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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

Look non, if you're so delusional as to think that one half of this nation fought the other half to free slaves on human rights grounds, I can't help you. It was a massive power grab by northern state interests that really had nothing to do with northerners themselves (i.e. - they not only opposed the war, they did so vociferously).

The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution was ended by the Civil War, not by a vote or compromise or anything legislative. The Morrill Tariff was pushed through, as Lincoln promised, but to incredible cost that he clearly could not see beforehand.

So, if she says that she owned the slaves and her favorite slave ran away in 1864, then I think we're going to have to believe her.

You may well do so. Mrs. Grant dictated the memoirs, she didn't write them. They were edited by John Simon, who is credited as author instead of Mrs. Grant. And then, of course, there is the fact that the Grant family must have deliberately violated the laws of the state of Missouri, or Illinois, or the District of Columbia, or Ohio, or wherever they lived when the 13th Amendment was ratified, yet somehow this has escaped all his biographers. But hey, believe what you want.

Look non, if you're so delusional as to think that one half of this nation fought the other half to free slaves on human rights grounds, I can't help you.

I never said that. One part of the nation fought the other part because one section chose armed rebellion to protect what they saw as a threat to their institution of slavery. That's what I've believed all along.

The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution was ended by the Civil War, not by a vote or compromise or anything legislative. The Morrill Tariff was pushed through, as Lincoln promised, but to incredible cost that he clearly could not see beforehand.

Strictly speaking the 3/5th clause is still valid. However, since the ratification of the 13th Amendment means that nobody falls under the 'all other Persons' category it's pretty much moot.

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. (Where were the Grants living from the surrender until the end of the year?) – This is from your post 349.

The 13th Amendment was ratified almost 12 months later, December 1865. – This is from your post 378. (this has to do with the 1864 runaway slave)

But, among other things, does not support the claim that Mrs. Grant still owned slaves as late as December 1865. – This is from your post 391.

Alouette’s post mentions two dates: (1)Julia Grant in her memoirs reports that her family slaves remained her property until they were freed by the 13th amendment. (2) 1864, the year her favorite slave ran away.

Your contention is that the memoirs are fake because the date can’t be right. So how was it possible for Mrs. Grant to still own slaves in December 1865 when she didn't live anywhere that slave ownership was legal?

Here is what I posted on the date of things:

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 – post 375.

The memoirs speak of the slave running away in 1864, so it fits in the time frame. - post 391

Now, here is what you have to say about my two posts: Who's dodging now? That's not what the memoirs say, and what you have been supporting. The memoirs say that she owned slaves until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. So we're back to the question if the memoirs are accurate than how was that possible?

That's not what the memoirs say,: If this is not what the memoirs say, then what do they say?

what you have been supporting I am just reporting what she wrote.

You want to know how it was possible that she owned slaves until the ratification of the 13th Amendment, and because you can’t make the correlation that she did (even when she said she did)– that somehow her ghost writer then changed her memoirs and we have to discount what she said.

I don't seem to be the one dodging.

Mrs. Grant dictated the memoirs, she didn't write them.

So she didn't read them when they were done. Didn't check to see what the ghost writer put down on paper. Alright...it's late, so we'll go with your crazy theory because heaven forid Julia Dent Grant knows when her slaves were freed. No...not possible. It's a conspiracy theory.

Who killed Lincoln?

Who killed Kennedy?

Who was responsible for 9/11?

Who changed Julia Dent Grant's memoirs and made NS look bad on a thread?

Inquiring minds want to know...

I'll stand by all of my statements and questions, but I'm not sure now what position you're taking now. You quoted Mrs. Grants memoirs and say they must be taken as the truth. The memoirs say Mrs. Grant owned slaves up until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Either you agree with that or you don't, and if you do where was she living between January and December where slave ownership was legal.

Your contention is that the memoirs are fake because the date can’t be right.

Fake is a bit harsh. I question the accuracy of that one claim because of evidence which shows it would have been legally impossible.

If this is not what the memoirs say, then what do they say?

You've been quoting the memoirs all along. According to your posts they state that Julia Grant owned slaves until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Or am I missing something?

Well, yeah. Either the biography is in error or Mrs. Grant was committing a crime, it has to be one or the other doesn't it?

Sure, you'll stand by them. You're too committed now.

I agree with her memoirs. I believe she knows when her slaves were freed.

What crime? Slavery ended with the ratification of the 13th amendment. Kentucky didn't free her slaves until December 1865. Was the whole state committing a crime?. So, if Mrs. Grant had her slaves up until the ratification, no crime has been committed.

