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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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, I realize this is hard for you, but follow me on this. You're president of a federation of states, half of which are for slavery with the other half tolerating it in other states and even returning escaped slaves to their owners based on law. Sure, there are those totally dedicated to abolishing it, but they are radical, radical few. So radical in fact that to be one could get you killed.

Now then. Powers as great as yourself (Britain and the European monarchies) have been involved in the slave trade but phased it out by methods of compensation, although they still tolerate in many ways in their colonies and sugar plantations in the tropics.

You want to end slavery in your country. Do you do it by the sword, or the pen?

Clearly, the sword would be your choice. It was Lincoln's also. To the tune of a war so horrific, that all the war dead in the wars that your country will fight over the next 150 years and all the wars it fought prior to your war will still not equal to war dead of your five year war to end slavery.

Unfortunately, the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery ending for the sake of ending slavery. It was a botched attempt for the Washington power brokers (Republicans and their big money backers, northern industrialists) to seize power. It was supposed to be a walk in the park. The first major battle was fought with civilians camped out on the hills thinking it was going to be a picnic!!! After the South routed the North in that battle, Stonewall Jackson told Jefferson Davis "Give me 10,000 troops and I'll give you Washington DC."

Davis refused and wrote in his diary that it was the greatest mistake in his life. Lincoln clearly had no idea what he had wrought.

But fine, you back him up, I don't.

You want to end slavery in your country. Do you do it by the sword, or the pen?

Obviously the pen is preferable. But in the U.S. impossible. There were 16 slave states in the U.S., 18 free states. Since there was absolutely no interest among the slave states in ending slavery by any means, compensated or otherwise, the chance of getting an amendment through the Congress was zero. In order to get it through Consitutional convention it would have taken 38 free states. Do the math, that's 64 total states. Lincoln could add, he knew that he could not end slavery. But he could try and halt the expansion. Which is what he advocated and which is what the South saw as threatening. So they rebelled. And they chose war to further their aims. Lincoln waged the war they forced upon him.

But fine, you back him up, I don't.

Facts back up Lincoln better than I can.

Obviously the pen is preferable. But in the U.S. impossible.

O spare me! In America the pen is always possible in terms of one half of the country not killing 1/4 of each other, especially in 1850. The anti-war protests in the North were HUGE! They involved riots and the murder of children! Booth himself was a northern!

You want to end this massive institution in the United States. An institution the Founders struggled over but ultimately gave their blessing too just a generation earlier! Come on!!!!!

O spare me! In America the pen is always possible in terms of one half of the country not killing 1/4 of each other, especially in 1850.

As Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, "While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

The anti-war protests in the North were HUGE! They involved riots and the murder of children!

Anti war sentiment in the south took the form of whole counties and parts of states opposing the rule from Richmond. Makes draft riots pale by comparison.

Booth himself was a northern!

Having spent a fair amount of time in Richmond, Booth considered himself Southern. He was also born and raised in Maryland.

What a powerful illustration. But let me correct it. The Civil War was NOT about the "north" and the "south" compromising. They never diagreeed.

This was about power brokers in Washington (laser beam focus on Lincoln) NOT screwing this country into it's most costly war ever, a war on the scale this nation will never, ever see again, for politics.

Period. End of story.

Hey, fellow FReepers.

I just want to say something totally out of left field here regarding this subject, the subject of the Civil War or the War between the States - whatever you prefer.

We can't begin to comprehend that war. I just clicked off Fox News that had two black guys suing Michael Richards (yes, a racist idiot) for screaming racial epithets at them last week. They want monetary compensation. By monetary I mean measure in six figures for them and their lawyer.

We're not here because of the Civil War. I truly believe in America and Americans. The Americans that were sucking oxygen in 1860 were predominantly good people for their time. The Americans (if there still is an America) in 2360 living on this soil may look back and say "OMG...they ate other animals!!! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!" Hindsight is 20/20 folks and I'm not judging Lincoln from my standpoint, but from his own time.

It is clear, CLEAR, by every bit of documentation available to us that Lincoln was out of touch (that's a euphemism) with this country, including urbane, cityfolk of the north. The war was so unpopular that only around 5% of those conscripted even bothered serving. This was American brother against brother folks.

Anyway, I just want to point out that however passionately we devote this topic, it can never equal the utterly sublime (READ: overwhelmingly non-human) event that took place.

This was without a doubt the most avoidable war in the history of this country. It just went the polar opposite of that.

Happy Thanksgiving indeed.

The 'Civil War' has always been over-simplified....and over-complicated. This was true while it was being fought, on this very thread, and will be for every argument about it in the future.

It is too easy to loose commen sense when caught up in sincere passions.

please....God bless us all.

I'm new here and someone at the beginning of this thread posted something to the effect of: Let's take off the gloves like we always do on this subject.

Guy was right. This one is a doozy. It's a doozy because it was brother vs brother, cousin vs cousin, American vs American.

I just happen to believe that the powers that made it happen did so from DC, not from a perspective of North vs South. Slavery is an utter abomination. This was just not the way to go about ending it. Lincoln was out of touch with the people.

Again, I want to reiterate. 6 million war dead in today's numbers.

Remember them this Thanksgiving.

I'm new here..This one is a doozy..Slavery is an utter abomination. This was just not the way to go about ending it

You are most welcome, and appreciated here.. this subject always is a doozy..slavery is an abomination; and the 'Civil War' was never about ending it.

It remains so passionate an argument as to make people loose their minds. Many of the apparantly insane on this thread are, ordinarily, fairly rational sorts(including me...really, I mean it).

Have a safe, & rewarding Thanksgiving.

Well, all I know is that had it been President Richardson instead, there would've been a phase-out (one existed already to the extent that the Confederates outlawed importing slaves under their own constitution) and a "Hey, let's bring everyone together and not fall into an abyss of blood" type of attitude. If it had been about abolition, true freeing of human beings based on the simple fact that they should be free as per the reason why the Founders struggled with the issue - "O wait Dear Sir...why cannot these African folk be free along with us?" I would've taken that flag up in two seconds. But I can't speak for how I would've been then. None of us can.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.