Jacob Newton Cardozo

Background

Jacob Newton Cardozo was born on June 17, 1786 in Savannah, Georgia, United States, but his father, who had been a Revolutionary soldier, moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 1796.

Education

Cardozo had a modest formal education; he left school at the age of twelve and subsequently became a lumber clerk. From an early age he displayed a remarkable intellectual curiosity and a talent for writing.

Career

After an ordinary education, Jacob was put to mechanical and mercantile pursuits, but interested himself in authorship, and in 1817 became acting editor of the Southern Patriot. Six years later he bought the paper and continued as proprietor and editor until 1845. Though he made the Southern Patriot a free trade organ, he used it to bolster commercial restriction in one notable instance. In 1818 and 1822 Congress retaliated against prohibitions of American trade with the British West Indies. In the latter year Baltimore and Norfolk remonstrated against the measures of Congress; Charleston merchants, suffering under the stoppage of trade, became excited and meant to lead the Southern ports in a memorial. Cardozo threw the weight of his paper against the movement, believing that the commerce with the West Indies would sooner be opened by America's showing Great Britain her resentment of the Orders in Council. He persuaded an adjourned meeting to his view, and later received assurances from Washington that the failure of the threatened interference had saved the effectiveness of the government's policy. Cardozo was one of the revivers in 1823 of the old Charleston Chamber of Commerce, and in 1827 or 1828 he was asked by this body to draw up a memorial against the "Bill of Abominations. " This is said to have been the first petition from the South on behalf of free trade, and was the beginning of the Nullification movement. Cardozo took no part in Nullification, but continued to preach free trade as a principle. In 1826 he published, in Charleston, Notes on Political Economy. He had prepared the manuscript for his private use, but published it in an effort to counteract the teachings of John McVickar's Outlines of Political Economy (1825). Cardozo's work is an attempted refutation of cardinal points in the system of David Ricardo, whose disciple McVickar was. It contains inklings of doctrine first clearly expressed by Daniel Raymond and later developed by the American National School, of which Henry C. Carey was the leading figure.

He did not deny the Ricardian rent theory on the absolute grounds perceived by Carey, but quarreled with parts of the doctrine. He was alive to the principle of increasing returns in industry, and believed that at least inventiveness would counteract the tendency toward decreasing returns in agriculture. The Malthusian account of population seemed to Cardozo untenable. In 1845 he sold the Southern Patriot and founded the Evening News. Two years later he disposed of his interest in the Evening News but continued as commercial editor until 1861, when he left Charleston for Savannah. During the Civil War he filled editorial positions in Mobile and Atlanta. In 1863 he published A Plan of Financial Relief Addressed to the Legislature of Georgia and Confederate States Congress. From the close of the war until the year before his death, when his eyesight failed, he wrote for the Savannah Morning News. He paid a brief visit to Charleston just before his death, which occurred in Savannah.

Achievements

• Cardozo showed that the conditions of American economic life suggested theories opposed to those of English classical writers, finding in this country a naturalness of development rather than a long history of mistaken measures of government.

Works

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  • A plan of financial relief

    (A plan of financial relief addressed to the legislature o...)

  • Reminiscences of Charleston. by J.N. Cardozo

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Notes on political economy

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • Jacob N. Cardozo: Economic Thought in the Antebellum South

Membership

He was a member of the Sephardic Jewish mercantile community who had served in the South Carolina militia during the American Revolution.