Shame of the Yankees - America's Worst Anti-Jewish Action [Civil War thread]

This year, the second day of Chanukah will coincide with the 144th anniversary of the worst official act of anti-Semitism in American history.

On December 17, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Union general Ulysses S. Grant issued his infamous "General Order # 11," expelling all Jews "as a class" from his conquered territories within 24 hours. Henry Halleck, the Union general-in-chief, wired Grant in support of his action, saying that neither he nor President Lincoln were opposed "to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers."

A few months earlier, on August 11, General William Tecumseh Sherman had warned in a letter to the adjutant general of the Union Army that "the country will swarm with dishonest Jews" if continued trade in cotton were encouraged. And Grant also issued orders in November 1862 banning travel in general, by "the Israelites especially," because they were "such an intolerable nuisance," and railroad conductors were told that "no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad."

As a result of Grant's expulsion order, Jewish families were forced out of their homes in Paducah, Kentucky, and Holly Springs and Oxford, Mississippi – and a few were sent to prison. When some Jewish victims protested to President Lincoln, Attorney General Edward Bates advised the president that he was indifferent to such objections.

Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.

Captain Philip Trounstine of the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, being unable in good conscience to round up and expel his fellow Jews, resigned his army commission, saying he could "no longer bear the taunts and malice of his fellow officers brought on by that order."

The officials responsible for the United States government's most vicious anti-Jewish actions ever were never dismissed, admonished or, apparently, even officially criticized for the religious persecution they inflicted on innocent citizens.

The exact reason for Grant's decree remains uncertain. As author and military historian Mel Young points out in his book Where They Lie, Grant's own family was involved in cotton speculation (as well as owning slaves), so perhaps he considered Jewish traders to be competition. And the language spoken by the many Dutch and German-speaking peddlers and merchants in the area was probably confused with Yiddish and many were mistakenly taken to be Jewish.

But most likely the underlying reason for the order was the prejudice against and hatred of Jews so widely felt among the Union forces.

Such bigotry is described in detail by Robert Rosen in his authoritative work The Jewish Confederates; by Bertram Korn in his classic American Jewry and the Civil War; and by other historians of the era. They recount how Jews in Union-occupied areas, such as New Orleans and Memphis, were singled out by Union forces for vicious abuse and vilification.

In New Orleans, the ruling general, Benjamin "Beast" Butler, harshly vilifiedJews and was quoted by a Jewish newspaper as saying he could "suck the blood of every Jew, and will detain every Jew as long as he can." An Associated Press reporter from the North wrote that "The Jews in New Orleans and all the South ought to be exterminated. They run the blockade, and are always to be found at the bottom of every new villainy."

Of Memphis, whose Mississippi River port was a center of illegal cotton trading, the Chicago Tribune reported in July 1862: "The Israelites have come down upon the city like locusts. Every boat brings in a load of the hooked-nose fraternity."

Rosen writes at length about the blatant and widespread anti-Semitism throughout the North, with even The New York Times castigating the anti-war Democratic Party for having a chairman who was "the agent of foreign Jew bankers."

New Englanders were especially hateful, and one leading abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, called Jews "lecherous," and said that their intellects were "sadly pinched in those narrow foreheads" and that they "did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover."

Meanwhile, in the South, Jews were playing a prominent role in the Confederate government and armed forces, and "were used to being treated as equals," as Rosen puts it, an acceptance they had enjoyed for a century and a half.

Dale and Theodore Rosengarten, in A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, observe that in 1800 Charleston had more Jews than any city in North America, and many were respected citizens, office holders, and successful entrepreneurs. Some referred to the city as "our Jerusalem" and Myer Moses, my maternal family patriarch, in 1806 called his hometown "this land of milk and honey." And so it seemed.

Some 3,000 or more Jews fought for the South, practically every male of military age. Many carried with them to the front the famous soldiers' prayer written by Richmond rabbi Max Michelbacher, who after secession had issued a widely-published benediction comparing Southerners to "the Children of Israel crossing the Red Sea."

