Judah P. Benjamin: A Confederate Portrait
BENJAMIN was a Jew. He was born a British subject. He made a brilliant reputation at the Louisiana Bar and was offered a seat in the United States Supreme Court. He became United States senator. When his state seceded, he went with it, and filled three cabinet positions under the Confederacy. He fell with the immense collapse of that dream fabric. Then, at the age of fifty-four, he set himself to build up a new fortune and a new glory; and he died one of the most successful and respected barristers in London. Such a career seems to offer piquant matter for portraiture. Let us see if it does.
Characteristic of the man at the very outset is his attitude about such portraiture. He will not have it, if he can help it; will not aid in it, destroys all letters and papers that may contribute to it. ‘I have never kept a diary, or retained a copy of a letter written by me. . . . I have read so many American biographies which reflected only the passions and prejudices of their writers, that I do not want to leave behind me letters and documents to be used in such a work about myself.’ And he is said to have quoted early advice given him to the effect that the secret of human happiness was the destruction of writing. On this principle he acted and by so doing certainly made my task more difficult. Indeed, it would have been impossible, except for the researches of Professor Pierce Butler, whose excellent biography must form the basis of all future writing about the Jewish lawyer and statesman.
But if Benjamin’s view of biography and its materials is characteristic in its secretiveness, it is also characteristic in its limitation and inadequacy. I take him to have been an honest man. Now, an honest man has nothing to gain by destroying records. Talleyrand spent hours of his retirement in burning paper after paper. John Quincy Adams spent hours, both of active life and retirement, in noting every detail of his existence for posterity. Has he not gained by it? Is there a line of his that does not emphasize his honesty, his dignity, his human worth? Do we not love Pepys far better for his minute confessions, even if he loses a little of his bewigged respectability? No; Benjamin’s endeavors to conceal himself remind me a good deal of the ostrich which rests satisfied when it has left perfectly obvious the least intelligent part of it.
The truth is, destruction of records hampers only the honest investigator. The partisan and the scandal-monger remain wholly indifferent. Professor Butler’s earnest efforts have accomplished everything possible, in the scarcity of material, to clear his favorite; but Benjamin’s popular reputation will probably continue what it was at the end of the war. That is, both North and South will regard him with dislike approaching to contempt. ‘The ability of Benjamin was undoubted.' says Mr. Rhodes, expressing the mildest Northern view, ‘but he was by many considered untrustworthy.’ And the same authority sees nothing in the Secretary’s career incompatible with complicity in the raid on St. Albans and the attempt to burn New York. A few Southern amenities may also be cited. ‘The oleaginous Mr. Benjamin,’ Wise calls him, ‘his keg-like form and over-deferential manner suggestive of a prosperous shopkeeper.’ ‘The hated Jew,’ says Dodd, ‘whom the President had retained at his council table, despite the protests of the Southern people and press.’ And Foote sums him up choicely as ‘Judas Iscariot Benjamin.’
It is our affair, from the mass of anecdote and recollection, and especially from such scanty evidence as the gentleman himself could not avoid leaving us, to find out how far this attitude is justified.
To begin, then, with Benjamin’s professional life; for he was first and last a lawyer, only by avocation a statesman. It is universally recognized that as a pleader in court he had few superiors. His power of direct, lucid statement was remarkable, and no one knew better how to present every remote possibility of argument on either side of a case. Even his admirers confess that he sometimes imposed on himself in this way. His enemies maintain that he was not imposed on at all, but argued for the side that paid him, with serene indifference to the right and wrong of it. And they conclude that in politics he was equally indifferent. They forget, however, that the lawyer’s second nature does not always drive out the first. Cicero pleaded for many a client whom he despised. Nevertheless, he was a passionate lover of Rome.
