This Day in Confederate History (Judah Benjamin, Sole Jewish Member of Davis Cabinet, Dies)

May 6, 1884— Judah Benjamin, who served close friend Jefferson Davis in three different Cabinet positions in the short-lived Confederacy, died at age 72 years old in Paris, thousands of miles and two decades removed from the slaveocracy in which he made his fortune and to which he devoted his considerable bureaucratic talents.

Few figures of the Civil War are as little known and mysterious as Benjamin. Much of that owed to his anomalous position as a Jew in a region of the country that was not merely Christian, but even overwhelmingly Protestant. 

But some of the obscurity that clings to his name derives from his actions rather than his character.

Like Aaron Burr, another enormously able politician and lawyer often perceived as traitorous, Benjamin put precious little to paper, even confessing that he had “never kept a diary or retained a copy of a letter written by me,” all aimed at frustrating attempts to ferret out the truth of his life by subsequent biographers.

In this effort he was only partly successful. While leaving little in his own hand, he couldn’t stop other people from writing about him.

And, as someone who served successively as the South’s Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, he couldn’t evade their judgments—more often than not, negative.

“Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century,” wrote biographer James Traub last year. “He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention.”

Had Benjamin done anything other than commit himself to the “peculiar institution,” he would have long since been acclaimed a great American success story. A native of British-owned St. Croix, he emigrated with his family first to North Carolina, then Charleston, SC.

At age 14, his brilliance shone so brightly that one of the city’s leading Jewish merchants offered to pay his tuition to Yale.

Even a dismissal from the university on mysterious grounds only slowed his progress rather than stopping it, for he simply relocated to New Orleans, where he transformed himself into an attorney with a thriving practice—and, courtesy of an advantageous marriage to the Catholic Natalie St. Martin, the owner of more than 100 slaves.

In 1852, Benjamin became the first Jew not to have converted to Christianity to win election to the U.S. Senate. Only a year later, he turned down another distinction—nomination as the first Jew to the Supreme Court—probably because the high court hadn't achieved the status it came to enjoy in the 20th century.

On the other hand, serving in the Davis Cabinet was an important but thankless job:

*As Attorney General, he soon discovered he didn’t have courts to speak off:

*Later, when Davis transferred him to the War Department, he had to laugh off taunts that he was the “clerk” of his strong-willed President, only to incur the wrath of the populace when, despite his flair for paperwork, armies in the field were missing vital supplies;

*Finally, after Benjamin accepted responsibility for a problem that really his, a grateful Davis moved him over to the State Department. Here, his exploitation of cotton’s commercial value in attempting to win diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France was “a luminous failure,” according to historian Frank Vandiver’s Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970).

In Richmond as in New Orleans, the short, plump, but witty Secretary of State cut quite a figure on the social circuit, leading to a late-20th century description of him as "the Confederate Henry Kissinger." 

Mrs. Harrison Burton recalled in a 1911 memoir that Benjamin brought to the home of a Richmond hostess “his charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books.”

All to little or no avail. Benjamin not only remained what Vandiver called “the most disliked man in Richmond,” but one who, despite considerable administrative skill and his failure to practice the faith into which he was born, elicited the latent anti-Semitism of much of the populace.

Most, if not all, of the criticism that came his way was unfair. As I noted in this prior post, the War Department may have been the most unstable of all the positions in Davis' rickety Cabinet, buckling under the Confederate President's touchiness and micromanagement, not to mention its disadvantages in materials and organizing a new government from scratch.

In the waning days of the war, Benjamin was nothing if not grimly realistic, advocating manumission in exchange for any slaves who joined the Confederate Army.

Then, as Ulysses Grant broke through the defenses surrounding Richmond in early April 1865, Benjamin refused to entertain the pipe dream that the government could somehow slip out of the city and reconstitute itself further west, where surrender was not yet an actuality.

In the war’s final days, Benjamin made one of the most daring escapes of any of the Confederates, resorting to one disguise after another—and even surviving more than one shipwreck—to make his way first to Florida, then to Great Britain, to which his birth in St. Croix entitled him to citizenship.

Benjamin had much more to fear from capture than his Cabinet counterparts: according to a June 2023 article in The Tablet by Jay Solomon and Jane Singer, his creation of a spy ring starting in the North and stretching into Canada led Union investigators to tie him to the assassination plot that killed Abraham Lincoln and nearly did the same to Secretary of State William Seward, an adversary dating back to their days in the Senate.

The U.S. extradition effort was no more successful than Benjamin’s wartime campaign for “Cotton Diplomacy.” His legal skills now allowed him to flourish in Britain, where he lived out much of the remainder of his life, building a prosperous practice, even reputation for brilliance, to rival what he achieved in New Orleans.

