his simple tombstone was engraved with the name "Philippe Benjamin."
"While Judah Benjamin preferred such obscurity, his prominence as a Jew assured that he would come under harsh scrutiny, both during and after his life. For example, on the floor of the Senate Ben Wade of Ohio charged Benjamin with being an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing." With characteristic eloquence, Benjamin replied, 'It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.'
"Perhaps the best-known posthumous caricature of Benjamin appears in the epic poem John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benet. Describing him as a "dark prince," Benet depicts Judah Benjamin as "other" in Confederate inner circles:
Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew,
Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,
Able, well-hated, face alive with life,
Looked round the council-chamber with the slight
Perpetual smile he held before himself
continually like a silk-ribbed fan.
. . . [His] quick, shrewd fluid mind
Weighed Gentiles in an old balance . . .
The eyes stared, searching.
"I am a Jew. What am I doing here?"
-- From http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/Benjamin.html
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"A rare Sephardic Jew in the Old South and a favorite of Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin has been described as "the brains of the Confederacy." He held three successive Confederate cabinet posts - attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state - and was Davis’s closest confidant in the government. But some have questioned Benjamin’s loyalty to Davis and the extent of his influence. More than 140 years after Benjamin first appeared on the Confederate scene, historians still debate his place in the history of the Lost Cause. Originally published in 1943 and now available for the first time in paperback, Robert Douthat Meade’s "Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Statesman" provides an absorbing account of the life of this enigmatic Civil War figure."
More About Judah P. Benjamin:
Burial: May 1884, Père Lachaise Cemetery (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise), Paris, France.
Plantation: Abt. 1833, Belle Chase, Louisiana.
Relationship to Author: 2nd cousin 4 times removed.
More About Judah P. Benjamin and Natalie St. Martin:
Marriage: 12 Feb 1833, New Orleans, LA.
Children of Judah P. Benjamin and Natalie St. Martin are:
- Ninette Benjamin, b. 1842, New Orleans, Louisiana, d. 1898.