Judah P. Benjamin takes office as a Senator on March 4, 1853, becoming the first professed Jew elected to the U.S. Congress.

During his first year as a Senator, he challenges another young Senator, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, to a duel over a perceived insult on the Senate floor; Davis apologizes, and the two begin a close friendship.

Born a British subject in Christiansted, Saint Croix, in the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands), to Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents, Benjamin had emigrated with his parents to the U.S. several years later and grew up in North and South Carolina.

In 1824, his father was one of the founders of the the first Reform congregation in the United States, the "Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit" in Charleston.

He attended Fayetteville Academy in North Carolina, and at the age of fourteen he entered Yale Law School, though he left without a degree.

In 1832 he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he continued his study of law, was admitted into the bar that same year, and entered private practice as a commercial lawyer.

In 1833, Benjamin made a strategic marriage to Natalie St. Martin, of a prominent New Orleans Creole family; the marriage seems to have been unhappy.

He became a slave owner and established a sugar plantation in Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

Plantation and legal practice both prospered.

In 1842, his only child, Ninette, was born; Natalie took the girl and moved to Paris, where she remained for most of the rest of her life.

The same year, he was elected to the lower house of the Louisiana State Legislature as a Whig, and in 1845 he served as a member of the state Constitutional Convention.

In 1850 he sold his plantation and its one hundred and fifty slaves; he will never again own any slaves.

By 1852, Benjamin's reputation as an eloquent speaker and subtle legal mind was sufficient to win him selection by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate.

The outgoing President, Millard Fillmore of the Whig Party, had offered to nominate him to fill a Supreme Court vacancy after the Senate Democrats had defeated Fillmore's other nominees for that post, and the New York Times reported (on February 15, 1853) that "if the President nominates Benjamin, the Democrats are determined to confirm him."

However, Benjamin had declined to be nominated.

Judah P. Benjamin, a founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, a state legislator, and a planter who owned one hundred and forty slaves until he sold his plantation in 1850, has served as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana since 1852.

Born to English Jewish parents in the British West Indies and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, he is one of the first senators to call for Southern secession in the wake of Lincoln's victory.

Speaking in December 1860 of the South's determination to secede, Benjamin says “It is a revolution and it can no more be checked by human effort...than a prairie fire by a gardener's watering pot.”

Davis and Stephens are inaugurated in Montgomery on February 18.

Judah P. Benjamin, soon after resigning from the U.S Senate in February, is appointed attorney general by his good friend Davis. (This makes Benjamin the first Jew to hold a Cabinet-level office in an American government and the only Confederate Cabinet member who does not own slaves.)

The Southern states count on patriotic fervor, the strategic advantage of interior lines of communication, and the international importance of their chief cash crop, cotton, to win a short war of independence from the North.

The "Stars and Bars" is adopted as the national flag.

Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the Union frigate San Jacinto, seizes from the neutral British mail steamer Trent on November 8, 1861, two Confederate commissioners, James Murray Mason and John Slidell (law partner of Confederate Attorney General Benjamin) who seek the support of England and France for the cause of the Confederacy.

This unauthorized seizure sparks a storm of indignant protest from the pro-Confederate British aristocracy, which sympathizes with the southern plantation owners.

Commercial interests, which hope for cheaper raw materials, especially cotton, from an independent South, begin pro-war agitation.

The British government issues an ultimatum demanding an American apology and the release of Mason and Slidell.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis appoints Judah P. Benjamin secretary of War on November 21, 1861.

Union forces led by Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside attack three thousand Confederate troops on tiny Roanoke Island, North Carolina, commanded by Colonel H.M. Shaw, on February 7, 1862.

Shaw's superior, Brigadier General Henry Wise, had contracted pneumonia on his return to the island after attempting unsuccessfully to obtain additional defenders.

President Jefferson Davis, lacking the men and materials to match the Union armies, decides to let Roanoke Island fall into Union hands without mounting a defense rather than let the Union know the true weakness of Southern forces.

The sixty sailing vessels used by the Union army constitute the largest amphibious troop landing in military history.

The seventy-five hundred Union troops, launched from Fort Monroe and supported by gunboats, quickly subdue the three Confederate forts.

After losing less than one hundred men, Shaw surrenders about twenty-five hundred soldiers and thirty-two guns.

The Union victory opens the entire North Carolina coast to the Federals.

Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin comes under heavy criticism from other government leaders and the public as a result of the Southern defeat on Roanoake Island.

Jefferson Davis replaces him with George Randolph and names Benjamin secretary of state (a post he will hold until the surrender of the Confederacy.)

...Richmond by the end of 1864, but Southern railroads have broken down or been destroyed, owing mostly to mismanagement and inefficiency.

The Confederate troops are thus ill-fed to the point of physical exhaustion and nearly immobilized by the lack of draft animals and cavalry mounts.

Hunger, exposure, and the apparent hopelessness of further resistance lead to increasing desertion, especially among recent conscripts.

Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin has privately persuaded Lee and other generals that the South's best chance is to emancipate any slave who volunteers to fight for the Confederacy.

When Benjamin repeated this proposal to an audience of ten thousand in Richmond earlier in the year, his idea had been fiercely rejected as politically impossible.

However, as the South runs out of manpower the issue of arming the slaves has become paramount.

By late 1864, the army so dominates the Confederacy that civilian leaders are unable to block the military's proposal, strongly endorsed by Lee, to arm and train slaves in Confederate uniform for combat.

In return for this service, slave soldiers and their families will be emancipated.

Lee explains, "We should employ them without delay ... [along with] gradual and general emancipation."

The first units will be in training as the war ends. (Nolan, Alan T. (1991). Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History. p. 21-22)

Georgian Howell Cobb had fruitlessly opposed Lee's eleventh hour proposal.

Fearing this move would completely discredit the fundamental justification of slavery, that blacks are inferior people, he said, "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."

During Sherman's March to the Sea, the army had camped one night near Cobb's plantation.

When Sherman discovered that the house he planned to stay in for the night belonged to Cobb, whom Sherman described in his Memoirs as "one of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army," he had confiscated Cobb's property and leveled the plantation, instructing his subordinates to "spare nothing."

 Lee immediately informs President Jefferson Davis that Richmond and Petersburg can no longer be held following the Confederate defeat in the Battle of Five Forks, and the evacuation is carried out that night.

Lee abandons Richmond on April 2; President Davis and most of his cabinet leave by train for Danville, Virginia.

Union Major General Godfrey Weitzel occupies Richmond the following day; a fire destroys most of the downtown district.