Though the former Southern politician entertained Davis on the few times his old boss came to England, Benjamin otherwise never looked back on his old life and never returned to the United States.

Unfortunately, success at the bar seems not to have brought happiness to the domestic sphere for Benjamin. 

Though he destroyed most of the documentation about his life, enough remained to show that he subsidized separate quarters in Paris for his wife, who had long provoked gossip with her spendthrift ways and extramarital affairs.

In one of the most heated Senate debates in the late 1850s, Benjamin dismissed an abolitionist’s jibe that, as the descendant of a people who had suffered at the hands of the Pharoah, he was being hypocritical in defending slavery—that he was, in effect, “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.”

Posterity has not shrugged off that charge so easily, complicating any attempt to come to grips with why this most brilliant of attorneys could be so blind to the foremost human rights question of his time.

(For a fascinating comparison of Benjamin with a Jewish appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court who served for years, see this August 2019 blog post from The Times of Israel by Tzemach Yehudah Richter.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Penn Warren, on Louisiana in Early April)

“A month from now, in early April, at the time when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid, throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heartbreaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else, and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave out of the swamp and try to cross the highway and your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like kerwhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to explode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass—well, a month from now, in early April, when all those things would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up within.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), All the King’s Men (1946)

This Day in Southern History (Huey Long Assassinated)

September 8, 1935—A 42-year-old U.S. senator, the linchpin of a political dynasty, whom detractors called ruthless and admirers hailed as progressive, was in the midst of challenging an incumbent President from his own party when he was assassinated, setting off endless controversies about his legacy as well as conspiracy theories surrounding his death. 

No, I’m not talking about Robert F. Kennedy of New York, but Huey Long of Louisiana. 

The circumstances of their lives and deaths, you can tell from the first paragraph of this post, were similar in many ways. But in the years since his death, Kennedy has enjoyed much better press than “the Kingfish.” 

It’s been more than 40 years since RFK was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, but the wound of what might have been still stings. Forty years after his death, however, Long did not evoke similarly weepy nostalgia, but instead, in that Watergate era of fears of corrupt, all-controlling executives, a sense of relief that the nation was spared the dictatorial style he honed in Louisiana, first as governor, later as Senator. 

It won’t do to dismiss or forget Long that easily. Five years ago, Americans discovered, to their astonishment, that deep divides still exist along racial and class lines in his state. Yet those fissures would undoubtedly have been a thousand times worse without the grand infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, etc.—and services he put in place. 

Contemporaries never made the mistake of ignoring Long. RFK has been lionized on disc (Black 47’s “Bobby Kennedy”) and the big screen (Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby”), but he has not become fodder for novelists in the same manner that Long did. 

From 1934 to 1946, a half-dozen novelists took a crack at rendering The Kingfish’s life and death in fiction, according to Keith Perry’s critical study, The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel. 

Ironically, the most famous, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, All the King’s Men, was the one most loosely based on his life. There were others by Hamilton Basso, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here), and Adria Locke Langley's A Lion is in the Streets (later, like All the King’s Men, adapted for film, this time starring James Cagney as the Long stand-in). 

Sixty years after the shooting, Joe Klein (writing as “Anonymous”) used All the King’s Men as a kind of template for his own novelistic study in ambivalence about a compromised Southern progressive, Primary Colors. 

Why so much literary interest in Long? For all the overtones of Greek tragedy evoked by the death of Bobby Kennedy, his life didn’t pose in stark terms, the way Long’s did, the elemental questions posed by the political process, such as whether the end justifies the means. 

Take a look at the roll call of governors from roughly the 1870s to the Roaring Twenties, when Long came to power. A dispiritingly high percentage of these came from the “Bourbon” set of politicians in the governor’s seat, conservatives intent on spending as little as possible on basic services for the state. 

Long broke that pattern, and nearly five decades after his death, many ordinary people who allowed themselves to be filmed for Ken Burns’ documentary on Long spoke highly of how the governor-senator positively affected their lives. 

Long’s take-no-prisoners style in assuring passage of his programs, however, along with certain aspects of his populist stances (e.g., “Share the Wealth” clubs that advocated redistribution of the incomes of the most affluent), led many to wonder if a homegrown version of Fascism was appearing in the U.S. 

None other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who had received crucial support from Long at the 1932 Democratic Convention—privately believed that the politician was one of the two most dangerous men in America. (The other “dangerous man” was General Douglas MacArthur.) 

The fiery opposition to his positions and his leadership style (Long had to fend off an impeachment move while governor), it somehow seems appropriate, ended in equally vociferous reactions to his death. 

For years, the accepted version of Long’s death was that it came at the hands of Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a judge being gerrymandered out of office by a set of bills that the Louisiana legislature was then passing. Weiss encountered Long in the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, and to the horror of eyewitnesses a hail of bullets was exchanged. Dr. Weiss was gunned down immediately by Long’s bodyguards, while Long died from his wounds two days later. 

