Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army 9781479812264

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JEWISH SOLDIERS i n t h e CIVIL WAR

JEWISH SOLDIERS

in the

CIVIL WAR

THE UNION ARMY Adam D. Mendelsohn Foreword by Adrienne DeArmas, The Shapell Manuscript Foundation

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2022 by New York University All rights reserved Cover image: Lt. Colonel Edward S. Salomon, later breveted brigadier general. From the Collection of Robert Marcus. References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mendelsohn, Adam D., 1979– author. Title: Jewish soldiers in the Civil War : the Union Army / Adam D. Mendelsohn. Description: New York : New York University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014014 | ISBN 9781479812233 (hardback) | ISBN 9781479812240 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479812264 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Participation, Jewish. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Jews. | Jewish soldiers—United States—History—19th century. | United States. Army—History—Civil War, 1861-1865. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Registers of dead. Classification: LCC E540.J5 M46 2022 | DDC 973.7/1503924—dc23/eng/20220329 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014014 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an eBook

To Sam and Emma

C ONTENTS F OREWORD ix

I NTRODUCTION 1 1: MUSTERING IN  1 9 2: THE JEWISH RECRUIT 45 3: IN THE COMPANY OF JEWS  7 1 4: FIGHTING TOGETHER 97 5: SACRED DUTIES 137 6: LOST AND FOUND 189 C ONCLUSION 221 A CKNOWLEDGMENTS 225 APPENDIX 1: THE GENESIS OF THE SHAPELL ROSTER 229 APPENDIX 2: THE METHODOLOGY OF THE SHAPELL ROSTER 233 APPENDIX 3: DATA FROM THE SHAPELL ROSTER 237 N OTES 257 I NDEX  3 1 3 A BOUT THE AUTHOR 323 A BOUT THE SHAPELL MANUSCRIPT FOUNDATION 323

FOREWORD Those who have written about Jews and the American Civil War have almost uniformly paid homage to Simon Wolf and his 1895 book, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. Its main purpose was to refute antisemitic claims that American Jews had shirked their patriotic duty during the Civil War. Wolf made clear in his introduction that many obstacles, the least of which was beginning the work three decades after the war ended, made his labor of love less than accurate, but that he was confident “the enlistment of Jewish soldiers, north and south, reached proportions considerably in excess of their ratio to the general population.”1 The book named just over eight thousand soldiers, but over time, possibly as a result of his own admission of having unintentionally excluded many names in his initial research, Wolf is credited with identifying ten thousand Jews who served in the Civil War. Benjamin Shapell used Wolf’s book as a resource when he first began collecting Civil War–era manuscripts. Through his own research, he identified one soldier in Wolf’s work as not Jewish, then two more, and so on. Meanwhile, Robert D. Marcus, a fellow collector and close friend, generously shared the names of additional Jewish Civil War soldiers and sailors not found by Wolf, discovered in sources not available a century earlier. Shapell, while respectful of Wolf’s accomplishment, wanted to further this accurate accounting of Jewish service in the Civil War, creating a solid foundation for the future study of American Jewish history. In 2009, two years before the start of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the Shapell Manuscript Foundation commissioned a small team of professional researchers to verify the names Wolf had identified as Jewish and compile a list of Jewish Civil War soldiers he had overlooked. Our expectation was that most of the names Wolf had amassed were Jewish, but that there were also thousands of undiscovered names. The

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latter was true, but the former was much less so. As the number of soldiers in Wolf’s volume confirmed as not Jewish began to multiply, it became clear that Wolf’s book was not as reliable as was once believed. The Foundation’s next challenge was how to share the research with the public— to respectfully update and expand Wolf’s nineteenth-century endeavor using twentyfirst-century technology and research methodology. Over time, the solution became clear: the Foundation would create a publicly accessible, searchable online database, replete with documentation to substantiate claims that a soldier was Jewish (or not) and that he served in the Union or Confederacy (or both). The database would record the dates and locations of the soldiers’ birth and death, a detailed accounting of their military service, and connections, if any, to other soldiers in the database. Whenever possible, it would include burial locations and attach primary and secondary source documents, including photographs, obituaries, postbellum pension affidavits, letters, marriage certificates, and vital statistics records. The search engine would be robust and flexible, allowing users to search nearly a hundred fields of data in virtually unlimited combinations.2 The goal was, and continues to be, that this Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War, both the database itself and its contributions to this book, would become the de facto touchstone in this field of study. In 2017, Adam Mendelsohn was selected to author two books on Jewish Civil War soldiers and sailors: this first volume on the Union, and the second on the Confederacy. Mendelsohn’s expertise in nineteenth-century American Jewish history (as is evidenced by his previous works, Jews and the Civil War: A Reader and The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire), as well as his engaging and thought-provoking prose, made Mendelsohn an ideal match for the work of interpreting and contextualizing the Roster data. The volume you are now reading is a result of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation and Adam Mendelsohn’s fruitful and ongoing collaboration. This book illustrates the endless possibilities for reimagining and reinterpreting American Jewish history in light of information extracted from hundreds of thousands of paper and digitized documents reviewed by the Foundation’s research team over the course of the last decade. As this work is ongoing, the Shapell Roster continues to expand with new discoveries, updated service histories, and more documents. We hope this book and access to the database will engage and inspire a diverse audience to produce fresh narratives, bringing the past into the present.

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The historical record bears witness to the lives of those resilient individuals who shared a collective experience: whether first-generation immigrants or native by birth, they experienced acceptance as Americans first, and Jews second. The ever-persistent specter of antisemitism had not quite taken hold in America as firmly as it had elsewhere in the world. But make no mistake, nineteenth-century American Jews endured difficulties in many forms, including, but not limited to, ignorant and baseless stereotypes and, in one notorious case in 1862, even expulsion from their homes. And yet they enlisted and served in a war not of their making, some heroically and valiantly, almost in spite of the resistance they encountered. They embraced the opportunity to pursue secular aspirations without abandoning their heritage. The most oft-asked question about Jews and the American Civil War is “How many?” It is understandable, given the genesis of The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, why the answer matters. In trying to address this question, Wolf unintentionally created an arbitrary standard by which any subsequent accounting would be judged. In reality, more than four hundred names were duplicates, and at least eight hundred were definitely not Jewish. Simultaneously, Wolf overlooked more than thirteen hundred servicemen (and counting) verified as being Jewish. Yet after spending more than a decade immersed in the lives of the Jewish soldiers who wore Blue and Gray, our response to “How many?” is that the answer tells us very little about the individual men, whereas more-nuanced questions, like the ones pondered throughout this book, yield much more interesting answers. Adrienne DeArmas Director, The Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War

I NTROD UC TI ON In May 1865 the editor of a Jewish newspaper in the Grand Duchy of Hesse summed up the epochal conflict so recently ended across the Atlantic. Offering no mention of the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s threadbare army at Appomattox Court House and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln the month before, he instead devoted his front page to other tidings from the front lines. “In the American army,” he marveled, “Catholics, Quakers, Jews, Methodists and hundreds of sects stand peacefully side by side [as they] honor their God in their own ways freely and unchallenged.” None had cause to hide their beliefs. “The Quaker carries his bible with him to the trenches, [and] reads psalms while under fire. The cannoneer operates his Armstrong [artillery piece] with the phylacteries strapped around his arm if he is Jewish, [and] carries the Madonna on his shako [cap] if he is Catholic.” The account singled out one Jewish soldier—an immigrant from central Europe— for bringing special honor to his people. Forced to ride into combat on the holy fast day of Yom Kippur, an “exhausted” Colonel Grün with “[r]ivers of sweat flow[ing] from his forehead” refused a canteen proffered by a fellow cavalryman, “dryly” replying that “today is Yom Kippur [and] as a Jew, I am allowed to consume neither food nor drink.” Taken to hospital after the skirmish to dress a wound, he excoriated a “brother in faith” whom he found eating. “You had better honor Yom Kippur!” he admonished. “How can you serve your fatherland faithfully if you cannot serve your God?” Assembling nine other Jews at the hospital for a prayer service “under the thunder of the cannons,” Grün intoned “The Lord our God, the Lord is One!” moments before word arrived of victory on the battlefield. As the sun set the colonel called out this refrain seven more times. The “returning warriors repeated it loudly, their voices joined in with the sound of the fanfare, [and] now all creeds prayed unanimously to the One God.” “No Yom Kippur,” the editor exulted, has “been celebrated by Jews in such a way since the days of the Maccabees.”1

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Replete with biblical motifs and allusions to a Jewish tradition of sanctifying self-sacrifice, this stylized story was presented by the editor as an accurate portrayal of the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Civil War. We should not be surprised at the ease with which he deployed the Civil War for his own purposes, nor by how the story transformed the bloodiest conflict in American history into a fable about exemplary faith and divinely ordained victory. Hued with a golden glow, idealized, affirmative, and redemptive stories of this kind circulated widely during the war years. They bore little relationship to the “blood and brains,” “bits of flesh,” and “splinters of bone” that haunted the charnel house killing fields of the Civil War.2 Paradoxically, just as the minié ball, high-caliber artillery, and elaborate fortifications transformed Civil War combat, these narratives restored the personal dimension to a conflict that otherwise rendered the individual anonymous and expendable. While most such stories—the product of a culture that found solace in sentimentalism and delight in melodrama—read now as “hackneyed nonsense,” others solidified into myths that remain durable to this day. One of the more persistent portrayals of the conflict is as a fraternal struggle. Though the Civil War did split families, this representation served particular purposes between 1861 and 1865, and then again in the following decades, when it became a central plank within a highly politicized narrative of reconciliation between former foes.3 As the tale of Colonel Grün demonstrates, this mythology was malleable. The editor who conjured the modern-day Maccabee also had a fraternal struggle in mind, but he imagined Jews as religious brothers-in-arms with soldiers of other faiths fighting side by side in an ecumenical army. The Jewish Messenger, a prominent New York newspaper, hewed closer to the popular understanding of the “brothers’ war” as a conflict that divided families, but inflected it with an element familiar from the first story. In recounting how Isaac Cohen, a lieutenant in the Eighth New York State Militia, offered water to a mortally wounded Confederate at the First Battle of Bull Run and then, after recognizing him as a Jew, recited the Shema (“The Lord our God, the Lord is One!”) as the graycoat died, the newspaper, too, implicitly claimed that Jews belonged within the national family. Although it was “sad” that war should pit “brothers in a twofold sense—brothers in faith and nationality” against one another, the moral was clear.4 Jews could simultaneously be brothers-in-arms to their Christian comrades—citizens of unimpeachable loyalty willing to shed the blood of Jewish Confederates—and maintain filial feelings toward those same Jews.5 In framing the war in this way, the newspaper neatly countered the canard that Jews could not be

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trusted because of competing loyalties to kin and country, and signaled that Jews would be able to restore severed bonds of solidarity once the fighting ended. Both tales contain a handful of common features and borrow freely from a broader wartime repertoire. That their facts existed only in the realm of fantasy—the real lieutenant Isaac Cohen wrote to the Jewish Messenger “to deny all knowledge or participation whatsoever in the incident,” and Colonel Grün almost certainly never existed—did little to dampen enthusiasm for tales of this genre.6 They are but two examples of the storytelling and mythmaking that occurred during and after a war that has been reimagined to serve many causes and masters. Indeed, much as the motif of the “war between brothers” was given second life on the national stage in aid of reunion and fraternalism between former white foes, so too did Jews revive their own version of this brotherhood narrative three decades after the end of the Civil War.7 They had a specific reason to want to prove their patriotism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a period of mass immigration of eastern European Jews into the United States. In 1891 and 1892, the pages of the North American Review flared briefly with discussion of “the Jewish Question,” the long-running debate about the appropriate social, political, and legal status for Jews. The debate in the august journal was initiated by Goldwin Smith—past holder of the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, and more recently professor at Cornell and journalist—who delighted in provocation. Jews, in short, brought persecution upon themselves because of their disloyalty. Although his calumnious Cook’s tour of Jewish perfidy devoted relatively little attention to the United States, and only glanced in passing at the Civil War, this subject elicited particularly impassioned responses in subsequent issues of the Review. Most seemed less offended by the suggestion that Jews had brought the pogroms in the Russian Empire upon themselves than by the aspersions Smith cast upon Jewish commitment to the Confederate and Union causes during a conflict that occupied a prominent place in living memory. Had Jews stood “shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens,” as one of their defenders avowed, or avoided wartime service in service of their avaricious and self-interested ends, as their detractors charged?8 Proponents of both camps beat ploughshares into swords in the pages of the North American Review. While the two sides could not find common ground on the true nature of Jewish involvement in the war, implicitly they agreed that the Civil War was the ultimate proving ground of loyalty to the United

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States and the bedrock (or quicksand) on which to build claims of worthiness of inclusion in the national fold. Among those who rallied to the defense of his forebears was a young Stephen S. Wise, later to become a color-bearer for a variety of Jewish causes. To his mind, it was not enough to proclaim Jewish patriotism. Historical evidence that told of “the heroic martyrdom the Jews rejoiced to suffer, to save their land from further degradation” was the ammunition that was needed to counter Goldwin Smith and his merry band of bigots. Wise’s plea for historical evidence was answered three years later with the publication of a massive tome whose title revealed its purpose.9 The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen was published in 1895 by Simon Wolf, a prominent lawyer and representative of the B’nai B’rith fraternal order in Washington, DC.10 An omnibus of articles and lists, running to over 550 pages, the book heralded the heroism and fidelity of American Jewry. At its heart was a listing of more than eight thousand Jews who had fought in Blue and Gray, including their names, ranks, and regiments, as well as pen portraits of some of their more distinguished number.11 Wolf provided his readers with battalions of stiff-backed Jewish heroes intended to replace the ghetto-bent refugee in the popular imagination. Whenever possible, he drew support for his claims from officers “entirely non-Jewish in their origin.” Moreover, according to Wolf, the heroic Jews he listed were distinctly Jewish, their “keen and responsive sense of duty” rooted in “Torah and Talmud.” Implicitly Wolf was defending Jews against the charge that their values were incompatible with Americanism. Far from being a parasitical people activated only by self-interest, Jews had a storied history of “personal sacrifice and heroism” on behalf of the collective. Describing the sacrifices of Jews during the Civil War was thus more than merely an effort to restore Jewish honor besmirched by the likes of Goldwin Smith; it was also the core of Wolf’s case for why present and future Jewish immigrants made excellent (and deserving) Americans. When he claimed that the “proportion of Jewish soldiers is . . . [not] only large, but is perhaps larger than that of any other faith in the United States,” he had his eyes fixed as firmly on the future as on the past.12 Others soon followed in offering stories of the Civil War that buffed group pride and rebuffed those who questioned the patriotism of Jews. These apologetic and celebratory tellings typically elevated a handful of heroic individuals to an ethnic pantheon or placed Jews in proximity to greatness. (A Jewish cult of Lincoln, for example, celebrated the

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telegraph clerk who supposedly tapped out the text of the Emancipation Proclamation as the president watched expectantly—in reality, Edward Rosewater had just completed a game of euchre at home when the famous telegram was dispatched—as well as the podiatrist who removed bunions from Lincoln’s wearied feet.) Whether by touching the toes of an American idol or shedding blood for the mother country, the message was that Jews were consecrated to the national family by serving as brothers-in-arms during the Civil War.13 These tales have been slicked and smoothed by many tongues over the past century and a half. As a result, historical writing about the experience of Jewish soldiers during the Civil War that has drawn on this repertoire of stories has often revealed more about the aspirations and anxieties of American Jews than it has about the nature of the war itself. The purpose of this book is not to distill these stories and disgorge their meaning, but rather to push them aside. For beneath the intoxicating myth is a far more complicated and fascinating story at odds with the received version. Overwrought language about modern-day Maccabees obscures the novelty of the Civil War. Never before had Jews joined a mass volunteer army—itself a relatively new historical phenomenon—in such numbers and with such enthusiasm.14 Yet it is not enough merely to offer a more faithful accounting of Jewish wartime service. There is little that is historically interesting in demonstrating that Jews fought too. Battle was no less harrowing for Jewish soldiers than it was for their peers. And the tedium of everyday soldiering—the repetitive drills, the press of bodies in camp and on the march, the chafing of personalities thrown together day after wearying day, the meager food, the layering of dust and grime, the mental and physical exhaustion, the daily struggle to get by—was no less sapping. So why, then, should we care about Jewish soldiers? Despite their considerable sacrifices for the Union cause, it did not matter a whit for the fate of the war whether Jews fought. But in ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers—other ethnic minorities included— who served in Blue and Gray. Wolf and his flock of followers sought to demonstrate sameness: Jews were as brave and loyal as any other volunteers, and they served in numbers at least equivalent to their fellow Americans.15 In an age when apologetics are no longer necessary, we can take as a given that Jewish soldiers were no less brave and loyal than their comrades-in-arms, and focus on those areas where Jews stood apart. These differences were apparent in a variety of areas.

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SIMON WOLF, MARK TWAIN, AND THE QUESTION OF JEWISH PATRIOTISM   Today he’d be called a “DC fixer,” but during the Civil War, when the young lawyer was just starting his extraordinary sixty-year run as the de facto ambassador of the Jewish people to the American presidency, Simon Wolf was simply someone who knew everyone— including, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, with whom he happened to have a drink the day the actor shot Abraham Lincoln. But if that was Wolf’s last meeting with Booth, his first with Lincoln was, by his own recollection, equally intimate. Implored at the last moment to save the life of a young Jewish soldier who claimed to have deserted to visit his dying mother, Wolf described how he found himself at the White House to argue the case—at 2:00 in the morning, but still in time to wring from Lincoln the pardon of a boy slated to be shot. Perhaps it was from that moment that Wolf’s reputation was born. Theodore Roosevelt considered him “as good an American citizen as is to be found on this continent,” and Wolf lived on as a crucial Jewish voice in the ear of every president from Buchanan up to Wilson. Yet if all Wolf’s accomplishments were to be rated, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen would be high among them. Wolf listed the names of thousands of Jewish soldiers and patriots who served in the American armies as officers and regular soldiers, with accompanying historical sketches of the periods and wars in which they served. This seminal work, which has stood for over a century, is, however, a nineteenth-century book, so much so that Wolf’s work would engage, involve, and ultimately influence Mark Twain. Although Wolf was initially moved to compose his book, with its impressive four-hundredpage listing of Jewish soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies, by a letter to the North American Review literary magazine slurring Jewish participation in the Civil War (“I had served in the field for eighteen months,” the writer attested, “but I cannot remember meeting one Jew in uniform, or hearing of any Jewish soldier”), Wolf proceeded, in 1895, to list some eight thousand Jewish soldiers. Across the ocean, and three years later, a traveling Mark Twain, too, was writing about Jews. In his Harper’s Magazine article of 1898, “Stirring The Shapell Manuscript Collection

Times in Vienna,” he chronicled an antisemitic

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parliamentary brawl in Vienna. Twain noted that the Jews, while completely innocent parties in the legislative dispute, were “harried and plundered,” and so he reflected that no matter what the issue or on what side, “In all cases the Jew had to roast.” This casual summation of Europe’s lurid history of antisemitism, which, so lately, had erupted in France’s infamous Dreyfus Affair, didn’t spare Twain, in some quarters, from being called out as a Jew himself, particularly with his given name of Samuel. Some even found proof, incredibly, in his aphorism from Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” But with the publication of Twain’s “Stirring Times in Vienna” came an American Jewish response that wondered, in print, why Jews had been and were even then “the butt of baseless, vicious animosities.” To this Twain responded in September 1899 with what he felt was an essentially philosemitic essay, “Concerning the Jews,” but to which some Jewish readers took exception for its negative stereotypes. When Twain wrote, for instance, that “the Jew” evinced “an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier” and tended to be civic “non-participants” even in the United States, where he was “by no means in as large force there as he ought to have been, with his chances,” Simon Wolf was quick to straighten him out, sending him a copy of The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. Twain, to his credit, reviewed the numbers, admitted his ignorance, and promised to rectify his comments—which he did, with a postscript to “Concerning the Jews” entitled, aptly, “Postscript: The Jew as a Soldier.” If apt, though, it certainly was not speedy: it came out in 1904. But even so, Wolf had changed the mind of one of the greatest writers in America.

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Though army life was more accommodating to sin than to the spirit—in camp, prayer played second fiddle to gambling, drinking, pornography, and profanity for most men—faith occupied a central position in the minds of Civil War soldiers. Public expression of faith was overwhelmingly Christian. Both armies were mobilized with language laden with Christian exhortations and marched to war with Christian hymns on their lips. They were ministered to by Christian chaplains, were made to believe they were doing the work of a Christian God, and followed the rhythms of a Christian calendar. The army made few allowances for Jews. Rations, though often light when on the march, were heavy on pork. In the field, distance from home and from Jewish civilians made adherence to dietary law, and other forms of ritual observance, all but impossible. Furloughs were rarely granted to the rank and file at the best of times, never mind to perform religious duties. With few exceptions, those who succumbed in the field to disease or wounds forwent a Jewish burial. Unlike other ethnic soldiers, Jews offered few outward markers of their identities. Their accents marked them as Americans or immigrants. Whereas fellow newcomers might identify revealing cues, the inability and unwillingness of most Americans to differentiate among central European immigrants—instead lumping them together with the derisory label of “Dutchmen” (or “flying Dutchmen” after they were unfairly characterized as cowardly)—meant that Jews often passed unnoticed. Given the small size of the prewar Jewish population in the United States—fewer than one in a hundred of those living in America in 1860 were Jewish—the average American had little direct exposure to Jews, and paid them less mind than the Irish and ethnic German immigrants who exercised the imagination of politicians and the press.16 Likewise, the average soldier was much more attuned to these two groups than to Jews, given the prominence of Irish and German units within the army, boisterous Irish and German mobilization on the home front during the first year of the war, and the prominence of Irish and German commanding officers. By contrast, Jews never formed a majority in any company or regiment in either army. Although they formed small clusters in some units, their dispersion meant that their experience was very different from that of the Irish, Germans, and even Swiss and Scandinavians, who could rely upon a critical mass of those who shared their backgrounds when serving in nonethnic regiments. For Jewish soldiers, the typical experience was of isolation from fellow Jews. The difficulties of identifying Jews created confusion during the war. In September 1864 the Confederacy’s adjutant general believed that granting furloughs to Jewish

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soldiers manning the defenses of Richmond to attend High Holiday services would achieve what Grant had failed to do during the bloody and battering Overland Campaign. Providing “10,000 to 12,000” men with temporary passes “would perhaps disintegrate entire commands.” General Samuel Cooper seems to have come to this wildly inflated number by presuming that the German names he found on unit rosters belonged to Jews, prefiguring a method that would similarly lead Simon Wolf astray when assembling his list of Jewish soldiers more than two decades later.17 Others who sought more accurate numbers during the war threw their hands up in frustration or, more typically, erred on the side of inflation.18 As we will see, even soldiers who marched and fought together for years sometimes misidentified their comrades’ religious identities. The level of invisibility of Jews within the ranks is notable given that they formed the largest non-Christian minority in both armies. And yet, as General Cooper’s error suggests, they were strikingly visible and invisible at the same time. Then as now, the size and influence of the Jewish element was often misunderstood. Despite their small numbers in antebellum and wartime America—between 125,000 and 200,000 Jews lived in the United States in 1860—Jews occupied an outsize place in the American imagination. The idea of the Jew was potent and complex. Jews featured as imagined villains in the public hysteria around scandalous military contracts in the first year of the war, and again during later episodes focused on shortages, profiteering, and commercial speculation. Newspapers in the North and South delighted in depicting Judah P. Benjamin—a stalwart within Jefferson Davis’s Confederate cabinet—as the rotund exemplar of Jewish perfidy. Civil War soldiers, Grant and Sherman included, used the term “Jew” loosely and broadly, but almost always as an epithet. (Similarly, Richmond journalist George Bagby arrived at an estimate of half a million Jews in the Confederacy—instead of a more realistic twenty-five thousand—by regarding as Jewish not only “unworthy Israelites” but also “Yankee tradesmen of whatever denomination, restaurant-keepers, confectionary and apple-sellers, oyster-cellar men, proprietors of hotels and boarding houses and the like” whose inflationary prices he disliked.)19 In the armies of both belligerents, rote hostility toward Jews—and other groups in an age when ethnic slurs and stereotyping were commonplace—coexisted with more benign fantasies. At a council of war called by General William S. Rosecrans at the end of the first day of the battle of Chickamauga, September 19, 1863, General Alexander M. McCook was persuaded to sing “The Hebrew Maiden’s Lament” before he and his

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THE DIVIDED LOYALTIES OF THE JONAS FAMILY   Certain immortal words to the contrary, a house divided against itself can stand—if, that is, the house be that of Abraham Lincoln’s dear Jewish friend, Abraham Jonas, who saw five of his six sons fight for the Confederacy and yet whose family not only held together but were united in their affection for their father’s foremost friend. In 1917, the then-old youngest Jonas son—and the only one to take up arms for the Union—recalled Lincoln to the avid Lincoln collector John E. Boos. Edward Jonas described in some detail Lincoln’s lawyerly dress, the ease with which he conversed, and the care with which he listened, as well as what he recalled of the Lincoln-Douglas debate that took place in Jonas’s hometown of Quincy, Illinois. Edward enlisted in the Union army, in which he served with notable distinction—knowing full well, on any given day, he might be fighting his own kin. And yet it seemed, at least with Jewish families like his own, familial ties remained strong. Perhaps being a minority in mass volunteer armies, liable to demonization and persecution provided a kind of bond for Jewish soldiers all its own. Here, though, the war long behind him, and pension eligibility having been yet again revised, the aged and ailing Jonas is supported in his claim for a pension of thirty dollars a month by his former commanding general. Thus Grenville Dodge attests to Jonas’s need, his splendid military record, and, all sectional passion spent, his notable Confederate family connections. “The family were divided,” he notes, “but each party loyal to its own side.” National Archives and Records Administration

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fellow generals retired to their quarters for the night. Unfortunately for the men under his command, McCook’s singing was better than his generalship on the disastrous day that followed.20 This popular ballad, however, bespoke a culture with Jews on the mind.21 A consequence of this dual visibility and invisibility is that only the most easily discernible dimensions of the wartime experience of Jews have received proper attention. We know much more about public episodes of prejudice—including Grant’s infamous General Orders No. 11 expelling Jews from the territory under his command, and the prohibition on the appointment of Jewish regimental chaplains—than we do about the less visible day-to-day challenges encountered by Jewish soldiers in the field. Jewish soldiers, moreover, were much more than objects of derision and discrimination: they were complex actors with their own individual and collective interests who lived and operated in the complicated ecosystem of wartime armies. Yet even as scholars have added light and shade to our understanding of how Irishmen, Germans, Native Americans, African Americans, and even the Amish and Mennonites fared during the war, we remain largely in the dark about Jews.22 The Shapell Manuscript Foundation has now rendered the invisible visible by assembling a carefully verified database of Jewish soldiers who mustered into Union and Confederate service. This book draws heavily upon the Shapell Roster, tracing the experience of individuals who served and examining the collective experience of Jewish soldiers in aggregate. It reveals a variety of otherwise elusive differences between the wartime experience of Jews and others who marched and fought in Blue and Gray. This quantitative approach—looking for patterns within data—follows the lead of several recent studies, but is particularly valuable for a group, such as Jews, that was scattered across both armies.23 Numbers can tell us nothing of the ache of a pack biting into shoulders fatigued by marching, the creak of caissons on roads rutted by the tread of ten thousand weary boots, or the sour stink of smoke, dust, and sweat caked on ragged uniforms. They are silent on the sounds and smells of camp life. They offer nothing of the boredom of an army in the field, or of the intensity of fear in battle. But they can offer a poetry of a different kind, hinting at rhythms otherwise obscured.24 As we will see, data from the Shapell Roster rewrites stories about Jewish soldiers during the war in ways large and small. Unfamiliar stories come into focus for the first time. Familiar stories become blurred. A case in point is the imbroglio over the

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appointment of a Jewish chaplain in the fall of 1861, one of only a few moments during the Civil War when Jews qua Jews became the focus of national attention. In October of that year, Arnold Fischel, a minister at one of New York’s most distinguished synagogues, applied for the vacant position of regimental chaplain of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry. He was rebuffed by the secretary of war on the basis of his religion—General Orders No. 15, issued by the War Department in May 1861 and subsequently confirmed in legislation, granted regimental officers the authority to elect a chaplain of their choosing to minister to the men of their units, but limited the chaplaincy to “regularly ordained minister[s] of some Christian denomination.” The case became a cause célèbre in the pages of Horace Greeley’s crusading New-York Tribune.25 Exactly a century and a half later, his version of events was repeated, with some embellishment, in the New York Times.26 According to Greeley’s account, a “large portion of the rank and file” of this Philadelphia-raised regiment were Jews, as were its officers. These men had already seen Michael Allen, the first regimental chaplain elected by the regiment, forced to resign because he was a Jew. Now they elected Arnold Fischel as their champion. Whereas Allen was not an ordained minister, all that Fischel was lacking in the eyes of the law was the religious convictions of a Christian. Here, in other words, was an ideal test case. Or so the story goes. Data from the Shapell Roster reveals the shakiness of this narrative, as do the actions of the regiment’s commanding officer. Instead of leading the charge against an unjust law, Colonel Max Friedman, traditionally cast as one of the heroes of the chaplaincy controversy, hastened to publicize that the “whole story, as published in the Tribune is without foundation.” His regiment “had never expressed a desire to have a Jewish chaplain . . . [and] there are not more than twenty Jews in his whole corps.”27 Friedman’s version—ignored by the Tribune and unknown to historians—is closer to reality. According to the testimony of a fellow soldier, Michael Allen resigned not because he was barred as a Jew from serving as chaplain but rather because “feeling against him was so strong” in the regiment. Allen explained his decision as necessitated by ill health, a not-uncommon reason for resigning a commission. The true cause is unclear.28 Fewer than twenty soldiers and officers (out of roughly seven hundred men) in the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry were Jewish, and there is no evidence of a coordinated campaign by Friedman and his fellow Jews to elect Arnold Fischel in place of Allen, or evidence even that they nominated him for the position.29 Fischel discovered the

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existence of the restrictive law only after making arrangements to assume the chaplaincy of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry. He appears to have acted on his own accord when writing to the secretary of war to appeal for an exemption from the law. His contract with his synagogue was expiring in a matter of weeks; he was in urgent need of work; and the military chaplaincy paid handsomely.30 Why was Friedman so eager to dispute Greeley’s account? Far from being a heroic figure, Friedman was likely motivated by more prosaic concerns. Strong evidence suggests that he profited by recruiting phantom soldiers to pad his regimental rolls, submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims to the government, selling commissions to officers, pilfering regimental resources, and appointing regimental sutlers who shared their profits with him, as well as committing several other forms of fraud. Michael Allen, who was involved in the liquor trade, may have been party to a Friedman scheme to sell whiskey to a captive market of bored and thirsty troopers.31 Or he may simply have been one of Friedman’s friends, offered a patronage position as a favor. None of these abuses was uncommon, but neither were they legal. Friedman certainly had no desire for unwanted press that would draw attention to him and his regiment, and he acted quickly to stifle the Tribune’s story. He resigned soon after, but this neither saved him from arrest and imprisonment, nor spared his regiment from a reputation as possibly the “most inept regiment of the Civil War.”32 A seemingly straightforward story is thus instead revealed to be a tangled tale. The truer version does not diminish the worthiness of a cause taken up by aggrieved Jewish individuals and organizations that successfully pushed to broaden the chaplaincy regulations.33 But it does reveal a past at once messier and more interesting than the more familiar version. The case of Colonel Friedman is a useful reminder of the complexity of individuals and their motivations, and of the need for caution when assessing the role of Jewish identity in the lives of Civil War recruits. There was nothing Jewish about Friedman’s frauds, but neither was there any apparent ethnic end game in his approach to the chaplaincy. He may well have enlisted and served for idealistic reasons; patriotism does not preclude opportunism. Friedman, and his fellow soldiers, contained multitudes. For Jewish soldiers, religion and ethnicity existed in concert with (and often played second fiddle to) a variety of other conscious and unconscious identities, which could include being a Republican or Democrat, a German, a Hessian or Bavarian, a Turner, a freethinker, an

I ntroduction    15

officer, a proud member of a particular regiment, or a score of other elements.34 Jewishness was one of many factors shaping the experience of Jewish soldiers during the war and was only sometimes the most determinative. It mattered more at some moments than at others, and less for some individuals than for others. This episode also demonstrates how ethnicity assumed additional meaning and purpose when mobilized, in this case through the advocacy of the Tribune. Then as now, ethnic identity was not a neutral and freestanding thing. During the war, ethnics and their critics engaged in a bare-knuckle brawl over the meaning of being Jewish, Irish, or German, offering contradictory interpretations of the imagined characteristics of each: brave or cowardly, steadfast or mutinous, drunken or spirited, self-sacrificing or self-seeking, American or foreign. These battles in the public realm filtered into how Jews and others in the army thought and felt about Jews and Jewishness, much as they did for their Irish and German peers.35 Jewishness and Jewish identity, moreover, are complicated things. At least two-thirds of all Jews living in America in 1860—Friedman included—were immigrants. The Jewish population of the United States had increased at least fiftyfold in the four decades before the war. Five of every six Jews settled in the states that would compose the Union. The majority were impecunious recent arrivals from central Europe—a ripple within the wave of German speakers who crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of religious and political freedom and, above all, economic opportunity—but also included those born everywhere from the Caribbean to the Ottoman Empire. Even so-called German Jews were in reality a polyglot group that included Alsatians, Hungarians, and Yiddish speakers from East Prussia. The degree to which those from Bavaria, Hesse, and other parts of the German Confederation were integrated and acculturated into non-Jewish, German-speaking society prior to emigration varied too: many viewed themselves as Jews rather than as Germans, spoke Judeo-German or Yiddish rather than High German, and had limited social contact with their German neighbors.36 Yet others cultivated a German identity, regarded German culture as superior, and belonged to German organizations within the United States. German was the preferred language for sermons within many synagogues in America, and it was not unusual for congregations and organizations to keep their minutes in that language. The baggage these immigrants carried with them to the United States added diversity to an already fractious Jewish population, and energy to competing efforts to adapt Judaism and Jewish life to the American environment. Their attachment to the traditional

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lodestars of Jewish life—a shared sense of peoplehood, a Diasporic identity rooted in themes of exile and exclusion, and fidelity to religious observance—ranged between the poles of rejection, indifference, and devotion. Immigrants familiar with structured and regimented Jewish communities abroad instead found in America communities in different stages of organization (and more often disorganization), with no truly national Jewish institutions and leaders, albeit with several rabbis auditioning for the latter role. Regional differences from the Old World were reproduced in the New, and were expressed in the formation of rival synagogues and elaborate social hierarchies.37 The same diversity was present in their views of the issues of the day, including on slavery and emancipation. As we will see, the political orientation of natives and newcomers alike was more often shaped by the places where they settled than by any common Jewish values or shared sensibilities. In 1860, one of every two Jews in America lived in just eight cities—Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, New Orleans, San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York—and one in three lived in the last two alone. A significant share of the rest lived in small towns and along rural byways, replicating their origins in the small towns and villages of central Europe. In the United States this settlement pattern was a direct legacy of the dispersion of Jews as peddlers, clerks, and storekeepers chasing fortune across the hinterland, as well as of the consolidation of communities in towns and cities where Jews clustered in niches—particularly the clothing and dry goods trades—that serviced this network of itinerant and settled merchants.38 Commerce scattered Jews to the winds. Merchants, whether carrying a pack or standing behind a counter, needed to live close to their customers. Since 80 percent of all Americans lived in rural areas in 1860—that is, in places with fewer than twenty-five hundred inhabitants—this meant that many Jews did too.39 Given the modest size of the Jewish population, their geographic footprint—a delicate rural latticework secured to larger towns and cities—was unusually broad, and set them apart from other religious sects and ethnic groups, which more typically formed denser regional clusters.40 These factors also played a determinative role in how Jewish soldiers experienced the war. To a striking degree, geography was destiny. As we will see, the contours and character of this pattern of settlement, and the related occupational profile of the Jewish community, shaped when Jews enlisted, who served, in which units they served, how they encountered their fellow soldiers, and their ability, or lack thereof, to create community with fellow Jews in the army.

I ntroduction    17

From this diverse, divided, and dispersed population came thousands of enlistees who joined the Union and Confederate armies. The chapters that follow trace the arc of their experience in the Union army from mustering in, to life in camp and in the field, reenlistment, demobilization, and return home, as well as how they—and the Jewish community—recalled the conflict after 1865. Civilians on the home front, whether rabbis or relatives of soldiers in the field, appear only occasionally. This is not a book about them. Neither is this a collective story of modern-day Maccabees in an ecumenical army, nor of redemptive encounters between Jewish foes on the battlefield. Instead, it is a story of ordinary men in extraordinary times, as fine and as flawed as their fellow soldiers, and Jewish too.

