Bibliograph

Judah Benjamin, counselor to the confederacy, James Traub

Type

Label

Judah Benjamin, counselor to the confederacy, James Traub

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Judah Benjamin

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1249079023

Responsibility statement

James Traub

Series statement

Jewish lives

Sub title

counselor to the confederacy

Summary

Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded

Classification

Creator