Jews’ and Lincoln’s Treatment of Negroes
Thomas Allen
The following are some comments on the Jewish treatment of freed slaves and Lincoln toward Blacks and slaves.
Jewish Treatment of Freed Slaves
In “We Thought They Were White,” Dontell Jackson discusses the prominence of Jews in the slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He provides some interesting information about Jewish exploitation of Blacks during Lincoln’s War and Reconstruction:
Writing in the journal of his travels throughout the South in the mid 19th century, author Fredrick Law Olmsted noted: “There is a considerable population of foreign origin, generally of the least valuable class; very dirty German Jews, especially, abound, and their characteristic shops (with their characteristic smells, quite as bad as in Cologne) are thickly set in the narrowest and meanest streets, which seem otherwise to be mainly inhabited by negroes. . . . A swarm of Jews has, within the last ten years, settled in every Southern town, many of them men of no character, opening cheap clothing and trinket shops, ruining or driving out of business many of the old retailers, and engaging in an unlawful trade with the simple Negroes, which is found very profitable.” Similarly, Mark Twain commented: “In the U. S. cotton states, after the war, the Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negroes’ wants on credit, and at the end of the season was the proprietor of the negro’s share of the present crop and part of the next one. Before long the whites detested the Jew.”
Civil War Union William Tecumseh Sherman on arriving in the South was astonished by the number of Jewish carpetbaggers and scalawags that he encountered operating in the Confederate states, saying: “I found so many Jews & speculators here trading in cotton and secessionists had become open in refusing anything but gold that I have found myself bound to stop it.” General Ulysses Grant wrote to the Assistant Adjutant General of the US Army on December 17, 1862, : “I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into post commanders, the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by the Jews and other unprincipled traders. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officer at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come South, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department. But they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any woodyard on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves, they will act as agents for someone else, who will be at a military post with a Treasury permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy at an agreed rate, paying gold.”
Lincoln on Blacks and Slaves
Abraham Lincoln is the most idolized President of the United States. Although he never freed any slaves and did not want to live among freed Blacks, he is known as the Great Emancipator and the forefather of racial equality. Furthermore, he is praised for saving the Union, although he destroyed the Union organized under the Constitution that the Founding Fathers gave the country and converted it into a consolidated empire primarily for the benefit of big business and big finance.
In “The Consolidation of State Power Via Reconstruction, 1865–1890,” Thomas J. DiLorenzo provides some interesting yet little-known information about Abraham Lincoln.
– Lincoln was a White supremacist and believed that the races should be segregated.
– As a supporter of African colonization, he wanted to repatriate freed slaves to Africa or send them to another country; they should not be allowed to remain in the United States as social or political equals of Whites. They certainly should not be allowed to settle in the territories because they were reserved for Whites.
– He married into a slave-owning family, and slave labor from the family’s plantation subsidized him and his wife.
– Lincoln supported the Illinois “Black Codes,” which restricted the trades and occupations of Blacks. (During Reconstruction, the federal government prevented Southern States from adopting such codes.)
– Moreover, he ordered Union officers to return runaway slaves to their owners and required his cabinet to sign a pledge to support the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution.
– When he was in the Illinois Legislature, he supported amending the Illinois Constitution to forbid the immigration of Blacks into the state. Also, when he was in the Illinois Legislature, he voted to deny blacks the privilege to vote. Further, he opposed Negro citizenship and opposed allowing them to serve as jurors or hold public office. Moreover, he favored taxing Blacks to help pay for schools for White children.
– As an Illinois lawyer, Lincoln defended slave owners, but he never defended a fugitive slave.
To DiLorenzo’s list, Clyde Wilson, in “Getting Right With Abe,” adds that instead of emancipating the slaves that his wife inherited, he sold them. Additionally, in “Erasing Black Confederates,” Wanjiru Njoya notes that Lincoln personally supported an irrevocable constitutional amendment, commonly called the Corwin Amendment, that protected slavery forever.
(For more on Lincoln’s attitude toward Blacks, see “Lincoln on the Negro Race” and “Some Nineteenth Century Thought on the Negro” by Thomas Allen.)
With their rapine, Jews, Yankees, and Republicans impoverished the South so severely that more than a century elapsed before Southerners and Southern Blacks recovered from the poverty caused by Lincoln’s War and Reconstruction.
Copyright © 2026 by Thomas Coley Allen.
