Fleeing for his life in a series of disguises, Judah Phillip Benjamin, lately Confederate attorney general, minister of war and secretary of state, reached the Florida Keys in July 1865, on his way to England and the extraordinary role that awaited him there in the early Privy Council cases that would shape Canada's constitution.
On the same day that he arrived at the Keys, the widow Mary Surratt was hanged in Washington as an accomplice in the murder of Abraham Lincoln, a crime ...