Civil War and Nativization

“T OTALING 150,000 BY 1861, the Jews had tripled their numbers in the United States over the previous decade and a half. But if they were a growing presence, they remained essentially an immigrant one. Dispersed throughout the country, still without authoritative leadership, still vulnerable economically and psychologically as non-Christians, they were more exposed even than Gentile immigrants to the pressures and ideologies of American life. By mid-century, too, the single most burning of America's public issues manifestly was the fate of slavery in the states of the newly opened West. Episcopalians, Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians; Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Swedes, Irish—all were divided by the escalating crisis of slavery and secession. Jews too, accordingly, were affected less by their religious teachings than by surrounding regional influences.”

For Southern Jews, loyalty to the Confederacy often was a matter of intense personal gratitude. Nowhere else in America had they experienced such fullness of opportunity or achieved comparable political and social acceptance. They were white, after all. The South's four million black slaves were the Jews' lightning rod. Indeed, possibly a quarter of the region's fifteen or twenty thousand Jews were themselves slave owners. Some Jews even were professional slave dealers, In her little-known commentary “A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin ,” Harriet Beecher Stowe quoted a letter from a Dr. Gamaliel Bailey alluding to the Davis family of Petersburg, Virginia:

But even Jews who did not own slaves saw little to criticize in the “peculiar institution.” Isaac Harby, a Charleston journalist and playwright (and pioneer advocate of reform in Jewish synagogue practices [see this page ]), lashed out against “the abolitionist society and its secret branches.” Jacob N. Cardozo, editor and political economist, insisted that “slavery brought not only great wealth to the South, but to the slaves a greater share of its enjoyment than in many regions where the relation between employer and employee was based on wages.” Edwin De Leon, journalist and Confederate diplomat, devoted many pages of his reminiscences to an apologia for slavery. Solomon Cohen, a Savannah merchant and civic leader who lost a son in the Civil War, wrote to his sister-in-law shortly after the end of hostilities: “I believe that the institution of slavery was refining and civilizing to the whites ... 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.” Nor is there record of any Southern rabbi expressing criticism of slavery. Several of them also owned slaves.

By 1861, however, the largest numbers of American Jews were settled in the North and West. Like their middle-class neighbors, and their fellow German immigrants, most welcomed the new Republican party, the party of free men and free soil, of vigorous business enterprise. In Chicago, four of the five organizers of the Republicans' local German-language chapter were Jews. Moses A. Dropsie and Solomon May were founders of the Republican party in Philadelphia. In New York, J. Solis Ritterband was elected president of the Young Men's Republican Club. Abram J. Dittenhöffer, a presidential elector from New York in 1860, served for twelve years as chairman of his state's Republican central committee. Sigismund Kaufmann was president of the German Republican Society of New York. Moritz Pinner of Missouri and Louis N. Dembitz of Kentucky were two of the three delegates who placed Lincoln's name in nomination at the 1860 Republican convention.

Even among Northern Jews, however, as many attitudes were current on slavery as among Northerners at large. Isidor Busch of St. Louis, elected to the Missouri legislature for three terms, was one of the most dynamic abolitionists in the Midwest. So was Michael Helprin, a Polish-born forty-eighter who had participated in Kossuth's Hungarian insurrection. August Bondi, a forty-eighter who had fought at the barricades in Vienna, participated with John Brown in the battles of Black Jack and Osawatomie. Yet militant abolitionism was not characteristic of the Jewish majority. From their experience with European mobs, Jews had learned to fear populist passions of any sort. Neither were they prepared to identify their religious views with the antislavery movement. Indeed, their spiritual leadership offered them little guidance beyond circumspection. Rabbis Gustav Gottheil and David Einhorn were themselves committed abolitionists. Einhorn sermonized so vigorously against slavery from his Baltimore pulpit that a secessionist mob eventually destroyed his congregational newspaper and forced him to leave town. But most rabbis and other “reverends” limited their sermons to generalities against slavery, without insisting that Jews had a moral duty to oppose it. Isaac Leeser steadfastly refused to publish his views on slavery in the Occident; he did not believe in Jewish discussions of “political” issues, he explained. As a matter of ethical principle, Isaac M. Wise acknowledged that he opposed slavery, but he opposed “warmongering” even more. By the late 1850s, in truth, Wise became so intemperate in his attacks on the abolitionists—“fanatics,” “demagogues,” “radicals,” “red republicans and atheists”—that he all but settled into an antiabolitionist position. Rabbi Morris Raphall of New York actually delivered and published a sermon rationalizing slavery as biblically sanctioned.

