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	Confederate Two Dollar Bill of the Confederate States of America picturing Judah Benjamin. Hebraic Section Five Hundred Dollar Bond, Confederate States of America. Authorized by an Act of Congress, C.S.A., August 18, 1861. Printed sheet with coupons. Manuscript Division Judah Benjamin was often referred to by historians as the "the brains of the Confederacy," even as others tried to blame him for the South’s defeat. When the slave states seceded in 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed him Attorney General, making Benjamin 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 as Secretary of State. During the Civil War, many Southerners blamed Benjamin for their nation’s misfortunes. The Confederacy lacked the men and materiel 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 revealing the true weakness of Southern forces, Benjamin, as Davis’s loyal Secretary of War, took the blame and resigned. Anti-Semitism was an unpleasant fact – 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 Iscariot. When the South was defeated, fearing that he could never receive a fair trial if charged with Lincoln’s murder, Benjamin disguised, traveled to Florida where he stayed at the Gamble Mansion outside Tampa, sailed to the Bahamas and the West Indies before settling in England. Evans speculates that, had Benjamin been captured by Union troops, the United States might have had its own Dreyfus Trial. He enrolled at Lincoln's Inn, London, as a barrister in 1866, and became Queen's Counsel for Lancashire County in 1872. He became so successful that by 1877, he would accept no case for a fee less than 300 guineas ($1,500). Benjamin died on May 6, 1884, in Paris, where he and his wife were buried. His daughter returned to the United States to claim her father’s assets which included vast real estate holdings. At the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond in 1890, Col. Charles Marshall, an aide-de-camp on General Lees staff, read part of a letter from Benjamin, which revealed that President Davis had agreed to allow Benjamin to be publicly censured: I consulted the President whether it was best for the country that I should submit to unmerited censure or reveal to a congressional Committee our poverty and my utter inability to supply the requisitions of General Wise, and thus run the risk that the fact should become known to some of the spies of the enemy, of whose activity we were well assured. It was thought best for the public service that I should suffer the blame in silence and a report of censure on me was accordingly made by the Committee of Congress. On the subject of slavery, both Davis and Benjamin were "enlightened" Southerners whose attitudes were evolving. Most Jewish historians have understandably reacted with revulsion to the fact that Benjamin owned 140 slaves on a sugar plantation, and they have been unable to consider the question of his views on slavery with anything but embarrassed dismay. To comprehend Benjamin on this score, one must put him into context as a political figure against a backdrop of planter dogmatism and abolitionist fervor.
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