1: MUSTERI NG I N August Bondi already had a distinguished record as a (failed) revolutionary when he mustered into the Fifth Kansas Cavalry in December 1861. Swept up as a fourteenyear-old student in the liberal uprising in Vienna in March 1848, he had carried a flintlock musket as the youngest member of the Academic Legion. In July of that year he volunteered for a regiment mustering to join the democratic rebellion in Hungary. His parents, well settled in Vienna, immediately persuaded their son to leave with them for St. Louis. He was one of at least twenty-eight Jews among several thousand political exiles—“Forty-Eighters”—who made their way to the United States once these liberal revolutions foundered.1 If August Bondi’s parents hoped that precipitate relocation would quiet their son’s revolutionary ardor, the move brought only temporary respite. For Bondi soon became “tired of the humdrum life of a clerk” and “thirsted for it, for adventure.” “Any struggle, any hard work,” he recalled, “would be welcome.”2 Settling in Kansas in 1855, Bondi was drawn into the political conflict that roiled the territory. By 1856 he was riding with John Brown, one of a handful of Jewish Forty-Eighters to fight alongside the radical Free Soiler. Given Bondi’s idealism, appetite for adventure, and willingness to commit to causes body and soul, it was little surprise that he was again drawn to the thunder of the guns in 1861. Bondi’s mother promised to take care of his wife and child—we have no record of what her daughter-in-law thought of this arrangement—and, according to his version, she came round to his revolutionary frame of mind. “[A]s a Jehudi,” he recalled his mother admonishing him, “I had the duty to perform, to defend the institutions which gave equal rights to all belief.”3 From what we know, George Kuhne could not have been more different from August Bondi. The Hungarian-born volunteer slipped away from the Army of the Potomac soon

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after enlisting as a substitute in the summer of 1863. Passing himself off as a peddler, he was quickly caught along with two other deserters. Abraham Lincoln closed his ears to their appeal for clemency. General George Meade, wanting to make an example of these suspected bounty jumpers—those who made a lucrative sport of serially volunteering to claim generous enlistment bounties and then absconding—issued a special order read to every company in the Army of the Potomac pillorying Kuhne and his confederates as members of “that class who . . . have embraced enlistment with a view to desertion for the purpose of gain.” Kuhne, if we are to accept Meade’s claim, acted out of a single motive: he was in it (again and again) for the money. The military authorities delayed execution of sentence so that an ecumenical assemblage—a rabbi, priest, and two Protestant ministers—could console the deserters before a firing squad discharged the point-blank volley that ended their lives. Kuhne was one of only 147 Union soldiers shot for desertion during the war.4 Bondi and Kuhne embodied archetypes often imagined for immigrant enlistees during the war: Kuhne, mercenary in motive and mentality; Bondi, the idealist whose aspirations, frustrated in Europe, achieved fulfilment in the American republic. Public discussion of Jews ricocheted between these two archetypes. Were they paragons of patriotism—a people with particular reason to embrace America’s freedoms—or the people of the pocketbook, swayed by inducements to enlist (or more often preferring to profit while others fought)? The figure of the Jew was press-ganged into a public morality play about the nature of the men who signed up for service and of those who did not. In reality, few Jewish recruits neatly conformed to the roles imagined for them as paragons of idealism or opportunism. Instead, their letters, diaries, memoirs, and public statements were interleaved with a mix of motivations. Patriotic sentiment and paeans to duty shared space with intimations that recruits were driven by a thirst for adventure, a desire to prove their mettle and manliness, and the weight of expectation. (Bondi was not the only soldier eager to please his mother. The Shapell Roster contains several examples of those who anticipated disapproval from their parents and relatives in Europe.)5 Motivations were dynamic and layered; patriotism did not preclude concern for practical needs, highly partisan political views, or a change of heart. Even an ardent revolutionary like Bondi could be a considerate one. With a newborn daughter at home and crops to harvest, he delayed enlisting until he had “my hay and enough of it well put up, fodder hauled together, a big pile of wood before the door, my hogs killed and pickled, a supply

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of breadstuff laid in.”6 That military service helped him pay off his debts does not diminish his bravery and idealism.7 Those in dire financial straits filled a significant share of the rosters of the first regiments raised in the spring of 1861, as well as of the units that followed.8 Political crisis leached the life out of the economy well before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in April 1861. The consequences were acute in the garment and dry-goods trades, where Jews clustered, which depended heavily on credit and Southern customers.9 As banks and businesses failed, and markets bled customers and confidence, the desanguinary effects of an economy bluntly cleaved in two were felt across the body politic. The Jewish community did not escape what the Hebrew Relief Association in Philadelphia, unable to meet a sudden surge of demand on its coffers and preferring a metaphor suggestive of the madness of the times, described as the “deranged state of business.”10 Joseph and William Kline were among those who enlisted in that city in September 1861. Although we can only speculate why they signed contracts committing them to three years in uniform, their letters home reveal how their family anxiously awaited a share of their wages in order to purchase food for their table, fuel for their hearth, and clothing against the winter cold. Before enlisting, both brothers lived with their parents and siblings above their small secondhand clothing store on South Street. The family, a neighbor recalled, “were what might be considered poor” and “did not make much, hardly a living.” Nineteen-year-old Joseph “was the best help to his father,” assisting in the store and adding the wages he earned from tailoring to the household’s income. Given their economic marginality, we can imagine that the prospect of the financial incentives offered to recruits and the promise of a steady income weighed heavily in their thinking, outweighing the loss of his labor in the shop and in their home. The last of their letters, neatly written in an English and Yiddish stilted by youth and earnestness, was sent in May 1862 as General George B. McClellan’s army advanced on Richmond from the Peninsula. Joseph, scythed down at the Battle of Fair Oaks with many of his regiment, “was brought home from the army, a corpse.” William, who was alongside his brother when he was killed, deserted soon after, one of many soldiers to abscond when wages seemed but poor compensation for the costs of soldiering.11 (Lightly wounded at the Battle of Malvern Hill, William recalled that he was “taken on a boat for the wounded to Washington but instead of going to the Hospital I went home to Philadelphia Penna, and through the pleadings of my parents who were almost distracted by the loss of my brother,

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THE POLYGLOT THIRTY-NINTH NEW YORK INFANTRY, COLONEL D’UTASSY COMMANDING   By dint of language and culture, mostly, German-speaking Jews often enlisted in “German” regiments. These units were not, however, homogeneous, or harmonious. Anti­semitism plagued Jews in German units as elsewhere. This recruiting poster was printed by Baker & Goldwin, a printing house across from City Hall in New York City. Such posters were displayed around the city to entice men to join the service, and different regiments used different tactics to inspire recruits to choose their regiment. The Thirty-ninth New York Infantry Regiment, or the Garibaldi Guard, formed by Hungarian Jew Frederick George d’Utassy, chose to appeal to many different foreigners all at once, including calls to action in Hungarian, Italian, French, and German. New-York Historical Society Museum and Library

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I did not return to the Army.”)12 At least one in every eleven Union soldiers deserted. Foreign-born recruits were more likely to do so, as were those who came from communities unenthused about the war, or were disappointed by the army’s threadbare promises to relieve them from poverty. George Kuhne, in other words, was unlucky to be executed.13 Jews were as careful as any other potential volunteers to weigh the pull of the war on their heartstrings against its implications for their purse strings. The poor were far from alone in being drawn into service by the call of patriotic duty and the promise of a steady wage. Bavarian-born Nathan Mayer, a graduate of the Cincinnati Medical College and one of the first Jewish novelists in America, was studying in Europe when the war broke out. Poison from across the Atlantic seeped into Professor Rouet’s storied classes at the Théâtre d’Anatomique in Paris. “[N]orthern and southern students,” Mayer recalled, “that before had loafed, studied and teased together now heaped abuse on each other. Bitter and caustic words fell even during instruction, so that it was impossible to think of anything but the mighty struggle across the ocean.” Although Mayer was not short of opportunity after his return to America, he sought a commission and was appointed assistant surgeon in the Eleventh Connecticut Infantry stationed in New Bern, North Carolina. He was not indifferent to the promise of reliable pay. Upon enlistment he could not afford to pay for his uniform and sword and long depended on the Soldiers’ Aid Society for underclothes and shirts after the army lost his trunk. For professionals like Mayer, enlistment served up a substantial pay packet—he received a regular salary of $123.81 a month in 1862—and the promise of practical experience in the field.14 Mayer’s zealous treatment of typhoid and smallpox cases in New Bern bespeaks his commitment to his calling and the cause. He was the only white person to routinely visit the quarantine tent—the work was otherwise delegated to four Black orderlies—and did so in a “much beflowered” scarlet robe with pockets stuffed with medicine and dressings because of the loss of his clothing. He put his surgical skills to use at South Mountain, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, at the first site wandering the battlefield to relieve the thirst and bladders of the wounded with a flask of water and a silver catheter “wiped off and moistened with saliva.”15 He was one of several Jewish doctors to enlist, but the only one to publish a novel about the war once he returned home.16 What set these volunteers apart from others? There was little that was distinct in why Jews joined the army. On the surface, the same was true of when they enlisted. The ebb and flow of enlistment seemed to follow the broader stream. At the start of the war,

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the fall of Fort Sumter unleashed a fever of patriotism that infected alike those who had dreaded and those who had welcomed its coming. Heated passion, burning outrage, and contagious jingoism—all symptoms of rage militaire—convulsed the Union and Confederacy. In the Union, almost as many Jews mustered in on a single frenzied day— April 19—as would sign up as new recruits in 1863.17 The April volunteers made up an outsize share of the total number of Jews who fought in Union uniform.18 Many of these agitated men were not fighting for “father Abraham” but despite him. They felt no love of the Republican Party—and lived among others who shared their views—but the call of patriotism, a sense of duty, and the promise of pay overswept their misgivings. After the initial war fever broke, enlistment of Jews and others spiked again during moments of military crisis. Though recruitment never reached the heights of the first two months of the war, later crises rallied significant numbers of Jewish recruits into regiments. In 1861 enlistment surged again following the shock of defeat in the First Battle of Bull Run and Lincoln’s urgent call for half a million men to join the army. Recruitment declined in June 1862 as McClellan marched ponderously on Richmond during the Peninsula campaign and recruitment offices closed with the expectation of victory. But once more, bleak news from Virginia became a potent motivator. Recruitment peaked in the month leading up to the Second Battle of Bull Run and the invasion of Kentucky— the Peninsula campaign had failed and Stonewall Jackson had driven Nathaniel P. Banks back at Cedar Mountain—adding urgency to the government’s plea for six hundred thousand additional men for the army and militia. Desperate tidings from Northern Virginia had the same effect during the summer of 1863. Enlistment peaked as Lee’s army marched menacingly northward in the weeks before Gettysburg, but then declined again when Meade sparred indecisively with Lee in October and November 1863. Only 1864 diverged from this grim pattern. In that year enlistment by Jews rose significantly in the three months following the Union victory at Chattanooga—coinciding with a call for a further five hundred thousand men—likely indicating a renewed burst of optimism that the tide of the war might finally be turning as well as the attractiveness of escalating financial incentives.19 On other occasions, major battlefield victories boosted enlistment only modestly, perhaps reflecting the sobering butcher’s bill that followed the good tidings.20 A profusion of blood spilled with little apparent gain produced the same outcome. Potential recruits were more receptive to calls to arms made during periods of panicked retreat than they were after offensives that seemed to do little but reap the

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ranks. Unsurprisingly, recruitment plummeted following Fredericksburg and during the Overland campaign when casualty tallies soared. Overall, the rate of enlistment ebbed in the long years after Fort Sumter. The number of new Jewish volunteers halved between 1861 and 1862, and then fell again in 1863, before recovering somewhat in the last full year of the war.21 With the exception of the winter of 1863 to 1864—when Grant’s victory at Chattanooga secured Tennessee and opened Georgia to invasion—volunteering followed a seasonal pattern. Enlistment peaked in the summer—coinciding with campaign season, and so often with crisis for the Union—and declined in the winter months as the cold idled the armies and drove soldiers into winter quarters and potential recruits toward thoughts of home and hearth. On closer inspection, however, these broad patterns that point to uniformity between Jews and their fellow citizens conceal more than they reveal. For lost in the soothing (or numbing) statistics are two crucial differences. The first relates not to when Jews enlisted, but whether they did so. Looking only at those who did volunteer obscures those who did not. Jews responded differently from the start of the war to the repeated calls to volunteer. Some young Jewish men marched off to war, but many more chose not to do so. The second area of divergence from the majority becomes clearer when we compare Jews with other ethnic groups. As we will see, Jews did not march in lockstep with the Irish, Germans, and other immigrants drawn by the drums of war.22 If Germans were overrepresented in the Union army, Jews, by contrast, enlisted at significantly lower rates. In New York, home to the largest population of immigrants from the German states in 1860, 36,680 out of the total prewar population of 256,252 German-born residents (14.3 percent) signed up for service. Rates of enlistment among the German born were comparable in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, albeit not so in Missouri and Ohio. Despite a German-born population less than half the size of that in Ohio, Missouri provided a third more German-born soldiers than did the Buckeye State. In the border states of Maryland and Kentucky only seven percent of all German-born immigrants enlisted.23 By contrast, the rate of enlistment among Jews was consistently lower than for German immigrants.24 Here too there was variation. In Maryland, a bitterly divided state with close ties to the South and that was home to a Jewish population estimated to be five thousand strong in 1859, we know of only sixteen Jews who enlisted in the Union army throughout the war (0.3 percent of the Jewish population). Baltimorean Aaron

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Friedenwald, who, like Nathan Mayer, was studying medicine in Paris at the outset of the war, fulminated against “debauched, black Republicanism” but held firm to his faith in the Union as a “holy institution.”25 He was an outlier within his own family. His brother Moses, by contrast, raged against Northern troops “infesting the city,” and Joe, his eldest sibling, participated in the mob that attacked a Massachusetts regiment on its way to Washington in April 1861. A fourth, Isaac, chose to enlist in the Confederate army. Such sentiments were deeply felt and durable. In the days before the Battle of Antietam, with Lee’s army ominously close to Baltimore, Aaron again wrung his hands at the excitement expressed within his city—and his own family—at the prospect of Confederate conquest.26 The enlistment rate was marginally higher in Kentucky.27 In Missouri, where more than a third of the total prewar German population enlisted, a little more than 2 percent of the total Jewish population can be demonstrably proven to have done so. The highest ratio was in Illinois, where 3 percent of all Jews enlisted. Among states that supplied more than a hundred Jewish men to the Union army, the ratio ranged from 2.1 percent in Pennsylvania (212 out of 10,000) and Ohio (192 out of 9,000) to 1.7 percent in New York (694 confirmed recruits out of approximately 40,000). Even making generous allowances for overcounting the total Jewish population and significantly undercounting Jewish soldiers, Jews did not flock to the colors in proportions equivalent to those of non-Jewish German immigrants.28 How might we account for this divergence? In much the same way that potential German and Irish recruits grew disillusioned when confronted by a surge in hostility on the home front, so too did Jews. The difference, however, related to timing. Although German and Irish Americans were also the focus of hostile rhetoric after Fort Sumter— nativism did not abate completely in the first two years of the war—they could draw comfort from an upwelling of positive sentiment that often celebrated the martial characteristics of both populations. Listening to the changed pitch and tenor of the press and public, non-Jewish German Americans could persuade themselves in 1861 and 1862 that nativism “appeared forever vanquished by their deeds on the early battlefields.”29 No such contrapuntal drumbeat spared the feelings of Jews. If the scales fell from the eyes of Germans and Irish only in 1863, the reckoning came far earlier for Jews. Already in the first year of the war, they felt the sting of prejudice as the “shoddy” scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear, even

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as soldiers shivered in the field for want of decent clothing and had large sums docked from their pay for the inferior garments they were required to wear. Several Northern newspapers hostile to the Republican Party led the charge. Army suppliers were lambasted in cartoons and satirical verse as “shoddy contractors” and “shoddy vampires.” Contractors whose profits and ostentation were deemed dishonest and immoral were derided as a crass and ill-mannered “shoddy aristocracy.”30 Although Jews were not exclusively blamed for “shoddy manufacturing,” the term not infrequently took on antisemitic coloration.31 At a moment when contractors were impugned as immoral, it was easy to imagine that Jews placed profit over patriotism. Wartime scandal accentuated existing fears of the corrupting influence of the market on the nation’s morals that were easily projected onto Jews. Wartime stereotypes drew on older associations of Jews with commerce and the garment trade, and particularly with the motif of the duplicitous Jewish used-clothing dealer, a stock figure whose silver-tongued salesmanship concealed second-rate wares. A variety of cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as the archetypal cunning contractor, not only refusing to enlist but indeed actively undermining the war effort in order to turn a quick buck. In the first year of the conflict several Northern newspapers used the terms “Jew” and “contractor” interchangeably in this context.32 Much as a barrage of nativism persuaded many non-Jewish Germans and Irish to retreat from the war in 1863, a similar fusillade suppressed Jewish enlistment much earlier in the conflict. Talk of Jewish profiteering and aversion to enlistment may have encouraged some to prove their patriotism by donning Union uniform, but more likely played on the doubts and misgivings of others already disinclined to enlist. Why put life and limb in the line of fire for a nation that seemed to treat your kin as cannon fodder and simultaneously scorn you in the press? The effect was more insidious than direct, gradually bleeding goodwill until it was difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the war, never mind for mustering into regiments destined for combat. Jews, unlike their white ethnic counterparts, had more reason to eye the war warily almost from its start. Crucially, the doubts felt by young Jewish men were nurtured by key communal leaders who, encouraged by the surge of antisemitism, did little to conceal their distaste for the war. Just as community and peer pressure could push men into uniform by indicating that enlistment was desirable and expected, it could equally keep them out of it by signaling that enlistment was undesirable and unnecessary.33 Within the United States,

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the pulpit and the Jewish press, two potential sources of inspiration and motivation, more often expressed ambivalence than full-throated enthusiasm for the war. Several otherwise stentorian hazanim whose newspapers religiously carried their rhetoric across the land now, for a variety of reasons, thought it wiser to stifle their pens and quieten their voices. In Cincinnati, Isaac Mayer Wise editorialized in the Israelite days after the fall of Fort Sumter that “silence must henceforth be our policy, silence on all questions of the day,” a pledge that he honored in the breach over the next four years.34 Though Isaac Leeser, his traditionalist rival in Philadelphia, made no equivalent pronouncement, he likewise steered his newspaper away from the shoals of war. He acknowledged taking “no pleasure in war, and studiously avoid[ing] alluding to it” in print.35 At a moment when flags were waved and bugles sounded, the conspicuous absence of rally-round-the flag rhetoric in Jewish newspapers with the widest circulation and the most-celebrated editors signaled that it was permissible to sit out the war.

“SHODDY PATRIOTISM”   In this cartoon, which appeared in Phunny Phellow in November 1861, the archetypal Jewish contractor makes plain his preference for profits over patriotism. Courtesy of Special Collections, Providence Public Library

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Not all followed Wise’s and Leeser’s lead. The Jewish Messenger in New York City exhorted Jews to “STAND BY THE FLAG!” in April 1861, printed a gush of patriotic sermons in the weeks after Fort Sumter, and then covered the mobilization of men and first clashes of arms closely. In that same editorial, Rabbi Samuel Isaacs, editor of the Jewish Messenger, gave some hint as to why Jews had a “duty that is incumbent of them.” The Union, “which extends its hearty invitation to the oppressed of all nations, to come and be sheltered beneath its protecting wings,” had provided a haven and home. Falling in defense of the flag was a “glorious and honorable death.”36 The newspaper’s approach mirrored that of Irish and German newspapers that used the war to simultaneously celebrate the patriotism of ethnic soldiers, counteract the charges of nativists, and apply pressure on the Lincoln administration.37 Even the Jewish Messenger, however, offered less and less coverage of the conflict as it continued. By 1864, month upon month passed with only faint whisper of the war. In a relatively small Jewish community, these conspicuous silences spoke as loudly as words, particularly in a thunderous environment where other immigrant and religious groups noisily avowed their patriotism.38 And not all of those who took a stand in the pages of their newspapers did so in favor of the Union. In San Francisco, Rabbi Julius Eckman, who had previously served a congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, railed against the war in the Weekly Gleaner, describing local synagogues that flew the Stars and Stripes as “undignified” and declaring the conflict better solved by sanctioning secession.39 Like Leeser and Wise, he much preferred a “peaceful divorce between North and South to a national unification cemented by force.”40 Very few of the prolix sermons that have survived from the period engaged directly with the great national conflict.41 Rabbi Samuel Isaacs was not alone in disapproving of “political Rabbi[s]” who made the “pulpit the vehicle for political invective.” Best, he thought, to “leave politics to others.”42 Leeser similarly thought pulpits were “not places for political discussions.”43 It was no coincidence that Leeser and Wise had strong ties to Southern Jewry, and a desire to keep the peace among American Jews, never mind within their congregations. Wise’s arch-antagonist, Rabbi David Einhorn—run out of Baltimore in April 1861 for his vocal opposition to slavery—scorned their approach as a betrayal of Jewish values: “‘the holy conviction’ of these pious gentlemen can, as a rule, be determined with mathematical exactness as soon as the geographical location of their place of residence is known, or that of the places in which customers of their customers are to be found.”44

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Rare were the words of Rabbi Solomon Deutsch of Syracuse, who described the conflict as a “holy war” against “perfidious traitors,” and summoned his listeners at a recruitment rally “to the business of filling up, as soon as possible, companies, regiments, brigades.”45 When Rabbi Sabato Morais delivered a rousing sermon in Philadelphia in November 1864 celebrating success on the field of battle (and Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election), members of his congregational board would, he wrote, “have stopped my speaking altogether.” “Copperheads became so enraged . . . that I got a hornet’s nest around my ears.” The furor abated after a self-imposed “three months of silence” from his pulpit.46 More typical was Max Lilienthal, one of the best-known rabbis in America, who preferred to show his support for the Union in private. The Cincinnati rabbi preached his first sermon on the war the week after the Confederacy surrendered, and another two weeks later. Like Lilienthal, most preachers preferred quiescence to the rousing calls to arms heard from some Christian pulpits.47 Indeed, the most notorious sermon from this period—a defense of slavery as sanctified by God, delivered mere months before the war from the august pulpit of New York City’s most distinguished Ashkenazi synagogue and then much reprinted—spoke words wont to cool rather than excite ardor.48 (The speaker, Rabbi Morris Raphall, was not the only Jewish Jeremiah to excite public attention by warning that “extreme opinions” on both sides were driving the nation to war.49) Raphall changed his tune after the fall of Fort Sumter, urging his congregation to defend the Union “at the peril of life and limb.” But even before his son Alfred Raphall transformed word into deed—he enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Fortieth New York Infantry in June 1861 and lost an arm at Gettysburg—Rabbi Raphall reverted to his earlier themes, fulminating from the pulpit against “demagogues, fanatics, and a party Press” that had caused a “needless sectional war.”50 He was far from alone in rediscovering his misgivings—and airing them publicly—once the brief blaze of Sumter died down. In much the same way, efforts to mobilize Jewish civilians on the home front typically guttered after an initial flare of enthusiasm. The initiatives vaunted by historians—the collection of funds, preparation of bandages, and participation in Sanitary Fairs—were for the most part sporadic and rarely sustained.51 Larger initiatives, such as the call for the establishment of a Jewish military hospital in Washington and of a Jewish Sanitary Commission to care for soldiers in the field and on their sickbeds, were touted in the press but died for want of enthusiasm. The latter initiative had the support of a soldier

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“I BELIEVE WE HAVE NOT YET APPOINTED A HEBREW . . .”   Bullet, bomb, bayonet: those were all to be mortally feared on the battlefield. But for some, there was a related dread. It was not only how they might die; it was also whom they might kill. “Brother against brother,” for these men, was no mere catchphrase. No one knows for sure how many brothers chose opposite sides in the war. Lincoln, himself, knew six brothers who wore the Blue and the Gray: they were the sons of his friend, the Jewish lawyer Abraham Jonas. But it is unlikely that Lincoln was aware of the divided loyalties of the Levy family when he made the historic appointment of Cherrie M. Levy to assistant quartermaster with the rank of captain. Levy was the son-in-law of New York’s leading Ashkenazi rabbi, Morris Raphall. Levy was more, though, than just “a Hebrew” and someone’s son-in-law; he was also the older brother of Clarence Levy, who, some six months before, had enlisted as a private in the South Carolina Heavy Artillery in Charleston, South Carolina. For Captain Levy, the war was one of brothers—and seven cousins too. All survived; they were lucky. But if survival in battle was in large measure a matter of luck, so too was much else in the war. Bad luck, for instance, ensured that a popular and hitherto unblemished officer like Cherrie Levy was court-martialed within the first six months of his service largely on the basis of testimony by a former clerk whose word, according to an assistant adjutant general involved in the case, could not be trusted even under oath. Found guilty of stealing wages—Levy claimed he was withholding money upon the order of his commanding officer so as to save the clerk “from squandering one hundred dollars per month [on alcohol] to his own destruction”—he was dismissed from the army for “conduct prejudicial to Good order and military discipline.” Cashiered, Levy was “forever disqualified to hold any office of trust or profit in the United States.” But even this steely sentence wavered, swaying back and forth, as it was revoked, revived, then revoked again. Lincoln, when initially called upon by a senator in November 1863 to reverse the sentence, said the case against Levy was so bad “it couldn’t be worse.” “To interfere,” he added for emphasis, “would blacken my own character.” Yet the next year, something had changed Lincoln’s mind. On January 18, 1864, Lincoln nominated Levy for reappointment, and the Senate confirmed the commission on March 18. Not surprisingly, during this period Rabbi Raphall wrote to thank Lincoln “for the generosity and justice with which you have treated my son-in-law Captain C.M. Levy. My whole family unites with me in feeling that you are his true benefactor.” There is more to the story, but suffice to say Levy never served as assistant quartermaster again, yet did serve as a postmaster, appointed by Andrew Johnson. Clearly, a letter or document or discrete conversation—some link in the chain of evidence—is missing. This may be seen, however, as more encouraging than not. The letter illustrated here, in which Lincoln expressly appointed Levy because he was a “Hebrew,” was not, in fact, discovered until 1955. The Shapell Legacy Partnership

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who complained bitterly that his brothers-in-arms had been “neglected by the wealthy Jewish congregations” and expressed resentment of “stay-at-home gentlemen” who were “always ready to criticize but mighty slow to nurse the wounded and alleviate the sufferings of the dying Jews.”52 His protestations, and more modest appeals for relief funds to assist wounded soldiers, came to naught. A meeting called in New York City for the same purpose drew only three participants.53 A similarly lackluster response bedeviled efforts to support a chaplain dedicated to visiting Jewish soldiers in the many hospitals that surrounded Washington, DC. Arnold Fischel, appointed for this purpose by the Board of Delegates of American Israelites—shortly after he was rejected for the vacant position of regimental chaplain of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry—was obliged to retire because the organization could not raise the funds to continue paying his salary.54 The pressing need of the families of soldiers unable to make ends meet because of lost earnings and rampant inflation was left to existing welfare agencies that struggled with this additional burden.55 Such evidence of tepid enthusiasm did not pass entirely unnoticed.56 While some of this want of support reflected an aversion to the appearance of sectarianism—as one newspaper put it, why should Jews segregate themselves into “Ghettoes” through their giving?—the broader pattern was one of apathy.57 These twin factors also explain the failure of efforts to recruit a predominantly Jewish regiment in New York City in September 1862, despite an impassioned plea from the Jewish Record. “Arise, then, ye men of wealth and power, stir from your comfortable couches, and if you cannot enlist yourself, call a meeting of Israelites and create a Jewish bounty fund, to promote enlistments in a regiment which you ought to call your own.” Evidently their couches proved too comfortable. Neither funding, nor a mass of able-bodied men, was forthcoming.58 By contrast, similar initiatives in Chicago and Syracuse netted enough money to provide financial support for raising two companies. Outside these and other large cities, Jewish populations were too small and diffuse to sustain the efforts at ethnic mobilization—recruitment drives, mass meetings, editorializing, and much speechifying—seen on a significant scale within the Irish and German communities. There was no equivalent, moreover, of the ambitious ethnic champions who saw political and personal opportunity in rallying throngs of their landsmen into regiments and in mobilizing the ethnic street to pressure the administration to advance ethnic interests.59 Nor was there any equivalent of the fervent efforts of churches to rally

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men into uniform, invoking God in service of the national cause and interpreting the war through a providential frame.60 The listlessness on the home front lowered the psychic costs of sitting out the war. Far from turning the young men who stayed at home into “demasculinized pariah[s],” as it did in other segments of the Northern public, the Jewish communal climate shielded the reluctant by reducing the personal shame of not enlisting and ensuring strength in numbers.61 Some of those who did enlist openly expressed their resentment of those who did not. After a visit to Cincinnati in 1861, Daniel Mayer, assistant surgeon in the Fifth West Virginia Infantry, complained of “the miserable croaker who refuses to go to war or assist in supporting the government, in any way.” “It is discouraging,” he continued, “to those who are now exposing themselves to the inclemencies of the weather, to hunger, fatigue and danger, that so many . . . have not now, when their services are so greatly needed, the spirit to make any attempt to preserve the priceless boon bequeathed to them by their more honorable ancestors.”62 The pressure to enlist weighed more heavily in 1861 and 1862 among the Irish and Germans than it did for their typical Jewish counterparts. But by 1863, when key elements within the Irish and German communities soured on the war, they too were released from the heavy load of expectation.63 All of this indicates why Jews had particular reason to be reluctant to volunteer. But buried within this broad pattern was significant local variation. As we will see in the next chapter, geography also played an important role in explaining the contours of enlistment by Jews. Three of the four largest Jewish communities in the United States were located in cities—New York City, Baltimore, and Cincinnati—where significant portions of the population, both natives and newcomers, were ambivalent about the conflict. At key moments, this ambivalence spilled into antagonism and violence. In other cities, such as Syracuse and Chicago, local impulses pointed in the opposite direction. Likewise, the sudden intrusion of the war could rapidly change the minds of men otherwise indifferent to enlistment. The Newburgh Raid, a sortie by a small group of Confederate irregulars into Indiana in July 1862, spurred one such localized burst of enlistment. The war was brought home to the Hoosier State as never before; the incursion reminded Indianans of their vulnerability and proximity to a war that might otherwise seem distant from the home front. In the six months prior to the raid only a single Jew enlisted in Indiana; in the

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single month that followed, a period of hand-wringing and agitation, seven did so. All but two enlisted into three-year regiments, suggesting that they had been considering whether to join up and that the raid spurred them into action. Once the sense of urgency ebbed, recruitment in Indiana reverted to a more sedate pace. The “siege of Cincinnati,” a period of panic in September 1862 that followed Edmund Kirby Smith’s capture of nearby Lexington, Kentucky, exerted a similar effect on a much larger scale in Ohio. No Union army stood between Kirby Smith and Cincinnati, and the city was poorly defended. Kirby Smith menacingly dispatched a detachment northward, and the foray set the city on edge. In reality this was nothing more than a demonstration by a brigade, designed to sow panic and distract from the main army’s real intentions. But those within the city did not know this. To their eyes, two Confederate armies—under Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg—marauded unchecked through a neighboring state, and now the Union’s sixth largest city, as well as their homes, were threatened. As the Confederates closed in on Cincinnati, panic spurred hasty preparation for the expected onslaught. The city was placed under martial law on September 2, and the civilian population mobilized. All businesses were ordered to close and the streetcar service was suspended. Able-bodied men who were not members of the militia, or who did not volunteer for service, risked being compelled to join the “shovel brigade” assigned to dig fortifications in the late summer heat. Jacob Elsas, whose firm manufactured large quantities of clothing for the army and who had publicly pledged $500 toward enlistment bounties, was press-ganged by a provost patrol after leaving the quartermaster depot where he had gone to have payment vouchers signed. This may have been no accident, as contractors were much maligned as malingerers and profiteers. Certainly, the Enquirer delighted in reporting that “three Israelitish gentlemen” who “tended to their sewing machines in women’s garb” had failed to evade detection and impressment. Whether true or not, such stories played to stereotypes of shirking by Jews. The numbers suggest otherwise. Almost as many Jews joined the army in Ohio in September as over the previous eight months. The vast majority did so in hastily assembled thirty-day regiments. Only one of those who signed up for thirty days—Simon Basch, who gave up tailoring for a brief stint in uniform in 1861 before being done in by a hernia “caused by excessive exertion while on a march”—had previously enlisted during the war. Whatever their weapon of choice—shovel or musket—Jews joined thousands of other new recruits to save their city. More eager than able in the ways of war,

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these barely trained citizen-soldiers were joined by ragtag volunteers from elsewhere in the state, as well as from neighboring Indiana and Michigan, many brandishing whatever weapons were to hand. Most of these “Squirrel Hunters” returned home after the Confederate troops withdrew during the night of September 11. Within a month, Bragg was defeated at Perryville, and Union control of Kentucky was restored. With the immediate crisis over, and the threat to hearth and home removed, not one of the Jewish recruits who signed up for thirty days of service rejoined the army then or later in the war.64 There were military crises aplenty elsewhere that might have persuaded these recruits not to stack their muskets and muster out. Less than a week after the threat to Cincinnati was lifted, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac halted, at staggering cost, the Confederate invasion of Maryland at Antietam. After the spectacular failure of the Peninsula campaign, the humiliation of Second Bull Run, and now the audacity of Lee’s drive into Union territory, few in the Union were left with any illusions that Confederate resolve remained intact: this was to be a long and bloody war. But immigrants in Cincinnati may have had particular reasons not to reenlist. When martial law was initially lifted, the sole exception was for businesses that sold alcohol. Before the war, the drinking habits of immigrants had been a source of friction as nativists found common cause with temperance advocates in arguing for curbs on the sale of liquor. Now affronted Teutonic publicans and their patrons interpreted this restriction as a direct attack by their political foes intent on achieving by stealth what they had been unable to achieve by other means. German immigrants took their retribution by damaging streetcar tracks.65 Nursing a new grievance, they may have retreated from duty when the immediate crisis passed. If the Indianans and Ohioans who enlisted in July and September 1862 were driven to arms by a war that forced its way into their backyard, those who rushed to the colors in June 1863 were of a different stripe. Following its crushing victory at Chancellorsville at the beginning of May, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia launched an invasion of the North, moving into the Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania and soon threatening Harrisburg. The Army of the Potomac, so recently advancing southward, now scurried northward to block the rapid Confederate thrust. This dramatic reversal of fortunes, accompanied by a crisis of confidence in the leadership of the army, played havoc with the Northern public: if the Army of the Potomac failed again, Lee could potentially strike at Philadelphia, Baltimore, or the nation’s capital.

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The crisis touched patriotic chords not sounded since the fall of Fort Sumter among Jews in New York. Enlistments spiked as soon as the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac on June 15; many of those who joined up had last served for three months in the summer and fall of 1861.66 These were men who rallied to the flag again, this time to defend their homeland.67 Scholars have long noted the power of this protective instinct as a motivation for enlistment. Even if the threat was less immediate than it was for those closer to the front line, New York Jews were stirred by patriotism as well as pressure from their peers and communities. (Those already in uniform disparaged enlistment in these hundred-day regiments as “nothing more than an elaborate way to dodge the draft” and as “Featherbed Volunteers,” a claim given credence by William Marvel.)68 Once decisive victory at Gettysburg turned back Lee’s invasion—and their term of service in these emergency regiments expired—few of these recent Jewish recruits reenlisted. New Yorkers had additional reason to return hastily to civilian life. Events in Pennsylvania persuaded these men to search closets for uniforms not worn since the first year of the war. Now events closer to home compelled many to return their dark blue fatigues to their wardrobes after a brief period of service. Bloody draft riots roiled New York City in mid-July. Exultation over the victory at Gettysburg—Pickett’s charge through the open fields below Cemetery Ridge had been broken but ten days before—was replaced by shock at violence meted out in Manhattan. If threat to the homeland could mobilize men, threat close to home could have the opposite effect. Three days of chaos—rampaging mobs, vicious fighting and violence, and artillery and musket fire in the streets— struck a lasting blow to the sentiment of Jewish New Yorkers about the war.69 Enlistment never returned to pre-riot levels as disheartened men stayed home. In the more than two years of war that preceded the riots, Jews who joined New York regiments made up more than 40 percent of all Jewish soldiers who enlisted for the first time in the Union army. Their share halved for the remainder of the war. Jews in Cincinnati and New York City were certainly not alone in being turned off by the draft and the formal issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Though there was a diversity of opinion among Jews about conscription and the Proclamation, the decline of enlistment by Jews in 1863 matches the behavior of increasingly gun-shy immigrants.70 In that year, the number of new Jewish recruits dropped precipitously, falling by two-thirds from the year before. Disaster at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, a gnawing suspicion that Union generals were inclined to treat ethnic

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regiments as cannon fodder, and the prospect of the draft sapped spirits already sagging after two long years of war. For Germans, Chancellorsville was a double humiliation. The sting of defeat was scourged still further by a press and public eager to assign blame for the battlefield disaster to the “German” Eleventh Corps. In the wake of Chancellorsville, German soldiers and the German community were subjected to a barrage of criticism shot through with nativist invective.71 Potential Irish recruits shared similar misgivings. Shot and shell had scythed through the vaunted Irish Brigade. The visibly thinned ranks of Irish regiments, and the conspicuous presence of battered and maimed veterans in the ethnic neighborhoods of Northern cities, made it more difficult to muster enthusiasm. Like their German peers, Irish leaders saw evidence of prejudice in officers passed over for preferment and smarted at canards casually directed at their troops. Their mood was further curdled by the Emancipation Proclamation and the introduction of conscription. The proclamation played upon racial fears—particularly the social and economic anxieties of white workers who anticipated future competition with freed slaves for work—and added weight to the words of those who questioned the value of shedding Irish blood for the Union cause. Some of those who willingly supported a war to save the Union now quailed at a war for abolition and the future that it betokened. The draft had much the same effect, leading some to ask why Democrats were being conscripted to fight and die in a Republican war, and heightening sensitivity to slights real and imagined. This created a self-fulfilling dynamic as potential recruits were repelled by this witches’ brew of discontent, and nativists carped at the disloyalty of ethnics unwilling to shed blood for the United States.72 Yet here again we see important differences in how Jews responded in this fateful year. Since most potential Jewish recruits were of German origin, it would be easy to assume that they responded less as Jews and more as disgruntled German immigrants when they shied from recruiting officers in 1863. The burden of insult and shame was no easier for Jewish recruits to bear than it was for their fellow German immigrants. That such squawking became more clamorous soon after so many foreign-born soldiers had soaked the soil with their blood near the Sunken Lane and Wilderness Church made the nativist onslaught so much more galling. Certainly, the grisly casualty list of the kind published in the Jewish Record after Fredericksburg must have given pause to those considering enlistment.73 The grim toll of the war on immigrants was evident for all to see in the names of the casualties, and the description of their wounds and amputations put

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an end to any residual romantic notions of the glories of battle. Jews too had reason to quaver at news (not entirely reliable) that 852 Jews had been drafted in New York City in 1863 alone. The somber list of names filled two columns in the newspaper, eerily echoing the casualty lists so familiar to newspaper readers.74 Even as the total number of new Jewish recruits declined sharply in 1863—they were no more immune to the despondency that seeped back from the front than others were—the proportion of new Jewish recruits of German origin who enlisted that year rose rather than fell.75 The opposite was true, albeit marginally, for American-born Jewish recruits, a group less likely to be troubled by the nativist innuendos directed at their Jewish peers of German origin.76 This suggests that the fog that hung over 1863 affected Jews as much as it did others—the bloody toll of the battlefield made recruitment a challenge irrespective of ethnicity and nationality—but that they also had concerns particular to them as Jews. As in the first year of the war, when antisemitism suppressed enlistment by Jews, it played the spoiler’s role again at the end of 1862 when talk about Jews momentarily shifted from corrosive to cataclysmic. Grant’s order expelling all Jews from the vast territory under his command in December 1862 elicited sustained outrage.77 Although it is difficult to disentangle the episode from other factors—Grant wrote his infamous order two days after the Battle of Fredericksburg ended and two weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued—it coincided with, and exacerbated, a winter of discontent for America’s Jews. In reality, the first frost had already set in two months before Grant issued his order. Enlistment in October 1862 was half that of the month before, reflecting September’s twin mortifications of profuse bloodletting at Antietam and Lincoln’s announcement of his intention to issue the Emancipation Proclamation at the start of 1863. Frost was followed by freeze. For Jews, Grant’s order was as chastening as Chancellorsville was for non-Jewish German Americans, exploding a sense of hurt ripening since the start of the war. The next seven months included the month with the single lowest number of enlistments by Jews during the entire war, as well as the lowest cumulative total of enlistments over any sustained period. The Jewish Messenger reported during this same period that attendance at houses of worship on the national fast day called by the president was light, explaining that “it was very evident that less respect was manifested for the recommendation of the Executive,” a pointed reference to Lincoln’s order.78 The timing suggests

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EDWARD WERTHEIMER IN WAR AND PEACE   Edward Wertheimer was born in Tutschap, Bohemia, in 1837, 1839, or 1840, and died in New York City in 1897. In Europe he had been a regimental paymaster in the Austrian army; upon arrival in New York in 1861, he at once enlisted as a soldier. His regiment, the Fifty-fourth New York Infantry—made up of German immigrants and known variously as the Black Rifles, the Hiram Barney Rifles, and the Black Hussars—fought in the Shenandoah Valley, at Gettysburg, and at Fort Wagner. Its battles were savage. Wertheimer was twice promoted for bravery—at the Second Battle of Bull Run and then Chancellorsville, where he gallantly rescued the Colors during a murderous crossfire of the enemy and was wounded and taken as prisoner of war. At Gettysburg many years after the war, Wertheimer spoke, movingly, at the July 4, 1890, dedication of the monument to the Fifty-fourth New York Infantry, which, having brought 216 men to the field, lost 102. “We again live in that period of heroic and willing sacrifice,” he said, and “feel again that impulse which in that time of youthful and ardent love of liberty caused us to obey the call of our beloved leader, Abraham Lincoln, to fight for the Republic, and to be victorious, or seal our devotion with our heart’s blood.” National Archives and Records Administration

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“CO-RELIGIONISTS” KILLED AND WOUNDED AT THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG   This grim listing of Jewish soldiers, printed in the Jewish Record days after the Battle of Fredericksburg, appeared shortly before word of Grant’s General Orders No. 11 reached the press. Unsurprisingly, enlistment declined precipitously in the months that followed. Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives

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that advance word of the Emancipation Proclamation chilled sentiment toward the war, and that its effects were compounded by Grant’s order and bad news from the front. For August Bondi, the Emancipation Proclamation stiffened his sense of purpose. But he appears to have been unusual in his early and passionate ideological commitment to abolitionism. Only later in the war did many others come to share his view that slavery must be extirpated before the Union could be made whole. If Jews behaved identically to German immigrants, we would expect their rate of enlistment to plunge following Chancellorsville (May 1–4, 1863), a battle that ruptured the resolve of German Americans after the press and public heaped blame for the rout on the “German” Eleventh Corps.79 Instead Jews enlisted at more than double the rate in the last five months of 1863 than they did in the first five months of the year, demonstrating that their reaction to the war and its vicissitudes was distinct from that of other ethnic communities.80 Yet despite this momentary blip, the overall trend was downward, as it was more broadly with recruiting for the Union army. Jewish enlistment never recovered to the levels seen in the first two years of the war: 80 percent of all Jewish recruits who enlisted in the Union army did so in 1861 and 1862. August Bondi, whose politics and patriotism were well aligned, was among their number. George Kuhne, who signed up as a substitute in the summer of 1863, was, like many others who enlisted late in the war, less committed to the cause. It is crucial to recall that aggregates conceal considerable variation. Some Jews, of course, defied these broader patterns, redoubling their commitment when others retreated, and drawing inspiration from the Emancipation Proclamation when others wavered. Moreover, sentiment toward the war, and toward Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, was not static. Perceptions shifted depending on the state of the war and other variables. It would also be wrong to assume, after having read the foregoing, that few Jews enlisted and those who did made for reluctant recruits. Far from it. Those who volunteered did so in spite of the headwinds we have already described. Who were these men?

