OK, I got motivated enough to drive all the way out to Chantilly and check out a biography of Judah P. Benjamin, "Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate," by Eli N. Evans, copyright 1988, the first paperback edition, 1989.
1. There is no doubt that Benjamin was expelled from Yale in 1829, and was not allowed to graduate. There is unresolved, and probably unresolvable, controversy as to the precise nature of the offense. In 1861, Francis Bacon, who attended Yale two years behind Benjamin, published a report in The Independent, which accused him of stealing items such as watches and pens and small sums of money from the other students' rooms. This has been discounted because The Independent was an abolitionist newspaper, and the piece was written during the Civil War. In 1901, the only surviving member of the class of 1829 told a newspaperman that Benjamin fell in with "a set of disorderly fellows who were addicted to cardplaying and gambling, and his abrupt withdrawal from college was understood to be occasioned by difficulties growing out of this practice." Benjamin was also expelled from the Yale debating society for "ungentlemanly conduct."
2. Benjamin indeed owned slaves. He became a lawyer by reading law, and was very successful. He was the protege of John Slidell, at that time the political "boss" of New Orleans. In the 1840's, he built a sugar plantation called Bellechasse, and purchased 140 slaves. He was forced to sell it in the 1850's after a flood destroyed the sugar crop.
I think it's interesting that we don't want to condemn people who owned slaves in this country, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc., etc., etc., because they lived in a different time, and felt morally justified. We feel no compunction about condemning Hitler and the Nazis for the concentration camps, yet they felt morally justified. I feel every sympathy for the parents of black children who don't want their children to attend a school named after a slave-owner. I can't imagine asking a Jewish child to attend a school named after Hitler or Eichmann, or an American Indian child to attend a school named after Custer. (Or an Irish Catholic child to attend a school named after Cromwell.) |
