The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Far more damaging than the ban on Jewish chaplains was the notorious General Order 11 of General Ulysses S. Grant. Issued December 17, 1862, it expelled Jews from all areas under Grant’s command, threatening Jews with imprisonment if they did not obey quickly. If there was a rationale to the order, it derived from Grant’s advancing into Mississippi to join with General William Tecumseh Sherman and take Vicksburg. Once Grant permitted citizens in these areas to resume their business livelihoods, various traders swept in. Seizing abandoned cotton and other goods, they sold them and offered gold and weapons to Confederate sympathizers whom Grant feared would resume hostilities.

  Investigations into these activities implicated soldiers, traders, and civilians of all persuasions. No doubt some were Jews. But Grant blamed the Jews, in part because of antipathy toward his father, whom he believed was engaging in such trading in conjunction with Jewish partners. Grant further suspected his father of trading on the son’s status as general in seeking a license to trade cotton. The order was what the historian Stephen V. Ash calls “a logical culmination of the history of anti-Semitism in Grant’s army and his own intensifying bigotry, a culmination shaped by the penchant of the soldier for quick and decisive remedies based on military considerations alone.”6

  General Order 11 was largely not carried out, but it was enforced in certain areas. Many Jews in northern Mississippi and Kentucky were ousted from their homes—fleeing north, in some cases on foot. But one of them, Cesar Kaskel of Paducah, Kentucky, managed to make his way to Washington and, accompanied by Congressman John Addison Gurley from Cincinnati, got an appointment with President Lincoln. Legend has it that the following exchange took place: “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” the president said to Kaskel. “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection,” came the reply. “And this protection they shall have at once,” Lincoln is supposed to have said.7

  Whether or not the exchange occurred precisely this way, Lincoln did ask General Henry Halleck, general-in-chief of the US Armies, to direct Grant to rescind the order. Lincoln later stated that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.” The episode was significant not simply because it demonstrated that prejudice was still a burden for Jews. It also showed Jews that they could fight back. Grant never apologized for the order but clearly regretted it when he ran for president in 1868 and later wrote in his memoirs that the order was issued “without reflection.” As president, Grant appointed Jews to public office and sought to reassure them of his intentions.8

  In the South, meanwhile, Jews faced their own share of anti-Semitic prejudice. Nearly every major Southern city had Jewish populations—from New Orleans and Charleston to Savannah, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, and Houston. As everywhere, Southern Jews ranged in professions. They were peddlers, teachers, musicians, lawyers, doctors, druggists, and of course storekeepers and merchants. Scholars presume that anyone prosperous enough to own slaves did. But Southern Jews’ chief reason for supporting the secession had less to do with defending slavery than with expressing loyalty to their communities.

  Many accounts suggest that although most Jews did not own slaves, they may have been especially comfortable in the South because they were part of a slave-owning class that could look down on the underclass of slaves as inferior, a rarity in any society in which Jews had lived in the world. “Whether so many Jews would have achieved so high a level of social, political, economic, and intellectual status and recognition, without the presence of the lowly and degraded slave, is indeed dubious,” writes the historian Bertram Korn.9

  Jews in the South had many reasons to enlist in the Confederate army, including social pressure and the lure of adventure. “Letters, memoirs, and obituaries all reflect Jewish soldiers’ chief reasons for fighting: to do their duty, to protect their homeland, to protect southern rights and liberty and, once the war began, to support their comrades in arms,” writes Robert N. Rosen, a historian of Jews in the Confederacy. But he also notes that Jews knew that they had to align themselves with monarchs and conservative regimes for self-protection.10 Indeed, as the cause of secession faltered, anti-Semitism flared among those looking to cast blame for the South’s difficulties. “The Jews are at work,” a Confederate diarist wrote in 1861. “Having no nationality, all wars are harvests for them.” Localities in some parts of the Confederacy sought to drive out Jews as dangerous and disloyal.11

  While Judah P. Benjamin was seen in the North as a sinister Israelite Svengali and manipulator, he received much blame in the South for its disastrous diplomacy, including the failure to win support from France and Britain, and the imploding finances of the Confederacy. An irony lay in the fact that Benjamin was among a number of Jews in the South who had intermarried and shed or at least downplayed their Jewish identity, including Lieutenant Governor Henry M. Hyams of Louisiana, and Louisiana House Speaker Edwin Warren Moïse. Benjamin possessed impressive political and personal skills and was the first Jew to serve in the United States Senate, from Louisiana. (David Levy Yulee of Florida had earlier become the first person of Jewish heritage to serve as a senator, from Florida, but he had formally converted to Christianity.) Benjamin served as the Confederacy’s attorney general before his appointment as the South’s top diplomat. Round-faced with curly hair and a close-cropped beard, Benjamin was hailed as the smartest and wiliest member of the Dixie cabinet by various commentators—the “brains” of the Confederacy, some said.

