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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

Every post you make is more clueless than the last.

"The South and North went to war over tariffs." Yet, the Slaver leaders didn't mention it. Yeah, oh yeah.

"Do you seriously, SERIOUSLY, believe that there was no way for this country to peacefully emancipate slaves as the European powers had done years before?" Ummm, and why don't you let us know about those countries which had MILLIONS of slaves? Slavers LOVED slavery they were in NO mood to end it by ANY means.

Who has claimed Lincoln was an Abolitionist other than the slavers themselves?

"The EP also caused a desertion crisis in the Union army to the tune of AT LEAST 200,000 and another 90,000 who fled to Canada to avoid conscription period!" Where do you get this crap? Crackpot.com?

Somebody brought up Laffer theory. Looks like the current trend of reconsidering the Civil War is catching on at the universities:

The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship
Robert A. McGuire and T. Norman Van Cott
McGuire: Professor, Department of Economics, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325. E-mail rmcguire@uakron.edu
Van Cott: Professor, Department of Economics, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306. E-mail tvancott@bsu.edu

Abstract

This article offers an example of a national constitution, that of the Confederate States of America, which effectively constrained its fiscal authorities to tax rates on the lower end of the Laffer relationship. The taxes were Confederate import tariffs. Drawing on primary sources, the paper documents the role that this de facto capping of tariff rates played in the history of the drafting of the Confederate Constitution. That the Laffer relationship found constitutional expression for an important tax suggests that the "tariff" might have played a more significant role in the North–South conflict than is currently acknowledged.

http://ei.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/3/428

Where do you get this crap? Crackpot.com?"

Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War scholar James McPherson. But there's no shortage of this stuff, you just have to know how to Google it:

In view of the conditions which prevailed in the war department and in the Union army, it is not surprising that desertion was a common fault. Even so the actual extent of it, as shown in the official reports, comes as a distinct shock. Though the determination of the fully number is a bit complicated, the total would seem to have been well over 200,000

http://www.civilwarhome.com/desertion.htm

Bubba, to make a proper analogy to the Civil War Ft Sumter incident we have to change the circumstances do what I've already told you:

1) No agreement to lease the base would exist in the first place.

2) I would be sending a humanitarian ship, not battleships and troops

3) My top general, the top brass, and most of my cabinet would not be telling me to abandon it.

4) I would not have promised to invade it in my inaugural address.

Oh, and the Confederates weren't "starving" Union troops. They asked them to evacuate the fort. We're going in circles here.

WHY AM I DOING ALL THE HEAVY LIFTING HERE? WHY CAN'T YOU GUYS DO FRESHMAN-LEVEL INTERNET RESEARCH ON THIS??

By April 4, President Lincoln, discovering that supplies in the fort were shorter than he had previously known, and believing a relief expedition to be feasible, ordered merchant vessels escorted by the United States Navy to Charleston. On April 6, 1861, Lincoln notified South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens that "an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only, and that if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, [except] in case of an attack on the fort."

The Confederate Secretary of War telegraphed Beauregard that if he were certain that the fort was to be supplied by force, "You will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such a manner as you may determine, to reduce it." Beauregard dispatched aides to Fort Sumter on April 11 and issued their ultimatum. Anderson refused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

I've already shown Lincoln boasting to his naval commander about kickstarting it over this. You don't come down the Charelston River with battleships to the most important fort guarding a major port unless you want to consolidate your position at the fort! The Grays told the Blues, "pretty please with sugar on top get the hell out of our fort" and then opened fire when they did not. Simple!

To All,

Also, isn't a bit sophomoric to endlessly rant over who fired the first shot and who hit who first? For those for Lincoln's take on things, the entire Confederacy was illegal in the first place! What difference does it make to anyone who fired first if the war was on?

Frankly, I think it shows resolve that the South fired first. They should've fired a whole lot sooner (when Anderson, the Union commander holding out in Sumter, had rifles smuggled in).

What's the point about bellyaching "Well, they hit first. Whaaaahhahaha!!"???

After the South seceded and the North didn't recognize the Confederacy, it was TIME TO GET IT ON.

Immediately following that clause in the Confederate Constitution is a clause that has no parallel in the U.S. Constitution. It affirms strong support for free trade and opposition to protectionism: "but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importation from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."

Yeah, that lasted all of three months. In May 1861 the confederate congress passed a tariff legislation that placed a 25% tariff on tobacco and tobacco products. Tobacco, as you may remember, was an important crop in Virginia and North Carolina. It placed a 20% duty on sugar, coincidentally raised in Louisiana. It placed a 20% duty on molasses, produced in several of the deep south states. It placed a 2 cent tariff on each bushel of salt, another southern product. Apparently tariffs weren't all that bad after all, and protectionism not that evil when it protected southern producers.

But then again history has shown that the confederacy paid lip service to the constitution time and again, ignoring it when convenient.

1) No agreement to lease the base would exist in the first place.

In fact, Castro has a stronger claim than South Carolina. The US government owned Sumter outright. South Carolina had given them the deed.

2) I would be sending a humanitarian ship, not battleships and troops

So you would try to supply the fort, while you decry Lincoln for doing the same. Your only difference is what kind of ship you'd send.