2: THE JEW I SH REC RUI T In an epistolary argument stretching over years, Marcus and Caroline Spiegel fought a personal war over his decision to enlist and then remain in uniform—she urging his return, he justifying his absence.1 Caroline, left alone with three young children and worried about his safety, was deeply unhappy. As she was raised a Quaker, her qualms may have reflected more than just concern about her husband’s wellbeing. Knowing his wife’s feelings, Marcus rarely larded his letters with patriotic and boyish flourishes. Only once did he pledge to “fight to the last” for the “Constitution, the Union and the Flag of my country”2 and only twice did he remark on war as an adventure.3 Instead, from his first letter from camp, he was forthright in explaining his decision to volunteer. Drowning in debt and unable to stave off circling creditors for much longer, Spiegel felt he had little choice but to volunteer. In Ohio, those on the brink of bankruptcy were exempted from foreclosure by “stay laws” if they enlisted.4 Military service, he wrote, would relieve “those pecuniary troubles that I have had for the last 3 years.”5 He did not join the first company formed in Millersburg, but instead assisted with raising a second later in 1861. The reward was a captain’s commission. Although the rank afforded good pay, his plan was to secure a “bombproof” job, preferably as quartermaster.6 Money was on his mind over the next months. In January 1862 he was “looking daily for the Pay master to pay me off and then I want to pay that note with the Bank . . . and then I am all right and you too, just keep your spirits.”7 By February he calculated that “[t]hings will soon be all right”—they could save their warehouse from their creditors—as long as the war lasted until summer.8 “I think the War will soon be over,” he speculated. “Yet I do not think we will be mustered out of Service very soon, neither do I care much, as long as I am safing $125 per month, think that is about as well as a man can do, considering hard times.”9 Living frugally—“we came here to save our money and

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not to spend it”—and savoring unaccustomed financial security, he began to dream of a future unencumbered by the fears that had plagued him for years. If “this War would only give me employment even in the position I hold now a year longer,” he mused, “I would have about $2000 of my own earnings subject to nobody and loans paid for the Warehouse partly and all would be right.”10 Spiegel’s motives in these early months accorded well with a broader pattern, described by William Marvel, of recruits driven by pecuniary need.11 However, already by March 1862, Spiegel’s mind was turning to other reasons to remain in uniform. He relished his first experience of leading men into combat at the Battle of Kernstown. A year later the acoustic terror of his first encounter with combat still resonated in his mind. He recalled the minutest details “as though it were but an hour ago”: his consternation at losing his “good Soup” as the regiment raced “double quick through the mud knee deep” to get into position, the anxiety of deploying his company as skirmishers for the first time under fire, and “the whizz of that Shell that took the head of the Cannonier to my right.”12 Spiegel exulted in his abilities as an officer, the respect he felt from the men under his command, and the rude health he enjoyed in the field.13 “I will come out of this with honor and Money,” he boasted to Caroline.14 As his financial position improved, thoughts of advancement began to uncurl in his mind. Should he be promoted to major, “I could in very few months fix it so I would have quite a nice little Capital to go and do business and, with the Money Oncle Joseph [his brother, Joseph Spiegel] could get in marrying, we could run the nicest institution in Millersburg.” He was “very anxious . . . to run a nice even business without any trouble and difficulty, without any pressure, without the necessity of blushing, without being compelled to go to a Beerhouse or anywhere else to keep up appearance, and without bowing my head to any one.”15 In July 1862, he adamantly declared that he would “not leave the Service until I have advanced a step or two,” an ambition he tempered soon after—“As soon as I can get off honorably, I will resign”—presumably under pressure from home.16 As the months wore on, he wrote more of his concern for his family’s reputation and his pride in soldiering, and less frequently about money. “Your advice to quit soldiering I know you do not mean,” he scolded Caroline in December 1862, “as I never before had half so good a chance and I do really mean to rise to some distinction in this Campayne if God spares my health.”17 By then he had been promoted from the captaincy of a seasoned company in the Sixty-seventh Ohio Infantry to the lieutenant colonelcy of the 120th Ohio Infantry. This

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“green Regiment,” newly raised in Holmes and three neighboring counties (all staunchly Democratic), was soon bogged down in the Vicksburg campaign.18 Now Spiegel wrote often of honor, reputation, camaraderie, and pride in his professionalism. Resigning his commission, as some of his officers were doing, “without an earthly excuse for forsaking my post in the face of the enemy would be disgrace.” And besides, “My expenses now is not over twenty Dollars per month.” “How,” he tempted Caroline, “would you like to buy the lot next to our House where Atkins now lives[?]”19 “Cary my love,” he wrote plaintively and with more than a hint of desperation, “I am establishing myself a reputation which will stand for life and I know you feel proud of it.”20 Spiegel’s letters seemingly did little to console Caroline. Returning to the field after recuperating at home from a wound, Marcus was racked with guilt. “[M]any hours of night I lay & think of home,” he wrote. “I frequently think I can hear you cry as you dit a certain night & say I know you dont care any thing about me, it startels me. Caroline my love, I want some positive assurance of you, that you are not mad at me any more and if I ever done or said any thing to injure your feelings forgive me, forgive me, for God knows I love you as no man loves his wife.”21 Yet he continued to resist her pleas to return home. He had a duty to his men. “[I]f I were to resign to day, one half of my officers would also and perhaps demoralize the Regiment . . . but never mind, I do not believe you want me to resign.”22 When his thoughts darkened, he slipped back to his former theme. Thinking about the future strengthened his wavering spirits.23 Yet even the prospect of resuming civilian life “without a dead weight [of debt] hanging around my neck” could not calm his mind when he read of the political maneuvering of abolitionists. Here his fulminations echoed those of his Democratic friends in Ohio; he was closely attuned to political sentiment in Holmes County.24 “If it is the object of Congress to prolong the war [until all slaves were freed],” he wrote indignantly, “I wish they would be honest enough to say so at once, and give us who have engaged in this war for a different purpose a chance to go home.”25 It was “not necessary to fight for the darkies,” he bluntly declared, “nor are they worth fighting for.”26 The men of the 120th Ohio largely shared his views.27 A week after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued—with Spiegel’s men knee deep in the mud and misery of campaigning along the Mississippi, and his hometown newspaper railing against Lincoln and his “Congo Dynasty”—Spiegel reported a souring among his men. “Men, Officers, who 60 days ago were in favor of fighting till the last man and the last Dollar is gone,” he lamented, “are now in favour of Compromise strongly on most any terms; I never in my

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CAROLINE AND MARCUS SPIEGEL   War, which introduces so many people to themselves, took the 120th Ohio Infantry’s colonel, Marcus Spiegel, by surprise. German-born and a father of three, he joined the regiment enticed, mostly, by the promise of steady pay. He wanted to fight for the Union, but not for abolition. He admired McClellan, detested Sherman, and repeatedly told his wife he would leave the service soon. Instead, he found leadership exhilarating and slavery abhorrent, and wanted to name a son after Sherman. He was thirty-four years old at the time of his death in battle, in 1864, and reputedly about to be commissioned a brigadier general. He is pictured here with his wife, Caroline, in the 1850s. Courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago

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life saw such a change in an Army in two weeks. Why we had 11 Resignations offered in our Regiment in one day and in every Regiment it is the same. Every body is getting tired of the war.”28 So demoralized was the 120th Ohio—rumor reached his ears that “not half the men would fire a gun for this d——d abolition war”—that he was obliged to address them as a group, imploring them to “Stand by the Government right or wrong.”29 When he was left alone to his thoughts, his mind strayed toward despair. “I have seen many of my comrades deposited in the soil of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana,” he wrote to Caroline in January 1863. “I am sick of the war and I do want to get out; I do not fight or want to fight for Lincoln’s Negro proclamation one day longer than I can help, yet I do not [wish] to after having undergone all the hardship, danger and privation of 15 months campayne and then leave in disgrace. As soon as I can get out honorable I will.”30 This was to be his low watermark during the Mississippi campaign. His mood soon rallied as his regiment joined Grant’s daring thrust toward Jackson and the envelopment of Vicksburg. Now he wrote of “whipping these Aristocratic Rebels until they consider they are whipped,” and abjured all talk of a “hasty peace,” even if it broke with sentiment in Holmes County.31 He assured Caroline that his “heart and soul are in the cause. . . . I must stay in the service as long as my Country needs me.”32 The man who proposed naming his child “George McClellan Spiegel” in 1862—and scorned Grant and his generals—now instructed his pregnant wife to select “William Tecumseh Sherman Spiegel” if the baby was a boy.33 And his thinking about emancipation changed as he had “learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before.” “You know it takes me long to say anything that sounds antidemocratic and it goes hard,” he confessed to Caroline early in 1864, “but whether I stay in the Army or come home, I am [in] favor of doing away with the institution of Slavery.”34 As his letters amply demonstrate, Spiegel’s motivations shifted as the war wore on, revealing how timing and context played on the minds of volunteers. In his case, a reluctant soldier in search of a bombproof job became a capable officer committed to uprooting slavery. Money, his pied piper in 1861, was of lesser note in 1862 and beyond. However, the thoughts and feelings Spiegel expressed in his letters were anything but unique. The press of need, the pull of honor and reputation, the lure of adventure, and the tug of duty and patriotism made no distinction between Jew and Gentile. The thinking of all volunteers was influenced by their age and origins, their economic position, and the politics of their hometown communities.

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So easily lost in the thicket of Spiegel’s letters are the factors that differentiated Jews from other immigrants. Whereas Spiegel’s age (he was in his early thirties when he enlisted), Hessian birthplace, commercial career, and residence in a community sympathetic to the Democratic Party were seemingly unexceptional, when Jewish volunteers are lined up side by side as if on parade, certain features collectively set them apart. For as we will see in the pages that follow, settlement patterns (the places they lived), geographic origins (the places they came from), and occupational profile (the economic roles they filled) were distinct among Jews and shaped how they responded to the call to arms from Washington. These factors, often imperceptible at the level of the individual but pronounced in the realm of the collective, acted in concert to produce a cohort of Jewish soldiers subtly different from their Christian comrades. Like Marcus Spiegel, four of every five Jews who enlisted in the Union army was foreign born. If a cross section of Jewish recruits were shoehorned into a single hundred-man company, fifty-eight would be from the German Confederation, twenty from the United States, a total of six from the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, five from the Russian Empire, four from Britain, and three from France, with the remaining four a polyglot mix of Caribbeans and Europeans.35 Even the “German” contingent was internally diverse, reflecting the fractured state of central Europe: a hodgepodge of principalities, kingdoms, and states, as well as Polish territory annexed by Prussia. Not all these men necessarily spoke German, and many only came to think of themselves as German once in the United States.36 The predominance of foreigners, and particularly of Jews born in German-speaking lands, among enlistees characterized a Jewish population dominated by immigrants: American Jewry had grown tenfold in the two decades before the war, and fiftyfold since 1820 thanks to this influx. The recruits joined an army in which more than one in four of their fellow soldiers were newcomers to the United States, including at least 200,000 German enlistees.37 The average Jewish volunteer was in his early twenties, marginally younger at first enlistment than the typical soldier who signed up for service in the Union army. But as in other matters, nativity muddies the picture when comparing Jews and Christians. Jewish recruits born under the Stars and Stripes tended to be younger than their immigrant peers. Close to half of all American-born Jewish recruits were still teenagers when they first signed their names to recruitment contracts.38 The demographics of the Jewish population largely explain the differences between the age profile of American- and

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foreign-born recruits. Many of those who made their way to America left their homes in Europe in their late teenage years or in their early twenties. The native-born Jewish population, by contrast, was disproportionately youthful because of a quirk of timing. Earlier immigrants—whose influx dramatically swelled the Jewish population in the 1830s and 1840s—produced a baby boom of American-born children of military age by 1861. These scions of immigrant households may have been fired with a patriotic enthusiasm particular to first-generation Americans. Young Jews made up a growing share of new recruits as the war wore on. When others wearied—despairing at the funereal procession of names in newspaper casualty columns, smarting from the ignominy heaped upon German soldiers, shocked by wastrel generals profligate with lives—young American Jews rallied to the shot-torn flag.39 Whatever their motives for enlistment, young Jewish recruits were only slightly more likely to sign up for longer terms of service than those in their twenties, who in turn were slightly more likely to do so than those in their thirties and forties. This reflected more than the confidence (or foolhardiness) of youth.40 Older recruits, like Marcus Spiegel, were more likely to have established families and businesses that added to the burdens of a prolonged absence. And the allure of adventure may also have been weaker for those who had sunk roots in American soil several years before the war. Some foreigners—and Americans—displayed greater eagerness than others to join up for long periods of service. For every Jew from Baden and Württemberg who initially enlisted for one hundred days or fewer, ten committed to three years in Union uniform. Undoubtedly their dedication partly reflected their enthusiasm for Baden-born Franz Sigel, a hero of the revolution of 1848 and an ill-starred Civil War general who commanded deep loyalty from German troops despite his poor record on the battlefield. Although the boast “I fights mit Sigel” was heard from the lips of many German soldiers, those from his home state had particular reason to be drawn to his flame.41 There were other Union generals of German origin, but none held equivalent stature within the German press and public. Bavarians, by contrast, were relatively reluctant soldiers. For every two who initially enlisted for one hundred days or fewer, three enlisted for three-year terms. At first they too had a champion, in Louis (Ludwig) Blenker, like Sigel a Forty-Eighter and brigadier general, but quick-fire scandals shredded his reputation and military career. Prussians enlisted for longer periods than the norm, while Hessians—like Spiegel—and Bohemians

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on average preferred shorter periods of service.42 Among American-born recruits, a higher proportion of New Yorkers signed up for three-year enlistment contracts than did Pennsylvanians. Neither state, however, departed far from the norm. By contrast, native-born Marylanders and Ohioans were outliers. For every short-term Jewish recruit from the Empire State, close to four others enlisted for three years of service. Among Buckeyes, by contrast, short-termers outnumbered their longer-serving peers by almost two to one. Age in part explains these variations. Bavarian and Hessian enlistees, such as Nathan Mayer and Marcus Spiegel, were typically grayer in beard and stouter in frame when they first enlisted. Their number included a significantly higher percentage of recruits older than thirty and significantly fewer teenagers. Those from Baden and Württemberg were their exact inverse. Native New Yorkers were younger on average than Pennsylvanians. But Bohemians complicate this apparently straightforward dynamic: they matched Prussians in age distribution but not in enthusiasm. And those Ohioans who did enlist were disproportionately young; their number did not include a single person who was thirty or older when he first signed up for federal service.43 The bashfulness of Jewish Buckeyes (and Bavarians) points to a further factor that pushed some groups to the fore and kept others skulking in the rear: the influence of the immediate environment. The recruitment decisions of immigrants and their American-born sons were acutely sensitive to the political, social, and economic pressures of the places where they lived and the broader communities within which they lived.44 Ohio, Marcus Spiegel’s place of residence, provides fitting demonstration of how this medley of elements—age, origin, and environment—interacted. Though no one has systematically mapped the settlement patterns of antebellum Jewish immigrants, there is compelling evidence that chain migration gave a Bavarian flavor to Jewish life in the Buckeye State. Bavarians accounted for two-thirds of German-born Jews who settled in Cincinnati—the Queen City of the West’s Jewish population was third only to New York City and Philadelphia in 1860—and half of all Jews who moved to the city before 1870.45 As Stephen Mostov has illustrated, many came from a small cluster of villages in Upper Franconia and the Palatinate.46 They were drawn to a boomtown. Cincinnati was a bustling mercantile and manufacturing center strategically sited on the Ohio River. In the decade before the war it was the largest inland urban center, and the fastest-growing city in the United States.47 Marc Lee Raphael found an even more pronounced pattern of Bavarian settlement in Columbus, as did Lloyd Gartner

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in Cleveland.48 The same processes that created clusters of Jews with a shared place of origin in Cincinnati produced pockets of Prussians (really from Posen) in Boston, Bohemians in Milwaukee, and Bavarians in Baltimore.49 Although these examples are suggestive, we know neither the percentage of Jews living in Ohio who hailed from Bavaria, nor their average age. Given that Cincinnati was home to by far the largest share of the state’s Jewish population, and that at least every second Jewish Cincinnatian originated in Bavaria, Bavarians were underrepresented among the state’s recruits: they made up only one in six Jews who enlisted statewide, and were outnumbered by Prussians and native-born Ohioans.50 What might explain this? The Matrikel laws in Bavaria, which severely limited the number of marriage licenses issued by the state and thereby circumscribed the ability of young Jews to establish households, as well as the persistence of other bothersome residential restrictions ensured that its Jewish subjects were in the vanguard of mass migration from central Europe.51 Since the Bavarian exodus began earlier than elsewhere, a larger percentage of Bavaria-born residents of Ohio may have fallen outside prime military age by 1861.52 Given their experience in Bavaria, Jewish immigrants from that kingdom may have retained a residual suspicion of state authority, which they carried to the New World. This mistrust may have been greater than among fellow immigrants from Baden, a state relatively more liberal toward Jews. But the evidence is inadequate and contradictory. Some Jewish emigrants from Württemberg in the 1850s, for example, ascribed their departure to a desire to avoid conscription.53 And yet Württembergers, wary of service in the Old World, were among the most eager of Jewish recruits in the New. In reality, Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s may have been less likely to identify with the kingdom or state that they had left than with a particular village or area that they regarded as home. Ultimately, the fact that many Jews in Ohio were Bavarian mattered less than that many Bavarian Jews were in Ohio. As Walter D. Kamphoefner has argued, political allegiance was a reliable predictor of how immigrants, whether in Ohio or New York, responded to the call to arms in 1861 and beyond. “Republican immigrants were more eager recruits to the Union army than were Democrats.”54 Spiegel, a reluctant volunteer from deeply Democratic Holmes County, fits this pattern. Holmes County acted as a bastion of support for Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election (only two other counties in Ohio awarded the Democrat a larger share of the vote) and was even unfriendlier to

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Lincoln four years later (Holmes gave him the lowest share of the vote of all counties in Ohio in 1864).55 Spiegel took an active interest in politics; he and his friends saw a war to preserve the Union as just. Such pro-Union sympathies did not, of course, guarantee enlistment, but they correlated with higher levels of volunteering.56 Spiegel’s views were entangled with those of friends and neighbors in Millersburg and remained so during the war as he continued to read and contribute to the local Democratic newspaper. His loyalty to the Democratic Party was not unusual. Immigrants found good reason to gravitate toward the Democratic Party (though certainly not all did so).57 The party positioned itself on the national level as a protector of immigrant rights and religious minorities in an age when nativism was on the march.58 Though the Republican platform did not share the policies of the defunct American Party, its ranks included former Know-Nothings. Moreover, the crusading language used by the party’s reformist wing stirred unease among Catholics and Jews suspicious that temperance, Sunday closing laws, and abolition were exclusionary Protestant projects targeted against them, and German immigrants were convinced that the call to curtail drinking was nativism by another name.59 For many of those pulled across the Atlantic by the promise of economic opportunity, the Republican ascendance injected unwanted uncertainty into the political and social order. State and local politics occasionally muddled this seemingly straightforward calculus that lined immigrants up in the Democratic column. Then as now, the adage “All politics is local” held true. Immigrants were acutely sensitive to evidence that local and state party officials were flirting with nativists and nativism, and punished such dalliances at the polls.60 In Ohio, for example, some German Americans defected from the Democratic Party in the 1850s because of the strength of a nativist faction within it.61 Further disenchantment ensued when Democrats in Ohio allied with a remnant of the American Party during the 1860 election. This, among other factors, won Lincoln a small plurality of votes in the state in that election.62 Nonetheless there were good reasons to return to the Democratic fold. For one, the Republican Party provided a complicated alternative. Whereas in parts of the state the party made overtures to immigrants, elsewhere local party officials acted in ways that gave pause to immigrants in search of a political home.63 For another thing, local Democratic candidates found eager support among voters who quaked at the prospect of war. In an act of forlorn hope, Cincinnati, a city dependent on Southern markets, elected a Peace Democrat as mayor in the month before the war began, and gave Democrats a virtual monopoly on municipal offices.

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It was not just Cincinnati that leaned Democrat. The party had a decided political edge in three of the five cities where Jews lived in the largest numbers in 1861: Baltimore, with a Jewish population of between five and seven thousand; Cincinnati (seventy-five hundred); and New York City (thirty-five to forty thousand).64 San Francisco (five thousand) and Philadelphia (ten thousand to thirteen thousand five hundred), where Lincoln won a majority of votes in the 1860 election, were exceptions, but this belied significant support for local and state Democratic candidates.65 Given the local Republican Party’s recent dalliance with Know-Nothings, Lincoln was less popular in immigrant wards in the City of Brotherly Love than the percentage suggests.66 Indeed, all of these cities boasted substantial immigrant populations. In New York City more than one of every seven residents were born in the German states and one in four in Ireland. In San Francisco, almost every second resident was foreign born.67 The political dynamic in each city was distinct. In some, such as Baltimore, fear of nativism among Jews weighed more heavily than in others. (Know-Nothings in New York City, by contrast, declaimed “The Jews let us alone,—and we all let them alone.”)68 Baltimore’s location in a border state and its close ties to the South also set it apart from its peers. Jews, like their immigrant neighbors in that city, voted for Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge by a wide margin over Abraham Lincoln in 1860.69 Although Jews in New York City preferred Douglas to Breckinridge, they too had a history, as Howard Rock demonstrated, of voting “predominantly for Democrats within a solidly Democratic city.”70 A lonesome Jewish Republican who stumped for Republican candidates recalled being “subjected . . . to obloquy from and ostracism by acquaintances, my clients, and even members of my own family.”71 Certainly, the “most prominent Jewish leaders” in New York unabashedly expressed their aversion to abolitionists, mouthing “pro-southern, and pro-slavery” views.72 Although one of their own sat on one of the loftiest perches of the Democratic Party—August Belmont headed the Democratic National Committee—Jews had more earthbound reasons to support the party.73 Common to most Jews in these cities was a profound fear of the fraying of the already brittle bonds of union. The Republican Party’s positions on tariffs and slavery—in favor of the first but not the second—threatened to disrupt the flow of credit and commerce that sustained the clothing and dry goods trades, both areas in which a significant share of the Jewish population earned their livelihood.74 Before Fort Sumter rendered the point moot, most Jews (and Democrats) favored political compromise.75

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When war came, Jews, like the majority of their immigrant neighbors in these cities, rallied for the restoration of the Union, albeit not to end slavery. (Spiegel, although he lived in rural Millersburg, was no different in this regard.) Indeed, in Cincinnati racial anxieties soon supplanted economic fears. Growing talk of emancipation in 1862 played upon concerns about competition for work. Agitation in the press spilled onto the streets. Abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s visit in March of that year sparked a public brawl, and race riots roiled the city in July.76 In the congressional elections that followed later that year, Democrats won fourteen out of nineteen districts in the state. Although Clement Vallandigham, the most notorious of Ohio’s Peace Democrats, lost his bid for reelection, his message of radical opposition to the war resonated within the state.77 Among those drawn to his flame was Isaac Mayer Wise, the most prominent Reform rabbi in America. Wise, who had enthusiastically supported Stephen Douglas, was sufficiently taken with Vallandigham’s message to consider running for office as a Peace Democrat. The rabbi chose not to do so only under pressure from his congregation, who in turn were likely responding to invective in pro-Republican newspapers that presented opposition to the war as tantamount to treason. He felt no need, however, to retreat from vituperation about abolitionists and abolitionism, and continued to warn of the encroachment on the liberties enjoyed by Jews.78 Support in Ohio for the Democratic Party ultimately ebbed as economic and military conditions improved. But here too timing mattered. At several moments, crises in the war coincided with episodes that stimulated concerns about nativism, dampening enthusiasm among immigrants at times when enlistment would otherwise be highest. Though the German-speaking population in Ohio did not speak with a single voice on matters of politics, the sheer scale of this group—more than 20 percent of residents of Cincinnati hailed from German-speaking lands—and its internal divisions provided cover and comfort for those with particular reasons to prefer not to enlist.79 The responses of Jews to the war in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and San Francisco spilled beyond the borders of these cities. Jews, no matter where they settled in the United States, maintained ties with fellow landsmen that were reinforced through marriage, business, and sociability. The conspicuous reluctance of the large population of Jews of Bavarian origin to enlist in Cincinnati and Baltimore (another city where a very large share of the Jewish population derived from Bavaria, and where attitudes to the war were conflicted) acted, therefore, as a brake on the enlistment of Jews of Bavarian origin elsewhere. These networks ensured that the (in)actions of the

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MORITZ PINNER: THE “RIGHT MAN IN THE RIGHT PLACE”   Moritz Pinner, like so many Jews stereotyped as gifted with commercial acumen, was appointed by Lincoln a quartermaster, and yet his true gift to the Union cause was not providing clothing, transportation, horses, or forage. His contribution, according to his peers, was ideological. That would seem to make Pinner “the right man in the right place” for Brigadier General Philip Kearny, Jr., entreating Lincoln for Pinner’s appointment. However much Pinner “was bred to this business,” abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips averred, it was his ideas that made him “a jewel.” Pinner was an abolitionist. Abolitionism was his focus and motivated his appearance in the public square, even made him willing to move, in 1858, to Bleeding Kansas to start a bilingual abolitionist English-German newspaper. This last endeavor was both brave, for he was bitterly attacked and threatened, and audacious, for he had been in America only seven years. It was said by his family—German-born, Moritz was the son of a rabbi—that when he arrived in Baltimore in 1851 at the age of 23, it was his being himself a Jew that gave him such empathy for the enslaveds’ bitter fate. He dove, as it were, right off the boat into abolitionism. He wrote about it, worked for it, and joined the newly formed Republican Party, and in 1860 he was one of a handful of Jews to attend the Republican Party Convention in Chicago. Although he supported the staunchly anti-slavery William Seward for the nomination, he was satisfied with Lincoln, telling Wendell Phillips, “I hold that out of Republ[ican] ranks no better man could have been selected. He is opposed to slavery in the abstract, is free in the expression of his sentiments on all subjects, is honest and therefore reliable.” Lincoln, when elected, offered him a diplomatic post, but Pinner wanted to be closer to the fight. As seen in this letter, career soldier Brigadier General Philip Kearney, somehow, came to sing his praises, which Lincoln endorsed, but, rumor has it, not until the secretary of war tried vainly, on procedural grounds, to deny the appointment. Later Pinner left Kearney’s command and lobbied to be placed on the staff of the ardent emancipationist Major General Cassius Marcellus Clay—an appointment that never got off the ground. Pinner, however, was not through contributing to the fight: he had an idea. Noting that the Army, on the whole, lacked both a viable ambulance service and some sort of “chuck wagon” capable of purveying hot rations to the troops, Pinner invented, and patented in 1863, “Pinner’s Ambulance-Kitchen” as a tool, he wrote, to “lessen the sufferings of the wounded on the battle-field. . . . May others prove as diligent in its use as I have endeavored to be in its construction.” This plan, too, did not get off the ground—and Pinner, for reasons unknown, made his way back to visit his German home in 1863. What other ideas he had, postbellum and back in the United States, would seem to have added, or tried to add, to the growing good of the world. Universal suffrage, primary education for all, even a campaign to abolish capital punishment: those were among his causes. And why? In the midst of his do-or-die passion to abolish slavery, he penned what seemed to him the only likely answer. “We are or seem to be nothing,” he said, “but so many tools in the hands of an unknown power, whose existence and consciousness are a mystery to us at last.” National Archives and Records Administration

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Bavarian Jews of Ohio were known to their landsmen in other states. In the same way that the conspicuous patriotism of peers could push a dallying youngster into a newly formed regiment, so too dallying peers could diminish social pressure and provide justification for sitting out the war. The same social forces that persuaded Jews from Baden to enlist acted inversely upon Jews from Bavaria in Ohio and beyond. It was not, however, only Spiegel’s location that explains his ambivalence about enlistment. A further factor seen in his biography influenced who within the Jewish population enlisted in Ohio and elsewhere. Born in Hesse, Marcus Spiegel had been in America for a peripatetic decade by the start of the war. He was following a road already well trodden by Jewish peddlers making lonely circuits along rural byways as they sought to advance, step by step, in their new land. In Ohio, Spiegel met and married Caroline Hamlin, the daughter of a Quaker farmer. By 1860 they were living in Millersburg, the last stop on a branch line railway to Akron, buying wool and selling staples from a warehouse for which they had borrowed heavily to purchase. Though in the early months of the war the press and political leaders clothed enlistment in the lofty language of patriotism and sacrifice, for many immigrants (and others) the earthbound demands of parnassa—earning a livelihood—were more compelling.80 Jews felt the pull of parnassa no less acutely than other immigrants did, but how they typically earned that parnassa set them apart. The general orientation of the community, as in the Old World, was toward commerce. There were regional variations, with a greater representation in the professions and urban working-class occupations in New York and Philadelphia than in the new boomtowns that sprouted in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. But from east to west, many Jews operated small businesses, or worked as clerks and salesmen for those who did. This gravitation toward commercial endeavor and predilection for self-employment had particular implications during wartime. In Cincinnati, a major center of the clothing and dry goods industries, more than 80 percent of Jewish men in 1860 earned their keep in mercantile occupations, as merchants, traders, peddlers, and clerks. Only the last two categories, however, were well represented among recruits. They served alongside a scattering of artisans and laborers. Proprietors, brokers, and traders in the retail and wholesale business, who collectively constituted 60 percent of Jewish workers in the city, were all but absent.81 There is evidence that only a handful of local Jewish merchants enlisted throughout the war. Their number included brothers Nathan and Jacob Menken, members of one of the first Jewish families to settle

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in what was then a small town. Aside from one other set of well-to-do siblings—the Fechheimer brothers, who clerked in their uncle’s substantial clothing business and served collectively for four months at the start of the war—the Menkens stood out for their affluence. Most of their fellow Jewish recruits came from far more modest circumstances. A larger proportion of Jewish recruits who enlisted in Pennsylvania and New York had gritty working-class occupations. They were pipe makers, wallpaper hangers, glaziers, shoemakers, express drivers, and errand boys: artisans, petty traders, and laborers. Cigar makers outnumbered merchants four to one among New Yorkers. The most common occupation among the recruits was clerk. Proprietors of retail and wholesale businesses were poorly represented.82 This pattern of underrepresentation of mercantile occupations and professionals mirrored that among the broader population, and in part reflected the reality that established merchants tended to be older and recruits typically younger.83 But age was at most a contributing factor. Why would merchants, including Jewish ones, have particular reason to stay away from the Union army? Proprietors of small and often marginal businesses may rightfully have feared that the enterprises they operated would flounder, or fail, without their active presence. This was certainly on the mind of Marcus Spiegel in 1861. If no family member could stand in for them behind the counter when they enlisted, proprietors would potentially have to sacrifice everything they had built—their customers, their stores, their credit networks, and their prospects—and start again once the war was over. The decision to stay on the sidelines did not necessarily suggest a lack of support for the Union. But for immigrants pulled to the United States for economic reasons, abandoning hard-won financial self-sufficiency was a high price to pay. And for many involved in commerce, it may have been a price that was impossible to pay. The wholesalers who supplied the goods on credit that stocked many a store may have been forgiving of those who left to enlist with debts and loans unpaid, but there is little reason to believe that they would gladly have forfeited profits for patriotism. The same was true for wholesalers linked to partners, creditors, and customers in a chain of obligations not easily unfastened.84 With more access to ready cash, wholesalers were in a better position to weather the financial storm in 1860 and 1861 than were artisans and laborers and to raise the funds necessary to hire substitutes when conscription arose as a real threat. Geography worked in their favor too; substitutes were more plentiful in urban areas, such as New York and Cincinnati, than in rural communities.85

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A TERRIBLE TOLL FOR THE MICHAELIS FAMILY   Perhaps the most famous Lincoln letter in the world is the one he wrote to Mrs. Bixby in Boston, the mother of “five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.” It has been endlessly published in facsimile and hung in public places and private parlors for generations, and is, without a doubt, the best example of the biggest problem facing manuscript collectors today. The Bixby letter is a forgery. There is blatant evidence of this, but even if the original—said to have been torn up—were at hand, miraculously on the right paper, in the right ink, and with the right folds, it still would not pass as authentic. The handwriting just isn’t Lincoln’s. Yet none of that matters. Fake though it may be, it speaks to a universal truth. Mothers lose sons in war. Some may lose one son, some even two—the unluckiest, more. Minna Michealis had three sons in the Civil War and lost, in a manner of speaking, two and a half of them. Mrs. Michaelis was a typical middle-aged German-Jewish immigrant to the United States but for one exception: three of her sons served the Union cause, two dying in short order and the third returning home “2/3 disabled.” Moritz died of typhoid fever, Charles was killed in action at Antietam, and August died of tuberculosis, fifteen years after being wounded at Antietam and getting discharged for disability. This was not just a tragedy for her boys; it was a disaster for the whole family. The brothers, having been the first to immigrate to the United States, had been sending money back for years to help bring their impoverished family over from Hesse to live, unfortunately, an impoverished life in America. Indeed, so willing, or desperate, were August, Moritz, and Charles Michaelis to reunite their family that, what with bounties and steady paychecks incentivizing enlistment, they volunteered to serve in New York regiments almost three months before the family even arrived. Perhaps that money, which may well have seemed a windfall, was what allowed Minna, her ailing husband, and their eight minor children, upon arriving in July 1861, to immediately settle into a “small brick house” that the boys had rented and furnished for them in Brooklyn. The boys risking, and then giving, their lives as soldiers was, in fact, what kept the family alive in New York. Eventually Minna, as well her husband, received pensions for their dead sons. It wasn’t much: in today’s money, it came to around $3,000 per year per pension, at best. No doubt it helped a little. In the words of the Bixby letter, it seems this is what it meant for Minna, her husband, and their young children “to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” Shown here is Moritz Michaelis’s casualty sheet from his Compiled Military Service Record, noting that Moritz died on August 7, 1862, at Harrison’s Landing. National Archives and Records Administration

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Although typically more reluctant to volunteer, some Jewish wholesale and retail merchants, including Spiegel, did so as a desperate gambit to save enterprises stalked by debtors. The secession crisis, following so soon after the economic panic of 1857, left many proprietors at the edge of despair. Bavarian-born Julius Ochs was typical in preferring to remember that it “was a sacrifice to leave my affairs to enter the army but I felt the call of country and responded, disregarding my financial interests, which suffered seriously in consequence.” Yet this heroic framing belied his own description of how military service saved his skin. “Business,” the commission merchant recalled of Cincinnati in the spring of 1861, “was at a standstill. . . . I had a wife and two children to support, with no immediate income, and my plight was quite serious. Rent was falling due, money was needed for necessities of life, and none was immediately at hand. I was compelled to dispose of my personal belongings and was dependent on the confidence of my landlord for our house.” In “this emergency, when things were blackest,” raising a company and serving as its captain supplied a lifeline for his foundering fortunes. His patriotism did not preclude pecuniary interest, and vice versa. His term of service—he spent five months “guarding bridges and checking passes” in the state militia—achieved its purpose. Having accumulated enough capital to open a store, he declined two offers to reenlist and then traded on his military connections to do business in Memphis after that city was taken by the Union army. During the Confederate siege of Knoxville he fitted out wagons for a treacherous overland expedition. The drivers were all soldiers from his former command; he accompanied them in captain’s uniform. Such was the demand for the goods he brought to the besieged city that, he recalled, “in a few days [I] was on my way back to Cincinnati with several thousand dollars in cash to purchase new supplies.” As an officer (albeit one on what he described as a very extended furlough) he “readily obtained the privilege” of securing a permit to ferry goods to the city. Over the next four months, he organized four caravans across the mountains to Knoxville and then settled in the city, where the Ochs family began its long association with the newspaper business.86 Despairing in the spring of 1861, he cannot have imagined that military service would not only save his stumbling career but ultimately make it. Instead, for him and many others faced with profound uncertainties in the spring and summer of 1861, volunteering was a desperate shot in the dark. Because of the nature of their economic profile, self-employed Jews, in other words, faced particularly strong disincentives to enlist. They had little reason to hope for an

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outcome of the kind experienced by Julius Ochs, but plenty of reason to expect the opposite. Yes, other immigrants also made economic sacrifices when they marched off to war, but the relatively shallow footprint of Jews in menial occupations, farm labor, and wage labor meant that enlistment was more economically complicated for them as a group than it was for those who swapped a salary from a civilian employer for one distributed by Uncle Sam.87 The healthy presence of Jewish clerks, peddlers, and wage workers among the regimental rolls bore this out. Clerks, who enlisted in good number, were not self-employed, and were probably younger on average than those who had graduated to proprietorship. Those who switched a peddler’s pack for an army haversack exchanged the uncertain rewards of life on the road for the prospect of a handsome bounty and the promise, though rarely fulfilled, of a reliable income.88 Peddlers and petty traders had particular reason to enlist in the early months of the war. In a time of uncertainty, customers were careful with their pennies. Already “barely able to make a living” as a peddler in the coalfields around Carbondale, Pennsylvania, Louis A. Gratz signed up after “business came to standstill.”89 David Zehden, who was only fifteen when he arrived in New York, in May 1861, resorted to peddling when it became clear that there were no other prospects for a new immigrant. “[A]ll my acquaintances,” he wrote in his first letter home, advised me that so long as I still had travel money I should return [home] immediately, for presently is the worst time America has ever experienced. . . . People who have been here for 15 years are unemployed, so my chances of finding work are even less. The only thing I might be if I could learn a trade. In a few weeks, I could perhaps learn to make cigarettes, but I would have to learn for three months and perhaps pay out money for tuition, and how could I pay for food? I have no money to continue with a proper lunch, and I eat almost nothing except white bread, coffee and tea. I now look so emaciated and brown that you would not recognize me.