As to Benjamin’s oratory, opinions differ. In England more stress was laid on his matter than on his manner. But in America friends and enemies alike seem to agree that he had unusual gifts. On this point mere printed speeches are not sufficient for a judgment. They lack the gesture, the expression, the fire, cunningly simulated or real. But, so far as such printed testimony goes, I fail to find the basis for the extravagant praise of Benjamin’s biographers. His rhetoric is neither better nor worse than that of fifty of his contemporaries, a clever knack of turning large phrases on subjects that breed rhetoric in the very naming of them. His farewell speech in the Senate is lofty and impressive. Who could have failed to be so on such an occasion? He can pass a noble compliment like that to Judge Taney: ‘He will leave behind him in the scanty heritage that shall be left for his family the noblest evidence that he died, as he had lived, a being honorable to the earth from which he sprang and worthy of the heaven to which he aspired.’ And a few minutes later he can fall into screaming melodrama: ‘Accursed, thrice accursed is that fell spirit of party which desecrates the noblest sentiments of the human heart, and which, in the accomplishment of its unholy purposes, hesitates at no violence of assault on all which is held sacred by the wise and good . . . Mr. President, in olden times a viper gnawed a file.’
In both the graces and the defects of Benjamin’s oratory it is interesting to note the riches of a well-stored mind. He was a reader all his life, a lover of Shakespeare and the great poets, quoted them and filled his thoughts with them; and this, too, although in youth he was poor and had to fight hard for book hours, perhaps all the sweeter when thus purchased.
But the strongest element of Benjamin’s public speaking is a singular frankness and directness. Now and then he comes out with an abrupt sentence that must have struck the Senate like cold water. ‘I did not think I could be provoked to say another word on this subject, of which I am heartily sick.’ ’If the object [of a certain bill] is to provide for friends and dependents, let us say so openly.”‘For you cannot say two words on this floor on any subject whatever that Kansas is not thrust into your ears.'
If the test of professional ability is success, Benjamin has been surpassed by few. His early income, for America of the fifties, was very large, and when he rebuilt his fortunes in London, his earnings again rose from nothing to seventy or eighty thousand dollars a year. I can find no evidence whatever that these earnings were based upon practice dubious or questionable. His connection with some financial schemes before the war is admitted by his partial biographer to have been unfortunate, if not indiscreet. But certainly his professional standing in Louisiana was totally different from that of a man like Butler in Massachusetts.
Moreover, no one can read the universal testimony to his position at the English bar without believing him to have been a high-minded gentleman. Blaine’s contention that the English admired Benjamin because they hated the North must indeed be allowed some weight at the beginning of his career. But no man could have gained increasingly for fifteen years the esteem and personal affection of the first lawyers in London, if he had not deserved it. ‘The success of Benjamin at the English Bar is without parallel in professional annals,’ says a good authority, and attributes the fact that it excited no jealousy to ‘the simplicity of his manners, his entire freedom from assumption, and his kindness of heart.’ Lord Coleridge called him ‘the common honor of both Bars, of England and of America.’ And Sir Henry James, speaking at the farewell dinner given Benjamin on his retirement, said: ‘ The honor of the English Bar was as much cherished and represented by him as by any man who has ever adorned it, and we all feel that if our profession has afforded him hospitality, he has repaid it, amply repaid it, not only by the reputation which his learning has brought to us, but by that which is far more important, the honor his conduct has gained for us.’ Few men can show a higher testimonial to character than that.
Now let us turn to the political aspects of this varied career. The Senate reports in the Congressional Globe during the later fifties show how constant and how many-sided was Benjamin’s activity. What has struck me especially in some of the large semi-private interests that he espoused is that he failed. He should not have failed. He may have been a great lawyer. To be a great man, he failed too often.
On public questions he invariably took the extreme Southern view; but it is characteristic that he did this without exciting animosity. No senator seems to have been more popular on both sides of the house, and his adversaries regarded him with respect, sometimes even with affection.
