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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

my reason for quoting Dr Brownmiller is that N-S only seems to believe NON-southerners & Brownmiller (for all her other problems) is NO dixie lass.

otoh, you ARE a southerner & you should know better than to believe the LIES out of the LEFTIST northeastern, elitist, sanctimonious, "halls of academia". but you OBVIOUSLY aren't that SMART!

in point of FACT, you wouldn't accept as fact ANY source ,no matter what it is, that disagrees with your PREJUDICES!

laughing AT you!

free dixie,sw

i wouldn't argue that Brownmiller is a historian and she IS a "polemicist" for the radical feminist cause. neither, to my knowledge, has anyone in academia ever doubted her SOURCES, even when (like ME) they disagree violently with her conclusions. AGAINST OUR WILL, Men, Women & Rape, to my knowledge has NEVER beeen sucessfully attacked on the HONESTY of its facts, but rather on Brownmiller's CONCLUSIONS from those FACTS.

the quote, (NOT that you'll accept it as a source!) is from the Public School Teacher's Guide to her book.

as i said to your "buddy", "JSU&TI", you wouldn't believe ANY source, that PROVES that the DAMNyankees were the remorseless WAR CRIMINALS that MANY of them manifestly were. ANY SOURCE!

the TRUTH is that your mind is made up & anything, from any source, that DISAGREES with your obvious, UNthinking, PREJUDICE is "dismissed out of hand". FACT!

free dixie,sw

DE,KY,MD,MO and (some would argue) NE (as they still had "lifetime indentured servitude" without pay = sounds like slavery to me!) were considered northern states.

care for a "do over"???

my question to YOU is how many northern states had HAD slavery before the WBTS & what disposition of those slaves was made of those slaves, when slavery was made UNlawful in those states??? (i'd bet you don't want to answer that UNcomfortable question.)

free dixie,sw

every post the 2 of you DUNCES post makes "the unionist cause" on FR look evermore DENSE,clueLESS, ignorant & PREJUDICED.

fwiw, "teacher's guides" are GENERALLY not listed in bibliographies of ANY book used in the public/secondary schools, as they are a SUPPLEMENT (you do understand the word: SUPPLEMENT, don't you??)to the book. (you REALLY ought to "check your facts" & "engage brain" BEFORE opening mouth. you might then NOT look like a HATE-filled, 1/2-educated, DUNCE!)

i guess i 'll have to add you to the list of DUNCES & "clueLESS nitwits", that i ONLY laugh AT & "make sport of". with any luck at all, we can make you yet another "target of opportunity for mirth & common abuse", as your buddy, "JSU&TI" already is. NOTHING he spews out like so much manure is believed or even "taken seriously" by other FReepers.

fwiw, when you first appeared on FR, i thought you might (for once) be an example of a SMART unionist. sadly, i've come to the conclusion that you're just a slightly "better read" (but EQUALLY prejudiced & "closed minded")dunce, than most of the DYs (who have previously sojourned on FR) are.

free dixie,sw

"And NO Northern states did not return slaves without federal coercion under the Fugitive Slave Act which was the Law of the Land."

First off, any time you mention "Northern states" you're going to have to mention that four of them were slave states. And to say that the North didn't return slaves without "federal coercion" further blurs the line between the two and certainly flies in the face of your ranting about the South's "tyranny" in your previous post on this subject, something outright laughable in light of your dismissal of Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, ignoring the Supreme Court, and dismissing with Congressional debate altogether as he plunged this nation into an abyss of blood and death that would today result in over 6 million dead Americans, a number equal to that of those massacred in the Holocaust half a century ago, something this poster is clearly fine with. The nation would never have gotten into war in the first place had compromise been the name of the game (reduction in unfair tariffs on the Southern states' trade internally and with Europe and a phasing out of slavery via compsenation a'la the way the European powers did).

Yes folks, that's right. The "North" passed a law requiring law enforcement officials to arrest runaway slaves or be fined $1000. That's the equivalent of a fine of over $100k in today's dollars! Sure, there were abolitionists and underground railroads and whatnot, but the notion that this poster has about some benevolent "North" (read: your average citizen) being anti-slavery is nuts.

The North's AWOL rate was 94%!!!! Scores of blacks were beaten to death by black mobs in our most cosmopolitan northern city! Ahem:

"Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility. At 4 P.M. on July 13, "the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution." The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes."

the TRUTH is that your mind is made up & anything, from any source, that DISAGREES with your obvious, UNthinking, PREJUDICE is "dismissed out of hand". FACT!

Oh, this is rich, coming from you. You're the king of rejecting any source that might disturb your absolutist "north all bad, south all good" worldview.

So what did you think of Brownmiller's account of the Willie Green case? Was he guilty or not? Why does she reject Green's wife's account and accept the white victim's? Does Brownmiller's overall thesis effect her version of the facts of the case? What about her statement that, had Emmett Till not been tortured and murdered, he would have raped a white woman? What about Brownmiller's contention that all armies, at all times, habitually rape? You're a former soldier, I understand. Did you rape any women? Did the US Army in Vietnam conduct a widespread program of rape in order to dominate the women? Brownmiller says they did. Her only exception to this "all armies rape" rule is the Viet Cong, in fact.

Yes folks, that's right. The "North" passed a law requiring law enforcement officials to arrest runaway slaves or be fined $1000.

Got a source for this? I'm just wondering how the "North" passes a law. Did they have a separate legislature? When was this law passed? Did the south's agitating over getting their slaves returned to them as guaranteed by the Constitution have anything to do with it?

Scores of blacks were beaten to death by black mobs in our most cosmopolitan northern city

I think you mean white mobs, but no matter. When you're playing that fast and loose with the facts, what does a detail like that mean?

"Really? And here I'd always read that it was the Yankees inside the fort and the south starting the shooting at them."

You need to refer to something other than the one paragraph long high school textbook version of events.

Lincoln was advised by all of his top brass and his cabinet to abandon Ft. Sumter because of, you know, the Confederate forces unwillingness to tolerate a Union military base withing their boundries. Lincoln promised that he would not reprovision the fort but, in typical Lincoln fashion, lied. Instead he sent a heavily armed naval force to the Fort. Why would he do this? Historian Bruce Cotton explains why:

Lincoln had plainly been warned by [his military advisers] that a ship taking provisions to Fort Sumter would be fired on. Now he was sending the ship, with advance notices to the men who had the guns. He was sending war ships and soldiers as well...If there was going to be a war it would begin over a boat load of salt pork and crackers...Not for nothing did Captain Fox remark afterward that it seemed very important to Lincoln that South Carolina "should stand before the civilized world as having fired upon bread."

Many Northern newspapers recognized that Lincoln wanted war badly. The Buffalo Daily Courier editorialized that "The affair at Fort Sumter...has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified."

And here's the New York Evening Day Book: :[Fort Sumter] was a cunningly devised scheme to arouse and if possible exasperate the Northern people against the South."

The Providence Daily Post wrote: "For three weeks the administration newspapers have been assuring us that Fort Sumter would be abandoned [but] Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to innaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of the aggressor."

It's many times the case that a deeper, scholarly reading of history overrides eventual assumptions commonly held by many. You just have to be up on this stuff.

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