Judah P. Benjamin takes office as a…

Judah P. Benjamin takes office as a Senator on March 4, 1853, becoming the first professed Jew elected to the U.S. Congress.

During his first year as a Senator, he challenges another young Senator, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, to a duel over a perceived insult on the Senate floor; Davis apologizes, and the two begin a close friendship.

Born a British subject in Christiansted, Saint Croix, in the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands), to Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents, Benjamin had emigrated with his parents to the U.S. several years later and grew up in North and South Carolina.

In 1824, his father was one of the founders of the the first Reform congregation in the United States, the "Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit" in Charleston.

He attended Fayetteville Academy in North Carolina, and at the age of fourteen he entered Yale Law School, though he left without a degree.

In 1832 he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he continued his study of law, was admitted into the bar that same year, and entered private practice as a commercial lawyer.

In 1833, Benjamin made a strategic marriage to Natalie St. Martin, of a prominent New Orleans Creole family; the marriage seems to have been unhappy.

He became a slave owner and established a sugar plantation in Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

Plantation and legal practice both prospered.

In 1842, his only child, Ninette, was born; Natalie took the girl and moved to Paris, where she remained for most of the rest of her life.

The same year, he was elected to the lower house of the Louisiana State Legislature as a Whig, and in 1845 he served as a member of the state Constitutional Convention.

In 1850 he sold his plantation and its one hundred and fifty slaves; he will never again own any slaves.

By 1852, Benjamin's reputation as an eloquent speaker and subtle legal mind was sufficient to win him selection by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate.

The outgoing President, Millard Fillmore of the Whig Party, had offered to nominate him to fill a Supreme Court vacancy after the Senate Democrats had defeated Fillmore's other nominees for that post, and the New York Times reported (on February 15, 1853) that "if the President nominates Benjamin, the Democrats are determined to confirm him."

However, Benjamin had declined to be nominated.