He preferred to peddle than to enlist despite the entreaties from “[m]any recruiters” who “called on me here to turn me into a soldier but I can’t. It would be useless. By the time I am free again, I would be 21 years old and cannot learn a trade.”90 His prospects had not improved by July 1861—he complained that he “had not earned a single cent” over the previous week and owed money “everywhere, to the baker, the butcher,

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SECOND LIEUTENANT PHILIP HAAS, PHOTOGRAPHER   Of the thousand or so photographers working during the Civil War, about ten of them were Jewish—and enlisted on both sides, roaming the camps and battlefields with their heavy wagonloads of glass, apparatuses, appurtenances, and chemicals. One such photographer was Second Lieutenant Philip Haas, a Dutch-born Jew celebrated as having taken the first known original photo of a U.S. president—a daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams in 1843. Haas was in his early fifties when he enlisted with the First New York Engineers in 1861, detailed to detached service in South Carolina. There he produced a series of photos of ships, batteries, forts, and even—in the words of the Jewish Messenger, “amidst flying shot and shell”—battle itself. Haas’s work was exceptionally clear; for the time, large, at 5 by 8 inches; and convincing proof of his claim to have trained with Daguerre himself in Paris. Haas took this photograph of entrenchments with his partner, Washington Peale, at Fort Wagner, on Morris Island, South Carolina, in 1863. The second photograph is of the U.S. fleet off of Morris Island in the summer of that year. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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my landlady, and all my acquaintances”—and no assistance seemed forthcoming from home.91 Dispirited, he enlisted in August 1861. Money from his parents arrived soon after, but “[u]nfortunately” it “came too late. . . . I had to allow myself to be recruited into the military. . . . I am sorry myself that I am a soldier.”92 Zehden’s experience was not unusual. In Syracuse, New York, a prosperous town where more than half of Jewish men who worked in 1860 earned their keep as itinerant traders, employment dipped sharply for peddlers. These traders, who tended to be newcomers to Syracuse, departed in large numbers, and the boarding houses that depended on their traffic emptied.93 A similar sense of desperation lured a small number of young men from Europe. His prospects dim after the bankruptcy of his family’s business and the death of his father, seventeen-year-old Joseph Pulitzer crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a hundred dollars dangled by a Union recruiter in Hamburg.94 This trend—the relative underrepresentation of proprietors and overrepresentation of wage workers and those in marginal occupations among Jewish enlistees—became more pronounced once the period of rage militaire and acute economic turmoil subsided. The initial war fever, coupled with desperate financial need, overcame the caution of men who more typically held back later in the war. By the fall of 1861 enlistment bounties offered by states, cities, and private organizations began to play an important role in incentivizing enlistment.95 Cash bonuses that added a heavy thumb to the scale for those with humbler prospects weighed more lightly in the minds of self-employed men obliged to balance a one-off windfall against a variety of tangible and intangible economic costs associated with a long period of absence from home and business. Alongside the costs of closing shop to serve in Union uniform, wartime also presented the prospect of profit for those able to stitch those very same uniforms for the Union army. Before the war, Jews clustered in the clothing and dry goods trades. Although only a few within the Jewish community became leading contractors with the Quartermaster Department, there were ample opportunities for storekeepers and wholesalers to begin manufacturing the goods they sold. The scale of wartime demand from an army ravenous for tents, uniforms, and accoutrements to equip its soldiers transformed the position of Jews in the clothing industry.96 Given the inadequacies of the overwhelmed military supply system during the first year of war, enterprising businessmen may have justified their preference for totaling columns to marching in them as aiding the war effort. Whatever their rationalization, to enlist meant losing out on a wartime boom.

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This may in large part explain why relatively few Jewish enlistees in New York had a prior history of involvement in the clothing and dry-goods trades even as those industries provided employment to a large share of the Jewish population in that city. And it is undoubtedly a key factor in explaining the relative reluctance of Jews in Cincinnati to enlist. They lived in a city whose economy depended on access to Southern markets before the war. Political crisis and, then, war throttled this access, driving merchants and manufacturers to despair in 1860 and early 1861. For Jews, the cessation of trade with the South sundered an elaborate ethnic ecosystem that connected wholesalers in the city with the peddlers and retailers in Kentucky and beyond. Much like merchants in New York City, they had ample reason to regret the coming of war. However, their fortunes shifted dramatically when Cincinnati rebounded as a major supply center for the Western Theater. Vast federal outlays sent money coursing through the city’s economy.97 This local boom benefited those who filled contracts for the quartermaster and the commissary general of subsistence, as well as the storekeepers and traders who clothed and fed the burgeoning urban workforce. After a period of famine, it was particularly difficult to forsake this feast of plenty. And in Cincinnati at least, there was little social or political pressure to do so. Tellingly, Lew Wallace, the “Savior of Cincinnati” (and future author of Ben Hur), celebrated the willingness of commercial-minded Cincinnatians to temporarily switch their attention to the business of war in his valedictory address after the “siege” of that city. Paris may have seen something like it in her revolutionary days, but the cities of America never did. Be proud that you have given them an example so splendid. The most commercial of people, you submitted to a total suspension of business, and without a murmur adopted my principle: ‘Citizens for labor, soldiers for battle.’98

Unless the city was under direct threat of Confederate force of arms, business unabashedly came first in Cincinnati. The same proved true for many among that other “most commercial of people.” This chapter has shown us who enlisted—and who did not—and the previous one explained why and when they did so. Next, we will explore what units they typically joined. Here too we will see distinct patterns born of the particular history of Jews in the United States.

3: IN THE C OMPANY OF JEW S In winter quarters in Whiteside, Tennessee, in early 1864, the soldiers of the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry had reason to reflect on the frenzied year just ended. Their initiation into soldiering had been testing. Assigned to the Eleventh Corps in the Army of the Potomac, their first active campaign involved marching and countermarching through miserable slough during General Ambrose Burnside’s ill-conceived winter offensive in January 1863. (“Patriotism has turned into rheumatism,” grumbled Private Friedrich Braeutigam.)1 Three months later, they crossed the Rapidan as part of General Joseph Hooker’s daring strategy to flank Lee’s army in northern Virginia. On May 2, the Eighty-second Illinois was among the regiments camped with Carl Schurz’s Division on the far right of Hooker’s army in the thickets and fields of the Wilderness. In the late afternoon men were cooking supper when waves of Confederates burst from the forest, scattering panicked soldiers and enveloping General Hooker’s right flank. By good fortune, the Eighty-second Illinois was not among the regiments initially overrun. Under immense pressure, it retreated toward Wilderness Church, maintaining order despite Confederates on two sides and stampeding horses and men from routed regiments. Here it joined a precarious defensive line that bought precious time for Hooker’s stunned army. With Colonel Friedrich Hecker and Major Ferdinand Rolshausen wounded, and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Salomon absent because of illness, command of the battered unit fell to Captain Joseph Greenhut.2 After the Union line gave way, the regiment reprised this same holding action at the Buschbeck Line before retreating further. In forty frantic minutes of relentless combat, the Eighty-second Illinois lost 155 men wounded, killed or missing, representing almost 40 percent of its total strength when the day began. Over the next days, the regiment retraced its line of march, returning to the camp where it had begun the campaign the week before with such expectation. Now the

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“many abandoned and empty huts” bereft of comrades and friends rendered the camp ghostly.3 Grisly scenes lingered in the minds of the soldiers. The “dead of both sides were lying around like cut grass,” wrote Private Friedrich Kappelman to his parents a week later, “one without a head, another one with both legs gone, the entrails were hanging out of another man, still another one without his arms.”4 Despite its sacrifices, the Eighty-second Illinois was not spared the taunt of “I fights mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz” that echoed through a punch-drunk Army of the Potomac trying to make sense of the scale of its defeat. Such was the indignation and disillusionment within the regiment that nine officers resigned or transferred after Chancellorsville.5 Lee’s unexpected advance northward cut short the regiment’s convalescence. Shadowing the Army of Northern Virginia as part of Schurz’s Division, the Eighty-second began July 1 in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Breaking camp early, they marched northward. Their step hastened as they heard firing ahead—the first signs of contact between the two armies—and ran the last stretch double-quick through a crossroads town and then into a field beyond. Sweat streaming and breath staccato, they “lay down in the moist earth of what had been a young growth of corn” under fire from Confederate artillery. The regiment held this exposed position into the afternoon until, with Ewell’s Corps flanking them on the right, the Federal line was pushed backward.6 In command of the Eighty-second and a sister regiment—Hecker had not recovered from a leg wound received at Chancellorsville—Salomon reported how he received orders to cover an increasingly chaotic withdrawal as Union regiments streamed toward the town.7 These two regiments were the last to enter the town in which the greatest confusion reigned. Artillery, ammunition wagons, ambulances, provision trains, disorganized troops, wounded soldiers carried along by the ambulance corps thronged the narrow streets of the town. The retreat became a rout. My two regiments drove the men forward.8

The Eighty-second Illinois “suffered most severely,” recalled Joseph Greenhut. Seventy-six men were captured in the chaos. The remnants of the regiment rallied on a gentle hill beyond the town. Exhausted men scrambled for shelter amid the stragglers and wounded from an army in disarray. Astride his horse, Salomon was a conspicuous target. A fusillade knocked him down.

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“We all thought he had been killed,” recalled George Heinzmann. Instead, he extricated himself from under his horse. He walked towards our Regiment, leaning on his sword, when I saw him drop to the ground. There was considerable firing at the time. I jumped over the wall with several of my men. We rescued the Colonel and carried him to Cemetery Hill, where he fainted and was attended to by our surgeon. After two or three hours he joined the Regiment again and assumed command . . . during the fight he had several hemorrhages, spitting a great deal of blood. . . .9

So ended the Eighty-second Illinois’s first day at Gettysburg. Aside from a frenzied nighttime engagement on Culp’s Hill and a sortie to clear sharpshooters, the regiment remained in position for the two days that followed. When it left the field at the end of the battle, the air suffused with an “insufferable” odor, the regiment’s ranks had been further thinned of 112 men, those who were wounded, killed, captured, or missing.10 But there was little time for rest. Now barely two hundred strong, the soldiers marched in pursuit of Lee’s army “[w]ithout shoes, malnourished, battle fatigued and soaked daily by rain,” covering an average of thirty miles a day until reaching Warrenton Junction in northern Virginia almost three weeks later.11 The regiment was transported westward in late September. Although its role in the battles that relieved the siege of Chattanooga was minor, by the end of the year the regiment was in dire need of rest.12 Brigaded with the Forty-fifth New York Infantry and the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Infantry, the Eighty-second Illinois waited out the winter months close to the Georgia border. The regiment had reason to start 1864 with confidence. Battle-hardened, they had proved themselves under the most trying circumstances. They were well led. Edward Salomon, less volatile than Friedrich Hecker, assumed command when the troublesome “Old Man” resigned in mid-March 1864.13 Even his detractors within the regiment begrudgingly recognized Salomon’s brave and able leadership. Over the year ahead—in the Atlanta campaign, on the March to the Sea, and in the Carolinas—the Eighty-second embellished its reputation as a fighting regiment, including small but important roles at Resaca, Georgia, and Bentonville, North Carolina.14 However, this was not how the regiment was regarded by some of those with whom it wintered in Whiteside at the end of its first tumultuous year in the field. On May 1,

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Sergeant Carl Wickesberg of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin wrote to his parents of his relief that his regiment had finally left what he described as the “Jewish brigade.” We “now have able and fit regiments on our side that can be depended on.”15 His choice of epithet was revealing. In reality, only a handful of Jews—probably four in total—served in the Forty-fifth New York in early 1864; the most senior was a quartermaster sergeant. Raised in New York City, perhaps it carried a whiff of cosmopolitanism with it.16 The Eighty-second Illinois included a larger contingent—eighteen when it went into winter quarters— but Jews composed but a fraction of its much-reduced complement.17 The regiment had more Swiss soldiers than it did Jews, as well as more Scandinavians and Germans. Captains Joseph Greenhut and Mayer Frank had resigned by the time Wickesberg passed his judgment, leaving Lieutenant Colonel Salomon and Second Lieutenant William Loeb as the only Jews among the officers. Neither the chaplain (Emanuel Reichhelm) nor the sutler (Gustavus Woydechowsky) was Jewish. Why then did Sergeant Wickesberg regard the Eighty-second Illinois as a Jewish regiment? He was not the only observer, then and since, muddled as to its composition.18 It was not just because, in his wisdom, Wickesberg imagined that a regiment with a Salomon in its upper reaches must be Jewish. Instead, the press reports that trumpeted the formation of the regiment in distant August 1862 may have provided the original cause of the confusion. There was little that was newsworthy in the core of German, Scandinavian, and Swiss immigrants recruited to the embryonic regiment in Chicago, Peoria, Bloomington, and Highland over the summer of 1862.19 But there was greater novelty in the public efforts of a group of Jews eager to assist. The Chicago Tribune, careless with its language, credited them with wanting to “raise a company of Israelites for the war.” Picking up on this report, newspapers reprinted the news of an “Israelite company” across the Union.20 The White Cloud Kansas Chief was not alone in exulting at the news of “the modern Jews going forth like their glorious old fathers to smite the uncircumcised Philistines, hip and thigh.”21 The Sacramento Bee regarded it as portentous that Jews—a “class of citizens” that “seldom” exhibit “fighting qualities” (“In that regard they, as a general thing, are Quakers”)—had “take[n] the Field.”22 And in Wisconsin, the Appleton Motor, racing ahead of the news, reported that the “Israelites of Chicago” had “already raised a company of volunteers composed exclusively of the ‘chosen people,’ without a Gentile among them.”23

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Such reporting would have been news to the group of Jewish men who met in Chicago in mid-August 1862. The actual resolutions they passed made it clear that the “Jewish company” was to be sponsored by the Jewish community rather than filled exclusively by Jews. Pledging to raise $10,000 for “immediately recruiting and organizing” the unit—they raised $6,200 within ten minutes—intended to open a recruiting office and offer “a bounty of $100 . . . to any man who will enlist.” Unsurprisingly, Chicago’s wellto-do Jewish merchants, manufacturers, and bankers were the most generous donors. Tellingly, their program made no mention of recruiting Jews.24 Indeed, the very notion of an exclusively Jewish unit was anathema to the organizers of the meeting. Concerned about being portrayed as a people apart, they declared that this was the “first time” that they had met together “to act upon any public matter.” In case the implication was opaque, they disclaimed “toward each other any and all relation aside on one common religious belief, except such as should exist among citizens” and insisted that “the Israelite is untrammeled and free to act for himself, and does exercise his individual judgment and discretion.”25 Such language made clear what they sought to avoid: nativists claimed that immigrants, particularly Catholics, illiberally and mindlessly marched in lockstep. In supporting a “Jewish company,” the meeting organizers instead walked a fine line between demonstrating patriotism and extoling ethnic particularity. The former reinforced the message that Jews were thoroughly integrated into American society whereas the latter risked the opposite. Hence the name adopted for the unit. The Concordia Guards—named for a newly formed Jewish social and civic club, and later designated as Company C—betrayed not a hint of ethnic exclusivity, but bespoke the harmonious social acceptance that was on the minds of its sponsors. The involvement of Friedrich Hecker, a leader of the uprisings in Baden in 1848, as putative colonel of the new regiment was symbolically important to the Jews of Chicago.26 At a recruitment rally he was credited with supporting the extension of full political rights to Jews in Baden, and he rhetorically linked a war against slavery to the urgency of emancipating Jews in central Europe.27 (Hecker, liberal in his attitudes to Jews, was unabashed in expressing very different views about the Irish. “One of Hecker’s favorite ideas,” recorded his confidant Emil Frey, “is the extermination of the Irish.”28 He felt little better about Catholics in general.) The regiment was to fly the flag symbolically and literally for the Jews of Chicago. A group of Jewish women donated the regimental flag, and Company C was designated as the color guard.29 In reality, fifteen Jews—including

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its captain and a first lieutenant—counted among the ninety-four men who volunteered for the Concordia Guards. In all, twenty-three Jews enlisted in a regiment that mustered 956 men.30 The Jewish volunteers reflected a mix of occupations, with as many clerks, bookkeepers, and storekeepers as laborers, butchers, and barbers. The rest of the regiment, by contrast, skewed toward farmers, laborers, and skilled craftsmen.31 Although the formation of the Concordia Guards was clearly intended to display Jewish patriotism to best effect, the timing of the initiative revealed another, less flattering motivation. As William Marvel has demonstrated, “all hell broke loose” in August 1862 when the War Department announced that states were expected to provide additional recruits to fill the depleted ranks of the Union army. Such calls came with the threat of compulsory service. Agitated citizens organized a flurry of meetings that were ostensibly about rallying recruits, but more often were about fundraising. The affluent in particular rushed to fill recruitment quotas with those more easily enticed by bounties, thereby sparing themselves the sword of Damocles.32 In Chicago, the Concordia Guards were in good company. A variety of private organizations and businesses, including the Board of Trade and the Young Men’s Christian Association, rushed to sponsor units.33 There was little apparent shame in deferring duty in this way. Those who donated funds to the Concordia Guards were listed by name, and the Tribune celebrated the patriotism and generosity of Jews. A similar mix of motives spurred parallel initiatives in New York. In Syracuse, Jews raised men and money in late August 1862 for what became Company A of the 149th New York Infantry.34 At a meeting at the Mulberry Street synagogue, more than a hundred Jewish men pledged $2,260 toward bounties.35 The sanctuary filled over the few next nights for a recruitment drive, with the rabbi and others preaching patriotism to an ecumenical audience. Twenty Jewish men joined Company A, including Captain Solomon Light and First Lieutenant Samuel Bronner.36 As in Chicago, the “Jewish Ladies of Syracuse” presented the regiment with the flag that it flew at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Lookout Mountain, Resaca, New Hope Church, and other battles.37 In New York City, by contrast, calls to underwrite a regiment advanced no further than the letter and editorial columns of the Jewish press.38 Even though less than a third of their complement were Jewish, Company A of the 149th New York and Company C of the Eighty-second Illinois were the closest that Jews came to forming identifiably ethnic units during the war. Bertram Korn credits

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the dearth of such units to a “reluctance to form Jewish enclaves in the army” born of a desire to avoid “unnecessary segregation.”39 Certainly the careful locution of the sponsors of the Eighty-second Illinois suggests that this was on their minds. But the limited interest in forming Jewish units bespoke deeper issues described in the previous chapter. Jews walked a tightrope between acceptance and rejection in Chicago, Syracuse, and elsewhere. In sponsoring specific units, they acted like a separate group even as they publicly rejected the concept. They wanted to appear patriotic—and indeed, were so—but were, in many cases, reluctant or unable to enlist. For them, the cauldron of pressures and emotions that bubbled on the home front must have been frustrating and frightening. Their position was not made easier by the smallness of their numbers and the lack of direction from Jewish leaders and organizations. Within the Irish and German communities, the formation of ethnic units drew upon the ambitions of ethnic leaders who understood that governors of Northern states and President Lincoln were responsive to ethnic mobilization.40 Instead, key Jewish leaders mustered little enthusiasm for the war in public, and less in private. The absence of ethnic units, in turn, denied the Jewish community symbols to rally around and reinforced a dynamic that reduced public and peer pressure to volunteer. The overall effect tended to suppress enlistment. Even if every Jew who served in an Illinois regiment during the war was corralled into a single company, that unit would not be filled to capacity.41 The persistence of the myth of the Jewish unit—Company C of the Eighty-second Illinois and Company A of the 149th New York are still routinely identified as Jewish—has reinforced a misapprehension about the characteristic experience of Jews in the Union army. Serving under a Jewish officer, and within a densely knotted cluster of fellow Jewish soldiers, was not the norm for the vast majority of Jews who wore the Union uniform. In reality, only a small minority of Jews served in units with sizable numbers of other Jews. In all, Jews served in at least 293 regiments. Less than twenty-five of these included ten or more Jews, and only ten regiments counted more than twenty Jewish soldiers.42 Even in these units—typically raised in urban areas—there was only the lightest sprinkling of Jewish officers. The dominant pattern, in other words, was of dispersion, and the characteristic experience that of isolation from other Jews. At least half of all Jewish soldiers spent part or the whole of their time in uniform in a regiment that had five or fewer Jews, not to mention in their company or squad. One in five served in regiments where they were the

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A FLAG PRESENTED “BY THE JEWISH LADIES OF SYRACUSE”   What military tactics of the Napoleonic Wars had to do with an 1862 Jewish temple sisterhood sewing circle may not seem immediately clear, but the line between them was, literally, straight. Civil War battlefield tactics initially dictated that, just like Wellington’s redcoats, soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder in ordered lines, two or three deep, and then, firing in volleys, immediately shroud the battlefield in low-lying smoke. This meant, of course, that no one could see, or hear, amid the choking smoke and deafening noise, exactly where his company was holding or headed. There was, then, a vital need for very large and brightly colored flags, which were hoisted on staffs about nine feet long and held high by the regimental color-bearers. These regimental “colors,” the only things visible above the fog of war, came in sets of two: the Stars and Stripes, provided by the Quartermaster Corps, and the regimental flag, supplied by whomever. Some were ordered at Tiffany’s, and others were sewn by women from the areas where units were initially raised—or, as such places are commonly called, back home. Enter, then, the ladies of the Temple Concord in Syracuse. With $200 and hearts full of love for the soldiers of the 149th’s (partly) Jewish Company A, they produced for the regiment, in the words of the congregation’s rabbi, “a token of the true patriotism and love of country which inspires not only the ladies but every one of Abraham’s children. . . .” The blue silk regimental colors included the arms of the United States on one side, and the arms of the state of New York on the other. Both sides read “Presented to 149th Reg’t N.Y.S.V. by the JEWISH LADIES of SYRACUSE, N.Y. Sep. 1862.” New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center

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sole Jew or where there was one other Jewish soldier.43 These patterns prevailed among immigrants as well as those born in America.44 Underlying this pattern was the geographical distribution of Jews in the antebellum United States. As we have seen, a web of peddlers, storekeepers, and clerks were spread across rural America, anchored by communities in larger urban centers. Given their modest numbers, this meant that rural Jews were much less likely than Scandinavians, non-Jewish Germans, and the Irish to find pockets of kinsmen and landsmen when they joined regiments raised outside of large cities. Marcus Spiegel, the storekeeper from rural Millersburg, Ohio, for example, was the only Jew whom we know of in the Sixty-seventh Ohio Infantry. Spiegel’s lonesome experience was more typical than that of Edward Salomon, who spent the war in the company of Jews who volunteered in Chicago. Although they did not form ethnic units, Jews, particularly those in urban areas, did exhibit preferences for the type of regiments they joined. Unsurprisingly, Jews from central Europe who in lived in cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis favored “German” infantry regiments like the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, Forty-first New York Infantry, Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry, and Thirty-second Indiana Infantry. (In reality, “German” regiments attracted a mix of immigrants, not all of whom were from the German Confederation.) Those who lived away from these larger centers often had less choice when they enlisted. But they too often found themselves serving alongside fellow immigrants, shoehorned into one or two companies that acted as de facto enclaves.45 This was true also of urban units. In the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, raised in Philadelphia, Company B was known as the “Dutch Company.” When a small group of Germans mustered into Company C, the captain of that unit made it clear that he “did not want the men as there were no other Germans in the Company,” and indicated that the men also preferred to be among their own.46 Native-born Jews, by contrast, were far less inclined to join ethnic units, even when those contained substantial numbers of Jewish immigrants. Jews who sought out “German” regiments did so for the same reasons as other immigrants. They too saw the advantages of serving alongside—and under—those with whom they felt an affinity, spoke a familiar language, and shared social and cultural habits. They too preferred that their accents and imperfect English not be held against them. They too were mobilized by a sense of common cause, collective pride, and jingoism.47 And they too were aided by a system of recruiting that enabled neighbors, friends, and

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kin to enlist together and then serve side by side within the same unit. It is less clear whether they were attracted to German units because of a particular sense of pride in a shared German identity. As already described, before emigration Jews from central Europe were not necessarily immersed in German culture and did not all speak High German. Before and after crossing the Atlantic they were unlikely to think of themselves primarily as German. In the United States they tended to participate in Jewish social, cultural, and fraternal organizations rather than in the German-immigrant equivalents. And their sense of connection with their German origins was weaker than their sense of attachment to German Kultur. Yet there were always exceptions. Many Jews sought fellowship and common cause with their fellow immigrants.48 Localized recruitment produced a lattice of relationships within and between regiments. Cousins James Monroe Cromelien and Alfred Cromelien served in the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, the former as a lieutenant. James’s commanding officer, Colonel Max Friedman, was also his brother-in-law.49 Washington Cromelien, Alfred and James’s uncle, enlisted in the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania, a regiment that was raised in Philadelphia. Father and son Henry and Maximillian Heller enlisted in that same regiment as surgeon and assistant surgeon in May 1861. Maximillian assumed the more senior role after his father resigned later that year. In the Sixty-sixth New York, an infantry regiment with a large contingent of Jews—at least thirty-three in all—the three Wenk brothers served together in Company K and the Feder and Pincus brothers in Company C.50 In the 149th New York Infantry, Lewis Light served under his brother Solomon. Likewise, in the Thirty-ninth New York Infantry, Carl von Utassy and Anthony d’Utassy were officers in a regiment commanded by their brother Frederick d’Utassy. In the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, Joseph Greenhut took orders from his brother-in-law Edward Salomon.51 The five Ulman brothers all volunteered for Pennsylvania regiments, two serving briefly in the same unit. These are but a few examples of a broader phenomenon. At least 105 sets of Jewish siblings enlisted in the Union army. (We know of ten families where siblings served on opposite sides during the conflict, giving credence to the claim that this was a war that pitted brother against brother.)52 Regiments raised early in the war drew upon the enthusiasm of the cultural societies, fraternal lodges, and sporting clubs that sprouted wherever immigrants settled. Prewar membership of turnvereins, for example, provided entrée and impetus to join regiments raised from these popular (and typically liberal) German athletic fraternities. In New

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THE FIFTH PENNSYLVANIA CAVALRY, COLONEL MAX FRIEDMAN COMMANDING   Max Friedman, the colonel of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, married a Miss Cromelien in 1849. Come the war, three more Cromeliens served under him, as officers. Friedman had in fact raised an entire regiment of twelve hundred men, including Jewish men to whom he was related, whom he knew from his synagogue, and whom he knew in business. A handful became officers. Perhaps because of such nepotism, the “Cameron Dragoons” had a perennial air of corruption, yet it is forever distinguished as having chosen a Jew, Michael Allen, to serve as its chaplain. This was a first in American history. A recruitment poster from 1861 is shown here alongside a certification of the August 10, 1861, enlistment of a soldier in Company G of the Sixty-fifth Regiment, under Friedman’s command. The Shapell Manuscript Collection (above) David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University (opposite)

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York City fifteen Jews signed up with the Twentieth New York Infantry (the “Turner Rifles”).53 Other regiments with a strong ethnic character were the outgrowths of prewar voluntary military formations. Such was the case with the 550-strong Sixth New York State Militia regiment, activated for Union service after Lincoln “call[ed] forth, the militia of the several States of the Union” on April 15, 1861. With at least seventy-four Jews, the majority of whom were immigrants from the German states, it contained the largest Jewish contingent of any regiment, albeit dispersed across several companies. Their presence was a legacy of their involvement in the prewar militia. By one estimate, two-thirds of all militiamen in New York City were German immigrants in 1860.54 (In Cincinnati, by contrast, the prewar militia had a reputation as being less welcoming of Jews.)55 Time sociably spent in the drill room and at an annual parade provided but poor preparation for the war to come. The Sixth New York State Militia departed for Washington with much fanfare, armed with antiquated Ward muskets, for what turned out to be three dull months of guard duty. They were relieved a week after the First Battle of Bull Run was fought and lost. Only twelve Jews reenlisted for three-year regiments, six of whom joined the Sixty-sixth New York Infantry, the linear descendant of their militia unit.56 The Jewish veterans of the Sixth New York State Militia had a markedly different occupational profile from the Jews who later joined the Sixty-sixth New York. The prewar militia regiment, which had offered the thrill of playing soldier in peacetime, enticed young men from the professional and mercantile fields. The Sixty-sixth, by contrast, was stocked with cigar makers, tailors, carpenters, butchers, and clerks scrambling for work. This dynamic was typical, with many of the short-timers who signed up in the first flush of enthusiasm falling away after three months of service. This was true, too, for several of those who started the war as officers. Though few Jews held rank in the prewar militia, a small number parlayed that experience into commissions. Prior military service was a scarce currency in the first months of the war. A regiment with an experienced officer at its head conferred confidence on prospective recruits and on the politicians thrust into the role of overseeing the rushed mobilization of tens of thousands of men. For Jews, too, prior military service, whether in the militia or in a European army, supplied handy coin when seeking recruits and a commission. Max Einstein and Max Friedman both traded on the senior rank they held in the Pennsylvania Militia, as well as their connections with Simon Cameron—the Pennsylvania politician turned secretary of war—as they scrambled to form regiments

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in Philadelphia in April and May 1861. Friedman, a major in the militia, ultimately became colonel of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, and Einstein, a brigadier general in the militia, the colonel of the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry.57 The latter regiment attracted one of the larger contingents of Jewish soldiers; at least forty-four served in the unit, spread across several companies. Other veterans of European armies also secured commissions, but had less success in mobilizing fellow Jews. Max Thoman, who enlisted as a captain in the Fifty-ninth New York Infantry, touted his record as a soldier of fortune in Europe and Central America.58 (Perhaps with Thoman in mind, the Jewish Messenger excitedly reported the “existence of . . . military adventurers among our people.”)59 The small group of Jews who enlisted in the regiment may have been more impressed by Philip Joachimsen, a prominent lawyer and communal worthy who briefly served as lieutenant colonel. Leopold Blumenberg, who enlisted as a captain in the Fifth Maryland Infantry and won promotion within two weeks to major, had served in the Prussian military and enjoyed local prestige in Baltimore as a prominent Turner and leader of a recreational shooting club. Though very few Jews volunteered in Maryland, a significant portion of those who did chose to serve in Blumenberg’s regiment. Jones Frankle, another veteran of the Prussian military who was commissioned as a major, was the sole Jew in the Seventeenthth Massachusetts.60 All these men were unusual in having strong social and political connections within broader society that speeded their ascent once the war began. Civilians and state governments charged with filling regiments in the early months of the war were impressed by those who mustered the mien of grizzled veterans, but were ill equipped to assess their credentials.61 More than a few of those who cloaked themselves in the glory of far-off imperial conflicts were exposed once in command. Likewise, several high-profile Forty-Eighters who had participated in the uprisings in central Europe in 1848 and 1849 were also shown up. The swift, small-scale, and sporadic character of much of that conflict proved poor preparation for combat during the Civil War.62 Colonel Frederick d’Utassy, who formed the Thirty-ninth New York Infantry (the “Garibaldi Guard”) and sought to fill each company with a different immigrant group, represented himself as a Hungarian aristocrat “bred to the profession” of soldiering, as a master swordsman who had trained in the Austrian military academy and fought in every major engagement of the Hungarian revolutionary war, and as an exiled patriot who had “presented his entire fortune to his impoverished and distressed Hungary.”63

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The reputation of his flamboyantly outfitted regiment—one veteran conceded that the unusual mélange of styles incorporated into the uniform “might not have been congruous, but it was conquering”—collapsed as quickly as it had risen.64 D’Utassy offered a doughtier defense when rumors soon began to spread that he was a Potemkin princeling. The seeming outrageousness of the accusation—the dashing aristocrat, detractors whispered, was really a Hungarian Jew who formerly earned his living as a clothing dealer or horse trader in Pressburg—rendered it less plausible, and demonstrated, in the eyes of his allies, that his enemies would “stop at nothing to injure [his] good name.”65 Rumors of financial impropriety were less easy to shake. D’Utassy was ultimately undone by his skill at making enemies of his own officers; several ultimately testified against him. After two years as colonel of the Garibaldi Guard, he was obliged to swap his Union uniform for that of prisoner at Sing Sing. His grandest fraud, however, remained intact. For Frederick d’Utassy really was David Strasser, whose contributions to the revolutionary cause amounted to selling horses to the quartermaster and serving as a clerk in the Hungarian military.66 Though the general press was more disbelieving, Isaac Mayer Wise confirmed Strasser to be a Jew in his newspaper in October 1861. Wise listed Strasser alongside Max Friedman of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry and Max Einstein of the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry as the most senior Jewish officers in the Union army.67 At least twenty-one Jews joined the Thirty-ninth New York Infantry; less clear is whether they felt any affinity with d’Utassy as a Jew, or even knew of his secret identity.68 War also found out Friedman and Einstein. The former ended his military career in prison too, albeit without a proper trial, after questions were raised about the recruitment and outfitting of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry. Unbeknownst to Isaac Mayer Wise, Max Einstein had already been discharged from the army by the time the rabbi printed the newspaper article. In the late summer of 1861, d’Utassy’s and Einstein’s regiments were brigaded together under the command of Colonel (and soon to be Brigadier General) Louis (Ludwig) Blenker. Einstein and his officers voiced unhappiness with the arrangement, petitioning General George B. McClellan about the quantity and quality of their bread (not dark enough), the poor quality of their coffee (“highly injurious to the health of the men”), the partiality and distrustfulness of their brigade commander, and their inability to get along with d’Utassy’s New York regiment (“rivalry existing between the Regiments from Pennsylvania and New York makes it almost impossible for us to

