Judah P. Benjamin - Exile in England

Exile in England

From London in late 1865, Benjamin provided considerable financial assistance to several friends in the former Confederacy. Joan Cashin, the biographer of Varina Howell Davis, said that Benjamin gave the Davis family a gift of $12,000. The gift supported not only the Davis extended family but many of their relatives and friends during the early years of the Reconstruction era.

In June 1866, Benjamin was called to the bar in England, the beginning of his successful and eventually lucrative second career as a barrister, working in corporate law. In 1868, he published his Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property, which came to be regarded as one of the classics of its field. The work's current edition remains authoritative under the name Benjamin's Sale of Goods. He was influential in commercial law that supported the rise of Great Britain as an imperial power. In 1872, he was selected as Queen's Counsel.

Benjamin appeared on several appeals from Canadian courts to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the final court of appeal for the Empire.

Benjamin retired in 1883 on his doctor's advice. He had earned $720,000 during his nearly two decades at the bar in London. He moved to Paris, where his daughter Ninette and three grandchildren lived. He died there on May 6, 1884, and was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.