When the Confederate government was organized, Benjamin was first made Attorney General. From this position he quickly passed to that of Secretary of War. Here again he was a failure. He had no special knowledge and this made him obnoxious to soldiers. Even his extraordinary quickness and business instinct were hardly equal to learning a new profession in the complicated conditions then prevailing. Charges of laxity and of corruption amounting to treason are brought against him, I think wholly without foundation. But he struck one rock after another and finally met disaster in the unfortunate affair of Roanoke Island. Wise charged that he was ordered by the Secretary to remain in an impossible position, that powder was refused him, and that thus the War Office led up to the catastrophe. Benjamin remained silent at the time; but it was afterwards explained that there was no powder and that he willingly submitted to public censure rather than reveal the deficiency. This is assuredly to his credit. Congress censured him, however, and a resolution was offered, though tabled, ‘that it is the deliberate judgment of this House that the Hon. Judah P. Benjamin, as Secretary of War, has not the confidence of the people of the Confederate States, nor of the Army, to such an extent as to meet the exigencies of the present crisis.’
Upon this, Davis, to show his own confidence in his favorite, transferred him to the still higher post of Secretary of State. It is said that Benjamin here served his chief in innumerable ways, drafting public documents, suggesting and advising on lines quite outside the technical limits of his office. The best known of these activities were in regard to the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, and the proposal to make military use of the Negroes, and even to emancipate them for the sake of securing foreign support. In these attempts also Benjamin failed, or what slight measure of success there was went to the credit of others.
In the State Department proper he devoted all his energy for three years to obtaining foreign recognition — and failed again, where perhaps no one could have succeeded. A side issue in this departmental work has discredited him more seriously than any other charge that can plausibly be brought against him. Acting generally under Davis, he authorized and instructed the agents in Canada who were to attack the Northern states from the rear. These men — Thompson and others — fostered discontent and insurrection everywhere. They planned the raid on St. Albans and the attempt to burn New York city with its thousands of innocent women and children. There is no evidence that Benjamin directly instigated these undertakings. But we know that he received and read Thompson’s account of them, and we do not know that he ever expressed any disapproval. Looked at now, in cold blood, they seem without excuse. We can only remind ourselves that passion has strange pleas, and that the whole South believed the North to be capable of worse deeds than any Thompson contemplated; nay,to have done them.
In this matter of the Canadian attempts, Mr. Rhodes is very careful to distinguish Davis from his Secretary, and the historian cannot believe that the Confederate President could have been a partaker in such infamy, but implies that the subordinate officer was much less sensitive. I hardly think Benjamin’s character deserves this sharp discrimination. In any case, I have been most interested to find one of the very greatest of Virginia’s statesmen and philanthropists explicitly advocating just such an attempt as that to fire New York. ‘She’ [England], writes Jefferson in 1812, ‘may burn New York, indeed, by her ships and Congreve rockets, in which case we must burn the city of London by hired incendiaries, of which her starving manufacturers will furnish abundance.’
In all these manifold schemes of Benjamin I look in vain, so far as the records go, for evidence of large, far-reaching, creative statesmanship. Again and again I ask myself what Cavour would have thought, have devised, have done in that position. For it is sufficiently manifest that a man of Cavour’s type was what the Confederacy needed — and did not get. Yet would any man of that statesmanlike genius and close practical grasp have attempted to solve the impossible problem of reconciling the loose theory of state rights with the fiercely centralized government required to cope with the overwhelming force of the North?
At any rate, Benjamin was no Cavour. His biographer does, indeed, point out that he had something of the dreamy, imaginative side of his race, as shown in the unpractical conceptions of his early business efforts. But dreamers do not make statesmen, usually quite the contrary. And Benjamin’s practical statesmanship was, I think, rather of the makeshift order. It is very rare that in his diplomatic papers we find any reference to the cloudy future of the Confederacy, and the only instance in which he amplifies on the subject, predicting that North America is ‘on the eve of being divided into a number of independent Governments with rival, if not conflicting, interests,’ is distinctly in the nature of a dream.
A dream also, the nightmare of a Jewish prophet, and clung to with a Jewish prophet’s tenacity, is his everrecurring hope of European recognition, which should free the South and end the war. Here again, it seems to me that Cavour would either have put the thing through or soon have felt its hopelessness. Even Benjamin’s own foreign agent declares that failure should have been foreseen and accepted at a very early stage. But Benjamin believed that recognition must come, that Europe could not be so foolish as to neglect its own interest. And long after the war he told W. H. Russell, in London, that ‘ though I have done with politics, thank God! I consider your government made a frightful mistake which you may have occasion to rue hereafter.’
