Perhaps no more concise and self-deceptive rationalization of slavery was ever written than the observations which were recorded by Solomon Cohen, the distinguished civic leader and merchant of Savannah, who had lost a son in the war, in a letter which he wrote to his sister-in-law, Emma Mordecai, shortly after the end of the war:
I believe that the institution of slavery was refining and civilizing to the whites — giving them an elevation of sentiment and ease and dignity of manners only attainable in societies under the restraining influence of a privileged class — and at the same time the only human institution that could elevate the Negro from barbarism and develop the small amount of intellect with which he is endowed.110
Such sentiments might well be expected of members of families long resident in the South and thoroughly acclimated to its habits and assumptions. The De Leon's, Mordecai's, and Cardozo's had lived with their neighbors long enough to share their ideas and attitudes. But what of the newly immigrant German Jews who came to the South in increasing numbers beginning in the 1840's? There is no evidence that they found it very difficult to adjust to the slave society of which they became a part. Julius Weis, of New Orleans, who came to the United States in 1845, recorded his shock at his first sight of a Negro
being whipped upon his bare back by an overseer. The sight of a human being punished in this manner was very repugnant to me, though living in the midst of a country where slavery existed. I afterwards got somewhat accustomed to it, but I always felt a pity for the poor slaves.
109 MM, vol. Ill, p. 368.
110 Letter, dated Jan. 8, 1866, Mordecai Mss., Duke University Library. A more extensive apology for slavery, embodied in a letter from Cohen to his aunt, Rebecca Gratz, has been published by Joseph R. Rosenbloom in his article, "Rebecca Gratz, Example of Conflicting Sectional Loyalties