4) I would not have promised to invade it in my inaugural address.

Lincoln made no such promise. In fact, he promised the opposite, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.

I've shown time and time again that the Confederacy did not outlaw tariffs but rather outlawed using them for pork projects. The South had half the population of the North and not near the resources. How did you think they were going to raise an army? Magic?

Even so, one of my previous posts linked out to an article at Oxford's website by two scholars who claim the Confederate general tariff rate was on the low end of the Laffer specturm, unlike the Union one. We're talking 20% vs over 40% and this in a country that has to war with another nation that has twice the population and many more resources.

Speaking of money...

TRIVIA MOMENT:

The Confederate States of America had a $500 bill. None other than Stonewall Jackson was on it! One just sold on ebay for about $276. That's nothing IMHO. I'm going to get one in the future.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Confederate-500-note-Stonewall-Jackson_W0QQitemZ170050268775QQihZ007QQcategoryZ3414QQcmdZViewItem

Please Non-Sequitur...make some effort yourself to do basic research. Just Google this stuff, ok? I swear, it's like feeding a baby, the baby gurgling it back, then having to wipe its mouth.

Unlike you, I have done more than mere basic research. In his book "Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson", Byron Farwell addresses the story:

"The dramatic scene and the shouted remarks to President Davis are suspect. McGuire was generally a reliable witness, and certainly it was he who dressed Jackson's wound, but the story did not appear in print until more than 20 years after the war."

Farwell goes on to note, "The next day, when Jackson wrote to Anna, he made no mention of the encounter with President Davis." Jackson, as Farwell also notes, shared everything with his wife and was not above name dropping. It seems highly unlikely that he would have failed to mention meeting the president. Add to that the fact that Jackson biographers like G.F.R. Henderson and Lenoir Chambers place so little credence in the story that they don't include it in their books and your story almost certainly falls into the category of a southron myth.

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.

That's your definition of AWOL? You need to look up the meaning of the word. It is true that as little as 6% of the Union army was conscripted. But the Union still had no problems finding enough volunteers to maintain their armies through the entire war. Contrast that to the confederacy. In April 1862 all enlistments were extended for the duration of the war, a trampling of states-rights that Lincoln never contemplated. The south also implemented conscription that same month and by the end of the war almost a third of the rebel army was drafted. So you may say that 94% were AWOL when in fact 94% of all Union soldiers were volunteers. On the other hand, by the end of the war virtually all confederate soldiers were there because they were forced to be.

Also, isn't a bit sophomoric to endlessly rant over who fired the first shot and who hit who first?

No, because the first resort to violence put the south squarely in the wrong and turned what had been a political crisis into a war. Toombs, if no one else in the CSA government, recognized this fact.

Oh, by the way, for all your talk about "battleships", the south had fired on the unarmed civilian ship "Star of the West" that Buchanan had attempted to use to resupply Sumter in January, and no Union ship had entered Charleston harbor when Beauregard began shelling the fort.

I've shown time and time again that the Confederacy did not outlaw tariffs but rather outlawed using them for pork projects.

No, you said in Reply 714 that they outlawed protectionist tariffs. And I quote, "This is why the Confederate States OUTLAWED protectionist tariffs in Article 1, Section 8, clause 1 of the Confederate Constitution." And as I've shown that it took the Davis regime not 3 months to totally ignore that clause of the Constitution and enact a tariff that was protectionist in nature.

Now, is there anything else you want to deny posting?

Even so, one of my previous posts linked out to an article at Oxford's website by two scholars who claim the Confederate general tariff rate was on the low end of the Laffer specturm, unlike the Union one.

Did they deny it was protectionist or hadn't they read it either?

The south also implemented conscription that same month and by the end of the war almost a third of the rebel army was drafted. So you may say that 94% were AWOL when in fact 94% of all Union soldiers were volunteers. On the other hand, by the end of the war virtually all confederate soldiers were there because they were forced to be.

But none of those conscripted confederate soldiers owned more than 20 slaves. To the end, Slavery Inc. had to honor the central role of whipping slaves and keeping the property in line. Intelligent southerners foretold that the effect of Confederate rule would be to put the mass of poor southerners into bondage to the economic and societal interests of the slave owning class, the nonproductive drone class that the Rockwell/DiLorenzo/Cindy Sheehan crowd confuses with "the South".

I've shown time and time again that the Confederacy did not outlaw tariffs but rather outlawed using them for pork projects.

Fort Sumter itself was a Pork Project that was obsolete even before construction began at the insistence of the Grand Daddy of all the secessionists --- John C. Calhoon during the aftermath of the War of 1812. The place was "under construction" for over 30 years and pumped millions over the years into the Charleston economy.

actually, there was NO starvation or even deprivation of LUXURY items. the merchants of Charleston were PLEASED to sell anything but munitions & ammunition to the fort.

at least on the day before, there were deliveries of food, clothing,chocolate, lace,fresh bread/pastries & other items to the post.

there are reports that deliveries continued on THE DAY of the bombardment. (obviously NOT during the relatively brief shelling!)

at least ONE "privately owned sidearm" was repaired & returned to a union officer by a local gunsmith, the week before the shelling.

free dixie,sw

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