Of similar character, though even more general in the South and less persistent in Benjamin, was the delusion as to the supremacy of cotton.
If, then, Benjamin was not a statesman of a high order, or of large and commanding ideas, how was it that, he so long held such a prominent position in the Confederate government? The answer is simple, and two good reasons furnish more than the solution of the difficulty.
In the first place, Benjamin was an admirable man of business, and those who have had the privilege of meeting a good many business men know how rare an admirable man of business is. He was a worker. While he loved ease and luxury, he was capable of enormous labor, did not shirk long hours or cumbrous documents, went right at a job and finished it. He would remain at his desk, when necessary, from eight o’clock one morning till one or two the next. He would work Sundays and holidays. And he did this without fatigue, complaint, or murmur, always cheerfully and easily, and as if he enjoyed it.
Industry in itself does not go far, however, or not the whole way. Benjamin had what is worth more than industry, system. When he went into the war office he was no soldier and could not please soldiers. But he was an administrator, and if he had stuck to that phase, I imagine he would have been useful. He began right away to bring order out of hopeless confusion; he organized, systematized, docketed. ‘Having had charge of the War Department but a few days,’ he writes, ‘my first effort was to master our situation, to understand thoroughly what we had and in what our deficiencies consisted, but I have been completely foiled at all points by the absence of systematic returns.’ And again, ‘Without them [returns] we cannot of course administer the service; can make no calculations, no combinations, can provide in advance with no approximation to certainty, and cannot know how to supply deficiencies.’ A systematizer of this order was a useful creature in Richmond during those four years.
But another quality, even more valuable than business habits, sustained Benjamin in his office: he was a student of human nature. He watched character perpetually, analyzed the motives of others, their wants, their weaknesses, knew how to adapt himself to them. ‘No shade of emotion in another escaped Mr. Benjamin’s penetration,’ writes the keen-sighted Mrs. Davis, whose warm regard for her husband’s adviser is one of his best credentials. ‘He seemed to have a kind of electric sympathy with every mind with which he came into contact, and very often surprised his friends by alluding to something they had not expressed nor desired him to interpret.’
How useful this quality was in dealing with Davis can be appreciated only by those who have studied carefully the peculiarities of that noble but complicated personage. A patriotic idealist in purpose, he wished to save his country, but he wished to save it in his own way. From his subordinates he desired labor, quick comprehension, a hearty support of all his plans and methods. Advice he did not desire, and those who gave it had to give it with tact and extreme delicacy. Here was exactly the chance for Judah P. Benjamin. Advice he did not especially care to give, but no man could divine Davis’s wishes with finer sympathy, no man could carry out his plans with more intelligent coöperation and at the same time with heartier self-effacement. The patient skill with which the result was accomplished is well indicated by Airs. Davis when she says: ‘It was to me a curious spectacle; the approximation to a thorough friendliness of the President and his war minister. It was a very gradual rapprochement, but all the more solid for that reason.’ J. B. Jones, the diarist, who disliked and distrusted his Jewish superior, analyzes the relation between President and Secretary with much less approval. ‘Air. Benjamin unquestionably will have great influence with the President, for he has studied his character most carefully. Ho will be familiar not only with his “likes,” but especially with his “dislikes.” ’ And when Jones hears that the President is about to be baptized and confirmed, he takes comfort because ‘it may place a gulf between him and the descendant of those who crucified the Savior.’
If we accept Benjamin’s own words, however, and I think we may, we shall conclude that his devotion to Davis was founded, at any rate in part, on a sincere esteem and admiration. Writing to the London Times after the war, he says: ‘For the four years during which I have been one of his most privileged advisers, the recipient of his confidence and sharer to the best of my ability in his labors and responsibilities, I have learned to know him better perhaps than he is known by any other living man. Neither in private conversation nor in Cabinet council have I ever heard him utter one unworthy thought, one ungenerous sentiment.’