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harmonia [sic]”).69 Unsurprisingly, none of this sat well with Blenker, who had prior reason to distrust Einstein. Blenker’s report on the First Battle of Bull Run accused Einstein of absenting himself from his unit. The prominent Forty-Eighter dispatched a letter of his own to McClellan describing “the reduced and undisciplined state of the 27th Regiment,” and urging that “the yet remaining incompetent officers (and there are many)” be discharged. If this “reorganization” did not take place, he asked to “separate this Regiment entirely from my Brigade.”70 The commander of the Army of the Potomac sided with Blenker, concluding damningly that Einstein was “in no respects fit to be a colonel.”71 Einstein was soon out of the army.72 Much as the rush to arms unleashed a flood of opportunism and fraud among those who sought to supply the army with muskets, tents, uniforms, and all the other (lucrative) matériel of war, so too urgency advanced those who could claim military credentials. War had a habit of revealing the deficiencies of even the best-trained men. Squadrons of adventurers, opportunists, charlatans, and men of indifferent ability burst on the scene in a blaze of glory, only to slink off disgraced and deflated. All three of the first Jewish colonels—d’Utassy, Friedman, and Einstein—sought advancement, eminence, and glory but instead achieved ignominy. By contrast, some who began the war more modestly fared better. Marcus Spiegel and Edward Salomon, who mustered in as lieutenants, both proved themselves in the field and rose to command regiments. Salomon, not quite twenty-five when he first enlisted, was born into a well-to-do family in the Duchy of Schleswig. He had been in America for a little over six years, mostly in Chicago, when he volunteered. He started in that city as a bookkeeper and clerk in a hat store, then apprenticed as a lawyer. He won election as an alderman in the same month that the war began.73 Salomon joined the Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry in June 1861 as a lieutenant. That unit, and later the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, were initially commanded by Friedrich Hecker.74 Hecker provided a rallying point for volunteers from central Europe eager to serve under a famous colonel. The unit, however, was troubled from the start. Hecker complained of an excess of aspirant officers—he oversaw “officers in great numbers, but few privates”—and trouble controlling those who wore straps upon their shoulders, despite (and probably because of) his famous facility with English and German profanities and his manner as a martinet. Edward Salomon became one of Hecker’s favorites. When Hecker discharged several officers because of his suspicion that they were conspiring against him, Salomon began a meteoric rise that

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THE BROTHERS D’UTASSY   Fraud, though rarely accorded the respect of virtue, nonetheless has a place—at least in war. It is, however, best practiced on one’s enemies, and not on one’s brothers-in-arms. Take, for instance, the Hungarian count Frederick George d’Utassy. Everything about him was remarkable. In the United States but a year, he raised a whole regiment to fight in the war. Splashier still, it comprised immigrants (almost) like himself: the polyglot Thirty-ninth New York Infantry Regiment had German, Hungarian, Swiss, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese companies. Named by d’Utassy the “Garibaldi Guards,” they wore resplendent uniforms. As its colonel, d’Utassy was hot tempered and, perhaps befitting his aristocratic background, rather a martinet: his discipline was severe. The troops disliked him. Nor did he enjoy the approbation of his fellow officers. In refusing to accept orders written in German and, reputedly, by ordering officers to sit for English proficiency exams, he offended his superiors and subordinates alike. They soon enough suspected him of myriad perfidies; some, in disdain, labeled him a Jew. But d’Utassy wasn’t, realistically speaking, a Jew. He wasn’t, realistically speaking, anything, save the marvelous invention of a very gifted impostor, David (or in some sources, Frederick George) Strasser. Strasser, in the guise of “Count d’Utassy,” fled Hungary for Canada in 1855, and passed himself off as an ex-Austrian officer impoverished by fighting in the Hungarian revolution of 1848. He worked as a dancing master, fencing master, professor of foreign languages (he spoke about twelve), and even, perhaps, as secretary to the governor of Halifax. Above all, though, he was an expert horseman—as was, back in the day, David Strasser. Whether Strasser was previously a pawnbroker, secondhand clothing merchant, clerk in the Austrian army, or a trick rider in the circus, he was, indubitably, three things: a knowledgeable purveyor of horseflesh, a Jew, and a brilliant fraud. By 1860, d’Utassy had arrived in New York, there to mine glory. But old habits die hard. As colonel, he was court-martialed and found guilty of multifarious crimes, serving a year in Sing Sing. Upon release, he promoted himself to general. “General d’Utassy” then entered commercial life, graced it, and ended up a very successful insurance broker. Less definite was his death by gas asphyxiation in a hotel room. Accident, suicide, or something else, it was, like so much about him, unfathomable. Frederick George d’Utassy is here pictured on the right; on the left is his brother Carl, who took on the surname “von Utassy” and served as a first lieutenant under his brother. A third brother, Anthony D’Utassy, also served in the regiment as captain. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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left him wearing the gold oak leaves of a major by September. He was demoted to his original rank just as quickly. After Hecker’s detractors gained the upper hand, Salomon and other officers, including their colonel, resigned in December 1861.75 We know little of what occupied Salomon after he returned to Chicago. The exception was an incident reported on in the press that speaks to his political views and personal bravery. In July 1862, Salomon and a police officer intervened on behalf of W. E. Walker, an African American man who was set upon by a bus driver. After Walker boarded a bus, the driver screamed racist abuse at him and demanded that he disembark. When Walker refused, the driver entered the carriage and assaulted him. Walker pinned down his assailant. Salomon and a police officer intervened to escort Walker through a gathering (and potentially menacing) crowd.76 Salomon’s military career was reborn nine months after leaving the army. Hecker, who had spent much of the intervening time brooding upon his farm, won appointment as colonel of the newly formed Eighty-second Illinois Infantry. Salomon became his second-in-command. Other senior positions went to those who had demonstrated loyalty to Hecker during their ill-starred service in the Twenty-fourth Illinois. Salomon earned his new rank in a manner typical of appointments in new regiments. The Eighty-second Illinois was a composite of companies formed by ambitious men who were rewarded with commissions. As we have seen, Chicago’s Jews provided the financing to recruit and equip Company C, including considerably higher bounties paid to recruits than other companies within the regiment.77 Adroit at recruiting and unwavering in his loyalty to Hecker, the lieutenant colonelcy was Salomon’s prize.78 As we will see in the next chapter, even Salomon’s fiercest critics in the regiment recognized his courage and competence. This included an ability to manage the internal diversity of the regiment, perhaps honed by his chastening tenure in the Twenty-fourth Illinois.79 That experience was not unusual for the jury-rigged regiments formed in the frantic first months of the war. Irish and Germans who had been encouraged to enlist en masse by their communities expected to be led by officers from these same communities, and smarted when they were not. Frederick d’Utassy proved incapable of managing the expectations of his officers and soldiers. Likewise, Max Einstein proved better at the horse trading in Harrisburg required to form the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania than at managing the tensions between the immigrants and natives who filled its ranks.80 His officers were either too German or insufficiently so. Benjamin Goodman, a sergeant in Company B,

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complained of being denied a commission because a German “who cannot talk a word of English” received preferment, as did another “with a broken leg.”81 Captain Henry Florsheim resigned the command of Company A because “I, as a German, cannot command an Irish company.”82 His Germanness, and not his Jewishness, was at fault, although the latter, if known, may have exaggerated his deficiency in the eyes of his men. Such friction was no small matter in an army where at least one in four was an immigrant.83 Tellingly, Salomon remained a lieutenant colonel from the day he mustered into the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry until the end of the war, in spite of his sterling record on the battlefield and his command of the regiment following Hecker’s resignation.84 His inability to win the coveted silver eagle of a colonel was not helped by the limited influence of the Jewish community on the home front and their tepid response to the war. Though Salomon and other Jewish officers were bestowed with typical gifts—horses, swords, pistols, sashes—by their home communities, they did not receive the persistent public promotion and support essential for advancing their careers.85 Jews lacked the heft on the home front that secured commissions for ethnic champions and defended them against their detractors. The German community, by contrast, rallied behind its heroes, sustaining and advancing the careers of several officers like Franz Sigel when their glorious reputations, built in Europe, came under fire.86 Veterans of dubious provenance like d’Utassy and others of mediocre military talent like Sigel were not the only individuals to spot opportunity in attaching themselves to the Union army. Each regiment was entitled to a sutler, a civilian trader licensed to sell supplies to soldiers in the field. The sutler carried his store in a wagon, setting up shop when the regiment bivouacked. He chose his stock to appeal to the wants of soldiers unable to stomach a monotonous diet or in search of small comforts. Given the sutler’s captive market of soldiers eager to spend their wages, the position could be a lucrative one, but not without risks.87 When the army marched into enemy territory, the slow-moving sutler’s wagon presented a juicy plum for guerrillas and raiding cavalrymen. During pell-mell retreat, the wagon and its stock provided an unwanted encumbrance. Even when safely ensconced in camp, the sutler’s stock was vulnerable to the weather, spoilage (soldiers complained of rancid butter and dysentery brought on by dubious pies), and theft. Many sutlers instead preferred to base themselves well to the rear of the army while regiments were campaigning, returning when the regiment encamped or the paymaster made his infrequent visits.

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HONOR FOR EDWARD SALOMON   German immigrant Edward Salomon began his military career as a second lieutenant and, by dint of his ability and gallantry, rose like a rocket through the ranks, reaching lieutenant colonel in September 1862. Yet he advanced no further despite distinction on the field of battle. (Major General Carl Schurz purportedly described Salomon to Simon Wolf as “the only soldier at Gettysburg who did not dodge when Lee’s guns thundered. He stood up, smoked his cigar and faced the cannon balls with the sang froid of a Saladin.”) Only after the war was Salomon brevetted as a brigadier general. Another honor made its way to Salomon in September 1867. He was presented with two beautiful dueling pistols, engraved with inset silver plates to commemorate the occasion. “Presented to General Edward S. Salomon,” the inscription read. “Declared by the vote of his fellow citizens as the most popular Soldier of Cook County at the Fair of the Chicago Turn Gemeinde in September 1867.” Perhaps, like his brevet as major general, this honor too had the scent of irony: dueling was, and always had been, illegal in Illinois. Salomon, nonetheless, went on to a prominent public career. Named by Grant to be the governor of Washington Territory, he was applauded for his appointment—in some quarters, though, as a kind of recompense, albeit communal and not personal. In the words of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, it showed “that President Grant has revoked General Grant’s notorious order No. 11.” The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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Since the sutler was most often appointed by a regiment’s commanding officer, this provided an enterprising colonel with the opportunity for patronage and profit. Although officers were warned neither to accept gifts from sutlers, nor to turn their authority into a source of income, these directives were often honored in the breach. Two months after mustering in, Marcus Spiegel marveled that sutlers were making “money as sure as the State Railroad of Ohio.”88 Once elevated to a position of command, he maneuvered to have his brother Joseph appointed as regimental sutler. Spiegel anticipated substantial rewards for both siblings: “We will make it pay with the help of God and as soon as it has paid pretty well we will ‘leave the service.’”89 Joseph Spiegel joined the 120th Ohio at Milliken’s Bend, in Louisiana, within fifteen miles of besieged Vicksburg, in March 1863. The Spiegel brothers’ expectations were not disappointed. In his first three days at the camp, Joseph took in $1,500. Marcus wrote exultantly to his wife: Such a rush you never saw. Three of my Lieutenants sold for him all day; the seven hands were as busy as they could be. At night they had to work opening and fixing up. Joseph and [his assistant Aaron] Sinsheimer and Jim dit not get their breakfast yesterday till three o’clock in the afternoon. I am in their tent all I can but you know of course it would not do for me to sell anything; yet I think I am doing him a little good anyhow. He sold every Hat and every pair of Shoes he had at a good profit. If he had known as much as he knows now what was and brought down the Goods, he could have taken $1000 a day for the next two weeks. You have no Idea how popular he is already. Everybody likes him except the other Sutlers.90

Joseph Spiegel soon dispatched Aaron Sinsheimer to Chicago for more supplies. By June the brothers were beginning to plan ahead: “Josey hopes to make about twenty thousand Dollars for him and Sinsheimer, and start a dry goods store [in Chicago] and have [me] go in as a partner.”91 Fate intervened to dash Marcus’s hopes. Joseph’s customers proved more fickle than expected, and on May 3, 1864, both Spiegel brothers were captured when their troop transport was ambushed. Marcus was fatally wounded, and Joseph spent the rest of the war in a Confederate prison camp. Sutlers were unlikely to volunteer their religious identities to their customers, leaving this to the realm of imagination and surmise. As we will see in the next chapter, the sutler was easily imagined to be a Jew because of preexisting associations between Jews

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and commerce—particularly the itinerant trade of wagon-borne peddlers who plied the countryside before the war—as well as a broadly shared sense that Jews and sutlers were rapacious. However, despite perceptions to the contrary, there is little evidence that Jews made up more than a small fraction of all regimental sutlers.92 We know with certainty the names of thirty-four Jewish sutlers spread through the Union army, though there were almost certainly more. One indication of their true numbers comes from ripples created by Grant’s December 1862 order expelling Jews from the vast military department under his command. The general’s headquarters received four telegrams inquiring whether the order applied to sutlers. Two of these requests for clarification were general in nature, and only two related to specific units.93 In the Army of the Tennessee alone, Grant’s order of battle included more than one hundred regiments. In part, the limited number of Jewish sutlers likely reflected a lack of access and connection to those with control over appointments to the position. Joseph Spiegel and Aaron Sinsheimer were unusual in being able to depend upon the protection and patronage of a well-placed (Jewish) regimental officer.94 By contrast, an imagined or real facility with bookkeeping, managing stock, and overseeing supplies may account for the striking representation of Jews among soldiers assigned to commissary and quartermaster roles within their regiments. Certainly, those with backgrounds as clerks and storekeepers were well suited to such roles, but benign prejudice may have played a role too. All this attention to Jewish sutlers, Jewish officers, and “Jewish” units should not reinforce what this chapter has sought to challenge. The presence of the occasional Jewish sutler, officer, and cluster of Jews in the Union army represented the exception rather than the norm. Contrary to Sergeant Carl Wickesberg’s fantasies about the Eighty-second Illinois, in no unit did Jews form a critical mass sufficient to give it a distinct character of the kind found in German, Irish, and other regiments well stocked with landsmen. Instead, Jews rarely found themselves in the company of significant numbers of other Jews. As we will see in the following chapters, these twinned features—the absence of Jewish units within the Union army, and the related pattern of dispersion and isolation of Jewish soldiers—determined how Jews encountered and responded to prejudice, as well as how they sought to create community in the field.

4: FI GHTI NG TOGETHER Joseph A. Joel, who enlisted in the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry in July 1861, felt forever indebted to his commanding officer for saving him from soldiers who bullied him because he was a Jew. Barely eighteen and newly arrived from England, Joel mustered into a unit that drew the majority of its men from two rural counties. “Do you remember,” he wrote in a letter to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1873, when at Fayette [West Virginia] a boy of 18 came to you, and asked you to transfer him from Co[mpany] F to Co[mpany] A, giving as a reason that he was so persecuted by the bigoted class of men it contained (Catholics) those men would steal my rations, mix my coffee Sugar & Tea together and when on a march trip me up, till I thought death would be far preferable. Our Marches, countermarches and other duties were at times burdensome enough without these extra ones. And you “Sir” did the kind act of transferring him, that boy is a man now, but you saved his life, and he lives to day to Bless you for it.1

Joel’s torments, and Hayes’s response, point to several factors that shaped the experience of Jewish soldiers during the war. The composition of units mattered, as did the inclinations of their officers. Whether because of a lack of savvy, lack of choice, or sheer bad luck, Joel found himself in poor company. Company A, raised in Cleveland, was more cosmopolitan in character than Company F. As a very recent immigrant and an Englishman, Joel did not have the support of a network of friends, relatives, or fellow landsmen within the regiment. In Company F, separated from fellow Jews, Joel lacked the backing of those who might rally to his defense, as well as obvious means to organize

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concerted action. Isolated in the midst of a throng of fellow soldiers, he became prey. When Joel responded to his tormentors, he did so alone. Though Joel was particularly vulnerable and his experience unusual, the small size of even the largest clusters of Jewish soldiers within regiments ensured that his isolation was not exceptional. The dispersion of Jews across the army meant that they had many fewer options for countering prejudice than did other immigrant groups that were better represented in the ranks and more vociferously supported by larger communities on the home front.2 When Jewish soldiers responded to discrimination, they almost invariably did so alone. Simultaneously, dispersion spared Jews from the attention directed at ethnic regiments. The Irish and Germans who hoped that conspicuous patriotism would elevate the standing of their communities were instead cruelly taught that the opposite was true. The visibility of Irish and German regiments ultimately intensified rather than ameliorated anti-Irish and anti-German sentiment. By not forming a distinctive cadre within the ranks, Jewish soldiers more easily passed unseen and, for the most part, were spared institutionalized discrimination as well as day-to-day harassment. But at the same time, their isolation made them more vulnerable as individuals, and under more pressure than other immigrant soldiers to mask their ethnic distinctiveness. Outside their immediate units, Jewish soldiers were more likely to encounter overt prejudice as foreigners than as Jews. Outsiders perceived audible cues more readily than religious convictions; accented English betrayed immigrant soldiers more obviously than markers of Jewishness did. Nativists, moreover, did not parse the ethnic provenance of German-speaking soldiers: all soldiers of central European origin became the target of the widespread calumny that they preferred to skedaddle than fight. Because their ethnic belonging proved more difficult to detect and easier to conceal, Jews were in an unusual position compared with other immigrant groups. They could potentially control their visibility, veiling their Jewishness from those around them or retreating into an alternative identity to draw the sting of antisemitism. (No evidence exists of Jews doing the opposite, conspicuously wearing their identities on their sleeves as an outspoken defense.) Mindful of the low repute of Jews within American society and anticipating that military service would immerse them among strangers as never before, Jews employed a variety of strategies to avoid attracting unwanted attention or, at worst, Joel’s misfortune. Some sought to forestall his predicament even before the ink dried on their recruitment contracts. More than one in ten of all known Jewish enlistees adopted an assumed

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name when mustering into the Union army or took on another name at some point during their term of service.3 In most cases, these were innocuous or minor variations, alternating between Lee, Leopold, and Louis, for example, or preferring Morris to Moses.4 But others deliberately changed their names so as to seek refuge in anonymity or mask their identities. (On occasion even minor changes could be strategic. Moses Wasserman, for example, explained “when we were sworn in, I was told they were no Jews in the 71st N[ew] Y[ork] [State] M[ilitia], I gave my name Maurice instead [of] Moses.”)5 Though enlistees adopted aliases for a variety of reasons, some choices suggest a desire to pass unseen. Louis Eppenstein supplied his recruiting officer with the more indistinct “Louis Aver” when he enlisted for a hundred days in the Twentieth New York State Militia in April 1861, and called himself “Louis Eber” when he joined the Forty-sixth New York later that year. He reverted to his real name when he was discharged from the army. Samuel Greenthal preferred to pass the war as Gustave Schroder, swapping a recognizably Jewish moniker for a German one. Some Jewish soldiers concocted vanilla names presumably imagined to be thoroughly American, as Isaac Drukker did when he enlisted as Samuel Wilson, Kaufman Mandell did when he became Henry Williamson, Marx Dreyfuss did when he chose Mark Travis, and Simon Guggenheimer did when he reimagined himself as Charles Brown. Though these men had names that were ethnically identifiable, the popularity of biblical names in the antebellum period offered others a measure of camouflage. Unusually, Simon Silverstein chose John Donnelly, suggesting that he may have believed that it was better to pass as an Irishman than as a Jew. These substitutions created complications after the war when veterans and loved ones sought to claim military pensions. Immigrants who had established themselves anew after they crossed the Atlantic were certainly aware of the promise of a new name in a new environment. Some, like the Russian-born cigar maker William Horn, had already adopted a new name in America. He now opted for an ethnically unambiguous alternative, selecting Isaac Cohen as his nom de guerre. Others understood that a new name offered an opportunity to escape from a sullied reputation—Israel Highhill, for example, became Charles Johnson to elude persistent creditors—or to create a new one from whole cloth, as Frederick d’Utassy (or Strasser) well knew.6 The decision to enlist under a new name reflected an awareness that the swapping of civilian garb for a Union uniform was more than merely a change of clothing. Jewish enlistees were separating themselves from the familiar and immersing themselves within a salmagundi of strangers.

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THE USE OF ALIASES   The most important thing a man has to tell you, the saying goes, is what he isn’t telling you. Private Joseph Levy of the Fourth New York Infantry didn’t want to be known as a Jew, and his way of not telling anyone that was to enlist under the name “Joseph Reese”—and then use that surname for the rest of his life. Why he chose to do this, according to Civil War pension records, is a convoluted tale of half-siblings and intermarriages, but he had the grace, nonetheless, to include a straightforward admission: he desired, he said, to “avoid ridicule as a Jew.” Joseph Reese is pictured here with his son, in a photograph taken in 1898. National Archives and Records Administration

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  If, in an idle moment, one wondered why so many similar-sounding names are spelled differently on Civil War documents, the answer is transcription. An enlistee’s declaring a “foreign-sounding” name to a clerk with less than perfect handwriting or spelling is enough to change a simple “Cohen,” for instance, into scores of “Cones,” “Kuhns,” “Cahns,” “Cowans,” and so on. Add, too, a thick French accent pronouncing, say, “Dreyfuss,” and a “Travis” may emerge on the rolls. Yet it cannot easily be determined how many name changes were the result of mishearing, idiosyncratic handwriting, or an intent to disguise, either for personal reasons or to fend off antisemitism. Take the case of the soldier pictured here, a Jewish private in the Second New York Cavalry. He was variously listed on the rolls as “Nathan Vanderise,” “Nathan Vanderice,” and even “Nathan Rice.” His wife, however, said his correct name was “Nathan Van Reiss” or “Nathan V. Reiss” or perhaps “Nathan Van Rice” or “Nathan Van Rise.” But the private did manage the last word: his tombstone is inscribed “Nathan Reiss.” National Archives and Records Administration

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Whatever their motivations for tactically deploying a new name—caution, embarrassment, opportunism, unfamiliarity with English—enlistment allowed Jews to jettison a prescribed name that carried cultural baggage in exchange for a name of their choice. Some sought to obscure their Germanness or Jewishness. Certainly not all sought refuge in anonymity because they anticipated encountering prejudice. Ellis Gotthold’s brother maintained that his sibling became Henry Ward in the army “in order to keep it from the family and conceal his identity.”7 Similarly, Fisher Grossman assumed the name John Fisher because, as he wrote after the war, he “did not want my people in Germany to know anything about my service.”8 Though he did not change his name, Louis A. Gratz’s first letter home after enlisting anticipated the disapproval of his family in Posen. “My dear ones,” he pleaded, “I beg you with all my heart not to be angry because I have gone off to war.”9 Such wariness of how news of enlistment would be received may have reflected more than just an expectation of anguish from parents afraid of a life squandered in a far-off land. Jews in Europe had particular sensitivities to military service.10 Not all of those who worried about prejudice changed their names prophylactically. And among those who did, some internalized the stigma associated with an identifiably Jewish name. Isaac Delevie, who served for seven months in a Missouri regiment as James Delevin, changed his name because he “was an Israelite and he never liked the name of Isaac for this reason.”11 According to a friend, Louis Reitler “wished his name was not so decidedly Jewish and he could not see why it could not have been a little different . . . a little more Americanized.” His family rued his decision to enlist as Louis Wright, complicating as it did their petition for compensation long after he fell at the Battle of South Mountain.12 Such reinvention was not always possible. Companies raised in a confined geographic area, drawing heavily on men from one or two small towns or a single urban neighborhood, offered less opportunity for anonymity than those that drew widely. Likewise, recruits who enlisted later in the war and were designated as reinforcements for depleted units were less likely to be familiar to their new comrades than were those who enlisted when the regiment was originally raised. Soldiers, moreover, were not always able to shear off all vestiges of their origins. We must imagine, for example, that Charles Brown—aka Simon Guggenheimer—betrayed his Bavarian roots whenever he opened his mouth to speak. Name changing provided but one way by which some Jewish soldiers sought to pass during the war. Foregrounding an alternative identity and disclaiming, in deed if

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not in word, any public trappings of Jewishness offered a related option. This approach caused consternation for those who eagerly sought out their fellow Jews in the army. Two years after the war, Emanuel Witkowsky recalled his wartime confrontation with a Jewish officer, the “Colonel of a colored regiment,” who “strongly denied his religious faith, and . . . found special gratification in maltreating and persecuting Jewish soldiers belonging to other commands.” He still bristled at being cursed as “a d——d Jew.”13 (Witkowsky himself likely served under an alias, as probably did the officer; there is record of neither name in the military rolls.) When August Bondi accosted Marcus Wittenberg, a fellow trooper within the Fifth Kansas Cavalry, to ask “if he was a Jehudi; he seemed at first not to understand.” When Bondi repeated “Are you a Jew?” Wittenberg answered, “I’m a Hungarian, my folks live near Lawrence.” Bondi had his suspicions confirmed soon after when Wittenberg died in a military hospital. Among his effects were letters from his parents written in Hebrew script.14 Others observed a similar reticence. An anonymous enlistee wrote that efforts to persuade Jewish soldiers to publicly identify themselves as Jews were “generally regarded as unbecoming, and even insulting.” Perhaps explaining his decision not to reveal his own name to the readers of the Jewish Messenger, he added that “[a]s a general rule,” the Jews do not care to make their religion a matter of notoriety, as it would at once involve them in an intricate controversial disquisition with the Christian Chaplains, for which they do not always feel themselves qualified, and which, of course can, under no circumstances, afford them any thing but annoyance. Some of our brethren fear that, were they known as Hebrews, it would expose them to the taunts and sneers of those among their comrades who have been in the habit of associating with the name of Jew, everything that is mean and contemptible.15

Arnold Fischel, who ministered as a chaplain on behalf of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in the camps and hospitals around Washington in December 1861, echoed this view: “[a]s a general rule,” the Jewish soldiers he encountered were “not known as Jews.”16 Isaac Leeser, who visited military hospitals in Philadelphia, noted in 1862 that “it is not easy among the mass of sufferers to ascertain who are our brothers.” This admission reflected not only the challenges of identifying Jews among all those invalided from the Army of the Potomac, but also the reluctance of some Jews to be found.17

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He was even more candid three years later when summing up the experience that he and other rabbis in Philadelphia had had when visiting military hospitals during the war. Such visits, he lamented, were “useless almost.” Despite proffering gifts—presumably food, clothing, and books—alongside spiritual sustenance, they were met with wariness. To some we were welcome, while others would scarcely confess their Jewish origin. Some even refused prayer-books when tendered to them, and all had to partake of the hospital food, and only on holy days we could get permits for them to leave, when one or more again refused to come out. There was, on the whole, a hesitancy to confess our religion, for fear of taunt or shame, false indeed, yet powerful enough to act as a check on them. . . .18

Although he recognized that some shied from revealing their religious beliefs to avoid “taunts and sneers,” the anonymous correspondent intimated in the Jewish Messenger that these fears were unfounded. “[I]t redounds much to the credit of the army,” he crowed, that in the course of my experience in the camps, which has been considerable, I have heard but of a single instance in which a Jew was wantonly insulted on account of his religion, and that was by a drunken Scotchman, who commenced damning in every variety of language and motion, when he learned he was addressing an Israelite, declaring them all to be cheats and thieves. His wrath was, however, of short duration, for the soldiers who were present, finding him incorrigible, after having repeatedly warned him to desist, at last resolved to inflict summary punishment, and collectively flung him into a certain capacious receptacle for liquid matter, from which, let us hope, he emerged a wiser and cooler man.19

As with several of the other observations in his letters to the Jewish Messenger, there is reason to question the reliability of his tale of the sodden Scotchman. Still, whether a revenge fantasy or rooted in truth, the account is noteworthy for the ease with which its author engaged in casual stereotyping of his own. For just as Jews were typecast as avaricious and disloyal, Jews themselves and others imputed characteristic traits to all the racial, religious, and ethnic groups around them. To the anonymous author, the Scotchman was conforming to type: wild, pugnacious, and soaked.

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Unsurprisingly, an army of citizen soldiers reflected the views of the wider society. Antebellum America was awash with prejudice, and most Americans shared an ease and fluency when speaking and thinking of the characteristics of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Although their views were often rooted in a lack of familiarity, many Americans instead thought that they understood the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Jews, and African Americans all too well. They widely believed that these and other groups possessed innate and defining traits, although they did not necessarily agree on what these characteristics were. Yet for many, casual words carried causal weight. Our anonymous correspondent, for example, implied that the ill-disciplined Scotchman acted according to type, his actions foretold by his origins. His nationality served as explanation for his behavior. In the antebellum imaginary, the characteristics ascribed to Jews were typically less threatening than those associated with Germans and the Irish. The latter in particular bore the double burden of being foreign and Catholic.20 While prejudices against the Irish and Germans softened in the early years of the war because of conspicuous sacrifices on the battlefield, they hardened again as these immigrants became convenient scapegoats for military failure and political unrest.21 Although the combination “German Jew” bore particular odium among those inclined to think positively of neither, the ubiquity of German-speaking immigrants within the Union army and the pungency of nativism toward them provided some measure of protection for Jews. Given the difficulties of reliably identifying Jewish soldiers and the absence of any Jewish units, they stood out less than other ethnic and racial lightning rods. (His detractors derided Gabriel Netter, a French-born Jew who became the lieutenant colonel of the Fifteenth Kentucky Cavalry, as a “little Dutchman,” suggesting they knew as little about geography as about his ethnicity.)22 Their European experiences, moreover, provided Jews with better practice at living with prejudice than the Germans and the Irish had. There was much more novelty for immigrants from Ireland and central Europe than there was for Jews in being stigmatized as bearers of an undesirable identity and in experiencing prejudice as a minority. Foreign-born Jews may also have had fewer expectations that the military would make any overt accommodation for their religious differences. Then again, the centrality of Christianity to soldiers in both armies ensured that “the Jew” occupied a distinctive position in the minds of many, Irish and German immigrants among them. As is typical of prejudice, wartime chauvinism revealed much more about those who expressed these views than about those they purported to describe. Labels were often

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THE SEARCH FOR SPIRITUAL SUCCOR—AND RELIGIOUS EQUALITY   It wasn’t a sought-after job. Priests might have been on the battlefield since the days of chariot, but few were eager to serve in the Civil War. Yet even if appointable Christian ministers were so scarce that many regiments went without chaplains, or selected those who were manifestly unqualified, the idea of Jewish soldiers having their own spiritual support was still anathema. Congressional statute restricted the chaplaincy to Christian ministers. It was clear, then, to the Board of Delegates of American Israelites—just three years old and the country’s sole national Jewish organization—that something had to be done. And the man to do it, the Board decided, was the Dutch-born hazan Arnold Fischel, leader of New York’s Shearith Israel Congregation. He would be the one to take up the Jews’ case—all the way to Lincoln, as it happened. This December 3, 1861, letter to Philadelphia’s prominent religious leader Isaac Leeser was the first step: The Board of Delegates has made temporary arrangements with me to go to Washington, and attend to the Jews in the Hospital, etc. I expect to be Monday eve or Tuesday in Phila to discuss the subject with you, & if, in mean time, you can get for me letters of introduction to the President or Secretary of War, or do something else in the cause, you will oblige. . . .

Although one of Lincoln’s private secretaries told Fischel that his chances of meeting Lincoln were slim at best, Fischel nonetheless got in line among the hundreds of people who had been waiting for days. But Lincoln, to Fischel’s great surprise, met with him at once, treating him, he noted, with “marked courtesy.” When the rabbi explained he was there to protest the discriminatory measure outlawing Jewish chaplains, Lincoln replied this was the first he had heard of it, and thought it unconstitutional. Indeed, a few days after their meeting, he wrote Fischel: I find there are several particulars in which the present law in regard to chaplains is supposed to be deficient, all which I now design presenting to the appropriate Committee of Congress. I shall try to have a new law broad enough to cover what is desired by you in behalf of the Israelites.

Lincoln made good on his “design,” although not without considerable opposition and congressional wrangling. Yet on July 17, 1862, Lincoln signed into law an amendment that stipulated that “No person shall be appointed a Chaplain in the United States Army who is not a regularly ordained minister of some religious denomination, and who does not present testimonials of his good standing as such minister, with a recommendation for his appointment as an Army chaplain, from some authorized ecclesiastical body or not less than five accredited ministers to said denomination.” Within two months, a Jewish chaplain was commissioned. And Arnold Fischel, disappointed not to be one himself amongst their number, went home to Holland, never to return. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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applied with imprecision and abandon, sometimes ascribing group membership to all imagined to possess a particular trait (for example, that all speculators were Jews) and, at other times, neatly categorizing groups that in reality were diverse and unbounded (for example, transforming Bavarians, Hessians, and Prussians into Germans). Race, religion, and ethnicity were likewise often jumbled together. Catholicism and Judaism, for example, were understood as distillations of the mental and moral proclivities of their adherents, and vice versa. In large measure, the attributes ascribed to Germans, Jews, and the Irish were refractions of the social anxieties of the wider society. In heated wartime, the rays reflected onto those groups occasionally became scorching. When it came to Jews, Americans drew on a cultural larder well stocked with stereotypes. Two interrelated themes dominated before the war. The first imagined the contemporary Jew as the inheritor of the sins of those who betrayed, tormented, and condemned Jesus, every bit as blind, stiff-necked, and stubborn as their forebears who had rejected his teaching. The second imagined the Jew as dishonest and greedy, crafty and crooked in pursuit of lucre, the slippery Judas of the modern-day marketplace. These stereotypes, in a multitude of variations, were reinforced in sermons, folklore, chapbooks, popular literature, and onstage and in the press.23 “Jew” became a slur, and economically exploitative behavior was “portrayed as metaphorically Jewish.”24 But not all the traits associated with Jews were regarded as irredeemable. The imagined Jewish facility with money was admired as well as despised, as were Jewish solidarity and the very survival of Judaism itself.25 Inconsistency and dissonance abounded. And not all Jews were lumped together solely as representatives of their race. As Jonathan D. Sarna has argued, Americans differentiated between the “mythical Jew” who embodied an imagined archetype and the “Jew next door”—the neighbor or acquaintance—whose everyday presence belied the cartoonish stereotype.26 In much the same way, close contact between Jews and their comrades-in-arms could scramble stereotypes. By its nature, prejudice was erratic and inconsistent. Ill feeling did not always alight upon real or imagined ethnic differences. And which particular stereotype was plucked from the air was not necessarily predictable. Mockery within the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry, for example, drove Maximillian Heller, a regimental surgeon, to distraction. The goading, however, had no relationship with his Jewishness and everything to do with his apparent attachment to the bottle. Such was Heller’s upset that the lieutenant colonel of the regiment issued an order to all the company commanders insisting that their men end their “shameful practise” of “hallowing . . . the word whiskey” whenever they marched

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past the surgeon. The threat carried a dire warning; failure to comply would result in the suspension of their whiskey allowance.27 Heller resigned “on account of . . . health” three months later.28 Contrary to Joel’s experience in the Twenty-third Ohio, the culture and composition of the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania—a regiment with a substantial core of Jews, as well as freethinkers and liberals—were not conducive to the expression of anti-Jewish sentiment. Nonetheless happenstance also mattered, including the particular mix of personalities within a unit. Some imagined traits, otherwise scorned, transmuted into positives when they fit wartime need. His messmates credited Private Jacob Cahn, a peddler before the war known as “Jew Jake” to the men of the 124th Ohio Infantry, with keeping them in “hard bread” during the siege of Chattanooga. Starving men, surviving off quarter rations, took to stealing from mess chests and the commissary. Cahn, sardonically described as an “Israelite, in whom there was no guile” by one of his messmates, proved expert at acquiring provender. “[N]o questions were asked” as to how he acquired “new white hard-tack that looked brighter and better than silver dollars.” Implicitly, however, they assumed Jewish expertise in matters of ill-gotten gains.29 Because of such unusual circumstances, Jacob Cahn transformed from “a Jew” into “our Jew.” Yet war also gave new life and purpose to these same stereotypes, transfiguring the metaphorically Jewish exploiter into the despised wartime speculator, contractor, and smuggler.30 Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous General Orders No. 11, issued in Holly Springs on December 17, 1862, was such an example of the word made flesh. Grant, who had grown frustrated by cotton speculators who proliferated as his army moved into plantation-rich territory along the Mississippi and whose trade he suspected of abetting the enemy, pinned his frustrations on “Jews as a class” and ordered all expelled from the Department of the Tennessee within twenty-four hours. To Grant’s mind, “Jew” was not only synonymous with speculator and smuggler—shorthand for those who violated “every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department”—but the worst among the speculators and smugglers. In several communications issued prior to General Orders No. 11, Grant advised his lieutenants to pay particular heed to Jews. Although President Lincoln stifled Grant’s order after being hastily petitioned, the general was far from the last senior military officer to give voice to similar ideas about Jews during the war.31 Grant’s words betrayed broader wartime anxieties. In seeking to explain the profiteering and corruption that attended the rush to war, the press summoned the specter

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of the venal and disloyal Jew. Jews, real and imagined, were fingered as contractors who outfitted soldiers in a shoddy fashion, as speculators who profited at the expense of the common good, and as smugglers who traded with the enemy.32 Because Jews were imagined to gorge on the business of war, they were spared the canard hurled at Germans and the Irish that they were merely wage soldiers, mercenaries whose dedication to the Union cause extended no further than the promise of pay. The assumption that Jews preferred profit to patriotism—and therefore evaded enlistment—continued to haunt them after the war. The contractor, smuggler, speculator, and shirker were, however, more than merely figures of scorn. As Brian Luskey has argued, in destabilizing the “value of bank paper, products, and people,” the war also “destabilized the power dynamics” in the wider society.33 Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” were seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the new economic and social order produced by the war, and as embodying the injustices of this world made topsy-turvy: those whose morals once marked them as outcasts now lorded it over others atop a new social heap.34 If the Jewish contractor, the Jewish speculator, and the Jewish smuggler became exemplars on the home front, for soldiers the Jew was most often personified in the figure of the sutler, the civilian trader licensed to sell supplies to a regiment in the field. The sutler, derided for exploiting this monopoly by charging astronomical prices, was described in ways that evoked the prewar stereotype of the unscrupulous and slippery Jew. “Sutler” and “Jew” were sometimes used interchangeably or together (“Jew sutler”).35 The rapacious Jewish sutler emerged as a stock figure in memoirs written by soldiers after the war, more often than not receiving his comeuppance following retaliation by disgruntled soldiers.36 Jewish storekeepers in the war zone may have paid the price for these stereotypes, too. Certainly Aaron Hirsch, a French-born merchant, believed that he received special treatment on the day that a “German Cavalry troop galloped through the main street” of Batesville, Arkansas, “with their knives in their mouths and pistols in each hand.” When they saw the “Hirsch & Adler” sign prominently displayed above his store, “they cried out ‘Zedeh Secesh’” and promptly dismounted to loot the premises. They returned later to take “everything they could find.” The “Germans were particularly unfavorable to me,” he remembered, “because I was a Jew.”37 In contrast to Grant’s terse order, in early 1864 General Benjamin Butler provided a more elaborate exposition of wartime thinking about Jews. Butler, commander of the grandiosely titled Department of Virginia and North Carolina (in reality consisting of a

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coastal foothold in each state) and recently designated as a “special agent” for orchestrating prisoner swaps, issued a short telegraphic dispatch describing the successful return of a raiding party that had ventured up the James River. Listed among the spoils—“22 of the enemy,” “99 negroes,” “240 boxes of tobacco”—were “five Jews preparing to run the blockade.”38 (The latter were discovered, along with a cache of valuables, concealed in the hold of a captured schooner.)39 Myer Isaacs, son of a prominent New York rabbi, sometime coeditor of the Jewish Messenger (his father’s newspaper), and secretary of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, rebuked Butler for identifying the presumptive blockade runners as Jews. His private exchange of letters with Butler became a public contretemps when widely reprinted in Union and Confederate newspapers from Muscatine, Iowa, to New Orleans and New York in March and April 1864.40 The combative general, more effective when crossing pens with antagonists than when crossing swords, refused to apologize for his choice of words. “It was meant, when used,” he argued, to designate nationality, and not religion, as one would say, five Irishmen, five Germans, or five Italians. I have always considered the Jews a nationality, although possessing no country. The closeness with which they cling together, the aid which they afford each other, on all proper, and sometimes improper occasions; the fact that nearly all of them pursue substantially the same employment, so far as I have known them—that of traders, merchants, and bankers—the very general obedience to the prohibition against marriage with Gentiles, their faith, which looks forward to a time when they are to be gathered together in the former land of their nation—all serve to show a closer tie of kindred and nation among the Hebrews, and a greater homogeneity than belongs to any other nation, although its people live in closer proximity.

