Marx E. Cohen and Clear Springs: Rethinking a Jewish Plantation Owner

Abstract

This essay is a historiographic milestone. It is the first attempt to analyze an antebellum Jewish plantation owner both biographically and in terms of how he managed his plantation on a day-to-day basis. While many historians have supposed that Marx E. Cohen of Charleston was a conventional planter who used Clear Springs to cultivate rice, this essay breaks new ground, arguing that Cohen used Clear Springs as a pleasant county house, rather than a means to an agrarian income.