No one, then, could long retain Davis’s confidence without an abundant supply of tact and sympathy. Probably the two men who made most use of these qualities in their dealings with the President were Lee and Benjamin. But an instructive difference strikes us here. Lee’s tact sprang spontaneously from natural human kindness. He treated his inferiors exactly as he treated his sole superior, and was as courteous and sympathetic to the humblest soldier as to the President of the Confederacy. With Benjamin it is wholly otherwise. He was at the war office for just six months. In that time I will not say he quarreled with everybody under him, but he alienated many, and quarreled with such a number that his stay there is but. a record of harsh words and recrimination. One brief telegram to McCulloch will abundantly illustrate the cause of this state of things: ‘I cannot understand why you withdrew your troops instead of pursuing the enemy when his leaders were quarreling and his army separated into parts under different commanders. Send an explanation.’
This sort of dispatch, from a lawyer who had never seen a skirmish, to generals of old experience and solid training, was not likely to breed good feeling, much less to restore it. It did not. Benjamin had trouble with Wise, trouble with Beauregard, trouble repeatedly with J. E. Johnston, and drove Jackson to a resignation which, if it had been accepted, might have changed the course of the war. This is surely a pretty record for six months. And observe that in many instances the Secretary appears to have been right and wise. This only emphasizes the misfortune of his getting into such difficulty. The suavity, the graceful tact which served him so well with Davis, seem to have deserted him in dealing with those over whom he had control. Or rather, it is said that the very suavity produced double exasperation when it was used merely to glove an arbitrary display of authority. ‘When I do not agree with Benjamin, I will not let him talk to me,’ said Slidell, who was his friend, ‘he irritates me so by his debonair ways.’
And now, with the qualities of Benjamin’s public career clearly suggested, let us turn for a moment to his private life and see how that helps to illuminate the other.
To begin with his social relations. As with Davis, so with all his equals whom he met in daily intercourse, his manner was full of courtesy, some even say, charm. To be sure, Wise calls him ‘oleaginous’; but Alfriend, who knew him well, goes to the other extreme: ‘I have never known a man socially more fascinating than Judah P. Benjamin. He was in his attainments a veritable Admiral [sic] Crichton, and I think, excepting G. P. R. James, the most brilliant, fascinating conversationalist I have ever known.’ One is tempted to blend these two views in Charles Lamb’s pleasant characterization of the singer Braham. ‘He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him, that you could not tell which preponderated.’
Less prejudiced judges than those above quoted render a verdict which is still decidedly favorable. In his earlier career in the United States Senate, Benjamin is said to have been generally popular and to have endeavored always to foster social relations; and Sumner, his bitterest opponent, bore testimony to his kindness of manner and conformity to the proprieties of debate. W. H. Russell speaks of his ‘brisk, lively, agreeable manner,’ and calls him ‘the most open, frank, and cordial of the Confederates whom I have yet met.’ Thomas F. Bayard, surely a connoisseur, says that Benjamin’s ‘ manner was most attractive — gentle, sympathetic, and absolutely unaffected,’ and that ‘he certainly shone in social life as a refined, genial, charming companion.’ And the testimony of his English friends is equally decided. ' A charming companion, ’ writes Sir Frederick Pollock, ‘an accomplished brother lawyer and a true friend; one I could not easily replace.’
In many of these social sketches of Benjamin there is a curious insistence on his smile, which seems to have been as perennial as Malvolio’s, if a little more natural. ‘The perpetual smile that basked on his Jewish lips,’ says the acrid Pollard. And Jones, in his Diary, recurs to it almost as a thirdrate playwright does to a character tag, so much so that on one occasion he notes Mr. Benjamin’s appearance without his smile as of inauspicious omen. ‘Upon his lip there seems to bask an eternal smile; but if it be studied, it is not a smile — yet it bears no unpleasant aspect.’
The implication in some descriptions that the smile and the courtesy were only on the surface is, I think, clearly unjust. Benjamin was not, perhaps, a philanthropist; but there is record of many kindly deeds of his, none the less genuine for not being trumpeted. He once lost sixty thousand dollars by endorsing a note for a friend, which, of a Jew, is worth remembering. Although never especially enthusiastic for his religion, he was ready to help a fellow Hebrew who wanted help, and it is said that old and needy Confederates in London did not apply to him for aid in vain.
