Rebel Disraeli

JUDAH P. BENJAMIN--Robert Douthat Meade--Oxford ($3.75).

The man whom Abraham Lincoln called the smartest of the Confederate civil leaders is no more familiar to most U.S. readers than Felix Kirk Zollicoffer.* Yet Judah Philip Benjamin was one of the most astonishing figures in U.S. history. This week, 59 years after his death, he got a full-length biography.

Most men are satisfied with one career. Judah Benjamin had five. Before he died at the age of 72 he had been 1) a great U.S. lawyer; 2) a railroad promoter; 3) a U.S. Senator; 4) Confederate Cabinet officer and Jefferson Davis' right-hand man through the Civil War; 5) a great lawyer in Great Britain. The careers are as neatly divided as the acts of a well-made play.

Disorderly Teetotaler. Like his contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, Judah P. Benjamin was a sephardic (of Spanish-Jewish ancestry) Jew. Born in 1811 at Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, he became a U.S. citizen when his drygoods-vending father was naturalized at Charleston, S.C. At 14, Judah was the youngest man in his class at Yale, and a member of the teetotaling Philencratian Society. At 16, Judah was bluntly bounced out of Yale. Probable reasons: "association with a set of disorderly fellows who were addicted to card playing and gambling," theft, mysterious temptations "which he had not the moral force to resist." Judah went to New Orleans to make his fortune.

Work Horse. New Orleans proved less seductive than New Haven. Judah got a job with a notary, studied law in his spare time. Admitted to the bar, he promptly married Natalie St. Martin, a Creole girl with "the voice of a prima donna." She liked parties in the Vieux Carre. Judah preferred to work like a horse. When Natalie left him to live in Paris, he worked harder than ever.

Work soon brought him an annual income of $50,000, leadership of the Louisiana Whigs, practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, a huge plantation mansion. When Judah was not busily promoting railroads or flourishing what his opponents called his "oily, plausible pertinacity" in courtrooms, he was trying to raise the best sugar in Louisiana. For recreation, Benjamin would recite from memory "a wonderful stock" of verses (he was a passionate admirer of Tennyson), play whist, harpoon devilfish. His appreciation of good food and drink was vast.

Bon Vivant. Benjamin was the first Jew ever offered an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. He turned it down to become a U.S. Senator (from Louisiana). In an age of eloquence, Benjamin was eloquent too. Many of his speeches were as fancy as a beaded bag. But he could also say things that made his Senate colleagues prick up their ears. Sample: "If the object [of this bill] is to provide for friends and dependents, let us say so openly." To a Congressman his voice was "as musical as the chimes of silver bells." But Mrs. Jefferson Davis thought he had "rather the air of a witty bon vivant than that of a great Senator."

Judah had been making an annual trip to Paris ever since his wife moved there. In 1859 he leased the elegant three-story mansion Stephen Decatur had built in Washington, lovingly filled it with "hitherto undreamed-of magnificence." Natalie came back. She was 45, beautiful, gay. But when Washington socialites called on her in a dignified phalanx, they caught their first and last glimpse of Mrs. Benjamin. Wrote Mrs. Clement Clay, then a bright ornament of Washington society: "Arab-like, the lady rose in the night, 'silently folded her tent and stole away' (to meet a handsome German officer, it was said), leaving our calls unanswered, save by the sending of her card, and her silver and china and crystal, her paintings, and hangings, and furniture to be auctioned off to the highest bidder!" Judah's life was in ruins.

Never! Never! He came back to Washington after the auction was over, to bury his sorrow in the Secession movement. Until the close of 1860 Benjamin had never advocated Secession. Then, to a packed Senate, he delivered what many thought his greatest speech. "You may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames; you may even emulate the atrocities of those who, in the war of the Revolution, hounded on the bloodthirsty savage to attack upon the defenseless frontier; you may . . . give shelter to the furious fanatics . . . but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of-the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power. . . .

Never! Never!" Then he resigned.

Promptly Jefferson Davis made Benjamin his Attorney General. He became an influential member of that shadow cabinet which helped mismanage Southern policy and made Jefferson Davis, as Bernard DeVoto has said, "the one military strategist whom Robert E. Lee was never able to defeat."

Benjamin knew nothing of war, but when he was promoted from Attorney General to Secretary of War, he bumbled bravely. Benjamin's legal mind made Beauregard's Creole blood boil. Joe Johnston wrote Benjamin that he was causing "great confusion and an approach to demoralization." Benjamin was blamed for disastrous shortages of food, soap, guns and gunpowder.

Opposition to Benjamin grew so bitter that Davis reluctantly transferred him to the Secretaryship of State.

When the news of Lee's surrender reached the fugitive Confederate Government, Benjamin's "deep olive complexion had become a shade darker." He said: "I will never be taken alive." At the last war council, held at Abbeville, S.C., Jefferson Davis, sheet-pale, wanted to go on with the war. No one else did. The men shook hands and said goodby. Benjamin announced that he was headed as far away from the U.S. as he could get, even if it took him to the middle of China.

He became French-speaking "Monsieur Bonfals." In a large cloak, goggles, his hat pulled down over his face, he crossed the Georgia border by horse & buggy. In Florida, disguised as "a farmer looking for land," he talked a farm woman into making him homespun clothes. Once he passed himself off as a cook. At last he caught a boat for Havana, got to England.

Fog! Fog! Fog! A year later he was wearing a barrister's white peruke in London. At 55 he had begun a new career. Judges winced at first at his "unpleasant American twang." Ten years later he was acclaimed as "the most famous advocate at the English bar."

In England he worked harder than ever, wrote a legal classic, A Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property, with Reference to the American Decisions, to the French Code and Civil Law, better known as Benjamin on Sales. He ran his income up to $150,000 a year. For the U.S. he felt no homesickness, though in Britain he sometimes felt discomfort. "Fog, fog, fog!" he wrote. "I am most impatient to [go] somewhere where I can breathe."

So he went to Paris. Natalie was still there. He had built her another mansion. One day he wrote to a friend: "What I require is warmth--will it never come?" A few days later he died.

* Confederate general killed at his first major brush with Northern troops at Mill Springs, Ky.

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