  Benjamin may have left his Jewish identity behind, but it did not leave him. When as senator he walked out of a debate about slavery and secession, Henry Wilson, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, derided him as a descendant of “that race that stoned Prophets and crucified the Redeemer of the World.”12 On the other hand, after meeting with him in New Orleans, Salomon de Rothschild of the Paris branch of the great banking family said he found it “astonishing” that high positions in the Confederacy should be “occupied by our coreligionists, or rather by those who were born into the faith and who, having married Christian women, and without converting, have forgotten the practices of their fathers.” In a letter home, Rothschild added that Benjamin had “a Jewish heart” and said he took an interest in him “because I represent the greatest Jewish house in the world.”13

  In fact, Benjamin’s biographer, Eli Evans, argues that he was “much more steeped in Jewish culture and tradition” than most records indicate. Though he did not speak or write about his religious beliefs, Evans argues that Benjamin was not a nonbeliever. He was, for example, son of a founder of the Reform Society of Israelites in Charleston, South Carolina. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that he led an unhappy personal life, in part because of anti-Semitism. He had been expelled from Yale for “ungentlemanly conduct,” which has never been detailed. There has been speculation that the charges could have involved anything from gambling to petty theft, carousing, and homosexuality, stimulated perhaps by a whiff of religious prejudice. In New Orleans, he married Natalie St. Martin, of Catholic and Creole descent, whom he tried to please by purchasing a plantation near the city called Bellechasse, where he kept a retinue of 140 slaves. “Since Bellechasse was not a plantation handed down to him by an earlier generation, he came to slave owning late in life from an urban background,” writes Evans. Benjamin never believed slavery was part of some divine order justified by the Bible and he “hated the cruelty of the overseers” of others in the Confederacy, Evans argues.14

  A dozen years after marrying in 1833, Benjamin was abandoned by his wife and Ninette, their only child, who moved to France. During their separation, the couple saw each other only about once a year. The marriage was obviously a stormy one. Diaries from the era describe her as openly unfaithful with a string of men in Paris. But Benjamin never abandoned her. Instead, he threw himself into his work and became a confidant of Jefferson
Davis, whom he helped persuade in the war’s waning days to offer freedom to slaves in exchange for military service on behalf of the Confederacy—one of the oddest turns in a war based on the South’s claims that the slaves were happy in their status.

  As the Union overran Richmond and headed for a crushing victory, Benjamin burned his papers and escaped to England, where he rose to prominence as an international lawyer; he never returned to the United States. In the postwar era, his reputation was plagued by continuing suspicions of involvement in the conspiracy behind Lincoln’s assassination, predicated evidently on the role he played in establishing a Confederate “spy ring” in Canada that was to function after the war, possibly as an insurgent group. Evans concludes that the evidence absolves both Benjamin and Davis in the assassination plot, though Davis served two years in prison on treason charges. (Three men and one woman were executed in 1865 for their roles in the assassination.) But anti-Semitism may have accounted for his decision to flee. Evans speculates that Benjamin knew that if he were captured, religious hatred would have prevented him from getting a fair trial. (Benjamin is buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.)15

  JEWS AND SLAVERY

  As the case of Benjamin illustrates, it is impossible to talk about the Jews of the South in the Civil War without discussing their role in owning slaves and their disagreements over the institution itself. In some accounts, Jews have been singled out for an allegedly outsized role in slavery and the slave trade. In light of their history as traders of other goods from Europe to the Western hemisphere, there is little doubt that Jews had something of a role. The slave trade, which flourished between 1450 and 1800, has been examined carefully by scholars, who have documented the important role of Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and pagans in Africa, as well as Jews. The conclusion from these examinations is that Jews did not play an exaggerated or disproportionate role.

  One historian who has looked at the records, Seymour Drescher, contends that it was unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the 12 million people enslaved and transported from Africa were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants. “At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims,” he concludes, although some of the slave trade was conducted by so-called New Christians, who were often Jewish converts whose abandonment of Judaism was forced on them by the inquisition in Spain and Portugal.16

  Only a small proportion of Southern Jews were planters or plantation owners, and thus most were not slaveholders on a grand scale. Benjamin was a conspicuous exception with his plantation. He lived there in a mansion of spiral staircases and silver doorknobs, and had his slaves tend the rose gardens on the grounds—all in an effor to placate his wife. Scholarly examinations of wills show that a number of Jewish slaveholders were sensitive to the slaves’ condition and treated them humanely. Some prominent Southern Jews emancipated their own slaves and openly supported the abolitionist cause. On the other hand, like many slaveholders, some Jews used their slaves as concubines. There is little doubt that Southern Jews were supportive of slavery overall. One defender, Jacob N. Cardozo, editor and political economist, wrote: “Slavery brought not only great wealth to the South but to the slaves a greater share of its enjoyment than in many regions where the relation between employer and employee was based on wages.” He also argued along with some Jewish scholars that the black race was obviously inferior to whites, as decreed by God.17

  More striking perhaps is the fact that many Jews in the North, even those who supported the Union in the Civil War, were reluctant to condemn the institution of slavery or support the abolitionist cause. Their uncertainty stemmed from a lingering feeling of precariousness about their role in society. This Jewish reluctance irritated and disappointed some abolitionists who had hoped they could be allies. “The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the Slavery question,” a report to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society said in 1853, noting that Jews seemed reluctant to mobilize their community to address such explosive political issues.18