Also, the smile was for himself, as well as for others. That is, it represented an attitude toward life. Through many ups and downs and odd turns and freaks of Fortune, Benjamin was never discouraged, never depressed. I do not think this meant in him any great strain of heroic fortitude. The smile shows that. It was an easy-going egotism, which neither touched nor was touched deeply, a serene, healthy wellbeing which let the blows of adversity strike and glance off, which turned trifles into great pleasures and very great evils into trifles. When work was needed, he worked with all that was in him. When he failed and fell, instead of being crushed, he jumped up, smiled, brushed off his clothes, and worked again. Where will you find a finer instance of recovery after utter disaster than this man’s rise in late life from nothing to fortune in a new country and an untried sphere? Even in his formal and official correspondence you catch little glimpses of the easy, devilmay-care fashion in which he took responsibilities that would have crushed others. Thus he ends a long letter of difficulty and trouble to his predecessor in the war office: ‘What a bed of roses you have bequeathed me! ’ Or he writes to Sidney Johnston — of all men: ‘In Mississippi and Tennessee your unlucky offer to receive unarmed men for twelve months has played the deuce with our camps.’ Fancy Lee or Davis writing that!
For a man armed with a smile of this kind, religion is a superfluity, and it appears that Benjamin had none. He practically dropped his own and never had the interest to pick up any other. He did, indeed, — unless he has been confused with Disraeli,— tell a sneerer at Judaism that his own ancestors were receiving the law from Deity on Mt. Sinai when the sneerer’s were herding swine in the forests of Saxony; but this was to make a point for the gallery, just as his burial in Paris with Catholic rites was pour plaire aux dames. His religion would not have been worth mentioning but for the delightful anecdote of Daniel Webster’s assuring him and Maury, the scientist, that they were all three Unitarians together. Benjamin denied this, and invited Webster to dine with him to prove it. They dined and argued, but Benjamin would not be convinced, though he did not know enough about the Bible to hold his ground. Oh, to have been present at that dinner! What conversation — and what wine and cigars!
As this discussion may imply, and as abundant evidence proves, Benjamin, for all his smiles and all his optimism, was neither cold nor always perfect in command of his temper. ‘He was like fire and tow,’ says Mrs. Davis, perhaps exaggerating in view of an incident shortly to be mentioned, ‘and sensitive about his dignity.’ I do not imagine that this went very deep, but at any rate the Southern sun had touched the surface with a singular petulance and vivacity. Even in age and in London fogs the temper would fly out. As when, before the solemn gravity of the House of Lords, Benjamin was arguing a case and heard the Lord Chancellor mutter, ‘Nonsense!’ The barrister stopped, gathered up his papers, and abruptly departed. So high was his standing at that time that the Chancellor felt obliged to make things right by an apology.
Even more entertaining is the earlier spat between Benjamin and Davis. Senatorial tempers were high-strained in Washington in the fifties, and men sometimes fell foul of friends as well as foes. The slap-dash, boyish interchange of curt phrases, even as staled in the cold storage of the Congressional Globe, must have rejoiced Seward and Sumner. Its straight-from-the-shoulder quality, coming from such reverend sages, recalls the immortal dialogue which Adam Smith reports himself and Dr. Johnson as exchanging, like coalheavers. ‘What did Dr. Johnson say, sir?’ — Smith: ‘He said I was a liar.’ ‘And what did you say?’ ‘I said he was a’ — never mind what. Benjamin’s language is more senatorial, but not too much so. ‘The Senator is mistaken and has no right to state any such thing. His manner is not agreeable at all.’ —Davis: ‘If the Senator happens to find it disagreeable, I hope he will keep it to himself.’— Benjamin : ‘ When directed to me, I will not keep it to myself; I will repel it instanter..' — Davis : ‘You have got it, sir.’
