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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

Of course, because all Southerners are Simon Legree in disguise. We like nothing than to make our slaves hoe the cotton and pick the corn while we drink pink lemonade from the shelter of the veranda and discuss how we are going to usurp the Constitution by seceding from the Union. I thought everyone knew that. Didn't you get the secret pamphlet and the decoder ring that comes with it.

The will provided for all of Custis' slaves to be emancipated, "the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease."

So, they were promised their freedom, but Custis gave his executors up to five years to see it done.

Ah, the cheap shot designed to cause me to feel shame. Right on time too.

The 13th Amendment came years after the Emancipation Proclamation< p>>Less than two years, actually, and within weeks of the Republican victory in the 1864 election, which ended Democratic opposition to it.

I mean really now, if this was about ending slavery, why tolerate slavery in four northern states?

Because they didn't rebel. If the south hadn't rebelled, they could have kept their slaves, too.

And spare me Missouri "ending slavery on it's own."

So you're arguing that Missouri didn't end slavery on its own before the 13th amendment was passed?

Mind you, not one of their congressional delegates signed anything to end slavery until the end of the Civil War.

What do congressional delegates have to do with ending slavery within a state? Maryland enacted a new state constitution in November, 1864 which ended slavery there.

So, if you want hide to behind the "not her properity" gambit, then we really have nothing left to say, because you refuse to be honest.

I think the lack of honesty is on your part and your accusation that others are dodging. The strongest evidence to support it is the fact that the slaves Julia Grant had use of were freed at the same time as the Dent family slaves, February 1863. And the fact that Grant freed the one slave he is known to have owned outright before moving to Illinois. And as a resident of Illinois he could not have owned slaves in the state before, during, or after the rebellion so where were they? Make whatever assumptions you wish.

Letters helped to ease the pain of separation, and Julia frequently traveled to her husband’s encampments, both alone and with the children. It is ironic to note that her slave, Jule, usually assisted with the children’s care on such trips.

Except that there is no evidence of the slaves after 1862. When Mrs. Grant visited her husband at Petersburg in 1864 she brought a hired German girl to look after the children. Why would she do that if she had a slave handy?

Stonewall...just shows how little you know about him. He was good in business. He owned a farm, part interest in a saw mill, part interest in a bank. And yes, he owned slaves. Cause most of them came with the wife from North Carolina. And some times, slaves would ask him to because they wanted to work for their freedom and he did it. He had two slaves doing just that.

So southron myth would have us believe. But there is no evidence at all of Jackson freeing any of his slaves. Virginia records don't show it, his wife's biography doesn't mention it, and Jackson doesn't mention emancipating anyone in any of his letters. So I guess they didn't work long enough or hard enough, huh? Jackson did sell two of the slaves he owned to purchase property shortly after his second marriage, and he also purchased outright a 5 year old slave who he gave to his wife with the intention of having her train the child as a ladies maid. He was a man who certainly had no problems with slavery as an institution.

Again, your last argument is disallowed. Again, not shocked or shamed at the word chattel.

You seem to dismiss a lot of things you choose not to accept.

You are suppositioning all over the place, and the argument is lost. Maybe the rest didn't want to go to Liberia? That is about as factual as your claim and made from the same straw.

Maybe they didn't, I have no idea. What I am saying is that since Lee had no problems subsidizing colonization for the Burke's, and since they are not the only slaves he freed during his life time, then it's possible that there were others he helped emigrate to Africa. I freely admit that I don't know for sure one way or the other.

Look, the entire issue was about tariffs and the 3/5ths clause that allowed the south to have representation in Congress weighted on slave ownership. I know you're think that the North was run by some human rights abolitionists who wanted to free the slaves out of pure humanity, but that's simply not the case. The South has sway in Congress because of the 3/5ths clause of the Constitution which counted the slave population in terms of voting.

The Republicans wanted to destroy this Congressional voting power by repealing slavery in order to weight Congress in the North's favor and pursue its industrialization by fleecing the south (and Europe) with wickedly high tariffs.

And Lincoln was their man. Folks, just follow the money, ok? I mean, we had New Yorkers burning down black orphanages in protest of the war. Editors of every major newspaper were either locked up or suppressed for speaking out against it.

This was a power grab at the federal level by the Republicans, nothing else. It had nothing to do with abolitionists.

