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Lincoln rescinded Grant's odious order, but not before Jewish families in the area had been humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and some stripped of their possessions.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

did you bother to actually read my previous post???

let me ask you a simple YES or NO question???

are you really clueLESS enough to believe that TWO different major boating magazines conspired to deceive their readership that a BOOK, which Motor boating & Sailing AND The Rudder BOTH reviewed in 1970/71, did NOT exist. (in order to believe the "nameless & BANNED shunned one" on this subject, that is what you HAVE to believe.)

frankly, i could care less about any other answer except YES or NO from you. absent that YES/NO, we have nothing to discuss on this subject.

free dixie,sw

No, I can believe that you're lying again. I can believe that one of these is simply an article about the USCG's Picket Patrol and the other a figment of your imagination.

Look, all you have to do is find one single source that lists "Yachts Against Subs" as a book. One library catalog. One bibliography. One bookseller. That's all.

But you can't, can you? And no amount of your sputtering and fuming is going to change that.

reference the provisioning of the fort at least the day before the shelling (and reportedly ON the DAY of the shelling): let me simply say that given the choice of the reports of the DAMNyankees AT the fort & the reporting of the CHARLESTON MERCURY, i'll take the word of the newspaper, thanks.

That's about what I figured. Eveyrone who disagrees with you is lying, everything that agrees with you is the truth. And the men inside Sumter were eating chocolate bonbons while Beauregard lobbed the odd shell off in their general direction.

Have you read the speech, or are you just trying to twist Lincoln's words to fit your agenda?

I've read Lincoln's 'Fever dream' / John Murtha/Kerry speech several times.

The right for me (because I can) to pound you into a bloody pulp is not a 'sacred right' - it's the sheer imposition of physical prowess. Lincoln is NOT advocating that bloody revolutions rise up around the world overthrowing the existing government - he's averring to the right to self government via peaceable separation. Lincoln states, 'Mexico, including Texas, revolutionized against Spain' - not seeking to overthrow the government in Spain, but separating FROM Spain only to establish local government of the Mexican people. '[S]till later, Texas revolutionized against Mexico' - again a separation FROM Mexico. Just as we 'revolutionized' from Britain - we SECEDED and formed our own government, one not under divine rule.

It all goes back to Jefferson/the Declaration and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, but Jefferson and the DoI argue for the right of the common people to rule themselves. That's the 'revolutionary' idea espoused by Lincoln.

Lincoln is NOT advocating that bloody revolutions rise up around the world overthrowing the existing government - he's averring to the right to self government via peaceable separation.

By citing two bloody revolutions as his examples? By talking about the right of a majority to put down a minority that might oppose their new government? By talking about the borders of Texas being only as far as they could physically control and no further? It's amazing how you guys try to twist everything Lincoln says to fit your agenda. Generally, though, you're trying to make him look bad. Now you're trying to make him look like some prophet of southern independence. It makes me laugh.

Now, do you accept that the speech also gives black slaves in the south the "sacred right" to rise up and overthrow their masters?

Heyworth,

The principle behind Locke/Jefferson is that ALL men have the right to self-government. Of course the slaves captures in Africa, carried on Yankee ships, sold in Northern markets, or living in the South have the right to self-government.

Lincoln is not clamoring for bloody revolutions to occur around the world - he wasn't Stalin or Hitler, why do you want to portray his ideology as such? What a madman he would be if he stood on the floor of the House and argued for every society to overthrow their rulers in a bloody massacre?

Do they have a right to MURDER anyone - NO! Just as no owner had the right to kill a slave.

laughing AT you.

btw, WHICH of the PERMANENTLY BANNED "former members of the DAMNyankee forum of lunatics, HATERS, nitwits, etc." are you???

me thinks i have read your BILGE & NONSENSE before.

fyi, i suspect you are the ignorant,BIGOTED, "nameLESS shunned one" in a NEW GUISE = the same old BIGOTED, hate-FILLED words/syntax, different name.

free dixie,sw

What a madman he would be if he stood on the floor of the House and argued for every society to overthrow their rulers in a bloody massacre?

It doesn't have to be a bloody massacre; that would depend on the opposition. But if you're claiming that no one has a right to self-government unless they can go about it without anybody getting hurt, then you've effectively denied the right altogether.

Do they have a right to MURDER anyone - NO!

Then by what right did the south begin to shell Sumter?

Then by what right did the south begin to shell Sumter?

'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'

'Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.'

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.'

You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're claiming that bloody revolutions are anathema, and on the other hand you're trumpeting them as your right. Why do you deny slaves the same right to rise up and overthrow their masters by use of violence that you claim the south had when they began shelling Fort Sumter? It appears that your position is that resorting to violence is okay if you agree with that side, but immoral if you disagree.

You're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're claiming that bloody revolutions are anathema, and on the other hand you're trumpeting them as your right.

You're misunderstanding the distinctions. A 'Revolution' need not be bloody - the revolution the framers/Lincoln refer to is that people will assert their God-given right of self government - to abstain from the misguided belief that we must be of royal blood to govern. Sadly, even the ancient Israelites chose to be ruled by an earthly king, ignoring their Heavenly one. That's what made the Declaration so important - not just to us but worldwide. An abandonment of earthly kings.

The right to rise up in revolt by force and commit murder is not God-given nor moral. God commands the slave to 'count their own masters worthy of all honour' [I Tim 6:1 KJV].

the revolution the framers/Lincoln refer to is that people will assert their God-given right of self government

God commands the slave to 'count their own masters worthy of all honour'

You don't see any contradiction in your statements?

