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

Jewish Press ^ | 11-21-06 | Lewis Regenstein

[SJackson]

Shame of the Yankees - America's Worst Anti-Jewish Action

By: Lewis Regenstein
Wednesday, November 15, 2006

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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

Northern Animus, Southern Hospitality

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.

The Moses Family

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.

Last Order Of The Lost Cause

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.

Why We Revere Our Ancestors

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.

[James Ewell Brown Stuart]

Let these words echo for all of our ancestors who fought in the war:

Men of the valley. Citizen soldiers. I am here at the order of General Robert E. Lee, commanding all Virginia forces. On April 15th of this year of our Lord 1862, Simon Cameron, the secretary of war of the United States sent a telegram to our governor to raise three regiments of infantry to be sent to assist in suppressing the Southern Confederacy.

Governor Letcher's answer is well known to you, but perhaps not his words. His wire to Washington stated: "You have chosen to inaugurate civil war. Having done so, we will meet you in a spirit as determined as the Lincoln administration has exhibited toward the South."

Two days later the Virginia legislature were voting for secession. Just as we would not send any of our soldiers to march in other states and tyrannize other people so will we never allow the armies of others to march into our states and tyrannize our people.

Like many of you, indeed most of you, I've always been a Union man. It is not with joy or with a light heart that many have welcomed secession. Had our neighbors to the North practiced a less bellicose form of persuasion this day might not have come.

But that day has been thrust upon us like it was thrust upon our ancestors. The Lincoln administration required us to raise three regiments. Tell them we have done so.

Dismissed.

Among these men who took up their arms to defend their homes, there is no dishonor and no treason. They have passed onto their children this legacy - that there is something worth living for and, if need be, worth dying for.

It is a legacy that I take to myself gladly and remember always.

And in defeat, they did not lose their honor or glory. In fact, it has been heaped upon them by all us who understand why they fought and will always remember them as heroes.

"Strike the tent."

[laotzu]

We have all been taught too well how to disparage each other.

Just one day, it would be a pleasure to not hear how Americans are evil; to not hear how much we suck, to not hear we are traitors.

Please.

Virtually everyone here at FreeRepublic is an honorable, conservative patriot....and you know that.

[laotzu]

"The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor." Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general--not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both white and black. And yet these impostors now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man--although that was not the motive of the war--as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference of principle--but only of degree--between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

If their object had really been to abolish slavery, or maintain liberty or justice generally, they had only to say: All, whether white or black, who want the protection of this government, shall have it; and all who do not want it, will be left in peace, so long as they leave us in peace. Had they said this, slavery would necessarily have been abolished at once; the war would have been saved; and a thousand times nobler union than we have ever had would have been the result. It would have been a voluntary union of free men; such a union as will one day exist among all men, the world over, if the several nations, so called, shall ever get rid of the usurpers, robbers, and murderers, called governments, that now plunder, enslave, and destroy them.

Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, "a government of consent." The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have got what is called "peace."

Their pretenses that they have "Saved the Country," and "Preserved our Glorious Union," are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people. This they call "Saving the Country"; as if an enslaved and subjugated people--or as if any people kept in subjection by the sword (as it is intended that all of us shall be hereafter)--could be said to have any country. This, too, they call "Preserving our Glorious Union"; as if there could be said to be any Union, glorious or inglorious, that was not voluntary. Or as if there could be said to be any union between masters and slaves; between those who conquer, and those who are subjugated.

All these cries of having "abolished slavery," of having "saved the country," of having "preserved the union," of establishing "a government of consent," and of "maintaining the national honor," are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats--so transparent that they ought to deceive no one--when uttered as justifications for the war, or for the government that has succeeded the war, or for now compelling the people to pay the cost of the war, or for compelling anybody to support a government that he does not want."
- Lysander Spooner*, "No Treason" 1870

[justshutupandtakeit]

Are you aware of ANY post by stand that could be called "accurate"?

[justshutupandtakeit]

Sometimes Truth is not pleasant. Of course, some whose ancestors were Traitors might not like it but I don't particularly care it doesn't change the Truth. Some of my ancestors were involved in the same Treason but I don't care to excuse, justify or ennoble it.

[James Ewell Brown Stuart]

That is a great commentary. Much appreciated. Thanks!