Although Butler utilized the language of nationality and not of race, he articulated what he regarded as a commonplace: groups exhibited defining characteristics.41 Careful to disclaim any ill feeling toward Judaism, he implied that deceit and disloyalty were among the characteristics that defined Jews. He considered patriotism—as well as its obverse—heritable national traits. Drawing on an older motif, he imagined Jews as a people adrift. Marshaling the example of the blockade runners (and Judas), he reminded Isaacs—incorrectly—that two Jews served in the Confederate cabinet, and later

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A PRELUDE TO GRANT’S INFAMOUS ORDER   General Ulysses S. Grant, while fighting the Confederacy, was also, incrementally, making war on the Jews. A month before Grant issued his notorious order expelling all Jews from the territory under his command, Frank Crosby, a quartermaster sergeant in the Tenth Iowa Infantry, writes home that “Grant has expelled all the Jews, but we soldiers can’t understand why they were singled out. Race prejudice no doubt. You know they were charged with having killed our Jesus.” To those in the ranks, General Orders No. 11 apparently came as no surprise. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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misidentified a third. (Others made similar assertions about prominent Confederates.)42 Butler also understood ethnicity, rather than nativity or citizenship, as the defining feature of Americanness. According to this logic, Jews would forever remain outsiders. That this argument was proffered by Benjamin Butler made it so much more noteworthy. When Grant issued his infamous order, he was the coming man, the hero of Forts Henry and Donelson, now in pursuit of Vicksburg, Fortress of the West. By contrast, Butler’s words were freighted because of his past. His actions earlier in the war at Fort Monroe—granting haven to runaway slaves and designating them as the legally confiscated “contraband” of war—forever associated him with emancipation. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, some Jews and other white ethnics fretted that the granting of freedom to African Americans would come at their economic and political expense. Butler seemed to confirm this cold calculus. In response, Myer Isaacs rejected the notion that Jews were a national group—“I am an American in nationality,” he retorted—and offered a parade of faithful Jews, including prominent politicians, powerful financiers, distinguished army officers, and “a three-year regiment . . . composed mostly of Israelites” to stand against Butler’s Judases. Although Isaacs disputed any insinuation that Jews could not be good Americans, he was not challenging Butler’s false claim that groups possessed core characteristics. He preferred, however, to substitute faithfulness for faithlessness, loyalty for disloyalty, and productivity for predation when it came to Jews.43 Revealingly, not just prejudiced outsiders saw Jews when and where they wanted. Even as he corrected Butler’s false claim that the Confederate secretaries of the Treasury and of the Navy were Jewish—it was likely no accident that Butler identified those responsible for the Confederate financial system and her blockade runners as Jews— Isaacs was little more accurate about the army officers and politicians that he listed as paragons of Jewish pride. These innocent errors, made by a person unusually well positioned within American Jewish life, reveal how difficult it was to know who was a Jew at a moment when the majority of Jews were recent arrivals who had dispersed across the United States, often felt no need to publicly identify as Jews, and lived among fellow German speakers whose names could be read in good faith as Jewish. Isaacs was not alone in taking stereotypes seriously. Hessian-born Marcus Spiegel, for example, internalized commonly held ideas about Germans. He explained to his wife from the field, for example, that he possessed a “dutch head” that accounted for

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his stubborn inclination.44 A year before Chancellorsville cemented the motif of “flying Dutchmen” in the popular imagination—the notion that German soldiers preferred to skedaddle than fight—Spiegel worried that the German soldiers who served under him were liable to “Stampede” out of the army.45 He had a poor opinion of German military officers. “[G]enerally,” he told his wife, “I am not very much prepossessed in favor of any high Officials because they are Germans as I invariably look upon them as impracticable or big Reshoim [wicked ones].” He anticipated that Major General Peter Osterhaus, his division commander, would conform to this type, and therefore delighted in “a man free from any of those prejudices usual almost with German Officers.”46 This comment hints at another of Spiegel’s expectations of his fellow Germans: inborn animus toward Jews. Jews were no more immune to the stereotypes in circulation than others were. Spiegel, for example, drew upon common ideas about manliness when he mocked a corporal in his company as a “little Ladyboy” for showing fear as a shell whizzed overhead during his regiment’s first engagement. Similar diminutives were applied to Jews. Asked to recall a private in Company C of the Eightieth Ohio Infantry long after the war, Sergeant Joseph Pershing “at first did not remember Kauffman Baum.” When prompted that he was better known as “Kossie, and a Jew,” he “recall[ed] him well.” “He was a little Jewey fellow always going to sick call from the first.” “He was no good as a soldier, and was not with us long . . . a delicate Jewey little fellow.” Notions of manhood and stout health were intertwined. Even though Kauffman served alongside Herman Baum, who was probably his brother and whom Pershing recalled as a “big fellow,” “Jewey” was synonymous with effeminate fragility in Pershing’s account. This cluster of stereotypes was also applied to African American and immigrant enlistees, deriding them as lacking in the manliness required of a “good soldier.”47 Sergeant Frank McMurray echoed these sentiments when he described Kauffman Baum as a “smooth faced effeminate looking boy.” “Most of the Boys,” he sneered, “thought the little fellow was a girl.” To their fellow soldiers, the Baums were distinguished by their physiognomy: “Big nosed Baum and Little Kossie Baum.”48 Here, too, “Jew” offered a handy tool to explain what was otherwise mysterious: why some made good soldiers and others broke and ran. In much the same way, blaming the failure of the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville on the deficiencies of Germans shielded other soldiers from the nerve-wracking admission that all could be unmanned by the enemy. The use of slurs did not necessarily indicate a deep well of hostility or even an intention to malign. Instead, these were often used as matter-of-fact and everyday shorthand

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BENJAMIN BUTLER, BIGOT   Lincoln did not share the crass prejudice toward Jews that animated some of his most senior generals. And so, with imperturbable fixedness, he either ignored, or simply counteracted, the virulent antisemitism around him. General Benjamin Butler, especially, bore watching. A prime example is this 1862 letter, in which he discussed the arrest of two Jewish blockade runners. I forward you a translation of a letter from one Schaffter, whom I have arrested, to Zachrisson who is engaged in smuggling arms into Charleston and Mobile through Nassau. He had a branch of his house conducted by one Maas at 36 Beaver St., New York. They are Jews who betrayed their Savior & also have betrayed us. I think the traitors should be arrested and dealt with there as I have dealt with them here—by imprisoning the man and confiscating the property.

Zachrisson, it would appear from contemporary accounts in Southern newspapers, was a passenger—hailing originally from New Orleans—aboard a British steamer transporting both a “valuable cargo” and a “valuable letter bag” from Nassau to Charleston. The Northern press put the transport down to gunrunning, claiming that the apprehended vessel was loaded with arms and ammunition. Neither the Northern or Southern accounts, however, mentioned Zachrisson’s religion, or named him a miscreant; those such niceties were left to Butler. Though he eventually apologized for the sentiment he expressed here, his attitudes toward Jews did not soften. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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to convey what was regarded as essential information. Stereotypes became naturalized. A corporal within the 131st New York Infantry, who served alongside Private David Geigerman for more than a year, used the term “Jew” and “Sheney” interchangeably when describing him.49 In this instance, the corporal was not accusing Geigerman of any particular misbehavior—and, indeed, could not muster anything overtly negative to say about his fellow soldier—but was instead communicating what he took to be his distinguishing trait, much as he might note his hair color or other defining physical feature. The corporal also volunteered, unbidden, that another Jew served in the same company, revealing how he paired them together. This may have reflected an assumption that Jews were clannish, but it certainly demonstrated that he thought of Jews as a distinct element within the regiment.50 Sometimes, however, such stereotypes did draw on a deep well of hostility. Antony P. Zyla, fully convinced that the colonel of his regiment was a closeted Jew, presented Frederick d’Utassy as a sulfurous medley of Jewish traits. In a sworn statement to investigators in March 1863, the chaplain of the Garibaldi Guard described d’Utassy as lascivious (lusting after the wives of his officers), avaricious (“an excessive thirst for gold”), corrupt (securing commissions for his brothers), and a “perfect coward in adversity, but proud and crass in prosperity.” Ending with a half-baked metaphor, he described his colonel’s “sophistry” as a “cake, baked of Jewish covetousness, gipsy eccentricity, and the sensual proneness of the beast.”51 The shadow of such stereotypes, whether malign or not, trailed Jews into the Union army. More often than not, however, these were eclipsed in the everyday interactions between Jews and those within their immediate company. Daily contact demystified the Jew, transforming a mythic figure into an identifiable individual, if not messmate, tentmate, or comrade-in-arms. Familiarity could breed indifference as well as affection. Alvin C. Voris, a captain in the Sixty-seventh Ohio Infantry, initially remarked upon having “a pleasant Col and a Jehu for a Lt. Col.” But even as his feelings soured on the former (“we are cursed by an imbecile imposter and knave”),52 the latter became a trusted friend.53 Grinding routine and shared hardship—neither in short supply—bound men together, as did a desire for acceptance and friendship. Drill and life at close quarters fostered mutual dependency, creating an impromptu “military family” that temporarily stood in place of an absent familial support system. The intensity of the shared experience could also melt away misgivings and prejudices. Letters home often compared combat to a crucible that “dissolved the petty rivalries and factions that existed in some regiments.”54

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Yet military families, like real ones, were far from harmonious. Regiments were riven by “incessant quarrelling” and rancorous relationships.55 Just as shared hardships could generate solidarity, unceasing daily contact chafed at relationships, and fatigue and stress rubbed them raw. A shared background offered but weak balm; intraethnic tensions roiled German and Irish regiments.56 The relationships between Jewish soldiers could be as fraught as those between any others. But when Christian soldiers squabbled with their Jewish comrades, ethnicity could again become fair game. Stereotypes, tenacious and ambient, were handy tools easily returned to service as and when needed. Although Captain Rudolph Müller of the Eighty-second Illinois was liberal in his dislikes, when it came to Jews (or those he imagined to be Jews), stereotypes gave form and structure to his resentments. Complaining in a letter to Friedrich Hecker that he was “in Jerusalem” and living in a “synagogue”—surrounded by Jewish officers—his language dripped with prejudice. Müller faulted Edward Salomon (the “great Mogul,” the “Creole from Jerusalem,” or the “trickster”) for “vigorously . . . promoting his popularity” in order to secure advancement and suspected him of financial impropriety.57 Joseph Greenhut, discharged from the army a few months before, did not know his place. Frederick Bechstein, recently killed at Peachtree Creek, Müller eulogized as “pure miserliness, dishonest as an officer, often niggardly in a dirty way  .  .  . belittled by his own men, then openly despised.”58 (Though Bechstein was not Jewish, Müller assumed as much, again reminding us of the difficulty of identifying Jews.) Yet even as he belittled Salomon as pushy and grasping, he grudgingly admired his “moral courage” under fire (contrasting him with a comrade who played the “pitiful role of a frightened hare whenever a bullet whistles by”) and conceded that he was “leading the regiment very ably.”59 Nonetheless, he made it clear that he would prefer to serve under an Irishman rather than under a Jew.60 (During the war, Edward Salomon never won the commission as a full colonel that Müller believed he so eagerly sought.)61 Alvin C. Voris, far more favorably inclined toward Marcus Spiegel, nonetheless also considered his friend’s Jewishness a disability. In a letter enthusiastically endorsing Spiegel’s promotion, Voris presented him as having overcome his origins, a butterfly birthed from a chrysalis. “Capt. S.,” he wrote, “is a German Jew by birth—became an American from choice and has indicated his preference for his adopted country by risking his life for its honor.”62 He was now “honest and popular.” Müller, misanthropic by disposition, always saw the Jew in Salomon. So, too, Voris’s views of Spiegel were filtered by his ideas about Jews.

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Even when they passed unseen as Jews, Jewish soldiers would likely overhear their comrades using derogatory language derived from a rich repertoire embedded in popular culture. However unpleasant, such low-intensity needling was familiar, as were occasional encounters with those who harbored philo-Semitic attitudes. Years later, an anonymous Jewish soldier recalled a conversation with the colonel of the Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry who became excited “solely owing to his finding me to be one of the race for which he has ever manifested the kindest feelings and a profound admiration.”63 Yet in spite of lurking stereotypes, good and bad, most everyday encounters were not fraught. At the company level, indifference, benign curiosity, and comradeship proved much more common than conflict. As with Voris and Spiegel, Jews formed friendships with their peers and integrated into their units. Tellingly, public expressions of disdain were largely absent at moments when Jewish soldiers were most vulnerable. In part this may have reflected the fact that antisemitism was easily camouflaged, working its will without explicitly invoking Jews and Judaism. But objective measures of discrimination paint a sunnier picture. Jews, for example, were not court-martialed at a higher rate than their peers, and trial records are free of the slurs and insinuations otherwise commonplace in the press. Although this does not indicate that these proceedings were free from bias, in aggregate they showed little sign of discrimination.64 There is little evidence either that Jewish soldiers were systematically disadvantaged when seeking promotion and appointment as officers, though the variability between regiments and states is suggestive. Few Jews rose above the company-grade ranks of lieutenant and captain. Of those who attained field-grade rank (major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel), an outsize share belonged to Pennsylvanian and New Mexican regiments. (Two of the five Jews known to have served in New Mexican regiments did so as majors; another did so as a captain.) Jews, by contrast, were underrepresented as officers in New York regiments relative to those in other states. This was true of field officers—the only Jew to command a New York regiment was Frederick d’Utassy, who hid his origins—and at the company grade.65 Seemingly, Jews in New York were less likely to receive preferment than their peers. When placed alongside the relatively low rate of reenlistment by those who served in these regiments, this hints at an internal dynamic less favorable to Jews than elsewhere. For example, not one of the twenty Jews whom we know of in Company A of the 149th New York Infantry was promoted after mustering in despite considerable attrition within a regiment that fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,

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Chattanooga, and the major engagements of the Atlanta campaign.66 Studies of other groups have similarly found substantial (and variable) levels of discrimination in relation to commissions and promotions. Those who served outside ethnic regiments may have been particularly vulnerable. As Dora L. Costa has demonstrated, the native born were more than twice as likely to be appointed officers than were immigrants, and Germans became officers at a higher rate than the Irish.67 Easier to measure is the rate at which Jews rejoined the Union army after serving part or the whole of an initial recruitment contract. Those who reenlisted did so despite firsthand knowledge of the hardships and risks that had been unavailable to them when they first signed on as callow recruits. Although reenlistment was a tangible demonstration of continued commitment to cause and comrades, considerable financial inducements also played their part.68 Soldiering provided some with status, social advancement, and a sense of purpose and fulfillment, as well as the incentives of a fuller pay packet. For noncommissioned officers—and the sprinkling of Jewish lieutenants, captains, and colonels within the Union army—military life created responsibilities, obligations, and bonds less easily sundered when a term of service ended.69 Louis A. Gratz, the peddler who enlisted for three months as a corporal in the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Infantry just days after the war started because he was “barely able to make a living” in the coalfields around Carbondale, Pennsylvania, was driven to reenlist in October because of the opportunities that the army offered. Assiduously studying English late at night so that he could earn a commission, he mustered in as a first lieutenant in the Ninth Pennsylvania Cavalry. Gratz proudly told his family, I have now become a respected man in a respected position, one filled by very few Jews. I have been sent by my general to enlist new recruits so I am today in Scranton, a city in Pennsylvania only twenty miles from Carbondale, where I had peddled before. Before this no one paid any attention to me here; now I move in the best and richest circles and am treated with utmost consideration by Jews and Christians.70

The military clearly offered him an agreeable environment; his letters home whisper not a word about prejudice. Overall, however, the rate at which Jews reenlisted did not compare favorably with other veterans. In the Army of the Potomac, approximately half of all volunteers who

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LAZARUS SCHONEY, RABBI AND DOCTOR   The numbers tell the story, mostly. Civil War dead: 750,000. Wounded: 476,000. Death by disease: 400,000. Amputations: 60,000. Number of physicians in the United States Regular Army when the war began: 113. That number, 113, as much as anything, makes sense of the others. Of those 113 doctors, 24 went south and 3 were dismissed for disloyalty. That left 86 doctors on duty in the North. Few had ever treated a gunshot wound. Rushing, then, to provide for those who would all too soon be in need of medical care, the Federal government appointed a first batch of physicians who passed a competency examination (numbers, again: 116 pass, 62 enlist). But more hurried still was the push to hire doctors already practicing or at least licensed. Anyone legally qualified, it seemed, whatever their skill or lack thereof, would do. One such hire was a young Hungarian immigrant, Lazarus Schoney. A studious man, with a PhD and rabbinic ordination acquired in Prague, he studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania upon his arrival in the United States. At the pay rate of a first lieutenant, Schoney first served at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, DC, where President Lincoln and the poet Walt Whitman often visited the wounded, fresh off nearby Virginia battlefields. It was in fact at one of those battles that Schoney, ordered to attend, himself almost became a casualty. He wrote: My order was for temporary duty and I went at a moment’s notice without preparation, but was ordered to the front at the Battle of the Wilderness. Having no change of clothes or shoes and being compelled to sleep on the ground I contracted a severe cold from exposure. I worked throughout the battle attending to the wounded without a single assistant until we were joined by the 14th New York which had surgeons. For three weeks I remained without change of clothing, being unable to get anything from home.

When ordered back to work at the Armory Hospital, Schoney returned profoundly damaged by his service in the field. No less a personage than Lincoln, visiting the wards, purportedly noticed this, telling him, “You are a sick man too”—and adding, Schoney said, how

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pleased he was that the doctor could translate Lincoln’s words to the wounded “in their own languages, there being as many as eight nationalities in the Hospital at that time.” Schoney continued to serve and to be “a sick man too.” He ended his military career as the chief contract surgeon, with offices in the Senate Chamber. At war’s end his civilian career began, with more study in Europe, a sequence of professorships, and the authorship of several scientific books. Later in life, and a widower, he married another renowned doctor, Theodosia Secor Fowler, a Catholic. Schoney, who died 1914, had come a long way from Budapest and the rabbinate, and even longer, perhaps, from the desperate killing fields of the Civil War. Lithograph of Lincoln Hospital, a temporary hospital established during the Civil War in Washington, DC, Print by Charles Magnus, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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signed up in the heady early months of the conflict—and whose three-year enlistments expired in the spring and summer of 1864—mustered back into service. This despite the bloodletting of the Overland campaign in that same year—the sanguinary battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, and Cold Harbor were fought in a single month—and the exhausted stalemate outside Petersburg. In the Western Theater, rates of reenlistment were considerably higher.71 Among Jews, by contrast, fewer than 30 percent of those who first enlisted in three-year regiments in 1861 signed a second enlistment contract.72 This was not necessarily a measure of particular misery among Jews (nor did it reflect any deficiency in their patriotism). Those who served in units where there were larger clusters of their coreligionists were no more likely to reenlist than those who served in regiments with few Jews. But Jewish soldiers were well represented among the categories least likely to reenlist (“older men, men from large cities, and Germans”), received little encouragement in the Jewish press, and may have had economic opportunities on the home front that set them apart from their peers.73 (Even the Jewish Messenger, otherwise supportive of the war, intimated in August 1861 that those who had recently completed three-month enlistment contracts had fulfilled their obligations to the United States.)74 As with initial enlistment, there was considerable variation when it came to reenlistment. Among foreign-born Jewish recruits, Bavarians and Hessians were least likely to muster back into service: one in five signed a second enlistment contract. Those from Baden and Württemberg, by contrast, reenlisted at almost twice this rate. These figures reinforce what was described earlier: Bavarians and Hessians were much more reluctant soldiers than Badenese and Württembergers. Among the American born, Pennsylvanians were by far the most likely to stay in uniform: more than 40 percent chose to do so.75 Despite their relative youth, Jewish Ohioans were least likely to sign up a second time. Less than one in five did so. New Yorkers were little better, reenlisting at slightly more than half the rate of Jewish Pennsylvanians. This likely reflects the impact of events in New York City in July 1863. Not only did the draft riots drive down new enlistments, but they dissuaded those in New York regiments from mustering back in. This variability in reenlistment suggests that if antisemitism weighed on the minds of Jewish soldiers when they contemplated signing up for a second term of service, it was only one factor among many that swayed their thinking. Tellingly, Joseph A. Joel remained favorably disposed to the military despite encountering overt prejudice. Joel was not alone in discovering that there was a short step from casual prejudice to casual cruelty. When discipline was lax, soldiers were bored, esprit

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de corps was weak, and officers were distracted, indifferent, or incapable, there was opportunity for bullies and petty tyrants. Like Joel, Max Glass suffered an extreme—and unusual—version of such torments. Glass, a hard-luck Hungarian immigrant who was tricked out of his enlistment bonus and substitute’s bounty when he joined the Eighth Connecticut Infantry in August 1863—recent arrivals were soft touches for scam artists—wailed that he “was abused for reason that I never understand” by a small clutch of men within his company.76 “It may have been,” he speculated, becaus I did not make them my companions in drinking, or as I am a Jew. If I went in the street or any wher I was called Jew. Christh Killer & such names. I also had stones, dirt thrown at me.

As a substitute, a foreigner, and a Jew, Glass had three counts against him in a regiment that contained a core of reenlisted three-year veterans who had seen hard fighting. He was easily imagined to embody the mercenary motives that veterans distrusted and despised.77 Unlike Joel, who was treated with sympathy by his commanding officer, Glass found his pleas were ignored. “I complained me to the comp[any] office & the Colonel, begged to be transferred, that no man that had feeling could stand such treatment; but no one would investigate.” The final straw came during a regimental skirmish drill. While Glass and other men rested, as usual many of them began to abuse me by throing mud at me & calling me some of the most infamous names. The officie in charge 1t Lt. Radburn [John Rathburn] acted not as was his duty by not stoping the abusement, and as my feeling was very much mortified I started to the camp in order to report it to the comander of the regt., but as I made about twenty pases the named office cried after me halt Dutchman, and as that was no way to order a soldier I kept on, and the offic[er] sent after me a corp[oral] with the two men who had abused me, they caught me by the collar & dragged me back., befor the whole company of man so they could make fun of me.

Glass reported the incident to the commander of the regiment, hoping that the offending soldiers would be punished. After “seeking in every way for Justice & not receiving [it],” he fled to Norfolk, hoping to escape his regiment by enlisting in the

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navy.78 Instead, Glass was spotted by an officer from his regiment and confined to the Hard Labor Prison in Norfolk. Tried as a deserter, he was redeemed by an unlikely savior. His previous appeals for justice having failed, he pleaded with General Benjamin Butler for mercy. Butler, then locked in his heated public exchange with Myer Isaacs, pardoned Glass and returned him to his regiment—and his tormentors—days before the Battle of Cold Harbor.79 Within months he deserted again, this time more successfully.80 In several respects, Moritz Samuelsohn’s experience echoed that of Joel and Glass. He too was taunted by his comrades in the Twelfth Maine Infantry. Here timing may have worked against him. When Samuelsohn enlisted in New Orleans, he joined a regiment formed in Portland more than six months before. Being a newcomer to a settled regiment may have accentuated his foreignness as a Prussian immigrant and a Jew. Samuelsohn’s wife remembered that “he was made the target for ridicule and derision by his comrades and was the constant laughing stock of his company by reason of his rigid faith, as a Hebrew, that he bore the geers and scoffs of his comrades until they became unbearable.” He too deserted, making his way to St. Louis, where he reenlisted under the assumed name of Moritz Rosenthal.81 Although privates were easier to pick upon than those with the protection of rank, even men with insignia upon their shoulder straps were potentially vulnerable. Philip Horwitz, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, was appointed as major of the predominantly German Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Infantry after the regiment was raised in Milwaukee. The commission was a reward for his successes in recruiting men for the regiment, but he left less than six months later. A veteran recalled that “there was a strong prejudice against the soldier by some in the same regiment because he was a Jew.”82 Unpopular among key officers in the regiment—his colonel actively campaigned to deny him promotion—he resigned rather than return after extended hospitalization for hemorrhoids.83 Though it is unclear whether their doubts about his competence and probity were compounded by his ethnicity (and vice versa), his Jewish identity counted against him. Was the ill feeling harbored toward Horwitz more typical than the taunts and torments experienced by Joel and Glass? In reality, we have few examples of the latter. On the one hand, the absence of evidence of such taunts and torments is not evidence of their absence. Joseph A. Joel’s pained letter to Rutherford B. Hayes is instructive. After the war, in his public recollections of his regiment and its famous commanding officer, Joel made no mention of his experience of bullying. He seemingly still felt the sting of

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shame years later. Openly admitting to these humiliations would have revealed weakness and vulnerability in a culture that extolled stoicism, fortitude, and endurance as intrinsic to manliness.84 Such memories were also at odds with postwar narratives that reimagined soldiers as brothers-in-arms, shearing away the more complicated dynamics of regimental life. Given that these stories were not eagerly shared, we can only guess at how many went untold and unrecorded. Likewise, soldiers had reason to be reluctant to share personal torment in letters home. Describing such experiences might have added to the misery of being picked on and humiliated in front of friends and comrades. Some may have preferred to censor themselves than upset their loved ones with stories that added to worries and encouraged doubts about a decision to enlist. Disparaging fellow soldiers may have felt like a betrayal of loyalty to the regiment and close comrades. The conventions of manly behavior constrained men from baring inner turmoil. Casual discrimination—needling by comrades, coarse remarks, and other reminders of difference—may also have been understood as unremarkable by soldiers habituated to such practices before the war, or who expected little more of army life. Such slanders may have been insufficiently noteworthy to record: why remark on the familiar, expected, and unexceptional? A sense of powerlessness and inevitability may have played a role too. Protest, even if only to family members at home, may have felt akin to wailing into the wind. On the other hand, the conspicuous silence of Jewish newspapers about everyday discrimination in the military points in a different direction. The press contained remarkably few accounts of mistreatment of Jewish soldiers. This was notable given that editors, and particularly Isaac Mayer Wise of the Israelite, regarded themselves as fearless champions of their people, and were quick to charge at the slightest sign of unfairness in public life. The press, for example, was scandalized by the chaplaincy controversy and Grant’s order. Such episodes elicited protests from apoplectic editors and excited outrage on the home front. The absence of evidence in the press of systematic discrimination against Jewish soldiers, in other words, suggests evidence of its absence, or at least of its infrequency. This is reason to regard the cases of Joel, Glass, and Samuelsohn as exceptional. If discrimination rose to that tempo with regularity, it likely would have featured in the Jewish press. Their cases, moreover, raise another issue. In the historical record, discord draws attention. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. Yet as James M. McPherson has counseled,

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“the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence for the historian.”85 The drama of Joel, Glass, Samuelsohn too easily distract from the dreary but undramatic daily lives of most Jewish soldiers. For many of them, being Jewish made little practical difference to their relationships with their peers. Though the military contained more than its shares of stresses—and was shot through with the same prejudices that were present on the home front—Jewish soldiers formed strong bonds with their comrades-in-arms, lived alongside their fellow soldiers as equals, and soldiered on without bullying and bigotry. These unremarkable everyday interactions went largely unremarked on in the press. Thus, even as we recognize the remarkable— the taunts and torments that made some soldiers miserable—we must not replicate the mistake of forgetting the unremarkable. This, of course, did not make it any easier for those who encountered discrimination. How, then, did those soldiers respond to bigotry directed their way? Certainly, not all Jewish soldiers responded to the sting of scorn with silence. As we have seen, Max Glass protested his maltreatment. When his pleas were ignored, he deserted. Joseph A. Joel favored flight of a different kind, escaping his tormentors by transferring out of a troublesome company. Though Joel’s torments were unusual, one in twenty of all Jewish soldiers transferred within their own regiment in the first three months after mustering in.86 Joel, by contrast, transferred six months after he joined the Twenty-third Ohio. The churn was particularly high among recruits who enlisted in three-year regiments in May 1861 in response to Lincoln’s second call for troops. The chastening defeat at Bull Run in July appears to have exhausted the forbearance of those who had tolerated an unhappy posting when it seemed the war was soon to be won. Jewish soldiers may have petitioned for transfer for reasons unrelated to their ethnic identity—every unhappy soldier was unhappy in his own way—or may not have initiated the reassignment. Adolph Bargebuhr’s brief service record—he enlisted in Company I of the Thirty-ninth New York Infantry on May 10, 1861, was transferred to Company A on May 18, and was discharged on June 12—reminds us that transfer was one way to rid a company of an unwanted or incapable soldier. Most of those who transferred, however, remained in their new companies unless promoted, wounded, or demoted. The rarity of serial switchers suggests that most soldiers settled down once they moved out of a particular company, hinting at troubles left behind. Absconding was a more radical option. With the exception of Max Glass’s plaintive appeal to Benjamin Butler, the extant sources suggest that there was little distinctive

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about the circumstances, and motivations, of Jewish soldiers who deserted. In aggregate, Jews appear to have deserted at a lower rate than their peers, but the pool of data is small.87 As was typical of Union deserters, most returned to their regiments after a short absence. Others were gone for as long as two years, reenlisted in different regiments, or never returned at all. Similarly, there is little direct evidence that Jews sought to be discharged because of persistent prejudice. Then again, in the eyes of the army this was not a valid cause for breaking an enlistment contract. Short of incapacitation and incapacity, completion of a term of enlistment, or special favor from a sympathetic superior, the army was parsimonious with honorable discharges when soldiers still had time to serve, particularly when it came to those without officer rank. (Three-quarters of all Jewish recruits served as privates for part or the whole of their term of service.) But as we will see, an obliging regimental surgeon could provide the necessary paperwork to enable a graceful exit from the army. There is, however, little way of ascertaining reliably how many medical discharges reflected nonmedical complaints. In this matter and in most others, officers had far more latitude than relatively powerless privates and corporals. Yet tellingly, we know of only a single case of an officer resigning his commission because of Grant’s General Orders No. 11. Philip Trounstine, born in Ohio and in his midtwenties, was the captain of a company raised in Cincinnati. By early 1863, the Fifth Ohio Cavalry had been active in West Tennessee and Mississippi for almost exactly a year. Blooded at Shiloh, it had supported the army’s ponderous march toward Corinth and Memphis, and then into Mississippi. If Trounstine expected dashing cavalry duty, he was disappointed. Dull months were consumed by protecting bridges and railway lines, interrupted by occasional skirmishes with bushwhackers and Confederate cavalry. Grant’s order, Trounstine confessed to his commanding officer in early March 1863, had inflicted deep wounds. Mobilizing the language of duty and honor, so often employed during the war to justify manly sacrifice, he offered his resignation in stilted and pained prose. “You are perhaps well aware,” he pointedly and poignantly reminded Major C. S. Hayes, of my having, been, whether fortunately or unfortunately born of Jewish parents; my futurity must of course decide which; you will therefore bear with me, Major, when I say that not alone; my feelings, but the sense of

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A FRIENDSHIP FORGED IN BATTLE   Of the 320,000 men who served from Ohio during the Civil War, nearly 200 were Jews, and one, Joseph A. Joel, became the lifelong friend of Rutherford B. Hayes. Their friendship, forged during their service in the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry, began when Joel was an enlisted teenager and Hayes, a lieutenant colonel. The devoutly Christian Hayes protected Joel from antisemitic bullying. Joel looked back on his days in the Ohio regiment as his greatest. So too did Hayes, despite having been president of the United States. Based on one of Joel’s drawings, this lithograph celebrates Hayes’s gallant command at the Battle of South Mountain. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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  The onetime private Joseph A. Joel here receives word, some eight years after the war, from his commander in the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry, Rutherford B. Hayes, that he is delighted to have a namesake: Joel’s first son, Rutherford B. Hayes Joel. “I am proud of your partiality and shall always regard with great interest the progress of the young gentleman,” Hayes wrote on April 22, 1873. “I shall try to remember him in some substantial way. Let him be as brave and honorable as his father and he will be a credit to his parents and namesake.” The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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Religious duty, I owe to the religion of my Forefathers, were both deeply hurt and wounded in consequence of the late order of General Grant issued December 17th 1862, in which all persons of collateral religious faith with my own, were ordered to leave this Department.

Trounstine’s decision was not, however, solely the response of an officer who believed himself duty bound to defend the honor of his people and his parents. For not only had Grant assailed his faith, but Trounstine had been betrayed by his very own men. Despite the two gold bars upon his shoulder straps, Trounstine’s life within the regiment had been made miserable in the short time since the order was issued. He could “no longer,” he confided, “bear the Taunts and malice, of those to whom my religious opinions are known, brought on by the effect that, that order has instilled into their minds.” These sneers pricked the pride of a soldier who already had reason to feel deflated. Tellingly, Trounstine transmitted a “copy of the charges impending against him” with his letter of resignation. He had been charged several months before with mutiny and sedition after signing a petition “disrespectful” of his colonel. These charges reflected a long-running power struggle within the regiment. With the colonel frequently absent and lines of authority unclear, rival officers jockeyed for preferment. The personal disputes that divided the regiment were overlaid with political disagreement; one camp was vehemently opposed to emancipation. Factionalized and rudderless, and wearied by morale-sapping picket and guard duty, the regiment saw its infighting aired at a sequence of court-martial proceedings in February 1863, shortly before Trounstine resigned. Though the sentiments he expressed in his letter of resignation were undoubtedly sincere, Trounstine had other reasons to want to flee a unit that had turned its guns on itself. His departure forestalled his own pending court-martial proceedings and removed him from a regiment in disarray. Officers were reported to be openly scorned by their men, refusing to leave their tents to perform basic duties. His was not the only departure; by April there had been a “drastic turnover” within the regiment’s leadership.88 Marcus Spiegel’s response to Grant’s order was more typical. Otherwise opinionated, he maintained a striking silence in his correspondence. Newly appointed as a lieutenant colonel, he was probably the most senior Jewish officer in the Department of the Tennessee in December 1862.89 When the order was issued, he and his regiment were on their way down the Mississippi to join Grant’s push on Vicksburg. Spiegel was none

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too complimentary of the “order, discipline, nor soldier bearing” of the units that he encountered en route—a “debauched set of ruffians”—and pined for a “McClellan in every Department” to hasten the end of the war, but he came no closer than this to overtly criticizing Grant.90 In January, with the campaign faltering and his regiment dispirited, he was forthright in his disapproval of the Emancipation Proclamation. “I do not fight or want to fight for Lincoln’s Negro Proclamation one day longer than I can help,” he wrote to his wife.91 He said nothing of the infamous order. Its sting may have been too raw, and its implications too shameful. He, unlike Trounstine, chose to remain in his post. We do, however, have some intimation of Spiegel’s thinking. A former captain in the 120th Ohio Infantry disparaged his commanding officer in a Republican newspaper in Ohio two months later. Spiegel, he reported, was “not a particular friend of Father Abraham on account of his Proclamation of Freedom, nor of Gen. Grant for his proclamation excluding all Jews from his army corps.”92 Yet if Spiegel bore any personal animus against Grant, he soon understood the merits of Grant in command. In May 1863 he lauded the general as having “shown in this campayne more true, gay, dashing, bold and strategic military skill than has been displayed by all the other Generals combined since the Rebellion broke out.” When Vicksburg finally fell in July, Spiegel hailed him as the “greatest Chieftain of the Age.”93 Over time, as we have seen, his thinking about slavery and emancipation changed too. Jacob C. Cohen, a second lieutenant in the Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry during the Vicksburg campaign, was less reticent than Spiegel. After wearying campaigning and now endless “drills, reviews and reconnoisances, raids, runaway horses, fevers, broken heads, quinine, ‘not granted’ leaves of absence, contrabands and whiskey” in Corinth, Mississippi, Cohen complained in April 1863 of “ennni” which “was rapidly making him a used up man.” Stimulated by an acute homesickness (and perhaps by whiskey), Cohen’s letters to the Jewish Messenger were remarkable for their lack of restraint. Openly mocking the “august U.S. Grant”—his commanding general—Cohen seethed that “one of U.S. Grant’s ‘as a class’ friends” took “it for Granted that Grant would not Grant me a leave” to return home to New York City. He was no more flattering of Grant’s generalship. It seems to be pretty clearly demonstrated that the Army of the Tennessee wants a leader; that is, a man who is free from the prevalent disease of Canal on the brain; a man who can refrain from kicking Israelites out of

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his back door, while the enemy enter at the front; a man who is a man, and a General; one who is free from the bigoted principles which are demoralizing our army and rendering our success more uncertain and distant.94

Jacob Cohen’s public gnashing of teeth about Grant reveals another means to express discontent about prejudice. What is noteworthy about Cohen’s letter, however, is how unusual it was. Though the Jewish press printed many letters from soldiers, these rarely discussed discrimination. Even in the month immediately following Grant’s order—when Jewish newspapers described an “exceedingly bitter” mood among Jews across the Union, and editors would have seized upon coruscating correspondence— such letters are strikingly absent.95 By contrast, the letter columns of the German-language press smoldered after Chancellorsville.96 This reticence may have derived from the same causes that seemingly discouraged Jewish soldiers from bemoaning encounters with prejudice in their letters home—it is difficult to imagine that antisemitism did not rankle—or it may have reflected a relative absence of discrimination. For in an age when self-worth was inextricably linked with reputation, insult was more than just an affront.97 Indeed, the experience of German soldiers after public opinion turned against them in the Union suggests that many Jewish soldiers would have acted on a sense of grievance and disillusionment if they felt sufficiently wronged. Rare were public expressions of outrage of the kind produced by Captain Ferdinand Levy after Harper’s Weekly questioned the patriotism of Jews. That article, written under a pseudonym by the political editor of the magazine soon after the draft riots in New York City, insinuated, perhaps with August Belmont in mind, that Jews had blood on their hands. You have no native, no political, no religious sympathy with this country. You are here solely to make money, and your only wish is to make money as fast as possible. You neither know our history nor understand our government. . . . This being the case with you and thousands like you, you are inevitably a Secessionist, a Copperhead, and a Rebel . . . the enemy of all who will risk war to save the nation. If quiet can be preserved by massacring the negroes, amen: you want money, and money requires quiet. If things can be kept still by slaughtering Irishmen, you cheerfully agree. . . .

