Jacob I. Cohen Jr. was a banker, railroad executive, and civic leader who helped win for Jews the right to hold public office in Maryland. Sources differ on some details of his early life. The 1912 History of the Jewsin America says his father was "Jacob J. Cohen", who emigrated from Rhenish Prussia to the American colonies in 1773, fought in the Revolutionary War, and died in 1808. The Maryland State Archives gives his father's name as "Israel I. Cohen", who died in 1803. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia says that the elder Jacob was the older brother of Israel, who followed him from Oberdorf, near Nördlingen, Bavaria, to Richmond in 1787, and there became the father of Jacob I. Cohen Jr. All agree that after the elder Cohen died, his widow, Judith Solomon Cohen, moved her six surviving children, all sons, from Richmond to Baltimore, where the family came to have sizeable influence. Jacob and at least one of his brothers served with distinction in the defense of the city during the War of 1812. In 1812, Cohen and his brothers founded Cohen's Lottery and Exchange Office, which became one of Baltimore's foremost lottery brokers, with branches in several other East Coast cities. Cohen brought each of his five brothers into business with him, and the arrest of two of them, Philip J. Cohen and Mendes J. Cohen, on charges of selling National Lottery tickets in Virginia led to a major U.S Supreme Court decision in Cohens v. Virginia. In 1820, Cohen's house on North Charles Street became the first private house in Baltimore to be lit with gas. In the early 1820s, Cohen and Solomon Etting led the fight for the "Jew Bill," which, when passed in 1825 by Maryland's General Assembly, altered the state's Test Act to allow members of the Jewish faith to hold public office upon swearing to a belief in "the doctrine of reward and punishment" rather than the generally required declaration of belief in Christianity. After the bill was passed, Cohen and Etting both ran successfully for Baltimore City Council in 1826, becoming the first Jews to hold elected office in Maryland. In 1830, he helped establish the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners, serving as its secretary and treasurer for eight years. He was also a member of the Baltimore City Commissioners of Finance. Also in 1830, Cohen and his brothers partners established J. I. Cohen Jr. & Brothers' Banking House, which would be one of the few banks to survive the Panic of 1837. In the mid-1830s, Cohen became a director of the Baltimore and Port Deposit Railroad and of the Wilmington and Susquehanna Railroad, two companies chartered by the state of Maryland to build a railroad that would link Baltimore with cities to the northeast. On January 22, 1838, he succeeded Lewis Brantz as president of the B&PD after Brantz's sudden death. Within months, both railroads merged into the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, which thenceforth operated the first rail link from Philadelphia to Baltimore. Cohen became a vice-president of the PW&B on February 20, 1838. He resigned the position on January 1, 1842, to reduce company expenses, and later in the month took a position on the southernmost of three new executive committees set up to manage the railroad. Cohen's service as a railroad executive is noted on the 1839 Newkirk Viaduct Monument in Philadelphia. Unmarried and leaving no children, Cohen died in Baltimore on April 6, 1869.
