97 Speech of Hon. David S. Kaufman, of Texas, on The Slavery Question. Delivered in the House of Representatives, February 10, 18i7 (Washington, 1847); Speech of Hon. D. S. Kaufman, of Texas, on The Slavery Question and Its Adjustment. Delivered in the House of Representatives, Monday, June 10, 1850 (Washington, 1850) ; Hiihner, op. cit., pp. 14, 20-22. Although Kaufman has generally been regarded as stemming from Jewish parents, there is no contemporary evidence for the assumption; all such testimony is of comparatively late date, as for instance, Henry Cohen el al„ One Hundred Years of Jewry in Texas (Dallas, 1936), p. 8.
58 Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865
adoption of his policy as an answer to the ever-present manpower shortage, but he also believed that "the action of our people on this point will be of more value to us abroad than any diplomacy or treaty-making." But most Southerners would rather lose the war than weaken the slave system in any way.98
Benjamin's proposal was certainly not a repudiation of slavery. Neither was the program which Judge Solomon Heydenfeldt of Alabama advocated in 1849 as an antidote to the problems created by the concentration of Alabama capital in slave property. Heydenfeldt first published his Communication on the Subject of Slave Immigration, Addressed to Hon. Reuben Chapman, Governor of Alabama, in the Huntsville Democrat on Jan. 31, 1849, and subsequently in pamphlet form. The jurist questioned the economic wisdom of unlimited slave immigration and protested that the state would become impoverished through the uncontrolled "dumping" of slaves in Alabama. But his arguments were denounced by fellowAlabamians. One critic said, in the Wetumpka Daily Stateguard of February 12, 1849, that if Heydenfeldt's proposal were to be adopted, an artificial scarcity of slaves would be created, the prices of slaves would soar, and the rich would become