And pistols for two, of course. But kind friends prevented the future secretary of state from shooting at his president. More seriously instructive and profitable is the contrast between the explanations offered by the two men in the Senate. Davis’s is in his best style, nobly characteristic, as thoroughly frank as it is manly and dignified. Benjamin’s is well enough, but cautious, as if he were afraid of his position and anxious not to say a word too much.
The keen sensibility, whether superficial or not, which appears in these incidents, characterized Benjamin in other ways besides temper. He liked excitement. It was the excitement of public contest that made for him, I think, the charm of his profession. After the war he was offered an excellent opening in Parisian finance, but he preferred to fight his way up in the English courts. And there is a remarkable sentence in his speech at the farewell dinner, when he mentions having been ordered by his physicians to avoid the excitement of active practice: ‘I need hardly tell an audience like this that to tell me or any person of a nature like mine to abstain from all possible excitement is to tell him to cease the active exercise of the profession; for without the ardor of forensic contest what is the profession worth? ’
He liked excitement in the form of games, also, liked billiards and whist. W. H. Russell even records as Washington scandal that Benjamin lost the major part of his very large income at cards. His biographer denies this, but in rather mild fashion, asserting that he was ‘not a rabid gambler’; and Benjamin himself seems less concerned at the accusation than at Russell’s ingratitude in making it.
On graver points of morals I find no trace of any charge whatever against Benjamin. But, in spite of his immense capacity for work, he was generally known as a lover of ease and good living. This, assuredly no vice in itself, came almost to appear like one in those last hungry months of the Confederacy. Very characteristic of the man — more so, perhaps, than she means it to be — is Mrs. Davis’s little sketch: ‘He used to say that with bread made of Crenshaw’s flour, spread with paste made from English walnuts from an immense tree in our grounds, and a glass of McHenry sherry, of which we had a scanty store, “a man’s patriotism became rampant.” ’ Alfriend also gives us a significant touch: ‘Mr. Benjamin loved a good dinner, a good glass of wine, and reveled in the delights of fine Havana cigars. Indeed, even when Richmond was in a state of siege, he was never without them.’ Immediately beside this I do not think it cruel to put his own letter in regard to soldiers who were starving on half rations and to whom a crust was luxury: ‘Hardship and exposure will undoubtedly be suffered by our troops, but this is war, and we cannot hope to conquer our liberties or secure our rights by ease and comfort.’ [Italics mine.]
On this very point of good eating, however, we must at the same time note the man’s kindliness and gentle heart. What he liked, he thought others would like, and was glad to get it for them, if he could. Thus Mrs. Davis records that at a very good dinner Benjamin seemed ill at ease and confessed that he was thinking how much his brother-in-law, left alone at home, would enjoy some of the delicacics; whereupon he received a share for his companion and went away contented.
Undeniably, in the matter of relatives Benjamin appears at his best, and his affection and thought for them — thoroughly racial attributes — are pleasant to read about. With his French Catholic wife he did not, indeed, wholly agree. There was no formal separation or quarrel. But for the greater part of the time she lived in Paris and her husband in America or England. Benjamin’s biographer attributes this largely to faults of her disposition. Perhaps he is right. But I would give a good deal for Mrs. Benjamin’s view of her husband. So far as I know, only one recorded sentence of her writing twinkles in the memory of men. But that one is a jewel. It paints the woman; it paints the Southern Creole class, and much that is Northern and human also; it paints wide vistas of domestic infelicity; and it shows charmingly that Benjamin had found the superlative in an art in which he could furnish a good comparative himself. He writes to his wife urging economy, and she writes back: ‘Do not speak to me of economy: it is so fatiguing.’ Miss Austen might have invented the phrase, — she could not have bettered it.
But Benjamin afforded rather a singularity in matrimonial affairs by apparently caring much more about his wife’s relatives than he did about her. And to those connected with him by blood, his daughter, sisters, nieces, and nephews, he was deeply and devotedly attached. His few extant letters to them form very attractive reading, and show a man as lovable as he was clever. They are full of a light and graceful playfulness, gossiping of trivial things in just the way that love appreciates.
