I find Abraham Lincoln and Judah Benjamin the two most interesting characters of the Civil War. Although much is known about Lincoln, Benjamin was covert and elusive about his personal thoughts and left only crumbs of written material regarding his personal life. The fact that he was Jewish and a lawyer who acquired wealth and aspired to political office made him an outsider and a villain in the eyes of many of his fellow countrymen, especially as the War lingered on.
Benjamin was a child prodigy who, at fourteen years old, left his home in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended Yale University. He excelled his peers academically and was known as a spellbinding orator. Despite this, he was expelled from Yale during his second year. The circumstances and the reason given for expulsion was a vague charge of improper conduct. Some allege that he was caught stealing money from fellow classmates. I find this doubtful. For one thing, his fellow classmates took up a collection and gave Judah money to temporally sustain him after he left the campus.
Rather than return home to Charleston, he traveled by steamboat to New Orleans, disembarking with less than ten dollars to his name, and no relatives or acquaintances to shelter him. Nevertheless, he flourished and at twenty-one years old, he passed the Louisiana State Barr exam and became an attorney specializing in commercial law. He authored a book, Benjamin on Commerce, which was used for reference into the twentieth century by schools and law firms.
He married Natalie St. Vrain, an aristocratic Creole woman and he started a sugar plantation where he owned slaves. He had a net worth estimated at 1.5 million dollars at a time when most working people earned less than two thousand dollars per year. In 1853, he was elected senator of Louisiana, a position he held until 1861 when he became the first Confederate States Attorney General. He went on to become the Secretary of War, and finally the Confederate Secretary of State. When the war ended in April of 1865, he escaped to England, where at fifty-one years old, he attended law school, graduated, and practiced as a member of the Queens Council, a specialized position in the English court system. He died at age 72, in France