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Unsurprisingly, the columnist concluded that “to call a man a ‘Jew’ is only less offensive than to call him ‘nigger.’”98 In riposte to the Jewish fifth columnists that Harper’s imagined skulking in the rear, Levy deployed steely sons of Israel proudly serving on the front lines. Levy, who described himself as “[b]eing always at hand to defend my co-religionists both in the field and at home,” was better placed to invoke service and sacrifice than editorialists who rehearsed such arguments in the Jewish press from the comfort of their desks.99 “[M]ost regiments in our army corps,” he wrote from Morris Island, South Carolina, “have more or less Israelites in their ranks.” “These facts” were “sufficient to show that said article is nothing but a falsehood.” He and his fellow Jews in the New York Independent Battalion—he counted thirty in total—“are now constantly in front of the enemy, and expect to be in Charleston shortly.”100 Though his unit was not involved in the first Union effort to capture the island in early July, nor in the ill-starred assault ten days later on Battery Wagner that made the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts famous, his proximity to the front added weight to his words. Morris Island meant something to the public mind in September 1863. Alas, his confident predictions were misplaced. Levy was cashiered for benefiting from bounty fraud two months later, and Charleston would not fall until February 1865. Because there were no Jewish units in the Union army, the responses of Jewish soldiers to prejudice—whether writing letters to the press, grumbling silently, fighting back, changing companies, or deserting—were individual rather than collective. In part, this reflected the organizational challenges presented by their dispersion. Given the limitations on communication between regiments, it was much easier for Ferdinand Levy to write to the Jewish press than to organize concerted action, even if only a petition, with Jews outside his regiment. And given their relative isolation, Jewish soldiers may have perceived themselves as vulnerable to sanction. (Levy had the rare distinction of serving under his father and alongside his brother, but this did not save him from court-martial. He was convicted of knowingly recruiting deserters to his unit.) Dispersion also inhibited their ability to develop a collective identity as victims of prejudice, as did their reluctance to publicly air their experiences of discrimination. Even the public response to Grant’s order was more likely to reinforce a sense of vulnerability and isolation among Jewish soldiers than to foster a sense of safety and solidarity. Although the episode whipped up outrage and protest by Jews on the home front, the response paled next to the wrath of the German and Irish communities at real and

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imagined injustices. The deputations dispatched to Washington to petition the White House to rescind Grant’s order made for respectable (and effective) politics, but the sedate style was unlikely to fire up soldiers in the field with confidence and pride. (“We rely on the justice of our cause,” the Jewish Messenger explained, “and have no need of the clap-trap or buncombe of mass meetings, to make our influence felt in proportion to the length of our orations and the gas evolved.”)101 Nor was the outcome satisfying. The order was revoked, but Grant remained in command. A victory of sorts, but unlikely to ease the minds of those far from the protections of family and community, and uncertain of what the future held. How then did Jewish soldiers seek to create community during the war? It is to that question that we turn in the next chapter.

5: SAC RED D UTI ES When Henry Auerbach mustered into the Thirteenth Ohio Cavalry in April 1864, he expected to tend to the regiment’s horses as a farrier. He may have soon regretted his decision to enlist. Instead of riding into combat, the regiment was obliged to make do with Shanks’s pony and was assigned to infantry duty with Burnside’s Ninth Corps in the works before Petersburg. By the beginning of July, Auerbach and his comrades were bivouacked behind the dense knot of entrenchments, breastworks, and forts that maintained a choke hold on the city. The sapping heat—there had been no rain for weeks— produced “ankle deep” dust and a lassitude broken by the shriek of the occasional shell and the whistle of bullets from sharp shooters. For the moment, shorn of his horses and temporarily idle, Auerbach was at a loose end. The lull allowed for a meeting of Jewish soldiers at the regimental headquarters with, as he proudly noted, “Farrier Henry M. Auerbach, presiding.” Auerbach was tasked with writing to Isaac Mayer Wise to solicit a “Siddur, Zizis and Tefilin”—prayer book, ritual fringes, and phylacteries—as well as copies of Wise’s newspaper, “for,” he complained, “we are tired of reading the Evangelist and others.”1 Ideally, Auerbach proposed, such accoutrements should be provided to each Jewish soldier in the army; Jews on the home front should create their own equivalent of the Sanitary Commission. We know of no other Jewish men in the Thirteenth Ohio. Auerbach may have taken liberties in order to add air to his appeal, or the gathering may have included Jews from other regiments involved in the investment of Petersburg; we know of four other Jews in the thirteen regiments and two batteries in his division. But the letter certainly demonstrates Auerbach’s desire to maintain some measure of religious observance in the field, as well as his confidence in donning garments certain to call attention to his religious identity. With

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his regiment temporarily becalmed, his request reveals how he mapped out a future that included time for orderly prayer. The army had other plans for Auerbach. Two days later, the Thirteenth Ohio went into line, occupying rifle pits and bombproofs roughly two hundred feet from their Confederate counterparts. The barrage of bullets and shells, a soldier in the regiment recalled, was now constant—“spat! spat!” went the “balls against our breastworks.” At night it sounded “like an old-fashioned wood-chopping.” A whiskey ration was issued twice a day. After two weeks, the regiment was moved further forward to occupy the very front line, even closer to the Confederate trenches. Here the regiment entered a new phase of misery. Deluges drenched the men and swept away fortifications. The ground was “alive with vermin; maggots washed down from the hillsides abound in the runs and springs, and our hard tack contains the little chaps. Put a hard tack in hot coffee and these little scamps will crawl out with a smile on their faces as if saying ‘how-de-do!’ . . . [O]ur appearance is dirty—graybacks, ragged cloths, unkempt hair, etc.” Launched forward on July 30 as part of the broader assault that accompanied the Battle of the Crater, the regiment was torn to shreds as it attempted to storm the Confederate breastworks. Bodies of friends and comrades lay in the foul and broiling no-man’s-land for three days, recognizable only by their cavalry jackets when finally buried under a flag of truce. Upon returning to the rear, more than twenty men in one company rebelled, refusing “to take muskets any more” and pleading to return to cavalry duty.2 Auerbach was spared part of an exhausting routine that continued until December in the trenches around Petersburg—picket duty, skirmishes, and the constant work of digging, felling trees, and building breastworks—because he was assigned to special duties as a veterinary surgeon. Eventually on December 19 the regiment was returned to cavalry duty, and Auerbach to his horses. There is no evidence, however, that he was ever sent his prayer book, or that he received his newspapers. As Auerbach’s plea to Isaac Mayer Wise reveals, Jewish soldiers largely had to fend for themselves in the field when it came to the availability of ritual objects and religious practice. Access to the wellsprings of Jewish life was limited. For the most part, the Armies of the Potomac and of the Tennessee marched and fought in areas where relatively few Jews lived prior to the war, or where the closest Jewish communities—in Richmond, Petersburg, Vicksburg, and elsewhere—were within the rebel lines. And most Jewish soldiers were far from home. Furloughs were seldom granted to enlisted men, save for

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when recuperating from injury or upon signing up for an additional period of service. The military, moreover, was indifferent to the religious needs of Jews.3 Despite these and other challenges, Auerbach and some of his fellow Jewish soldiers sought to fashion space for themselves within an environment more accommodating of the profane than of the sacred. The military’s reputation for hard drinking, hard swearing, and hard living was long established by the beginning of the war and became entrenched as it wore on. Devout Christians vociferously complained in the press that most soldiers were indifferent to religious fellowship, that coarseness and boorishness reigned in military camps as idle hours were filled with sinful pursuits, and that officers and men were unconcerned about observing the Sabbath.4 Few were under any illusion that the mass volunteer armies provided a haven for the faithful. Tellingly, an anonymous correspondent writing to the Jewish Messenger felt it necessary in 1862 to publicly challenge the idea that soldiering was far from godliness. “Most people take it for granted,” he complained, “that every soldier is an infidel, and that no sooner does he enter on active duty, than he banishes all idea of religion from his mind.” This, he protested, was not true.5 While he was correct that army life did not automatically make infidels of believers, it did present significant challenges for those—Jew and Christian alike—who sought to faithfully follow religious precepts. Yet as adherents of a religion historically centered on observance—of laws and customs that regulated daily life, as well as of rituals bound to a sacred calendar—Jews faced particular challenges in the Union army. Traditional Judaism is a religion of practice, and practice was hard in the army. Although many of those who enlisted had already broken with traditional stringencies prior to mustering in, they nonetheless encountered difficulties with performing even the most basic of sacred duties. Some of these challenges were intrinsic to the systems and processes that regimented life in the Union army. The ration system, for example, made little allowance for variation and individual choice in diet. Other challenges derived from the isolation and dispersion of Jewish soldiers within the army. As we saw earlier, only ten regiments contained more than twenty Jewish soldiers. (At full strength—which they rarely were—regiments usually included one thousand men.) More typical were regiments with only a handful of Jews. This made it difficult for Jews to gather for worship and celebrate Jewish festivals together. For many, their experience of Judaism—which at home was imbricated with family and community—now became solitary. Additionally, adhering to any religion could attract

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unwanted attention. Christians who prayed in public, particularly during the first two years of the war, complained that they faced scorn and scoffing by comrades; the conspicuous display of piety was associated with women and domesticity, not the manly vigor of soldiers.6 As we will see, if faithful Christians feared the mockery of their comrades, Jews had even more reason for reticence. In other ways, Jews were less likely to be troubled by some elements of military life than were devout Christians. Marcus Spiegel was affronted by the profanity of his men and ascribed this sensitivity to his “moral feelings” and “religious” nature.7 While his discomfort reflected his sense of propriety—gentility and respectability were central to Northern ideas about masculine honor, as well as his decorous values as a German immigrant—Jewish soldiers as a group were less sensitive to the alleged vices that exercised their zealous evangelical comrades.8 For Jews, gambling and drinking were not the cultural taboos that they were for the penitential Christian soldier who repented of making “use of foolish games, such as dominoes, checkers, chess, and I regret to say sometimes handling the vile cards.”9 Indeed, such censoriousness probably reminded immigrant soldiers of the efforts of nativists to suppress these practices before the war. Jews were certainly not alone in enjoying the diversion provided by the bottle and a deck of cards. Gambling was popular throughout the army, but German regiments had the particular privilege of access to beer until May 1863.10 Colonel Max Einstein of the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry, for example, was known for “ensuring sutlers stocked with beer visited his regiment.” (He also insisted that his soldiers be supplied with the black and brown bread they preferred to the milquetoast white issued to the rest of the army.)11 And, as we will see, Joseph A. Joel recalled with fondness carousing with his Jewish comrades on Passover. Some German regiments, well stocked with freethinkers, had a particular reputation for religious indifference. Jews enlisted in several such units, but did so for a variety of reasons. In reality, the typical recruit, whether Jewish or Christian, encountered significant religious diversity within the ranks. Regiments threw together men with very different backgrounds, shoehorning those who would not otherwise share a pew (or pray at all) into the forced intimacies of army life. The denominational fecundity of prewar Protestantism was well represented within most regiments.12 Likewise, the scale of enlistment by Irish immigrants spared Jews from some of the attention that otherwise would focus on those whose beliefs and practices were so noticeably different; Catholics and

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Catholicism were the subject of particular suspicion prior to the war. The denominational diversity within regiments also encouraged some chaplains to be more circumspect. Jacob C. Cohen, writing from Corinth in May 1863, complimented the chaplain of the Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry for “taking every care to avoid wounding the feelings of those who are not of the same creed as himself.” (The chaplain was less compromising when it came to politics. “[T]here are men among us of every shade of political opinion,” Cohen reported, “and many have been dissatisfied because our chaplain, as they said, ‘preached too much nigger.’”)13 Likewise, Emanuel Reichhelm, chaplain of the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, was complimented for displaying “not even the slightest religious reference” in some of his sermons.14 Denominational diversity was, however, cold comfort for those who worried about marching off to war as a lone Jew among Christian soldiers. Military service immersed Jews among Christians in an environment suffused with Christian music, hymns, prayers, and preaching, with a shower of Bibles, tracts, and newspapers rained upon them by mission societies.15 The cause itself was sacralized in Christological language, and putatively nondenominational sermons often invoked Jesus.16 The Articles of War “earnestly recommended” that all men attend worship services, and Lincoln ordered the “orderly observance of the Sabbath,” Sunday being the assumed default.17 And even if only one in four Christian soldiers, or fewer, was devout, as one historian has suggested, most still understood their experience through a providential frame rooted in a Christological worldview, and the “vast majority looked to the heavens for guidance.”18 The tone and tenor of devotion, moreover, changed as religious revivals took hold in the armies in the east and west from the fall of 1862 onward.19 To be a Jew in the army was still to be a religious outsider. According to one soldier, few willingly courted what he described as the “notoriety” of being publicly “known as Hebrews,” potentially inviting unwanted attention from those who might wish to save their souls, eliciting the taunts of comrades, and generating a sense of shame among those who regarded their religion as a cross to bear.20 On the personal level, religious differences appear to have posed little impediment to forming intense bonds of comradeship. Charles Sonnenberg recalled of his relationship with Hugh Kelly that they “never separated” from their days of drilling on Staten Island until he left the army: “We were always together and occupied the same tent, in fact we were bosom friends, and long after I had left America we kept up a correspondence.”21

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August Bondi shared a similar bond with his bunkmate, but the friendship was severed by death on the battlefield. Marcus Spiegel regarded Captain Phelan of his regiment, “a devout irish Catholic,” as one of his “most ardent and warmest friends.22 The intensely social Marcus Spiegel marveled that he was popular despite his religion and abstemiousness. “I do not play Cards, or any other game,” he boasted. “I do not drink or spree; I do not run after foreign Gods or strange Women and yet my tent is the rendesvouz of the officers. It is very often that I can scarcely find Room to sit down.”23 Spiegel was at ease in discussing religion with his peers. He joined “regular morning and evening devotions” conducted by his Christian messmates, and was comfortable talking of his children’s morning prayer with the quartermaster (“he was so taken with it, he wrote it down at once and sent it to his ‘Charlotte’ to learn it to his children”).24 As a senior regimental officer, Spiegel found it much easier to be a Jew on his own terms. Jews were not unusual in abjuring discussion of faith in their writing.25 Indeed the diaries, memoirs, and letters of Jewish soldiers were typically taciturn when it came to matters of religion. References to God are relatively infrequent. This was the case for Marcus Spiegel. A rare exception was when he credited “God our heavenly father” for how he evaded injury at the First Battle of Kernstown, even though “a many, many well aimed bullet whizzed passed my head and close by my body.” But such invocations of the divine are difficult to interpret: they may reveal staunch belief, reflexive fatalism, a providential worldview only loosely tied to faith, or merely the habitual use of formulaic language.26 Likewise Spiegel’s letters from Young’s Point, Louisiana—written while his regiment was losing four men a day to disease as it dug an ill-fated diversionary canal to bypass Vicksburg—may have invoked God to quieten his anxious family. “Don’t worry about me,” he reassured his mother. “With God’s help and your blessing everything will be alright.”27 (His mother was not mollified for long. She is “very much down about me staying in the Army,” he confided to his wife in 1864.)28 August Bondi, by contrast, credited his mother with viewing military service as a religious obligation.29 Bondi also wrote little of God and belief in his memoir.30 By his own account, he was a “consistent Jew” who “believed in the continuance and upholding of all the ceremonial laws,” but “[n]ever orthodox.” As we will see, he was proud of his Jewish identity. But both he and Spiegel assumed a pragmatic and flexible approach to Judaism shaped by their peripatetic prewar careers. As young immigrants, they had lived far from the constraints and expectations of home, and cut off from continuous contact with fellow

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Jews. In this, they were not unusual. Many immigrant Jewish men started in America as peddlers, accustoming them to a lifestyle that rewarded adaptability and pragmatism, as well as to the experience of living as a Jew among strangers with only occasional access to a religious community.31 For Bondi and Spiegel religion had become largely a private affair by the time they enlisted. Though some pursued religious fellowship during the war—seeking to worship side by side with coreligionists—Bondi and Spiegel primarily sought out their fellow Jews for social connection and solidarity.32 The whispered benedictions of Jewish soldiers, out of earshot of their comrades and unrecorded in letters home, are lost to us, as is much else about the contours of their inner religious lives. We know of only one amulet written by a sage to protect its wearer from “men of war [and] that God may help him return to his home,” and can only speculate as to whether other Jews carried charms of this kind.33 Indeed, letters and diaries do not reveal anything distinctive about the worldview of Jewish soldiers, certainly not enough to discern a common disposition that set them apart from their Christian comrades. In part this may be a product of the limited number of such sources that have survived, but it may also reflect wariness among religious Jews to enlist and the likelihood that most of those who did enlist had limited religious educations and were not steeped in Jewish theology. Much of what we do know about the role of religion for Jewish soldiers is instead revealed in the quotidian: the choices they made relating to Jewish dietary laws, the Jewish Sabbath and religious festivals, and prayer. These tell us more about everyday religious matters—what scholars describe as “lived religion”—than about belief and faith. They also explain why enlistment was more attractive to men like Bondi and Spiegel than to those who, before the war, dutifully sought to maintain traditional Jewish religious practices. As observers of a religious tradition rooted in law and ritual, observant Jews would be forced into endless compromises and accommodations within a regimented and unyielding military culture. As we will see, August Bondi, Marcus Spiegel, and many of their peers were less put off by these breaches. There is little reason to imagine that Bondi, who slaughtered his hogs before leaving to join the Fifth Kansas Cavalry, was troubled by the salt pork, bacon, and beef that were staples of army rations. In reality, the Civil War soldiers’ diet was, as William C. Davis described, “a three-course meal of monotony, insufficiency, and improvisation.”34 Bondi, frequently hungry in the field because of the inadequacy of supplies, relished the foraged

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additions that he and his messmates added to the pot whenever they could. When times were tough, his contributions included raccoon.35 Likewise, Marcus Spiegel made little fuss of the meat he ate, though he took careful note of the occasions when his drab diet was supplemented through the industry of his men. “My boys killing 3 young hogs during the night,” he related to his wife on one such occasion, and “gave me a couple of nice hams which with other things made us a splendit repast.”36 Nathan Mayer had similarly fond memories of “a fine good-sized pig” that his “colored orderly had stolen or confiscated” and then boiled after the Battle of South Mountain. Though he “fared well on it for two days,” he was still able to share the rest with his regiment’s staff officers before the Battle of Antietam.37 Alexander Appel, captured with much of his Iowa regiment outside Atlanta in July 1864 and held captive in the notorious Andersonville prison, had little hope of supplementing his meager rations. He shared a loaf of cornbread, a mess kettle of beans, and a pound of sowbelly with thirty other men, and counted himself lucky when the sowbelly was provided.38 Whereas others only remarked on the consumption of pork during lean times— when its presence was a luxury—or when complaining of a monotonous military diet (“Getting tired of pickled Pork,” Spiegel grumbled),39 Joseph C. Levi regarded his daily pork ration as taking his (treyfe) medicine for Uncle Sam. “Camp life,” he complained to the Jewish Messenger from Camp Belgar outside Baltimore in June 1862, involved an unvarying “bill of fare” that included “bread, coffee and pork for breakfast, coffee, pork and bread for dinner, and pork, bread and coffee for tea.” [P]erhaps as a good orthodox,” he warned the readers of the newspaper, “the less I say on the subject the better.” Unlike Bondi, Spiegel, Mayer, and Appel, who were more concerned with having a full belly than how they filled it, Joseph Levi held his nose in the mess tent and resigned himself to an unholy diet. Ultimately, he had little choice but to “adapt myself in this, as in other things, to existing circumstances.”40 While he did not discourage others from following his example by enlisting, Levi’s letter reminded readers of the New York newspaper that army life required many compromises of observant Jews.41 Immigrants in particular may have been accustomed to making do. Certainly sixteen-year-old David Zehden relished the “good food and drink” he received in the army. “[O]ur best food” he wrote to his family in Berlin, “[is] thick rice with syrup and a piece of bacon.” This in spite of indications that Zehden continued to observe the traditional worship rite of donning phylacteries. He kept these on hand in his “bread-sack” until the

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latter (and its contents) were stolen after he had spent almost ten months in uniform. Zehden’s perspective about food may have been shaped by his struggles after arriving in New York in May 1861. Unable to find work, he complained to his parents, “Hunger is painful and it takes an awful lot if a young person is supposed to feed himself all alone.”42 Such compromises, born of the press of circumstance, would be familiar to others seeking to make their way in the New World. Though the consumption of pork was particularly taboo for tradition-minded Jews, the fresh and salted beef supplied to soldiers was not kosher either. In reality, it was wellnigh impossible for an enlisted man to permanently forgo his meat ration and subsist on coffee, hardtack, beans, and the plunder of foragers, even if supplemented by generous food parcels dispatched by family and friends on the home front. The arrival of these occasional packages did more to bridge the psychic and physical distance that separated men from their loved ones than to provide a reliable source of sustenance.43 Marcus Spiegel pined for the comforting tastes of home. “You may send me something nice to eat in the Box; it will not cost any more,” he coaxed his wife in February 1862. “A bottle of something to drink won’t hurt anybody.”44 Two weeks later he salivated at the prospect of soon receiving the promised parcel: “my ‘mouth is watering’ for the contents already. . . . [I] have no doubt but it will be here by to morrow and then O God, wont I pitch in? I should think I will.”45 Pitch in he did. “[T]ongues,” presumably pickled, “were just the thing on a hard march,” he wrote home approvingly after gorging himself. 46

“QUARTERMASTER’S SUPPLIES—SKETCHED BY A HEBREW VOLUNTEER.”   In this sketch, published in the New-York Illustrated News in September 1861, a “Hebrew volunteer” pointedly comments upon the prevalence of pork in military rations. Courtesy of Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, NY

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Soldiers supplemented their rations by purchasing food from the regimental sutler. Each regiment was entitled to its own sutler. The sutler carried his store with him in a wagon, setting up shop in a canvas tent when the regiment bivouacked, and selling items chosen to appeal to the wants of the infantryman bored with his monotonous diet and drab camp life.47 Soldiers frequently complained about sutlers, bemoaning the quality of the food they sold and the exorbitant prices they charged. Yet in much the same vein as the Borscht Belt chestnut, they were wont to complain both of the unscrupulousness of the sutler and of the infrequency of his visits.48 Though we do not know whether the sutler of the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry sated the appetite of the handful of Jewish soldiers in the regiment for pickled tongues, he was purportedly responsible for shipping unleavened bread from Cincinnati to mountainous and remote Raleigh County in West Virginia in April 1862 so that they could celebrate Passover.49 The sharing of food—whether treats from home, purchases from the sutler’s wagon, daily rations, or a barrel of matzah—reinforced bonds between soldiers. August Bondi was typical in joining an informal mess in his unit—sharing the duties of drawing rations, cooking, and washing dishes—and eating together with seventeen other men day after day. Though the group did not tire of one another’s company—they stuck together during their entire period of enlistment—they did tire of one another’s cooking. After close to a year in the field, they hired an African American woman to cook for them at six dollars per month.50 In an environment where food—and cooking duties—were shared, breaking bread (more often hardtack) together was a tangible demonstration of belonging, comradeship, and friendship.51 Though the food was poor, Jews had every reason to want to pitch in with their fellow soldiers. To eat separately or differently was to set oneself apart. It was not much easier to observe even the rudiments of religious ritual. The regimented rhythms of military life granted men limited autonomy. When in camp, an endless cycle of drill and parade structured time and allowed for little variation in routine. Few allowances were made for the Christian Sabbath, never mind the Jewish one.52 When in the field, regiments were even further removed from civilian rhythms. Campaign season was bound by the weather, the ambitions of Union generals, and the movements of the Confederate army, not the conventional calendar and certainly not the Jewish one. Separated from family and home, soldiers found it easy to lose track of Jewish time. Because home is the locus of so much of Jewish ritual, particularly with regard to the Sabbath and festivals, religious observance was that much more challenging for Jewish soldiers. They

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had ready access to neither the foods that set these days apart from the regular calendar, nor the family that added meaning and the press of social expectation to these occasions. Marcus Wittenberg, who served in the Fifth Kansas Cavalry with August Bondi, received letters from his family informing him of the dates of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This likely reflected the desires of his family rather than his own impulses: Wittenberg, it will be recalled, refused to acknowledge that he was a Jew even when directly asked by Bondi.53 Jacob Lyons’s day-to-day diary assiduously recorded the visits of the paymaster—a matter of material interest to any soldier—but not Jewish holidays, again suggesting how military life created an all-encompassing world that marched to its own drumbeat.54 While officers had more freedom than enlisted men, the vagaries of military movements and the lumbering nature of a military bureaucracy stingy with leave made it difficult for even the most assiduously religious soldier to plan far ahead with any degree of certainty. Though Marcus Spiegel was certainly not punctilious when it came to matters of Jewish observance—he learned from his chance encounter with Simon Brucker in Suffolk, Virginia, in September 1862 that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were a few weeks away— unusually his plan to attend a synagogue on these days in nearby Norfolk was scuttled by the granting of long-awaited leave.55 Spiegel did not expect his life in the military to be guided by the customary calendar, but he held the domestic sphere to a different standard. His children should be kept out of school on the High Holy Days “for his sake,” and he expected his wife to spend Passover with his family in Chicago. He noted in a letter to her that he did “not exactly know when Pesach is.”56 And yet paradoxically these festivals seem to have taken on particular meaning for Spiegel during wartime. Before the High Holy Days he urged his wife to pray for “the deliverance of this once happy Country and the Peaceful enjoyment of our family Circle at the End of the unhappy War.”57 Even if Spiegel could not attend synagogue in Norfolk for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Simon Brucker did. His regiment, badly bloodied at the battles of Winchester and Port Republic in the Shenandoah Valley, was enjoying a respite in Suffolk, “easy times” spent constructing two forts to defend the town. Brucker was serving as an aide-de-camp to his brigade commander, a position that afforded him a degree of freedom. Alerted by his parents to the presence of a nearby synagogue—he also continued to receive the Israelite, which was delivered to him in Suffolk—he “was pleased to find a large congregation engaged in prayer” when he arrived on the first evening of Rosh Hashanah.58 “Oh!” he delighted. “It made me feel as though I were at home among friends once more.”

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His reception was mixed. By his reckoning “all the Yehudim in Norfolk are embittered against the northern soldiers,” and he had “several little arguments with some of them.” He “found most of them pretty reasonable excepting the young ladies, they can outargue the smartest statesman in the world according to their own way.” This fit a broader pattern of hostility by Southern women toward Union soldiers.59 Nonetheless, Brucker’s hearty thanks to particular individuals suggests that he was provided with hospitality, and on the whole he appears to have received a warmer welcome than that experienced by displaced Confederate refugees in some Southern religious communities.60 Brucker was certainly not alone in seeking out a synagogue when stationed near a town with a Jewish community. Jacob C. Cohen, a second lieutenant in the Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry, relished his time in Memphis in 1863 after many taxing months of marching, countermarching, and skirmishing in Mississippi.61 Though the city was still under martial law, it offered relief from “the monotony of camp life” and an opportunity to “kill time more pleasantly than heretofore.” For Cohen, this included visiting the synagogue on the Sabbath and festivals. He was not the only soldier seeking community in the city. “[A]mong the worshippers,” he wrote after Shavuout, “I noticed several blue coats.”62 Daniel Mayer, assistant surgeon in the Fifth West Virginia Infantry, sought out rabbis Isaac Mayer Wise and Max Lilienthal during a visit to Cincinnati from Ceredo, West Virginia, a journey of more than 150 miles by steamboat along the Ohio River.63 And Marcus Spiegel attended Wise’s synagogue while awaiting departure for Vicksburg.64 Not all eagerly sought out or could access organized religious activity. August Bondi, by contrast, entered a synagogue for the “first time for many years” after the war.65 Very few contemporaneous accounts exist of Jewish soldiers at prayer in the field. The Jewish press, which otherwise delighted in reporting on incidents that reflected well on Jewish patriotism and religious fidelity, could muster only a single report: It is quite common for Jewish soldiers belonging to the same company, to meet together for worship on Sabbath, in some secluded spot, and I know a young soldier, who was on Kippore morning, ordered to take part in a skirmish, near Harper’s Ferry, which he had to go through, without having tasted food, and as soon as the enemy retreated, he retired to the woods,66 where he remained until sunset, reading his prayers. The character of these devotions is not the less interesting from the fact, that they are

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always performed in solemn silence, and in some secluded spot, where the noise of the camp cannot penetrate. . . . I feel most solemnly impressed by hearing in these Virginian forests my brethren, utter the Shymang Israel, which first our great lawgiver proclaimed in the plains of Arabia.

The author’s stated intention was to demonstrate that military life was not incompatible with Jews and Judaism, a purpose that encouraged his fanciful descriptions of the religious practices of Jewish soldiers during prior wars and his elaborate explanation of how Manassas, infamous site of the battles of Bull Run, was named for Menassch, the Jewish owner of a long-past lodging house that served stagecoaches on the road to Richmond.67 Several other elements sow additional doubt on this account, not least that the soldier and regiments went unidentified. This sudden modesty was at odds with the practice of a Jewish press otherwise eager to lionize Jewish soldiers. Equally unusual was passing mention in the press of the celebration of Passover at the Sprague Barracks in New Dorp, Staten Island, in April 1863. Simon Levy, forty-nine years old and recently promised a lieutenant colonelcy, was in New York seeking to recruit two companies for a battalion that had struggled to fill its complement of men. Two of his sons, one of whom was commissioned as a captain, were among his first recruits. He was much less successful in enlisting other Jews (and recruits more generally). The battalion, then stationed in South Carolina, already had a significant number of his coreligionists—at least nineteen—but in 1863 even the promise of serving under Jewish officers and among fellow Jews appears to have been but poor inducement to new recruits. The promise of participating in a campaign to take Charleston may have also deterred would-be volunteers, as may have the effects of Grant’s order, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the disaster at Fredericksburg. Temporarily on Staten Island, Simon Levy, his son Captain Ferdinand Levy, and the other new recruits would soon join the rest of the battalion in South Carolina. The Israelite indicates that Ferdinand celebrated Passover with others in his company. If this was indeed the case—we have no details of what, if anything, they did to mark the occasion—the circumstances were unusual. All were newly separated from civilian life, still more civilian than soldier in orientation, in close proximity to New York City and its abundant supplies of matzah, with time on their hands as they awaited mustering in, and under the command of two officers very conscious of their Jewishness.68 Such circumstances were not often repeated.

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What is even more telling than the paucity of accounts in the Jewish press of Jews worshiping together is that these purported gatherings went unremarked upon in the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by their Christian comrades. Jewish soldiers were living at close quarters with bored and curious onlookers likely to notice and comment on strange and unfamiliar Jewish religious practices. And yet even as a set of stories developed around the exotic figure of the Jewish sutler, these same sources are strikingly silent on the exotic religion of the Jewish soldier. Though again, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, this silence, in the Jewish press and from firsthand observers, suggests that Jewish group worship was not frequent or conspicuous. This is not to claim that Jews did not seek solace in religious belief and that they did not pray when alone or in the company of others. Indeed, there are hints of private prayers whispered by Jewish soldiers out of earshot of their Christian comrades.69 Jews were certainly not immune to the impulses that drove some of their fellow soldiers to embrace religion: the terrifying casualty rates, distance from family, stresses of military life, despondency at the faltering war effort, and alienation from the home front. But Jewish soldiers seem to have been less likely to express their religious feelings through public worship. Nor, given their isolation and dispersion, did Jewish soldiers have many opportunities for public worship in the field. Few contemporaneous sources describe Jewish soldiers breaking bread (or matzah) together on Sabbath and Jewish festivals, but several stories first recorded after the war have filled this vacuum. That these stories have been told and retold is unsurprising. There are few better representations of a Jewish American synthesis and of Jewish fidelity to their religion than stories of Jewish soldiers collectively seeking social and spiritual succor close to the field of battle. The most often repeated is Joseph A. Joel’s vivid description of celebrating Passover in 1862 while idled by winter in the village of Fayette in the “wild woods” of West Virginia. Told of the approach of Passover, presumably in letters from home, Joel and twenty of his “comrades and co-religionists” belonging to the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry were granted relief from their regular duties to prepare for the festival. Entrusting the sutler with some of their newly paid wages, they enlisted him to send them matzah once he returned home to Cincinnati. The precious cargo—seven barrels of unleavened bread and two prayer books—arrived by wagon train with mere hours to spare. “We were now able to keep the seder nights,” Joel recalled, “if we could only obtain the other requisites for that occasion.”

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We held a consultation and decided to send parties to forage in the country while a party stayed to build a log hut for the services.70 About the middle of the afternoon the foragers arrived, having been quite successful. We obtained two kegs of cider, a lamb, several chickens and some eggs. Horseradish or parsley we could not obtain, but in lieu we found a weed, whose bitterness, I apprehend, exceeded anything our forefathers ‘enjoyed’. We were still in a great quandary; we were like the man who drew the elephant in the lottery. We had the lamb, but did not know what part was to represent it at the table; but Yankee ingenuity prevailed, and it was decided to cook the whole and put it on the table, then we could dine off it, and be sure we had the right part. The necessaries for the choroutzes we could not obtain, so we got a brick which, rather hard to digest, reminded us, by looking at it, for what purpose it was intended.

With symbolic foods in place—sacramental wine (or at least a stand-in), a lamb shank (in this instance, an entire lamb), an egg, bitter herbs, and a substitute for charoset (a paste of nuts and fruit representing the mortar and brick of labor in Egyptian bondage)—they were now ready for their seder. Joel led the service. The ritualized meal, which began with a somber exhortation for divine intervention “to preserve our lives from danger,” soon devolved into farce. The ceremonies were passing off very nicely, until we arrived at the part where the bitter herb was to be taken. We all had a large portion of the herb ready to eat at the moment I said the blessing; each eat his portion, when horrors! what a scene ensued in our little congregation, it is impossible for my pen to describe. The herb was very bitter and very fiery like Cayenne pepper, and excited our thirst to such a degree, that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups, and the consequence was we drank up all the cider. Those that drank the more freely became excited, and one thought he was Moses, another Aaron, and one had the audacity to call himself Pharaoh. The consequence was a skirmish, with nobody hurt, only Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh had to be carried to the camp, and there left in the arms of Morpheus. This slight incident did not take away our appetite,

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and, after doing justice to our lamb, chickens and eggs, we resumed the second portion of the service without anything occurring worthy of note.

