The African Slave Trade: The Secret Purpose of the Insurgents to Revive It. No Treaty Stipulations Against the Slave Trade to Be Entered into with the European Powers. Judah P. Benjamin’s Intercepted Instructions to L.Q.C. Lamar

The background to this pamphlet is as follows: The Confederacy, in which Judah P. Benjamin served as Secretary of State, entered into secret negotiations with the European powers seeking to be recognized by them as an independent Nation. It was feared that the Europeans would require, in exchange for recognition, a stipulation on the part of the Confederacy forbidding the importation of slaves from Africa. Judah P. Benjamin parried, by arguing that no stipulation was necessary, for the Confederacy was already legally bound to forbid the African slave-trade. A letter by Benjamin to this effect intended for Mr. L.Q.C. Lamar, Confederate envoy to the Russian government in St. Petersburg, was intercepted by the North, and Benjamin’s argument was exposed as sophistry. Judah Philip Benjamin (1811-1884) was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands and moved as a boy to the United States. He went on to become senator from Louisiana and during the Civil War, served first as Secretary of War and later as Secretary of State of the Confederacy. See EJ, Vol. IV, cols. 528-9