Yet how infinite are the shades and diversities of character! For all this graceful playfulness in his private letters, for all his reported wit in conversation, I do not find that Benjamin had much of that complicated characteristic which we call humor. I do not find it. in many of these Southern leaders. It is as absent from the brilliant cleverness of a Dick Taylor as it is from the rhetoric of a Davis. At any rate, I miss it in Benjamin. Read in the Congressional Globe the secession debate in which Baker of Oregon simply demolishes Benjamin, not by argument, but by pure Lincolnian quizzing, which the Southerner cannot meet because he cannot understand it. For the height and depth of humor the man did not view life at a large enough angle. He smiled perpetually, but his smile was the pleasant smirk of social responsiveness, and took no account at all of the tragedies of existence.
And now I think we are in a position to consider what was Benjamin’s real attitude toward the Confederacy. First, was he an able, selfish, scheming, unscrupulous adventurer, who played the game simply for his own personal ambition and aggrandizement; a sort of Talleyrand? This may be excluded at once. If there were no other evidence, little more would be needed than his own evidently genuine comparison of Gladstone and Disraeli, decidedly in favor of the former, who, indeed, is said to have been Benjamin’s idol. Gilmore, who, with Jacquess, visited the Secretary in Richmond, gives a description which is vital on this point. ‘There is something, after all, in moral power. Mr. Benjamin does not possess it, nor is he a great man. He has a keen, shrewd, ready intellect, but not the stamina to originate, or even to execute, any great good or great wickedness.’
But again, some who recognize Benjamin’s honesty assert that he took up the Confederate cause as a mere law case, utterly indifferent, to its wrong or right, or to any personal issue, giving it his best service as long as he could, then turning cheerfully to something else. Here also I think there is error. The man’s whole heart was in the work and he felt for it as deeply as he could feel. Passage after passage in his public and private writings shows indisputably the partisan hatred and the devoted enthusiasm of the loyal citizen. ‘I entertain no doubt whatever that hundreds of thousands of people at the North would be frantic with fiendish delight if informed of the universal massacre of the Southern people, including women and children, in one night.’ ‘No people have poured out their blood more freely in defense of their liberty and independence, nor have endured sacrifices with greater cheerfulness than have the men and women of these Confederate States. They accepted the issue which was forced on them by an arrogant and domineering race, vengeful, grasping, and ambitious. They have asked nothing, fought for nothing, but for the right of self-government, for independence.’ ‘How it makes one’s breast swell with emotion to witness the calm, heroic, unconquerable determination to be free that fills the breast of all ages, sexes, and conditions.’
Like many other Southerners, Benjamin rather melodramatically declared that he would never be taken alive. He never was. Like many others, he declared that he would never, never submit. And he never submitted. The Jewish obstinacy would not be overcome.
No; it is utterly unjust to deny that his patriotism was genuine, or that he gave his very best sincerely, and in his way unselfishly, to what he felt to be his country. Only, with him nothing went deep. When the struggle was over, it was over. Some measure of his sunny cheerfulness must be credited to self-control. Most of it was temperament. Lee, too, made no complaint; but the tragedy of his people was written perpetually on his face. Benjamin’s face would not take impressions of that nature. Not one regret for a lost cause or a vanished country is to be found in his intimate personal letters. ‘ I am contented and cheerful under all reverses,’ he writes. And he was.
The truth is, viewed by the permanent standards of history, he was a small man, a small man placed in a great position, and he rattled about in it. The crises of nations always exhibit such misfits, in lamentable number. But with Benjamin the impression prevails that he was a man of remarkable ability, an adventurer of genius, but of little character. This view was strong upon me when I began to study him. Now I am forced to the opposite conclusion, that his character was respectable, if not unexceptionable, but his ability mediocre. Davis damned the latter with the faintest possible praise, to a nicety: ‘Mr. Benjamin, of Louisiana, had a very high reputation as a lawyer, and my acquaintance with him in the Senate had impressed me with the lucidity of his intellect, his systematic habits, and capacity for labor.’
In short, he was an average, honorable, and, in politics, rather ineffectual gentleman. Perhaps he would have preferred a different verdict. If so, he should not have destroyed those papers.