The right to rise up in revolt by force and commit murder is not God-given nor moral.

In other words, the American Revolution was immoral?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The Civil War began because of two things: tariffs, politics, and Lincoln's totatlitarian ways.

Lincoln ran on the Morrill Tariff, said two weeks before his inauguration that no other issue was as important. As for the politics part, the newly formed pro-tax, anti-states rights Republican Party wanted to stop the spread of the Democratic Party out west and ending slavery was part of that.

As for Lincoln's dictatorial tendencies, he centralized the government of this country like no one before, and no one since. He fulfilled his mentor Henry Clay's vision of a huge federal government and massive taxation, and "American System" endless pork projects.

It must also be pointed out that he utterly botched the seriousness of the war, almost had to abandon the White House right after the very first major battle, and set in motion a bloodbath that would amount to six million dead Americans in today's numbers.

This is a man who is praised by communists (the 3000 Americans who went to Spain to fight for the communists during the Spanish Civil War called themselves the Abe Lincoln Brigade), praised by Hitler.

He was a dictatorial politician, locking up anyone who spoke out against the war even in areas where the war was unpopular with virtually everyone. Suspension of habeus corpus, destruction of civilians in the south, women and children faced with a scorched earth campaign by his top generals. This was never, ever about slavery. It was about collecting taxes (he threatened war over the tariff, not slavery, in his first presidential speech), locking up the west for the Republicans, and federalizing the country.

The Civil War began because of two things: tariffs, politics, and Lincoln's totatlitarian ways.

That's three, but then you're the king of 2+2=the south paying tariffs on exports.

As for Lincoln's dictatorial tendencies, he centralized the government of this country like no one before, and no one since.

Care to cite some examples? I'd say that Wilson, both Roosevelts, and LBJ did far more to centralize power.

You call Lincoln a dictator, but what kind of dicatator puts himself up for reelection--a reelection that he might well have lost, were it not for some military successes.

It must also be pointed out that he utterly botched the seriousness of the war, almost had to abandon the White House right after the very first major battle, and set in motion a bloodbath that would amount to six million dead Americans in today's numbers.

Jefferson Davis failed to understand what war meant as well, DID have to abandon his capital, and, by ordering the firing on Sumter, set in motion the bloodbath that would follow.

This is a man who is praised by communists (the 3000 Americans who went to Spain to fight for the communists during the Spanish Civil War called themselves the Abe Lincoln Brigade), praised by Hitler.

Hitler also praised highway construction. Does that make Eisenhower a Nazi favorite?

He was a dictatorial politician, locking up anyone who spoke out against the war even in areas where the war was unpopular with virtually everyone

Do you have any idea how unpopular Lincoln was in some quarters? If he'd locked up everyone who spoke against him, as you claim, he'd have to lock up millions.

This was never, ever about slavery.

According to the Declarations of Causes, Stephens' Cornerstone Speech, and hundreds of other original southern sources it was.

I double-dare anyone to look that one up.

You're on. Here's the actual relevant text from Mein Kampf:

By a federated state we understand a league of sovereign states which band together of their own free will, on the strength of their sovereignty; ceding to the totality that share of their particular sovereign rights which makes possible and guarantees the existence of the common federation.
In practice this theoretical formulation does not apply entirely to any of the federated states existing on earth today. Least of all to the American Union, where, as far as the overwhelming part of the individual states are concerned, there can be no question of any original sovereignty, but, on the contrary, many of them were sketched into the total area of the Union in the course of time, so to speak. Hence in the individual states of the American Union we have mostly to do with smaller and larger territories, formed for technical, administrative reasons, and, often marked out with a ruler, states which previously had not and could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that had formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states. The very extensive special rights granted, or rather assigned, to the individual territories are not only in keeping with the whole character of this federation of states, but above all with the size of its area, its spatial dimensions which approach the scope of a continent. And so, as far as the states of the American Union are concerned, we cannot speak of their state sovereignty, but only of their constitutionally established and guaranteed rights, or better, perhaps, privileges.

Now, you find me where Hitler actually mentions the name of Lincoln or praises him for consolidating government. This is yet another of those allegedly smoking guns that Lost Causers are so fond of waving, which turns out on closer examination to be more like a cold pickle.

Anti-Semitism also reared its ugly head in the South via the same Populist movement that imposed segregation and maltreatment of black Southerners. Tom Watson, Theodore Bilbo, and others recycled the anti-Semitic arguments of Nordic supremacists. The Klan of the 1920s and the 1960s repeated much of the same rhetoric against Jews as would have been found in Nazi propaganda. The lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia is evidence of the anti-Semitic animosity in the South in the Populist era.

Actually, the so called "Black Codes" were modeled by Reconstruction (yankee)legislators to model the laws of their own New England and Indiana/Ohio codes.

Nathan Bedford Forrest disbanded the original Klan in 1874. The Klan of the 1920's and '60s has it's origins in Indiana, not the South.

The South has always provided a safe-haven for Judiasm. The largest Jewish military cemetary outside Israel is in Richmond.

Shalom

Actually, the so called "Black Codes" were modeled by Reconstruction (yankee)legislators to model the laws of their own New England and Indiana/Ohio codes.

Nathan Bedford Forrest disbanded the original Klan in 1874. The Klan of the 1920's and '60s has it's origins in Indiana, not the South.

The South has always provided a safe-haven for Judiasm. The largest Jewish military cemetary outside Israel is in Richmond.

Shalom

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