Once the Civil War began, in any case, the issue of slavery was transcended by that of loyalty to the Union or the Confederacy. Between eighty-five hundred and ten thousand Jews served in their respective armed forces. Perhaps six thousand of these were in the Union Army, two to three thousand in the Confederate forces—although the latter comprised a far larger proportion of their numbers in the South. There were instances of Southern Jews rushing to enlist in the Confederate ranks as entire families, among them the five Moses brothers of South Carolina, the six Cohen brothers of North Carolina, the three Levy brothers of Louisiana, the three Levy brothers of Virginia. David Camden De Leon, the saber-wielding surgeon of the Mexican War, now became surgeon general of the Confederate forces. Levy Myers Harby, another hero of the Mexican War, commanded the port of Galveston. Lionel Levy served as judge advocate of the Confederate forces, Abraham Myers as quartermaster general.

In the North, the Hungarian-born Major General Frederick Knefler was the highest-ranking of eight Jewish generals. His performance in the Battle of Chickamauga first earned him promotion to brigadier general. A year later, as a major general, he rode with Sherman through Georgia. Brigadier General Alfred Mordecai, a West Point graduate, fought at Manassas and by 1865 was recognized as the Union Army's leading authority on ordnance and gunnery. The German-born Edward S. Salomon, a young lawyer in Chicago at the outbreak of war, immediately enlisted as a second lieutenant. His performance in a succession of battles won him a colonelcy. At the Battle of Gettysburg, as regimental commander, Salomon for two days bore the brunt of the Confederate attack on Cemetery Ridge, losing half his troops but withstanding the assault. He ended the war as a brigadier general, at twenty-nine. Among other Jewish officers, Phineas Horwitz served as Union surgeon general, the counterpart of David De Leon in the Confederate Army. The Union's seven Jewish Medal of Honor winners were all enlisted men. Civilian participation in home relief activities was equally vigorous.

At the same time, American Jews throughout the war ran a gauntlet of official discrimination and popular xenophobia. Initially their troops were denied access to their own chaplains. The Volunteer Bill made provision only for Christian clergymen, and a special appeal to President Lincoln was required, in March 1862, before Congress agreed to correct the inequity. No comparable difficulties were anticipated in the Confederacy, given the well-regarded status of Southern Jews. Here, too, however, the area's suppurating racism and chauvinism soon made themselves felt. In the armed services, prejudice toward immigrant Jews occasionally boiled over into threatened mutinies even against native-born Jewish officers. Civilian frustrations concentrated initially on immigrant Jewish merchants. In the Confederate House of Representatives, legislators singled out Jewish immigrant traders as extortionists, counterfeiters, blockade-runners. In Richmond, the journalist-historian J. B. Jones, who counted local Jews among his closest peacetime friends, charged in his A Rebel War Clerk's Diary that “illicit trade has depleted the country and placed us at the feet of Jew extortioners.” As the war turned for the worse, the press vented the South's regional bitterness even more explicitly. Southern Punch magazine declared:

The Richmond Examiner extended the accusation to local Jewish storekeepers.

The Examiner no longer troubled to distinguish between native Jews and immigrant Jews. Outraged, Colonel Adolphus Adler, a regimental commander and native Richmondite, challenged the newspaper's editor to a duel. The editor immediately printed a retraction.