  Abolitionist hopes for Jews to call upon their celebrated history of freedom from slavery in Egypt to be more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause thus were unfulfilled. What seems clear is that, lacking a clear direction or interpretation of the Bible, Jews tended to adhere to the beliefs of their neighbors, whether North or South—another example of their desire to Americanize their identity. In addition, many Jews maintained that it was inappropriate, if not dangerous, to speak in one voice on issues ostensibly outside their expertise and their own laws. This reluctance came at a time of genuine debate among Jews over whether slavery was acceptable or a moral sin, since the Bible seemed to countenance slavery even while imposing strict rules on how slaves should be treated and under what circumstances it was forbidden to return runaway slaves to their masters.

  Another factor in Jewish uneasiness was that many fundamentalist Christian groups supporting abolition were not themselves tolerant of Jews. Some abolitionist leaders—including white preachers and pamphleteers like William Lloyd Garrison but also the great African American reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass—had gone so far as to denounce Jews as evildoers and killers of Christ. Garrison had attacked Mordecai Noah for Noah’s anti-abolitionist writings, labeling him “a Jewish unbeliever, the enemy of Christ and Liberty.” In another publication he called him “the miscreant Jew” and a “lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross between two thieves.”19

  The Jewish leaders most likely to side with abolitionists in the North came from the “reformer” camp, led by Rabbis Max Lilienthal of Cincinnati, Liebman Adler and Bernhard Felsenthal of Chicago, and S. M. Isaacs of New York. But it was not always easy for them. Isaacs’s appeal for Jews to stand with the Union prompted a torrent of protests calling him Brutus and canceling subscriptions to The Jewish Messenger, where he was editor.

  Perhaps the most active among these Northerners was the Reverend Sabato Morais of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, who referred to the Confederates as “misguided . . . disaffected children.”20 But his case also illustrates the problems of speaking out against slavery among Jews. Born and educated in Italy, where his father had been imprisoned for agitating with other revolutionaries to establish a republic, Morais passionately championed democracy in his sermons. Though not an outright abolitionist, he opposed the South’s secession as a threat to democracy and stability. “We must have peace, but not at the cost of our national existence,” he wrote. Morais was even more notable for his affection for Lincoln. He delivered a moving sermon when Lincoln’s son, Willie, died in 1862, and some of his preaching stirred unease among those in his congregation sympathetic to the Democrats and the South. In 1864, when he seemed to advocate Lincoln’s reelection, the board demanded that he get its approval for future sermons, provoking a counterreaction among his defenders. Disputes within the congregation continued to rage, culminating in another vote in 1865, granting him blanket permission on sermons.21

  These change-oriented Americanizing rabbis acknowledged that African Americans were, on the whole, and with obvious exceptions, less well educated than whites were. But they argued that the unequal status of blacks was not racial but the result of generations of mistreatment, subjugation, and deprivation of rights to education and of liberty. In doing so, they were mindful that lethal racial stereotypes had been used against Jews themselves, who were looked down on not simply because of their customs and traditions but because of their caricatured racial identities as big nosed, hunched over, and swarthy. The racial stereotypes of African Americans, to many Jews, ominously resembled anti-Semitic bigotry. Rabbi Felsenthal compared the plight of blacks specifically to the restrictions on Jews that kept them in backward conditions in the West for centuries. “The Jewish antislavery crusade was extraordinarily sensitive to charges
of innate inferiority and civic inequality,” writes the historian Jayme A. Sokolow. “They believed that slavery was not only wrong but dangerous. Its defenders could use their arguments against other groups, and thus all minorities had a stake in showing that the Blacks’ shortcomings had environmental, not racial causes.”22

  It was easier for reform-oriented rabbis to condemn slavery despite its existence in the Bible. They had already been arguing that events depicted in Scripture should not be taken literally and instead understood in the context of their times. But slavery posed a tough dilemma for Isaac Mayer Wise, who criticized literal readings of the Bible but opted to stay out of the issue of whether the Bible justified slavery. Wise never made the argument advanced by many Jews that equated abolitionism with the story of Jews freed from slavery in Exodus, for example. His political leanings in Cincinnati were to the Democrats, the dominant party in the South. He supported Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas against Lincoln for president in 1860 and even considered running for the state legislature in 1863 as a Democrat, only to be blocked by his synagogue board members.

  In the years and months before the Civil War, as Democrats and antislavery Republicans argued over the issue, Wise’s view was: a plague on both your houses. He worried more specifically that a war over secession would jeopardize the hard-won security of the Jewish people. “The fanatics in both sections of the country succeeded in destroying the most admirable fabric of government,” he wrote in The Israelite at the end of 1860. But he was repeatedly more willing to label the party of Lincoln as the fanatics who drove the nation to war, blasting antislavery politicians as disrupters bent on destroying the Union. During the war, he sided with the so-called Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, who urged a negotiated end to the conflict as argued by General George B. McClellan, fired by Lincoln only to run against him as the Democratic nominee in 1864.