Yet, surprisingly enough, as outlined in Robert Travis Scott’s article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on the 75th anniversary of the shooting, the most fundamental forensic evidence from the case—e.g., the bullet, the gun—did not receive what we would think of as standard identification and preservation. 

To the annoyance of Long’s band of admirers today, then, questions impossible to dismiss have lingered as to whether a) Long died directly from the crossfire of his own bodyguards rather than from the bullet Weiss was able to fire, or b) whether Weiss merely got into fisticuffs with Long, and that his guards, to cover up their overreaction, arranged the evidence to point in the direction of Weiss rather than themselves. 

A quarter century to the day of the assassination, Huey’s only slightly less colorful brother Earl Long was buried, after 18 months in which he a) took up with stripper Blaze Starr, b) his wife committed him to a mental institution, c) he checked out of said institution and ran for Congress, d) he won the race, and e) he died after a second fatal heart attack while in the hospital.

Quotes of the Day (Edwin Edwards and Peter Cammarano, Demonstrating Touching Confidence in The Electorate)

“The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”—Former Louisiana Governor (and current jailbird) Edwin Edwards, handicapping to reporters his chances of winning a 1983 election against GOP opponent Dave Treen, quoted by Jeremy Alford, “The Cajun Express,” The Independent Weekly (Lafayette, La.), September 28, 2008

“Right now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down. Nothing can change that now. I could be, uh, indicted, and I’m still gonna win 85 to 95 percent of those populations.”—Just-resigned Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III (the guy in the accompanying photo, doing the perp walk), discussing his prospects for winning a runoff election for his office last year, quoted in United States of America v. Peter Cammarano III and Michael Schaffer

Mr. Cammarano, you just have been, uh, indicted. Your unique political science theory is about to be put to the test in ways you couldn’t imagine in 2008.

Unlike ex-Gov. Edwards—who displayed such a raffish charm that his bid for a pardon by George W. Bush was supported by politicians in both parties, even old rival Dave Treen—Cammarano has displayed only monstrous hypocrisy. He campaigned as a reformer, if you can believe that—bringing to mind the adage by columnist James J. Kilpatrick that reform consists of throwing your rascals out and putting my rascals in.

Moreover, Cammarano served as state legal director of Sen. Bob Menendez’s campaign a few years ago. I’d love to hear about the kind of advice he served up then.

Edwards and Cammarano epitomize the two different styles of corruption perpetrated by politicians on the good citizens of Louisiana and New Jersey.

New Jersey politicians are as much fun as a highway full of oil refineries on fire. If they squeezed silver dollars even a smidgen harder than they do right now, the poor coins would scream for relief. They meet the people they shake down in the kind of diners that Tony Soprano and his wrecking crew used to frequent on the HBO series.

Moreover, it’s all part of what Acting U.S. Attorney called, referring to the environment in which Cammarano operated, “an ethics-free zone”—i.e., the entire Garden State. The culture of corruption permeates every level of state government and law, even traffic court—where, because of our gazillion municipalities’ need to make money, it can easily cost a citizen more than $400 to cop a plea to wipe out points on a license for a moving violation that could otherwise leave you paying a surcharge for several years on your car insurance.

(In the 44-person indictment just handed down by the Feds, even rabbis ended up indicted, for God’s sake. I’m still suffering from cognitive dissonance, as I try to square the concept of representatives of the religion of The Law—you know, Moses and the 10 Commandments—breaking all sorts of them. Will someone explain to me how they got involved in this sorry mess?)

All of this wouldn’t be so hard to take if our politicians were entertaining. But the only thing funny about our public officials are the Quasimodo-like humps they’ve grown in carting out ill-gotten booty. The booty they stole, especially aggravating in a bum economy, from us.

Louisiana, taking its cue from the New Orleans motto, “Let the good times roll,” has by far the more cheerfully colorful crew of crooks. I think that if I’m going to be had, I’d rather be done by them.

Governor Earl Long, Edwards’ predecessor, is a case in point. Younger brother of Huey Long, committed to a state mental hospital by his wife after coming out for black voting rights, ol’ Earl managed to check himself out of the institution and run for Congress, all the while flaunting his relationship with stripper Blaze Starr. (You might remember the Paul Newman movie about this, Blaze.)

Here’s one of the things I like best about the fellow A.J. Liebling called “The Earl of Louisiana.” In the 1950s, he decided to backtrack from a position he’d taken, upsetting some of his most loyal supporters. An anxious aide asked how to finesse voters displeased that he’d gone back on his pledge.

Long’s response—paradoxically breathtaking in its brazen honesty—is one that I wish my state’s small-time double-talkers would try once in a blue moon: “Just look them in the eye, and tell them I lied!”