Many Jewish Confederates distinguished themselves by showing, along with their Christian comrades, amazing courage, dedication and valor, and enduring incredible hardships against overwhelming and often hopeless odds.

The Confederacy's secretary of war (he would later become secretary of state) was Judah P. Benjamin, and the top Confederate commander, General Robert E. Lee, was renowned for making every effort to accommodate his Jewish soldiers on their holidays.

Some find it peculiar that a people once held in slavery by the Egyptians, and who celebrate their liberation every year at Passover, would fight for a nation dedicated to maintaining that institution. But while slavery is usually emphasized, falsely, as the cause of the war, Confederate soldiers felt they were fighting for their homeland and their families, against an invading army that was trying, with great success, to kill them and their comrades, burn their homes, and destroy their cities.

Anyone with family who fought to defend the South, as over two dozen members of my extended family did, cannot help but appreciate the dire circumstances our ancestors encountered.

Near the end of the War Between the States, as I grew up hearing it called, my great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Moses, participated in a dangerous mission as hopeless as it was valiant. The date was April 9, 1865, the same day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Having run away from school at 16 to become a Confederate scout, Jack rode out as part of a hastily formed local militia to defend his hometown of Sumter, South Carolina.

Approaching rapidly were the 2,700 men of Potter's Raiders, a unit attached to Sherman's army that had just burned Columbia and most everything else in its path, and Sumter expected similar treatment.

Along wih a few other teenagers, old men, invalids, and wounded from the local hospital, Sumter's 158 ragtag defenders were able to hold off Potter's battle-seasoned veterans for over an hour and a half at the cost of a dozen lives.

Jack got away with a price on his head, and Sumter was not burned after all. But some buildings were, and there are documented instances of murder, rape, and arson by the Yankees, including the torching of our family's 196 bales of cotton.

Meanwhile, on that same day, Jack's eldest brother, Lt. Joshua Lazarus Moses, who'd been wounded in the war's first real battle, First Manassas (Bull Run), was defending Mobile in the last infantry battle of the war. With his forces outnumbered 12 to one, Josh was commanding an artillery battalion that, before being overrun, fired the last shots in defense of Mobile.

Refusing to lay down his arms, he was killed in a battle at Fort Blakely a few hours after Lee, unbeknownst to them, had surrendered. In that battle, one of Josh's brothers, Perry, was wounded, and another brother, Horace, was captured while laying land mines.

The fifth brother, Isaac Harby Moses, having served with distinction in combat in the legendary Wade Hampton's cavalry, rode home from North Carolina after the Battle of Bentonville, the last major battle of the war, where he had commanded his company after all the officers had been killed or wounded. His mother proudly observed in her memoirs that he never surrendered to the enemy forces.

He was among those who fired the first shots of the war when his company of Citadel cadets opened up on the Union ship, Star of the West, which was attempting to resupply the besieged Fort Sumter in January 1861, three months before the war officially began.

The Moses brothers' uncle, Major Raphael J. Moses, from Columbus, Georgia, is credited with being the father of Georgia's peach industry. He was General James Longstreet's chief commissary officer and was responsible for supplying and feeding up to 50,000 men (including porters and other non-combatants).

Their commander, Robert E. Lee, had forbidden Moses from entering private homes in search of supplies during raids into Union territory, even when food and other provisions were in painfully short supply. And he always paid for what he took from farms and businesses, albeit in Confederate tender – often enduring, in good humor, harsh verbal abuse from the local women.

Interestingly, Moses ended up attending the last meeting and carrying out the last order of the Confederate government, which was to deliver the remnant of the Confederate treasury ($40,000 in gold and silver bullion) to help feed, supply and provide medical help to the defeated Confederate soldiers in hospitals and straggling home after the war – weary, hungry, often sick or wounded, shoeless, and in tattered uniforms. With the help of a small group of determined armed guards, he successfully carried out the order from President Jefferson Davis, despite repeated attempts by mobs to forcibly take the bullion.

