Did Judah P. Benjamin draft North Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession?

   Joseph C. Sitterson, in his 1939 book, The Secession Movement in North Carolina, makes an interesting claim, that Judah P. Benjamin reportedly wrote North Carolina’s ordinance of secession.[1] Sitterson writes that Convention delegate Burton Craige introduced a the resolution at the request of Governor John W. Ellis. The simple ordinance “repealed and abrogated the ordinance of 1789 by which North Carolina had ratified the Constitution of the United States and declared the union between the state of North Carolina and the other states, under the title of ‘The United States of America’ dissolved.” Is there any truth to this?

Judah P. Benjamin

   Judah P. Benjamin is one of those interesting people in history. Born in 1811 in St. Croix, in what is now the United States Virgin Islands, his parents were Sephardic Jews. In 1813, the family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and then to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821. Benjamin enrolled in Yale College in 1825, but did not graduate, and moved on to New Orleans where he eventually worked in a mercantile business, clerked in a law firm, tutored French Creoles in English, and eventually earned a law degree, being admitted to the bar in 1832 at the age of 21. Benjamin specialized in commercial law. In 1842 Benjamin won election to the Louisiana House of Representatives, then served in a Louisiana Constitutional Convention, was appointed a United States Attorney in New Orleans, served in the Louisiana State Senate, and in 1853, was elected a United States Senator. He was twice offered a place on the United States Supreme Court but declined both times. Benjamin remained a United States Senator until February 1861. When the Senate was not in session, he tried cases before the Supreme Court. Benjamin served as a Confederate Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, and was with Jefferson Davis as the president moved through North Carolina and South Carolina at the close of the war. Benjamin escaped, fleeing to Great Britain, and becoming one of the leading barristers in the country before retiring to Paris where he died in 1884.

   At time the delegates were meeting in Raleigh to considered secession, Benjamin was serving as the first Confederate attorney general in Montgomery, Alabama.

   J.G. de R. Hamilton, in his book Reconstruction in North Carolina, tells us that North Carolina’s ordinance “was prepared by Judah P. Benjamin” and “brought to Raleigh from Montgomery by James Hines, a North Carolinian, and delivered to Gov. Ellis, who asked Burton Craige, the member from his county, to introduce it.”[2] Hamilton does not give a source for this information. Barrett, in his history of North Carolina and the War, leaves out this little piece of information. Just how Benjamin came to draft North Carolina’s ordinance of secession seems to be somewhat of a mystery.  

John W. Ellis

Turning to Governor Ellis’s papers, we find an interesting letter from former United States Senator Thomas L. Clingman. Writing from Montgomery on May 14, 1861, Clingman tells Ellis: “I enclose you drafts of Ordinances which I think ought to be adopted at once by our convention. I got Mr. Benjamin the Attorney General to draw them up and hope they will be put through on the 20^th.”[3] In Jeffrey’s biography of Clingman, we read that Ellis sent Clingman to Montgomery after the capture of Fort Sumter. Clingman’s job? To “negotiate North Carolina’s entrance into the Confederacy.” There is no mention of the Ordinances.[4] It is possible that Ellis and Clingman discussed the matter of the Ordinance prior to Clingman’s departure from Raleigh to Montgomery. At the same time, Clingman might have taken it upon himself to visit Benjamin and ask for some guidance regarding the Ordinances, and Benjamin wrote the Ordinances and gave them Clingman who gave them to Hines who caught a train to Raleigh. This begs another question: who was James Hines? Was he just a messenger? A quick search has not produced an identity. And yet another question: did Judah P. Benjamin play a role in any other Ordinances of Secession passed by the other Southern States?

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[1] Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina, 246-47, n.103.

[2] Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 29.

[3] Tolbert, The Papers of John W. Ellis, 2:50.

[4] Jeffrey, Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire Eater from the Carolina Mountains, 162.