ondon where he rose to great eminence as a lawyer. He
was made Queen's Counsel, and on his retirement from practice,
because of ill health, in 1883, a farewell banquet was given him by
the bar in the hall of the Inner Temple, probably the most notable
compliment paid in England to any orator since the banquet to
Berryer. He died in 1884.

Benjamin was called the "brains of the Confederacy" and in acuteness
of intellect he probably surpassed most men of his time. He
resembled Disraeli in this as well as in being a thorough-going
believer in an aristocratic method of government rather than in one
based on universal suffrage and the will of the masses determined by
majority vote.

FAREWELL TO THE UNION (On Leaving the United States Senate in 1861)

Mr. President, if we were engaged in the performance of our
accustomed legislative duties, I might well rest content with the
simple statement of my concurrences in the remarks just made by my
colleague [Mr. Slidell]. Deeply impressed, however, with the
solemnity of the occasion, I cannot remain insensible to the duty of
recording, among the authentic reports of your proceedings, the
expression of my conviction that the State of Louisiana has judged
and acted well and wisely in this crisis of her destiny.

Sir, it has been urged, on more than one occasion, in the
discussions here and elsewhere, that Louisiana stands on an
exceptional footing. It has been said that whatever may be the
rights of the States that were original parties to the Constitution,
--even granting their right to resume, for sufficient cause, those
restricted powers which they delegated to the general government in
trust for their own use and benefit,--still Louisiana can have no
such right, because she was acquired by purchase. Gentlemen have
not hesitated to speak of the sovereign States formed out of the
territory ceded by France as property bought with the money of the
United States, belonging to them as purchasers; and, although they
have not carried their doctrine to its legitimate results, I must
conclude that they also mean to assert, on the same principle, the
right of selling for a price that which for a price was bought.

I shall not pause to comment on this repulsive dogma of a party
which asserts the right of property in free-born white men, in order
to reach its cherished object of destroying the right of property in
slave-born black men--still less shall I detain the Senate in
point