Major Moses's three sons also served the Confederacy. One of them, Albert Moses Luria, was killed in 1862 at age 19 after courageously throwing a live Union artillery shell out of his fortification before it exploded, thereby saving the lives of many of his compatriots. He was the first Jewish Confederate killed in the war; his cousin Josh, killed at Mobile, the last.

Moses had always been intensely proud of his Jewish heritage, having named one son Luria after an ancestor who was court physician to Spain's Queen Isabella. Another son he named Nunez, after Dr. Samuel Nunez, the court physician in Lisbon who fled religious persecution in Portugal and arrived from England in July 1733 with some 41 other Jews on a tiny, storm-tossed ship. As one of the first Jews in Georgia, Nunez is credited with having saved the colony in Savannah from perishing from malaria or some ther kind of tropical fever.

After the war, Raphael Moses was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives and named chairman of the Judiciary Committee. One of his best known writings, reproduced countless times in books and articles, is a lengthy, open letter he wrote in 1878 to a political opponent who'd attacked him for being "a Jew."

This was a rare deviation from the general acceptance the South showed toward its Jews, and Moses hit back hard.

"Had your overburdened heart sought relief in some exhibition of unmeasured gratitude, had you a wealth of gifts and selected from your abundance your richest offering to lay at my feet," he wrote, "you could not have honored me more highly, nor distinguished me more gratefully than by proclaiming me a Jew."

One cannot help but respect the dignity and gentlemanly policies of Lee and Moses, and the courage of the greatly outnumbered, out-supplied but rarely outfought Confederate soldiers.

In stark contrast and in violation of the then-prevailing rules of warfare, the troops of Union generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan burned and looted homes, farms, courthouses, libraries, businesses, and entire cities full of defenseless civilians (including my hometown of Atlanta) as part of official Union policy not simply to defeat but to utterly destroy the South.

And before, during, and after the war, this Union army (led by many of the same generals, including Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer) used the same and even worse tactics to massacre Native Americans in what we euphemistically call the Indian Wars. It would be more accurate to call it mass murder – a virtual genocide – of Native Americans, including helpless old men, women, and children in their villages.

The valor of the Jewish Confederates and the other Southern soldiers and the blatant anti-Semitism so prevalent in the North form a nearly forgotten chapter of American history. It is, seemingly, an embarrassment to many Jewish historians – and hardly politically correct – in this day of constantly reiterated demonization of the Confederacy and worshipful reverence for Lincoln and his brutal generals.

But the anniversary of Grant's little-remembered Nazi-like decree and his other atrocities should serve to remind us what the Southern soldiers and civilians were up against. Perhaps it will help people understand why native Southerners, including many Jewish families, revere their ancestors' courage and, despite the controversy it causes in certain "enlightened" circles, still take much pride in this heritage.

Lewis Regenstein, a native Atlantan, is a writer and author. He can be reached at Regenstein@mindspring.com.

How could I forget Texas. How could I forget Hood's Texans and the wonderful stand they made in the cornfield at Antietam.

They are among my favorites to read and to write about.

My apologies to the Lone Star State!

How could I forget Texas. How could I forget Hood's Texans and the wonderful stand they made in the cornfield at Antietam.

I believe that the preferred rebel term for the battle is Sharpsburg. Keep calling it Antietam and they'll drum you out.

I knew it would end being about "us Southrons". Oh, well...just add it the list of transgressions you have tucked away in your desk.

BTW, I did not call you a big meanie. I just pointed that your hate was showing. (That you did not dispute).

You would have probably been better served to prove to the Mrs. that Grant was not the drunk she supposes him to be then attacking ignorance with hate. In fact, he was one heck of a good general. The third best general in the war behind Jackson and Lee (of course).

Because slavery was a secondary cause of the war between the states and because a pot load of other countries have still managed NOT to do away with slavery...?

Generally, slavery dies out when it is no longer economically viable,
or when someone runs out of competing tribes;
here it went away along with some rather scratchy constitutional issues.
(But not because of the emancipation proclamation and not until after the war ended)

Learn what you will from history but recounting the fact that Jews were more prominent and better assimilated in the antebellum south is NOT 'divisive' and it is not suddenly wrong to relate people to events of 140 years ago.....we've had selected parts of that relationship rammed up our throats forever.