[justshutupandtakeit]

"Virtually everyone here at FreeRepublic is an honorable, conservative patriot....and you know that."


Virtually everyone is but not all. I call no one a "patriot" who spends time attacking those who fought to prevent this nation from being dismembered, who spend time slandering some of our greatest leaders like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan etc. Patriots do not swallow whole the lies of the Slaver Ruling Class of the South which tried to destroy the United States of America. Patriots do not rave insanely about "Damn Yankees" and other such inanities.

Why would a current day Patriot be upset when the truth is told about those who tried to destroy the United States in order to perpetrate petty tyranny?

[laotzu]

Yes. It is one of the best I have run across.

Are you in Israel now?

[laotzu]

Do you picture me hoisting a beer with Harry Reid, Katy Couric, or any other who insults Americans?

Why, on earth, should I have any conversation with you....or you with me?

[justshutupandtakeit]

Lincoln did not believe there were no States' Rights. Nor would there have been any appreciable increase in the power of the tiny federal government had the RAT Rebellion not broken out.

Your quote also means Hitler agreed with Madison. Is that absurd enough for you?

For the South the War was 99% about slavery unlike the North for which it was 100% about preserving the Union. And the South did ATTACK federal installations, property and personnel of the United States.

There was NO "massive" tariff. In fact, the tariff was almost as old as the country and was less than it had been in the past. Midwest farmers were as affected by the tariff as was the South. It may have been 0.01% of the reason for the Slaver attack but was principlely merely an excuse. It should not be forgotten that until 1861 the government was almost always under the control of either Southerners or Southern sympathizers.

Sherman did not slaughter civilians and you are also very mistaken to believe civilians had not been slaughtered in large numbers in the past. Maybe you have heard of the 30 Years War? Or the Mongel invasions of Europe or the Huns Or the Assyrians Or the Trojan War Or HUNDREDS of other such incidents?

[James Ewell Brown Stuart]

Yes, I am. I am a graduate student.

[laotzu]

Wow. That is a grand adventure.

My respects.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I don't refer to the Union as the "North" so reject the idea that the War was between the States or North vs South.
The would-be Confederate States attacked the UNION and the war was the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs an insurrection brought about by Slaver fanatics.

Since the Union was not fighting over slavery I find it rather pathetic that you are claiming slavery should have been affected in the loyal portions of the Union where it had been legal. Lincoln had no intention to do anything unconstitutional about slavery where it was legal so why would he have done anything in the loyal states. Slavery was NOT legal in Northern states though it was in the Southern and Border states. Trying to foist off the Slaver motivation as that of Lincoln is silly.

Grant did not own the slaves his wife's family owned in a Border state were slavery was legal. There is no sophistry there. As I asked before lets see any evidence that Grant ever purchased a slave. Grant was too poor to own slaves or any other luxuries prior to the war.

[justshutupandtakeit]

You are addressing a guy who tried to claim Grant was a heroin addict among other insanities. Lots of luck.

[justshutupandtakeit]

"I do not defend a rebellion." That is exactly what you are defending. "What I do defend is the constitutional and moral right of the Southern states to secede, and to form a new government." There was NO such right and certainly NO "moral" justification for what the Slavers unleashed on the United States.

You need to wipe the crud from your eyes if that is all you have seen.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have as many degrees as you, if not more, and NONE are from Matchbook U. If the ignorance you display in this area of history is indicative of what you learned you should sue the schools graduating you for malpractice.

[justshutupandtakeit]

That crack makes even LESS sense than your others. stand must be wearing off on you.

[stand watie]

exactly so.

had the 1864 election been FAIR/honest, lincoln would have been back in IL, being a "crooked railroad lawyer".

free dixie,sw

[justshutupandtakeit]

I rarely think of those persons and never in relation to you.

My posts are directed at the contentions made here whether by you or anyone else.

[stand watie]

and "JSU&TI" called me WHAT in post #18????

and in other posts on this thread???

what i said about him is FACTUAL. he is both a south-HATER & a throughly dishonest poster OR he is a TROLL (i am of 2 minds about him. i often think he's sitting at his PC "chortling" about all the trouble, confusion & problems he's caused on these threads. otoh,he may actually be a BIGOT.).

free dixie,sw