corruption than those who had an honorable and useful career. Both Claude G. Bowers and E. Merton Coulter take occasion to mention Thomas Y. Cardozo as an example of a corrupt, politically-oriented Negro office-holder, without even a bare mention of his more important, more talented, and more honorable brother Francis.95
Our final example of miscegenation concerns the family of Barnet A. Cohen, who was born in 1770 in Bristol, England, had plantations in King's Creek, South Carolina, and died there on March 23, 1839. The fortunate preservation of a batch of family papers enables us to comprehend, in a uniquely personal way, the difficult social and psychological problems which faced a free mulatto.96
By 1810, when the first of these papers was drawn up, Barnet A. Cohen had fathered two children, Barnet Owens Cohen and Benjamin Phillip Owens Cohen, by a "free woman of Colour," Catherine Owens. A number of neighbors, including four Jews, signed a document attesting to the family relationship and the free status of the woman and her children. According to the second document, in March, 1822, Barnet A. Cohen, the father, as legal guardian for his son Benjamin, and on his behalf, purchased "a Negro wench named Sarah and her child Lina," the mother probably being bought as a concubine for Benjamin. The lot of a free Negro was far from simple; his choice of mates was extremely limited. Most frequently he had to buy his own women, and unless he could emancipate them, which was next to impossible, he was compelled also to own title to his own children.
In 1832, with the approval of his father-guardian, Benjamin Cohen purchased a nine-month old Negro, "Alonzo," for $100. It would seem obvious that Alonzo must have been his own child by a slave
these dates for his great-unele's birth and death: Dee. 19, 1838, and April 13, 1881. There was a third brother, Rev. Henry W. Cardozo, born in 1831, who died on Feb. 21, 1886.