Julia Grant in her memoirs reports that her family slaves remained her property until they were freed by the 13th amendment.

A couple of problems with Julia Grant's memoirs. In the first place they were ghost written. Also they were not published until the 1970's, over 70 years after her death. Then there is the fact that Missouri amended its state constitution to ban slavery in January 1865. So that would mean that the Grant's weren't living anywhere that slave ownership was legal at the time the 13th Amendment was ratified.

She also reported that she was very upset when her favorite slave ran away in 1864, apparently the slave did not realize that the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to her.

There is no evidence of any of the Dent family slaves still being around after February 1863.

Here's the seed of the Civil War right here:

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise between Southern and Northern states reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention in which only three-fifths of the population of slaves would be counted for enumeration purposes regarding both the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the United States House of Representatives.

Slaves are counted in terms of determining who gets seats in Congress???? Holy Cow! Guess where most of the slaves were? OMG! Guess what the Civil War was? It was redistricting at the most extreme level, nothing more.

I know you guys want to believe that Lincoln and the Republican and northern industrialists who put them into power were, you know, working for Amnesty International, but sadly that was not the case.

1) Lincoln was beholden to Northern Industrialists who were losing business to the South because the South traded predominantly with Europe.

Traded in what? The South exported cotton, tobacco, and the like. What were they importing in such massive quantities?

2) Lincoln wanted to empower the federal govt and force his Henry Clay ideas (the American System) on everyone in the country by initiating massive publics works projects in the North.

Having read the 1860 Republican platform, and a good number of Lincoln's writings, I'm not sure just what massive public works projects you could be talking about. The transcontinental railroad? I would point out that both the Douglas Democratic Platform AND the Breckenridge Democratic platform both called for the transcontinental railroad as well. Maybe they were all for 'massive public works projects' too?

3) Lincoln had to put massive tariffs on the South in order to fund his American system.

The tariffs hit everyone who imported goods, not just southerners. Why would a tariff hit them disproportionately?

4) The South seceded because of the tariff, not because of some imaginary nonsense that Lincoln was going to war to free slaves in America. The Confederate Constitution is clear on this.

Can't be that clear. I see where the confederate constitution protects slavery. I see where it protects slave imports. I see where it guarantees that slavery would exist throughout the south and in any territories it acquired. I don't see where the confederate constitution is all that big on tariffs.

Oh, and let me ask you one other thing. If the tariff was such a big bone of contention then why was one of the first acts of the confederate congress the passage of, you guessed it, a tariff? Using the same rates as they were before the rebellion? And enacting the same protectionist measures as were enacted before the rebellion? I thought that the confederate constitution explicitly forbids protectionist tariffs but there it is, a 25% tariff on tobacco products. High tariffs on molasses and sugar. My, my. What possible explanation can there be for ignoring their own constitution so blatantly?

5) Lincoln stated he would collect the tariff revenue by force but was assured the war would only last a couple months.

He also said he'd deliver the mail. Maybe that was more threatening?

This is the best evidence, from Julia Grant herself. Can't parse this at all...

Julia Grant in her memoirs reports that her family slaves remained her property until they were freed by the 13th amendment. She also reported that she was very upset when her favorite slave ran away in 1864, apparently the slave did not realize that the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to her.

This little disagreement started when you said that Mary Custis' slaves belonged to Robert E. Lee because the wife's property belong to the husband. Catch-22. If you are going to say this, then it applies to Grant. Julia says they were hers. By your own post..they were his.

Wow the whole Stonewall thing is a huge smokescreen that has nothing to do with the fact that I agreed with you that Stonewall Jackson had slaves.

So I guess they didn't work long enough or hard enough, huh?

Yeah, they probably hadn't paid their debt back yet.

You seem to dismiss a lot of things you choose not to accept.

What did I dismiss? That I wasn't shocked by the use of the word chattel.

Maybe they didn't, I have no idea.

Thank you. Now, that wasn't so hard was it.

And as I pointed out in an earlier thread, Julia Grant did not write her memoirs, they were ghost written. They were not published until, I believe, 1975 when Mrs. Grant had been dead for over 70 years. And since Missouri ended slavery in January 1865 the Grant's did not live anywhere that slavery was legal as late as December 1865. How do you explain all that?

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