History of Saint Croix Falls, (Polk County) Wisconsin United States of America

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Judah Philip Benjamin, lawyer, was born in St. Croix, W. I., Aug. 11, 1811. He was of English-Jewish parentage, and passed his early years in New Orleans, La., and Wilmington, N.C. He studied at Yale for three years, and read law in New Orleans, where he was admitted to the bar in 1834, and became a member of the law firm of Slidell, Benjamin & Conrad, which soon acquired an extensive practice. In 1845 he was a member of the convention to revise the state constitution, and in 1853 was elected to the U.S. senate as a Whig; but during the anti-slavery agitation he became a Democrat. In a controversy on the floor of the senate he antagonized Jefferson Davis and would have been involved in a duel with that senator, had not Mr. Davis made an apology in the presence of the assembled senators. He was re-elected to the senate in 1859, but withdrew with John Slidell at the secession of Louisiana in 1861. During his term he advocated the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854, but afterwards declared that the decision of Judge Taney in the Dred-Scott case had set aside the principle of popular sovereignty. In February, 1861, he was appointed attorney-general of the provisional government of the Confederate states, and in August, 1861, was transferred to President Davis's cabinet as secretary of war, to succeed L. P. Walker; but being subsequently accused of incompetence by the Confederate congress, he resigned, and was appointed secretary of state, which portfolio he held until the Confederacy was broken up. He fled from Richmond on the overthrow of the Confederate government, escaped to the Bahamas, and thence to England, in September, 1865. He then studied English law, entering Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1866, and was called to the bar the following summer. He was promoted Queen's counsel in 1872, and acquired an extensive practice. His best-known argument was delivered before the court for crown cases, on behalf of the captain of the Franconia, and his last great case was a suit against the London and Northwestern railway. Later he appeared only before the House of Lords and the privy council. He retired from practice in 1883, and after a notable farewell banquet at the Inner Temple, London, he removed to Paris, where he died May 8, 1884.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor

History of Saint Croix Falls, (Polk County) Wisconsin

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