Accusations intensified as the Confederacy's circumstances deteriorated. Among merchants, the most visible small shopkeepers often were Jews. Charges of profiteering inevitably followed. Investigating commodity shortages in the spring of 1862, a jury in Talbot County, Georgia, denounced the Jews for “gouging.” When the county's lone Jewish merchant protested, the grand jury hurriedly sent a delegation to the man, insisting that of course they had not meant him. Unmollified, the Jewish merchant, one Lazarus Straus, departed with his family. In August 1862, meanwhile, hysteria was rising in Thomasville, Georgia. The Union Army was drawing nearer. With the prices of scarce items climbing, rumors circulated that traders were passing counterfeit money. Soon the culprits were deemed to be the three resident Jewish families, as well as occasional itinerant Jewish traders. A mob of irate citizens then passed a “resolution” giving the local Jews ten days' notice of expulsion. Within the week, the three families silently departed. The episode was chronicled with barely disguised approval on the front page of the Savannah Daily News . At this point, Savannah's highly respected Jewish business community gathered to denounce the slander, and thirty Jewish soldiers in Company C of the nearby First Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment dispatched a signed letter of “earnest and indignant protest” to the press. The accusation was not retracted. The three families did not return.

There were other, even more convenient scapegoats of regional frustration. The most eminent by far was Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy's secretary of state. Posterity's sense of the man has been derived in considerable degree from such post-factum literary embellishments as Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body .

During the Civil War, however, Benjamin evoked a far coarser appraisal. Born in the British West Indies of Sephardic parents, he was reared in Charleston, spent two years at Yale, and settled in New Orleans, where he soon began a successful law practice. After marrying a beautiful Creole girl much younger than himself and buying a spacious plantation, Benjamin mixed in the best circles, making friends and connections among eminent politicians. In 1852 he was elected to the United States Senate, the first professing Jew to achieve that high office. (David [Levy] Yulee, earlier elected from Florida, had converted to Christianity.) Benjamin was then forty-one years old. Photographs of him in this period reveal a short, somewhat fleshy man, his temples adorned with soft black curls. The appearance of preciousness was as deceptive in his case as in Disraeli's. A witty bon vivant in private life, Benjamin was an enthralling orator on the Senate floor.

With the outbreak of war, Benjamin was coopted for Jefferson Davis's cabinet. He served first as attorney general, then as secretary of war, finally as secretary of state. He proved to be a terse, dynamic administrator with an encyclopedic memory for detail. Indeed, President Davis trusted Benjamin's political judgment more than that of any other cabinet member. But as the sufferings of war intensified, so did political jealousy and popular hatred. Benjamin was described as a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” as “Judas Iscariot Benjamin,” as the “sinister power behind the throne.” Newspaper references to his personal wealth alluded darkly to “lavish open houses in Richmond,” to “fine wines, fruits, the fat of the land,” to rumors of “gaming tables and corruption.” The charges were embellished in the North, where Benjamin's Jewishness made him a choice target for Union superpatriots. Among these was Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who as a senator had referred to his colleague David Yulee as “that contemptible Jew,” and added, in the same denunciation, “There's another Jew—that miserable Benjamin!” Following the Confederacy's surrender, therefore, Benjamin knew that escape was a matter of life and death. Johnson, now president, had placed a price on his head. Accordingly, Benjamin fled in disguise by army ambulance and on horseback to the Florida Keys. From there a series of vessels carried him to Bimini, to Havana, to Nassau, and at last to England, where he resumed the practice of law. No Jew would occupy as exalted a position in American public life until Henry Kissinger, and no Jew in government would endure as ferocious a campaign of abuse. 6olIOorSOhwv3p1XVdtAXxpxjJFKTl43d2BblGBtNvumO8DMuf26pt1jcROcgQ6F