PS:Yes, slavery is a bad thing.

PPS: Also yes, as pogroms go, this one was pretty tame but it took place nonetheless.

Jews fought and died on both sides in the civil war.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 -- which saw brother against brother as well as Jew against Jew -- there were 150,000 Jews in the United States. Three thousand fought on the side of the Confederacy and 6,700 for the Union.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/text/jews_text.html

You would have probably been better served to prove to the Mrs. that Grant was not the drunk she supposes him to be then attacking ignorance with hate.

Miz Darla posts with equal parts ignorance AND hate. Tales of Grant and alcohol are widely embraced, especially among the southron supporters, and are just as widely exaggerated. I'm not sure why your side clings to it. If Grant were the slobbering drunk y'all portray him as then it's even more embarassing that he won so consistently and beat every southern general he came up against.

"Higher education was so much better most of the Southern ruling class sent their children to Northern colleges"

My third great grandfather was educated at a private, Masonic institute. He was instrumental in bringing public schooling to NC in 1839. He sent his sons to the University of North Carolina, the nation's first public university, founded in 1792. I'm the first college graduate in my family since before the Civil War, due to the privation brought on by the aftereffects of that conflict. So, don't preach to me about education. Especially since you are an unthinking ideologue, and wish to dictate your understanding of the history of my home, to me. You're rather dense, and quite offensive for having done so.

Well thanks for painting all of us with one broad paint brush. That doesn't say much for your abiity to see people as individuals. As one great man says, "Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time."

Tales of Grant and his drunkeness are embraced by everyone (North and South) because it is easy to believe the worst about people than the truth.

I am going to leave the rest of your post alone because I do not believe it is true and arguing about it will just be a waste of time.

"However, there are those who will do or say anything to dispagage the heroes who saved the Union and glorify the Traitors who tried to destroy it rather than address the Evil of Slavery."

Written like a true Yankee fanatic! The only difference between you and a terrorist is skin color, your way of thinking is exactly the same! Rubbish and myopic! Only those who can view things with an open mind (meaning both sides) can be considered a serious student of history.

Everything about your post is true about the quality of education in the old South. But I think you'll find that the University of Georgia is the nation's oldest state university and that Charleston College was founded in 1771.

Nothing that you claim disputes what I said. It is unfortunate that you cannot accept FACTS without claiming it is "preaching".

Since you are impervious to information regarding these matters check the census of 1860 it supports what I have said 100%.

I am the least ideological person you can find and it isn't the "unthinking" which gets you in an uproar but the THINKING which undermines your carefully cherised mythology about the IGnoble Cause.

On the other hand, I don't think it is healthy to gloss over that which makes us uncomfortable, such as the fact that it was legal to buy and sell slaves in some northern teritories even after the war and the emancipation proclemation didn't free slaves then under Northern control. Also, Lee freed his slaves at the war's outset, while Grant owned slaves throughout the war.

All who attack the United States are my enemy including any ancestors of mine OR yours. Too bad.

If my father were a Concentration Camp guard should I pretend he was correct and defend him?

Slavery was illegal in EVERY Northern state prior to the war some as long as 70 yrs. before. It was illegal NOWHERE after the War. Where did you come up with that.

There was nothing wrong with Lincoln freeing slaves within the rebelling states and not the loyal Border states. He never claimed to be fighting the war to free the slaves in any case and making the Proclamation posed a great danger to the South.

Grant owned no slaves. You need to forget the false claims of those trying to defend the RAT Rebellion which appears to provide the basis for most of the mistakes in your post. These people are liars.

The University of North Carolina was the first public university in the country to open its doors, and Old East is the oldest campus building, dating to1793.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill

"I am the least ideological person you can find"

That certainly appears to be true regarding political matters in the present day. However, when it comes down to this particular, historical conflict, you are as ideological and partisan as they come.

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