The number of Jews who distinguished themselves by their bravery and who attained high rank and other forms of recognition, was also correspondingly large, especially if we consider their inexperience in war. But before treating of the men who gained eminence on the field of battle, and of the others whose creditable record in the war helped them to attain positions of prominence in other walks of life afterwards, we shall speak of the one man who occupied a really commanding position in this gigantic struggle, the greatest Jew in American public life――Judah P. Benjamin. Illustration: Judah P. Benjamin. From Pierce Butler’s “Judah P. Benjamin.” He was the son of Philip (b. about 1782) and Rebecca de Mendes Benjamin, who emigrated from London, England, to St. Thomas, W. I., in 1808, shortly after their marriage, where the son was born August 6, 1811. The Benjamins removed to the United States, where they originally intended to go, about 1818, and settled in Charleston, S. C. Judah Philip entered Yale University in 1825, and left in 1827, without taking a degree. A year later he came to New Orleans, where he taught English, learned French and studied law as a notary’s clerk. He was admitted to the bar in 1832 and a year later married his former pupil, Natalie St. Martin, who remained all her life a devout Roman Catholic. The marriage was not a happy one, and when their only child which survived infancy was about five years old, Mrs. Benjamin moved permanently to France to educate her, and Mr. Benjamin saw them only on his visits to Paris, which he made almost annually. Benjamin was associated with Thomas Slidell, who later became Chief Justice of Louisiana, in the preparation of the _Digest of the Reported Decisions of the Superior Courts in the Territory of Orleans and State of Louisiana_, which was published in 1834. He soon afterward became interested in politics, and was elected to the lower house of the General Assembly of Louisiana on the Whig ticket in 1842. When he was forced by weakened eyesight to relinquish his law practice for a time, he took up sugar planting, in which he likewise succeeded very well. The plantation, however, was ruined by a flood, and Benjamin removed to New Orleans, together with the members of his family, whom he brought over from South Carolina. They were his mother (d. 1847), his oldest sister, the widow of Abraham Levy (whom she married in 1826), and his younger sister, who later became the mother of Julius Kruttschnitt (b. in New Orleans, 1854), the railroad manager. As a planter Benjamin became a slave owner, and some of his slaves, who were still living at the beginning of the present century, “would tell visitors all sorts of tales of the master of long ago――none but kindly memories and romantic legends of the glory of the old place.”[40]