richer, while the poor who hoped sometime to become slave-owners would be deprived of any expectation of economic advancement. Heydenfeldt was far from being the abolitionist some have imagined him to be."
Long after the Civil War had been fought and lost by the South, Philip Phillips of Alabama, who for a time served in the House of Representatives and was perhaps the outstanding Jewish attorney of the ante-bellum South, said that he regarded emancipation as a new opportunity for the South. "So far as the loss of property in slaves was involved," he said, "I regard it as the greatest blessing . . . A new generation with self-reliant spirit will create a new South, and crown it by their energy and industry, with all that enriches and enobles a land ..." But he never criticized slavery as an enemy of self-reliance and creativity while it was the accepted economic and social foundation of his state and section.100
98 Sitterson, op. tit., pp. 131, 154; Meade, op. tit., pp. 92, 100 ff.; Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861-1865 (New Haven, 1938), pp. 152, 154 and 157; Speech of Hon. J. P. Benjamin, of Louisiana. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, May 22, 1860 (Washington, 1860).
99 Schappes, op. cit, pp. 293-301 and 643-644; James Benson Sellars, Slavery in Alabama (University, 1950), pp. 188-190.
i»° MM, vol. Ill, p. 149.
Opinions of Jews about Slavery
Nor was there anyone among the many Jewish journalists, writers, and publicists of the Old South who questioned the moral, political, or economic justice of slavery. Jacob De Cordova, the Texas realestate