You write: am I missing something. You know you are not missing anything. You understand exactly what I'm saying.

If this is not what the memoirs say, then what do they say?

In your post #394 - you write: that's not what the memoirs say. So, I asked: then what do they say if they do not say she freed her slaves until December 1865?

Again, it was no crime to own slaves up until the ratification of the 13th amendment. So, the biography can still be right and no crime was committed.

Not if she lived in Kentucky, no. Or Delaware for that matter. But she didn't live in either state, she lived in Missouri which outlawed slavery in January 1865. Or she lived in Illinois, which was a free state. Or Pennsylvania, a free state. Or she lived in D.C. which oulawed slavery in 1862. She had to live somewhere, and everywhere she might have been living had outlawed slavery. So are you suggesting she knowingly violated the law somewhere?

You write: am I missing something. You know you are not missing anything. You understand exactly what I'm saying.

Well no, sorry, I don't. You say you believe the memoirs? Fine. How was it legally possible? That's all I'm trying to understand.

So, I asked: then what do they say if they do not say she freed her slaves until December 1865?

That response was in reply to your post 394 where you said, "Since 1864 is a whole year before 1865, than Mrs. Grant could have freed her slaves before December 1865." That's not what her memoirs state. You've said all along that the memoirs say she had slaves until the ratification. Then suddenly your suggesting that she might have freed her slaves before December 1865? Don't you believe her anymore?

Again, it was no crime to own slaves up until the ratification of the 13th amendment. So, the biography can still be right and no crime was committed.

Again, it was in every Union state except Kentucky and Delaware. And, I believe, every southern state by that time as well. Now, if you can show where the Grants were living in either of those two states between January and December of 1865 then I'll concede defeat.

Well, first off, the South, being overwhelmingly rural, was not nearly as densely populated as the North. Ergo, you numbers are meaningless. It's like comparing New York and Mississippi. Hope that makes sense to you. As for volunteers in the North, I've got your volunteers right here chum:

Under the Union draft act men faced the possibility of conscription in July 1863 and in Mar., July, and Dec. 1864. Draft riots ensued, notably in New York in 1863. Of the 249,259 18-to-35-year-old men whose names were drawn, only about 6% served, the rest paying commutation or hiring a substitute.

So how was it possible for Mrs. Grant to still own slaves in December 1865 when she didn't live anywhere that slave ownership was legal?

I just went down to the basement and blew the dust off Julia Grant's memoirs.

"Eliza, Dan, Julia, and John belonged to me up to the time of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.* When I visited the General during the war, I nearly always had Julia with me as nurse."

*Since Missouri was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation, Julia Grant's slaves probably remained her property until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, edited by John Y. Simon, University of Illinois Press, p. 83 ff.p. 88 by John Y. Simon.

You've just justified everything I said. The very fact that the 13th Amendment was ratified a full half-decade after the war began says it all! There was never any full-blown abolitionist movement in the halls of Congress. That stuff was on the street and change was already in the air. For crying out loud, it was the southern states decades earlier that had decried the notion of counting slaves as "property" instead of human beings and it was the Confederate Constitution that outlawed international slave trade in the Confederacy.

Look, the precedence of secession had been set decades before, not just in the South but in the New England states as well. All Lincoln had to do to prevent it was compromise, just as presidents had done before him.

You don't just stop slavery in a nation overnight, you phase it out. I would've compensated the south, dispensed with the tariffs and created immigration initiatives whereby immigrant workers could have basically a free ride to the south and incentives to work the hard stuff (and let's be frank, immigrants in this country at that time pretty much built everything after slavery ended).

Is that so hard? But nope, Lincoln had go the route of six million dead Americans in today's numbers. Holy friggin' crap. My only regret about Booth blowing his head off is that he didn't do it in 1859.

in 1899, NOBODY in the army would have admitted that they did those things.

i don't have easy/routine access to ARMY LAWYER any more, as i'm retired from the military service. i suspect that ANY large metropolitan library can access that magazine either electronically or by Interlibrary loan. it won't be hard to find.

may i suggest that you stop asking people for a "link", as MOST research documents are NOT & will NOT be found on the "worldwidewierd"? expecting to find such complex and "deep" things on the Internet, is like trying to write a dissertation from an encyclopedia.= it cannot be done successfully.

may i suggest that you go to the library & look for the information, yourself. there is a GREAT DEAL of relevant data about the "kangaroo court" that UNLAWFULLY convicted & hanged CPT Wurtz. then you'll KNOW the TRUTH.

free dixie,sw

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