“There, in the wild woods of West Virginia,” Joel reflected, “away from home and friends, we consecrated and offered up to the ever-loving G-d of Israel our prayers and sacrifice. I doubt whether the spirits of our forefathers, had they been looking down on us, standing there with our arms by our side ready for an attack, faithful to our G-d and our cause, would have imagined themselves amongst mortals, enacting this commemoration of the scene that transpired in Egypt.” The template for this story was a lesser-known (and less humorous) account of celebrating Yom Kippur “in the wild mountains of West Virginia” that Joel published in September 1865. Like his tale of Passover, this first version appeared four years after the events it purported to describe. Many of its details were familiar: the building of a temporary sanctuary with benches “covered with boughs and decorated appropriately for the occasion,” the hunt for “five Tiphelas and an old Machsor [prayer books],” the pride and satisfaction after a day of fasting of returning to camp and eating rations. “Since then a number of my comrades have fallen defending the cause of their country,” Joel concluded. “I have yet received wounds all but mortal; yet there is no circumstance of my life that I can recur to that imparts more inward pleasure than the celebration of the Day of Atonement in 1861.”71 While Joel’s account of Yom Kippur is all but impossible to verify, it is easier to distinguish between what he remembered and misremembered in his tale of Passover.72 Joel, for example, errs as to where he was on Passover in 1862. After spending the first part of the winter in Fayette, the Twenty-third Ohio was divided in late December when two companies were sent to Raleigh, West Virginia, a semiabandoned hamlet an undulating twenty miles away through the thickly forested foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. They named their rudimentary new outpost Camp Hayes in honor of Rutherford B. Hayes, their lieutenant colonel. (William McKinley, another future president, was a private in Company E.) As the weather improved over the next months, the regiment re-formed in Raleigh, making occasional forays into the mountains to seek out bushwhackers. Joel and Company A tarried in Fayette as they awaited tents—the rest of the Twenty-third Ohio was billeted in houses and barns in Raleigh—and only joined the regiment on April 5. The recombined regiment was to begin its march to Princeton,

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West Virginia—and the resumption of active campaigning—soon after. Snow, followed by days of rain, made rivers unfordable and kept the regiment in the sodden camp longer than planned. They still had not moved by April 14, the first night of Passover. Joel may have celebrated the festival in Fayette, before his company rejoined the regiment, but if he did so, it is unlikely that he could have mustered twenty fellow Jews for the celebration. Simon Wolf, that most optimistic of enumerators, could find only six Jews in the entire Twenty-third Ohio regiment.73 The Shapell Roster has positively confirmed a total of four Jews in the regiment, only one of whom was in Joel’s company. Other details accord better with what we know about the regiment. With supplies low after a long winter and camped in countryside that offered poor prospects for foraging, Rutherford B. Hayes complained in late March, “Our living is hard, the grub I mean, and likely not to improve. Salt pork and crackers. The armies have swept off all fresh meats and vegetables. A few eggs once in a great while.”74 This changed within

A TELLING TOKEN   The sutler of the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry was G. W. Forbes, described by Joseph A. Joel as “a co-religionist,” and, like all sutlers, he issued tokens to simplify the process of extending credit. The system was simple. Between often irregularly spaced paydays, a soldier could request credit from a sutler and, by signing a paymaster’s order, receive tokens good at the regimental store, which sold necessities such as clothing, shaving and toilet utensils, pen, ink, papers, tobacco, matches, candles, books, newspapers, and—at least once, provided by G. W. Forbes, perhaps even in exchange for this token—Passover matzah. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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weeks. The paymaster soon made one of his infrequent visits to the regiment. Trains of laden pack mules arrived in advance of the regiment’s spring campaign, as did a new sutler with a well-stocked wagon who came bearing gifts from Cincinnati for the lieutenant colonel and, most likely, for Joel and his fellow Jewish soldiers.75 After months of unvaried winter rations, sudden abundance must have added to the jollity of the Passover feast. Though we will never know the extent to which Joel faithfully described the seder, his mode of storytelling—presenting himself as a member of an idealized band of brothers that found temporary escape from their earthly cares in faith, japes, and high jinks— drew upon popular modes of remembering and retelling the war. And he had good reason to have fond recollections of the early months of 1862. After incessant bullying, he had recently transferred to a new company, where he escaped the torments inflicted by the “bigoted class of men” who amused themselves by making his life miserable.76 Joel’s memories, moreover, were almost certainly inflected by the traumatic events that followed in September 1862. The severity of the wounds that Joel received during a heroic charge at Fox’s Gap during the Battle of South Mountain—gunshots to the right leg, right arm, and right shoulder, fracturing bones in each and puncturing his lung, and the loss of the tips of two fingers—likely added luster to his recollection.77 Indeed, the story’s mix of comedy and sentimentalism, focused on a haloed moment mere months before his life was forever altered, may have served as a coping mechanism, as it did for so many others.78 We get a sense of the pathos of Joel’s memory in a now seldom-recalled coda to his recollections of the Passover seder. “Since then,” he wrote at the end of his tale, “a number of my comrades have fallen in battle in defending the flag, they volunteered to protect with their lives.” “I have myself,” he concluded, “received a number of wounds all but mortal, but there is no occasion in my life that gives me more pleasure and satisfaction than when I remember the celebration of Passover in 1862.” These words would be familiar to those who read his account of Yom Kippur, though that was published in a different newspaper in a different city. Within months of his wounding, Joel petitioned to rejoin his regiment. Hayes, his commanding officer, was sufficiently impressed to note in his diary that the “Jew who got eight bullet holes in his person and limbs . . . thinks he can stand service in a couple of months.”79 Instead, against Joel’s wishes, he was discharged on account of disability. For the rest of his life, Joel, an immigrant from England who enlisted as a newly arrived eighteen-year-old, viewed his time in uniform with the fondness of one who had sacrificed

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so much for cause and comrades.80 His account of Passover in West Virginia was part of a larger project to recall and celebrate service and sacrifice. After the war, Joel became author, editor, and publisher of the Grand Army Gazette, a monthly journal for veterans, as well as of Rifle Shots and Bugle Notes, a compendium of colorful remembrances of the war. Cast into the wilderness so soon after his Passover idyll, Joel sought to preserve, in memory at least, that promised land of faithful comradeship that he experienced as a young man in West Virginia. Equally endearing, but even less reliable, is the Passover tale of Myer Levy, a cavalryman in the Fifth Pennsylvania. Levy is remembered as having come across the unlikely sight of a young boy munching on matzah upon entering a town in Northern Virginia in April 1864. “When he asked the boy for a piece of the unleavened bread, the child fled indoors, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Mother! There’s a ‘damnyankee’ Jew outside, and he wants my matzah.”81 The boy’s mother, we are told, displayed more grace than her son. She “came out immediately and invited him to return for a Passover dinner that night.”82 The story first entered the historical record in 1949 when relayed by Levy’s niece. Other hand-me-down stories are supported by even more threadbare evidence. Such is the tale of Rabbi Max Delbanco, who is credited with visiting Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1864 to conduct High Holy Day services for Union soldiers stationed in that fortress city.83 There is no evidence of his expedition, nor of the steamboat explosion that is remembered as having killed him on his return voyage to St. Louis. But the Jewish press did report in May 1865 that he was alive and well in New York City, albeit behaving erratically, more than six months after his supposedly fatal accident on the Mississippi River.84 Even if they did not routinely gather to pray, some soldiers sought out their fellow Jews for other forms of fellowship. Simon Seligmann and Max Samuels, who served in different companies in the First New York Engineers, “became acquainted because we were Hebrews.”85 Sixteen-year-old David Zehden, a private in the Fifty-second New York Infantry, delighted that he “ran into Freudenberg from the Schoenhauser Street 16 [in Berlin] in the Garibaldi Guards; I visit him sometimes.” He shared a tent with a “cousin of the brothers Lueck in the New Koenigs Street 72 [in Berlin].”86 Far from home, such distant connections took on new meaning and importance. Marcus Spiegel’s excitement at his chance meeting with a Jewish lieutenant attached to another regiment provides some indication of the rarity of such encounters. Simon Brucker, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in the Thirty-ninth Illinois Infantry, was from

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RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS   It couldn’t have been easy. The tiny minority of Jewish soldiers were religious outsiders in an army that made few allowances for their needs. They were expected to subsist on a diet heavy on pork. Time for Sabbath observance was set aside on Sunday, not Saturday. Even in the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, which initially had a Jewish colonel, Jewish officers, and a Jewish chaplain, it was nigh impossible to faithfully observe Jewish religious traditions. Here the Fifth Pennsylvania is seen in a quiet moment at camp in Virginia on Saturday, October 29, 1864. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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Alzey in Hesse, close to Spiegel’s hometown. And Brucker knew Spiegel’s father, which made the meeting so much more special.87 Spiegel later lavished attention on Abraham Ruhman, an eighteen-year-old Jewish private in his regiment whom he knew before the war. The soldier shared his tent every night; Spiegel nursed him when he was sick. When Ruhman confided that “I don’t mind being a soldier but I don’t want to fight,” Spiegel promised, “When the time comes I shall manage to have him out of the fight. I will fix it so as to send him honorably to the rear on an errant for me.”88 Spiegel found him a bombproof position as a clerk in General Osterhaus’s headquarters.89 Ruhman barely lasted four months in uniform, at least forty days of which he was unfit for duty. Spiegel’s final gift was to orchestrate Ruhman’s discharge from the army without undergoing medical examination. (His discharge papers describe “a boy of delicate constitution; unable to undergo the fatigues and exposures of camp life,” given to “extreme weakness and nervousness,” “so lightly build [sic] it was always a great test for him to perform any duty,” and “also very near sighted.”) This was not the first occasion on which Spiegel sought and secured discharge from the army for acquaintances.90 In the end Spiegel was irked by Ruhman’s ingratitude. Like an overstepping father, Spiegel had acted without seeking the teenager’s consent.91 August Bondi received the cold shoulder from Marcus Wittenberg for other reasons. As we saw earlier, when Bondi asked whether Wittenberg was Jewish, he was rebuffed. A month later Wittenberg fell sick and was taken to a hospital in Mound City, Missouri. He died there of gangrene soon after. One of Wittenberg’s friends in the regiment, finding letters in Hebrew script among his effects, brought these to Bondi to interpret. This confirmation that Wittenberg was indeed a Jew amplified Bondi’s regret. If he “had not denied being a Jew,” Bondi lamented, “I would have done all in my power to have him treated for his ailments in post hospital and had seen to him daily and had possibly saved him.”92 Not unlike Spiegel’s nursing of Ruhman, Bondi’s desire for solidarity and kinship was accentuated by recognition of a shared vulnerability. Spiegel confessed of Ruhman that “I could not see him among strangers while sick.”93 In those poignant words we might detect the hope that, in times of need, Spiegel too would not be left to the care of strangers. This desire for mutuality encouraged the development of informal circles of selfhelp and mutual aid. Far removed from any organized Jewish community and with no access to a chaplain, farrier Henry Auerbach described how he and his small band of Jewish soldiers did all they could for the nine Jewish men they knew to be confined in hospital near Petersburg. Even more poignantly, they provided a measure of care to those

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who fell in battle. “In every instance where a coreligionist has been killed, and the fact ascertained, we have buried them by themselves.”94 Auerbach’s choice of words is telling. The most that his band could provide was burial in a separate grave, sparing the dead the indignity of a makeshift pit shared with others.95 How did Jewish soldiers like Auerbach and Spiegel recognize and identify their fellow Jews? As August Bondi’s awkward conversation with Marcus Wittenberg indicates, even those who served in the same regiment did not necessarily know who among their comrades were Jewish. This was less of an issue in companies that recruited heavily in confined locales, whether urban neighborhoods or small towns, thereby diminishing the potential for anonymity among enlistees by vacuuming up networks of friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. Likewise, the enforced intimacies of company life created a familiarity between soldiers, but one that grew progressively weaker at the regimental, brigade, and division levels. One might know the business of a messmate, as well as maintain friendships with those with whom one practiced company drill on a regular basis, but one could not be on close terms with all of the thousand men who constituted a fully manned regiment. Gregarious soldiers, however, shared gossip about the peculiarities of their own peers. Banter between bored soldiers might include discussion of Jewish comrades, whose religion was unfamiliar and intriguing. Such gossip could relay information between units, and potentially within earshot of other Jewish soldiers.96 Jewish soldiers gossiped too, presumably sharing the names of Jewish comrades. We can imagine that the group that temporarily coalesced in Petersburg developed in this way. The case of Marcus Spiegel and Simon Brucker suggests that happenstance was important too. Spiegel would not have met Brucker had the latter not recognized a familiar surname in Suffolk, Virginia. The lieutenant, Spiegel wrote home, “shed tears when he heard my name.”97 Their paths may have crossed over the preceding months as their regiments trudged up and down the Shenandoah Valley in exhausting pursuit of Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers. But for chance, however, they might never have met, although the fact that both were officers might have rendered them more visible and increased their contacts and connections across regiments. As officers, they also found it easier to seek out Jewish civilians, another source of information about other Jewish soldiers in the vicinity. Jacob C. Cohen stumbled upon the foolproof method of divining Jewish soldiers: surveying the blue jackets amid the austere suits in a synagogue in Memphis.98 Cohen, Bondi, and Spiegel craved contact with Jewish civilians, expressing no qualms about fraternizing with those who until

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SCOT, JEW, YANKEE   Ephraim M. Joel was born in the late 1820s in Edinburgh, Scotland, and arrived in the United States sometime in the 1850s. He lived, worked, raised a family, and died in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1862, in his mid-thirties, he joined a Missouri infantry regiment with the rank of first lieutenant. By 1864, Abraham Lincoln had promoted Joel for his part in the Siege of Vicksburg to the rank of captain in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps (right). His brother, Benjamin Joel, also served in the Union, where he was wounded at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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recently had been Confederate citizens. Such meetings provided occasional interludes from military life, briefly restored identities otherwise cloaked beneath their Union uniforms, and offered human connections for those starved of civilian company and homecooked food. Their accounts of these encounters suggest an eagerness to find points of commonality and community with their hosts, particularly to identify family, friends, and hometowns in common, which broke through the barriers that otherwise separated Union soldiers from Confederate civilians.99 After the siege of Atlanta, the Jewish officers of the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry welcomed local Jews, some of whom were relatives, into the regimental headquarters. They “hang around High Head[q]uar[ters] every day, and since they are good, quite good Union people, even eat the Sabbath meal there,” Captain Rudolph Müller remarked sarcastically. Edward Salomon, Müller reported disapprovingly two weeks later, made nighttime excursions to visit a Mrs. Löventhal. Though his pursuit of the “demure Reb.” earned him a black eye from her husband, this did not end the romance.100 August Bondi’s chance encounter with two Jewish men in Pine Bluff, Arkansas—he helped retrieve their horses which had been stolen by his regiment—facilitated an invitation for a Rosh Hashanah meal with a prewar acquaintance.101 Marcus Spiegel found another way to engineer invitations. Early in a sapping campaign season in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862—before his regiment was marched off its feet by Stonewall Jackson—Spiegel described how he had “lots of fun . . . with Yehudim [Jews].” Recognizing Jewish civilians “by the name as well as ponim [face],” he would surprise them by dropping Hebrew into his conversation. “[Y]ou ought to see them jump and ask Yehudah [Jew]?” He delighted in their respect, accepting invitations to dine with a Jewish family in New Market, Virginia, but refusing offers to billet away from his regiment.102 His attitude toward civilians was entirely different from at least one of his fellow officers, who viewed them with wariness and disfavor.103 Spiegel repeated his trick in Memphis. Temporarily leaving his men aboard a transport that would soon take them to Vicksburg, he encountered a Jewish couple as he strolled along the riverbank. Remembering that it was Saturday, and itching for the chance to have “a kosher lunch,” he greeted them with “‘Happy Sabbath, dear people’ frightening the gentleman and probably his wife, unused to being offered ‘Happy Sabbath’ by a man in uniform with sword, spurs, and so forth.” Directed to a Jewish boarding house, he joined thirty other “very surprised” Jews for lunch. His host recognized his face and established their familial interconnections.104 This chance meeting paid dividends.

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A month later, when camped three miles above Vicksburg, Spiegel received a sumptuous “Box full of things” from a well-wisher in Memphis.105 Such opportunities were few and far between. He next celebrated the Sabbath in similar style more than a year later. In Baton Rouge he was invited to the house of Mrs. Baer, an enterprising Jewish widow, who regularly entertained Union officers. (Her “place,” he complained, “would seem very pleasant to go to if it were not for 6 as mean children as I ever saw.”)106 Spiegel was aware that Mrs. Baer’s hospitality might have involved mercenary motives. He noted that she was “of course smart enough” to get the officers she entertained permits to send goods out of Baton Rouge on her behalf, evading restrictions on trading by civilians.107 Likewise, the invitations Spiegel received in the Shenandoah Valley may have reflected something in addition to goodwill and ethnic solidarity. Civilians were acutely vulnerable to the depredations of both armies during a campaign that tore up and down the valley. Union and Confederate soldiers plundered liberally, horses and wagons were impressed to move captured supplies, and homes were filled with billeted troops. That Spiegel spoke German may have been seen to provide additional advantage: German-speaking units had a particular reputation for destruction.108 Both armies arrested those they suspected of disloyalty, and Stonewall Jackson’s army summarily enforced conscription on white men aged between eighteen and thirty-five from April 1862 onward.109 In this chaotic and unpredictable environment, Spiegel, as a sympathetic Union officer, was a potential source of protection and favor. Bondi and Spiegel seemed unbothered that Jewish civilians may have had such ulterior motives. Indeed, these encounters were welcome reminders that prewar bonds would survive the war. Both men expressed similar enthusiasm when meeting fellow Freemasons, suggesting that they thirsted for the familiar rather than placing specific weight on fellowship with Jews. Such encounters were an antidote to loneliness and isolation. Spiegel started a lodge within his regiment; sixteen officers were Masons.110 Bondi recalled with gratitude how he was treated by a Freemason whose sons were in the Confederate army after he received a serious wound in battle. Bondi was retrieved from the battlefield—saved from feral hogs that were rooting at the corpses—and cared for before returning to Union lines. He also took tremendous pride in the fraternal bond that enabled a temporary truce and a shared feast to mark St. John’s Day with a group of sixty Confederate Masons despite frequent and bloody skirmishing during this period.111 Unsurprisingly, in old age he instructed his children that he wished “Kaddish to be said

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by my children at the grave after the Masonic burial service,” indicating how both religion and fraternity were intrinsic to his sense of self.112 What formal options were available to Jewish soldiers like Bondi and Spiegel for spiritual succor in the field or when confined to a sickbed? Each regiment was entitled to appoint a chaplain who received official staff status and the pay of a captain. Though not all regiments chose to fill the position, over the course of the war the United States government commissioned 2,154 regimental chaplains. These men—the efforts of a Wisconsin regiment to appoint the Reverend Ella E. Gibson were shot down by the secretary of war—were responsible for leading regular religious services, as well as performing a host of other formal and informal functions that included writing letters on behalf of the incapacitated and illiterate, ministering to the sick and wounded, conducting burials, informing families of the deaths of their loved ones, teaching reading and writing to unschooled soldiers, acquiring and lending books, and serving as regimental postmaster.113 The work of the chaplain was aided by the United States Christian Commission (evangelical in orientation) and the United States Sanitary Commission (more liberal and universalistic in its approach, but nonetheless Christian), both of which sought to supply soldiers with care and comforts otherwise unprovided, as well as by the efforts of tract and Bible societies and other organizations thirsting to save their souls.114 Conscientious chaplains sought to make the most of a position that was often held in low regard, but others, because of inability or inadequacy, did not surpass the jaundiced expectations of their critics. Making the cruelest of comparisons, one veteran rated sutlers more popular than chaplains.115 August Bondi was not unusual in naming his regimental chaplain “the useless person on the regiment” and comparing him, employing a much-used metaphor, to a “wagon’s fifth wheel.”116 Many soldiers, indifferent to the ministrations of earnest chaplains and impatient of long-winded exhortations, avoided all but the occasions when religious services were compulsory.117 Attendance, George C. Rable writes, was “shockingly low” during the first two years of the war.118 Several factors worked against the appointment of rabbis as regimental chaplains. The most obvious impediment was the congressional statute that limited the role to a “regular ordained minister of a Christian denomination” until the law was amended in July 1862.119 (The new law was passed on the same day that Congress amended the Militia Act to expand enlistment to “persons of African descent.” The timing may have been coincidental, but the expansion of rights for African Americans and not for Jews could

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have been interpreted as an affront.) Jews were scattered across the army, never forming the critical mass that enabled, for example, Irish regiments to insist upon Catholic priests as their chaplains. Even Roman Catholics, however, were disadvantaged by the system of selecting chaplains. Though roughly one in ten of all enlistees was Catholic, only 3 percent of chaplains were priests.120 Judaism, moreover, does not require a rabbi to lead religious services or conduct day-to-day rites. (Priests, by contrast, were typically needed to administer the sacraments: to take communion, hear confessions, grant absolution, anoint the sick, and administer last rites.) Indeed, many synagogues in America were led by laymen because of a shortage of qualified candidates. Some of those who filled prestigious pulpits as ministers were not ordained rabbis. Though Christian denominations were not bedeviled by this same problem, the chaplaincy proved particularly attractive to those with less than stellar prewar careers, and unattractive for those who preferred not to “sleep on the ground rolled in a blanket,” “spend whole days in the saddle,” risk exposure to “all the camp diseases,” and face “hostile fire.”121 Even the more prosaic functions of a regimental chaplain bore little resemblance to traditional rabbinic duties. Michael Allen, who was chaplain of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry for less than a month, had little formal training. (His lack of ordination was true of many of those who styled themselves as rabbis and reverends at the time.) The diary that he kept during September 1861 offers some indication of how poorly defined, unstructured, and unregulated the role was, and why it attracted the disfavor of rank and file soldiers who chafed at the regimentation and discipline imposed on them by the army.122 Stationed within easy reach of Washington, he frequently visited the city to attend synagogue and dine with friends. He expected, but did not receive, leave so that he could travel home to Philadelphia for Rosh Hashanah. Instead, Allen spent the High Holy Days in Washington, away from his regiment, and was granted a medical furlough two weeks before he resigned, claiming ill health.123 Aside from leading a nondenominational service on Sundays, his duties were slight.124 His sermons plucked familiar patriotic chords. When “you are about mounting” your horse, he urged his auditors, “forget not to prepare your souls.” Exhibit “good will and kindly feelings towards each other as brother soldiers.” Should “we be called upon to yield our spirit on the field of battle, should we be stricken down by the pestilence, it is to us a comfort and a solace to know we die fighting in a [just] and a glorious cause.”125 His departure from an unhappy regiment seems to have exercised historians far more than it did the men of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry.

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When Arnold Fischel’s plan to fill Allen’s boots was tripped up by the restrictive congressional statute—the regiment ultimately appointed a Baptist minister—he was offered a temporary position as “chaplain at large” by the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. Founded less than two years before the war, the upstart organization sought to speak on behalf of all American Jews but was challenged by prominent detractors who questioned its authority and legitimacy. Though now best remembered for its efforts “to keep a watchful eye on occurrences at home and abroad” that threatened the “civil and religious rights of Israelites,” in 1861 the Board’s ambitions were broader, including a desire to play a role in the religious affairs of the Jewish community.126 In appointing Fischel, the Board was following the example of the United States Christian Commission, newly formed by representatives of the YMCA, which dispatched volunteers, mostly clergymen, to minister to soldiers in military camps and hospitals.127 The Board hoped to provide a stopgap as they battled to change the law that restricted the chaplaincy, and simultaneously to raise its own standing within American Jewry.128 Assuming that there were “nearly eight thousand” Jews in Union uniform, the Board wanted Fischel to take responsibility for “visiting the camps, looking after and advising our coreligionists in the army, seeing to their religious welfare, offering them consolation in sickness and pain.”129 Fischel was to be the first of several such appointments; the Board went so far as to solicit the names of potential candidates to serve in the Western Theater “as soon as the funds at their disposal allow.”130 Ultimately, however, these ambitions came to naught: the Board was not even able to raise enough money to extend Fischel’s contract beyond an initial three months.131 Fischel began his task of ministering to all Jews within the Army of the Potomac with enthusiasm. “Jewish soldiers,” he delighted, “soon recognized me and expressed great satisfaction at the object of my mission.”132 His plan was to survey his scattered flock by visiting every division in the army, then dispersed in winter quarters in a dense arc around Washington. For the moment he had little tangible to offer those he met, including “some of my former parishioners and other New York Jews of respectability,” beyond leaving his address “so that they can telegraph to me if my presence be wanted.”133 He proposed to distribute the “smallest size prayer books and psalm books,” and asked to be sent “fifty at once,” a truer indication of demand than his more sanguine estimates that he directed toward his employer. (“Unless they are extremely small,” he reported, the prayer books “cannot be used as the baggage of a soldier is limited to the smallest compass.”)134 Fischel was careful to emphasize that he had spoken with “hundreds” of

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Jews who had “express[ed] their anxiety and hope that some provision may be made for them,” helpfully suggesting to the Board how any future chaplain ought to operate.135 But Fischel was soon defeated by the immensity of his task. Other chaplains were responsible for the men of a single regiment; he was responsible for Jews scattered across an entire army. Although he had “no difficulty” in obtaining passes to visit military encampments, wearying travel was “as expensive as it is disagreeable.” The sum provided by the Board was easily exhausted on railway and carriage fare, as was Fischel by interminable journeys.136 Though Fischel did not describe difficulties accessing army camps and meeting freely with soldiers, he likely received a similar reception to that encountered by delegates of the Christian Commission at this time. Despite arriving armed with letters of endorsement from the president, secretary of war, and commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, Christian Commission delegates complained that their work was impeded by officers suspicious of civilians wandering about encampments.137 By January Fischel was complaining of overexertion and was convalescing from “a severe attack of fever.”138 He soon shifted his focus to the more easily accessible military hospitals in Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria. There he found “generally from thirty to forty” Jewish men. “[W]ithout exception,” these soldiers expressed “their wish in sickness to be surrounded by their own people, and to buried among their kindred.” “[N]early all” complained that “they had not seen a ‘Yehudee’ since they entered the Hospitals.” “[I]n addition to the suffering of disease,” Fischel wrote pointedly, these soldiers were forced “to submit to the torture of religious controversy, forced upon them by over zealous Christian clergymen, who are anxious ‘to save their souls’(!)”139 These sentiments echoed fears expressed in the Jewish press about the vulnerability of Jewish soldiers to conversion, and played upon deep-rooted sensitivities that had underpinned efforts to establish Jewish hospitals before the war.140 This was not an idle concern; missionaries understood the particular power of a sympathetic and persuasive presence at a soldier’s bedside when thoughts turned to mortality. The embrace of faith could quiet loneliness and fear.141 Herman Kuhn, for example, complained that his brother, a patient at the Baptist College Hospital in Washington, was receiving the particular attention of his doctor, a “converted German Jew.” At Kuhn’s beside the kindly doctor piled books with a common theme, as revealed in the title of one that caught Kuhn’s eye: Is Jesus the Messiah?142 Convalescing after the Battle of Nashville, another Jewish soldier, who identified himself by the initials B. F.

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P., recalled similar sentiments, albeit expressed more crudely, from his fellow patients. “Say thy prayers like a Christian, idiot, forswear thy stock, pray the Lord Jesus to forgive thy sins and die in salvation!” “Haloo, thou unbelieving son of Abraham, hast thou got a piece of pork at length into thy clutches? No! Well, then, it were better that thou hadst, for until thou eatest swine’s flesh, thou never canst be saved.”143 Others seem to have been less troubled by such pressure—the theme goes unmentioned in letters and diaries—though we do know of at least one conversion.144 By March 1862 Fischel was back in the field, following the army as it cautiously trailed Joseph E. Johnston’s retreat through the burning wreckage of Manassas.145 The Army of the Potomac soon began its great transhipment eastward, en route to the James and York rivers, and the beginning of the Peninsula campaign. Fischel, however, was cast adrift, his contract expired, and his prospects of official appointment as chaplain sunk. He continued to hold out hope for several months yet. In July, Congress amended the legislation to allow for the appointment of accredited ministers of all “religious denominations.”146 Regimental chaplains were still to be elected by a vote of the unit’s officers. Given that Jews never made up more than a small portion of any regiment, these officers had little reason to prefer a Jewish chaplain. Many regiments forwent chaplains entirely.147 Two months earlier, the passage of a lesser-known law formalized the appointment of hospital chaplains. By creating a more realistic mechanism for selecting Jews for this role in the military, this law had more practical effect than the change to the chaplaincy regulations. The Board of Delegates of American Israelites was slower to act than a group of rabbis in Philadelphia who petitioned the White House in August 1862 for the appointment of a Jewish hospital chaplain with the expectation that “not a few persons of our persuasion will be brought hither in a condition to require spiritual no less than bodily care.”148 Lincoln acceded to the request, and Jacob Frankel, the fifty-four-year-old rabbi of congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, was selected for the role.149 For the next six months Frankel busied himself ministering to the “sick and wounded soldiers who came under my notice.” His language here and elsewhere was telling. He described visiting the hospitals only “periodically,” suggestive of the limited demand from patients and the distractions of his position as a congregational rabbi. Frankel’s appointment lapsed for more than a year—the result of bureaucratic bungling and a failure to win Senate confirmation for his commission—during which time other local rabbis made occasional

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hospital visits.150 Isaac Leeser, one of these colleagues, noted that “it is not easy among the mass of sufferers to ascertain who are our brothers.”151 This same problem undid ill-fated Arnold Fischel’s last efforts to secure an official position. Galvanized by Jacob Frankel’s appointment as a hospital chaplain in Philadelphia, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites implored Lincoln to follow suit by commissioning Fischel as a hospital chaplain in Washington. Lincoln was, however, less charitable toward this second request. Skeptical of the Board’s claim that Jewish soldiers were “sick and dying in the hospitals—hundreds of them,” he asked for the surgeon general’s input. A survey of the hospitals around Washington confirmed his suspicions. In the thirteen hospitals that responded—representing over five thousand patients—Medical Inspector General Thomas F. Perley could find “but 7 Jews.” He advised that it was “inexpedient to appoint a chaplain” as “[t]here would be not over 25 soldiers, to whom he could administer and they so scattered, that it would be impracticable for a clergyman, to find and attend to them.”152 Lincoln took this advice, and Fischel soon gave up entirely on America and returned to Europe. Lincoln appointed a second Jewish hospital chaplain in February 1863 at the urging of Kentucky congressman Robert Mallory.153 Forty-four-year-old Bavarian-born Bern­ hard Gotthelf ministered to what he described as the “German Jewish Congregation” in Louisville, a city with a much smaller Jewish population—in military hospitals or otherwise—than Washington. The ongoing imbroglio over Grant’s expulsion order and its controversial implementation in that same state cannot have been far from the president’s mind. The appointment certainly did not reflect local need. Indeed, the military’s medical director in Louisville was soon complaining that he was “unable to find a single Jew in any of the hospitals in this district” and was therefore “unable to assign him [Gotthelf] to duty.” The medical director recommended that Gotthelf be “transferred to some other point where his services are more required.” On receiving this advice, the surgeon general went a step further, and proposed that Gotthelf be mustered out of the army. This recommendation was not acted on, again reflecting the political nature of the appointment.154 Much like Jacob Frankel, another political appointee, Gotthelf thereafter enjoyed the unusual dual status of active congregational rabbi and hospital chaplain not “attached to any particular hospital.”155 Gotthelf visited the military hospitals of Louisville, as well as those across the Ohio River in New Albany and Jeffersonville, Indiana, daily and “in regular rotation” in order

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“to seek out & assist in particular my brethren.”156 He did not think it “proper or desirable to preach before the inmates generally,” instead prevailing on “all the convalescents of my faith to attend Divine Service on our Sabbaths and High Festivals in the Synagogue.”157 As the only chaplain in Louisville able to speak German, he soon broadened his focus in order to “render myself generally useful to all the sick and helpless of my native land.”158 This included considerable effort to collect German-language books for the patients in these hospitals, and championing the cause of soldiers (and their families) left without pay while they convalesced.159 Frankel and Gotthelf took on these additional responsibilities as part-time work.160 Arnold Fischel, by contrast, better fits the more dyspeptic assessment of many a soldier that the chaplaincy was the last resort of ministers otherwise unable to secure a pulpit.161 Ferdinand Sarner, who achieved what Fischel could not, also fits this unflattering template. Sarner had a ragged record in America. No longer a young man when he arrived in 1859—he was thirty-nine—Sarner brought with him a newly earned doctorate in divinity from Hesse and the expectation that his services would be in demand in a country where university-educated rabbis were a rarity. Instead, he churned through successive pulpits in multiple states. A detractor in his first congregation, in Rochester, New York, described the circulation, within months of his appointment, of a humiliating petition to annul his contract, and the offer of $175 if he would leave the congregation. His congregants, the same report noted, made “a perfect stampede to get out of Shule” when he delivered sermons.162 Rejected from an opening in Albany, he went southward instead. His tenure in Shreveport, Louisiana, was not much longer. The modest congregation, established shortly before Sarner was appointed, met in a single room near the courthouse.163 Recruited in February 1861, he announced his intention to leave four months later. By November Sarner had left the Confederacy for a brief sojourn in the capital of the United States, and soon thereafter for a congregation in Newark, New Jersey.164 This too was short lived. With his prospects as a congregational rabbi disappointed, he enlisted in the Fifty-fourth New York Infantry in April 1863. He knocked five years off the age he gave the recruiting officer, presumably to ensure that he was not deemed too old to secure the position. Sarner joined a regiment drawn heavily from German-speaking immigrants in Brooklyn and New York City who had served together since the last months of 1861. They were less likely to complain, as his congregants did, of his imperfect command of English, and may have been content, as Bertram Korn speculates, to be joined by a man of culture and

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education. At least ten Jewish soldiers served within its ranks. By the time Sarner joined the regiment, it was far from full strength. The unit had been heavily engaged in Pope’s campaign in Northern Virginia in August and September 1862, suffering 161 casualties over two disastrous weeks, and then slogged with Burnside through weeks of mud along the Rappahannock in January 1863. When Sarner mustered into service in April, the regiment was enjoying the last weeks of a winter lull spent alongside the Potomac in Stafford, Virginia. Though we do not know how Sarner came to the post, Edward Wertheimer was among the fourteen officers who elected him as chaplain. This vote, however, was no longer enough to secure the position. The 1862 statute now required that chaplains receive the endorsement of a relevant denominational authority or be vouched for by five clergymen of the same faith.165 Given the congregationalist structure of American Judaism, the schism between Orthodoxy and Reform, and the related difficulties of obtaining the required support, Sarner opted instead for a makeshift alternative. After a month’s delay Sarner found six regimental chaplains willing to attest that, after “careful examination,” he was a “regularly ordained minister of the Lutheran church.” None of those who endorsed him could pretend to be Jewish; “Lutheran” may have been a negotiated alternative palatable to all involved that would satisfy the military regulation that the chaplain be of the same faith as his sponsors, or simply an error. Perhaps Sarner maintained ambiguity about his affiliations in order to ensure the confirmation of his commission. He was, after all, the first Jew to be elected regimental chaplain after the change of the congressional statute that thwarted Arnold Fischel in the first year of the war. As a doctor of divinity trained in Europe, Sarner would be quite capable of demonstrating basic familiarity with Christianity, or at least enough to satisfy a board of chaplains concerned about an ecumenical approach. Certainly, the commanding officer of the regiment, who was not present when Sarner was elected, later scorned him as a “converted Jew,” a description that may hint at misrepresentation.166 If Sarner did conceal his identity, he did not maintain the act for long. He had no hesitation in announcing his appointment in the Jewish press.167 Nor did the Jewish press hesitate in trumpeting that Sarner’s appointment “settles definitely the chaplain question.”168 The Fifty-fourth New York Infantry soon provided Sarner with a baptism of fire. Within two weeks of his enlistment at Brooke Station in Northern Virginia, the Fifty-fourth was battered at Chancellorsville by Stonewall Jackson’s lancing attack on Hooker’s army. Stationed at the end of the Eleventh Corps’ right flank, the regiment was one

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of the first to be overrun. The Fifty-fourth broke and scattered as marauding Confederates exploded out of the dense woods in the late afternoon of May 2, 1863.169 The routed regiment, shattered and demoralized by the fury of the Confederate assault, and humiliated in the press in the weeks that followed, must have been in need of spiritual succor. We can only speculate, however, as to whether they sought it from their newly appointed chaplain, and if he was able to offer fitting words of consolation. The regiment suffered even heavier losses two months later. On the first day at Gettysburg, the Fifty-fourth skirmished alongside two other German regiments at Rock Creek, and on the second was under bombardment on Cemetery Hill.170 The regiment entered the battle much depleted–it brought only 216 men to Gettysburg—and left with its ranks reduced by almost half, with eight killed, forty-six wounded, and forty-eight missing. Replenished by a new batch of recruits but still at less than half-strength, and with its reputation shredded along with those of other German regiments that had fought in the Eleventh Corps, the Fifty-fourth was in August dispatched southward to South Carolina to join the effort to take the forts that ringed Charleston Harbor. It was on Folly Island that we have an indication of the duties that Sarner performed. In his formulaic reports from May and June 1864 he describes leading “Divine services, Religious Instructions, writing and reading lessons in several languages” as “often as practicable.” He distributed “Tracts, Religious papers, New Testaments and Hymn Books” and maintained a regimental library, “established by the kindness of the U.S. Christian Commission,” that was stocked with “Moral and Religious books.” These duties were typical of regimental chaplains; there was little indication here of anything distinctive—or, indeed, Jewish—about the nature of his chaplaincy.171 The men, Sarner relayed, were in “a very good Religious and Moral condition.”172 Colonel Eugene Kozlay, who feuded with several of his officers in the regiment he commanded, was less inclined to agree. A large portion of those stationed on Folly Island were enlistees who joined the Fifty-fourth New York in the latter months of 1863, fundamentally changing the character of the regiment. Most were native-born English speakers from Albany and Goshen in New York. The new recruits spelled trouble for Sarner. In August 1864, Kozlay listed Sarner among his problem officers. Max Rosenberg was addicted to opium (“He cannot exist without it, and with it he is in stupor, unfit for Service”). Edward Wertheimer “had money given to him by privates for safe keeping, and he spent the money.” August Osterthal was “addicted to drink.” And “[t]he Chaplain,

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Dr. Sarner,” he concluded, “has also to go.” The men “don’t like him, neither can they understand him. . . . [A] Jew and a German is of no use to me.”173 The colonel’s dismissive attitude toward his chaplain was not uncommon of regimental officers across the army, who routinely disparaged the office and its incumbents. Though Kozlay picked out Rosenberg, Wertheimer, and Sarner for opprobrium (Osterthal was not Jewish), there are few other signs that Kozlay bore particular animus toward Jews.174 Instead, Kozlay had an alternative candidate in mind to fill the chaplaincy. Edward Dewey “had a congregation once” and “served his country faithfully with the musket in his hands.” “Dr. Sarner,” by contrast, had “never done anything else but drew his pay for his worthless services.” Kozlay’s problem was solved when Sarner absented himself without leave. Sarner’s discharge in November 1864, backdated to the end of July, bore Kozlay’s vindictive imprint: the chaplain, the special order noted, had “performed little or no duty prior to that date.”175 By the beginning of 1865, Sarner resumed his efforts to secure stable civilian employment, a cause not helped by public accusation in the Jewish press that he was trading off a phony limp that he claimed he had acquired at Gettysburg.176 This was surely not the future that he imagined for himself when he stepped off ship in America five years before. Personal shortcomings aside, the reach of each of these official chaplains was limited. Allen and Sarner were responsible for single regiments, and Gotthelf and Frankel for the general military hospitals in Philadelphia and Louisville. No dedicated chaplain served the hospitals that mushroomed in Washington, Frederick, Nashville, or scores of other cities and towns that became centers for convalescing. In the absence of any sustained and systematic Jewish response to the needs of Jewish soldiers—there was no equivalent of the Sanitary Commission, despite the urging of some Jewish leaders, nor of the mass voluntarism seen within some religious communities—Jewish communities resorted to makeshift arrangements.177 For the most part, this involved a piecemeal extension of the pastoral care that rabbis provided to their parishioners and of the welfare that communal organizations supplied to the indigent, relying on volunteers and conscripting local rabbis to patch together support for those in need. Less typical was the disquieting duty performed by Benjamin Szold, rabbi of Oheb Shalom Congregation in Baltimore, on August 29, 1863, when summoned to Beverly Ford on the Rappahannock. Delayed by a day because he could not secure a train ticket—the seats had been reserved for those on their way to a presentation at Meade’s

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headquarters—Szold arrived at the camp of the Second Brigade of the First Division shortly before noon, and was soon cloistered with George Kuhne. Szold had travelled on Saturday, breaking the Sabbath; Kuhne, manacled and distressed, had been confined to a tent under guard for two weeks. Their conference, in German or Hungarian—they were both from Hungary—was punctuated by the steady tramp, tramp, tramp of tens of thousands of boots.178 At three o’clock, Kuhne and Szold stepped outside. Below them were three divisions of the Fifth Corps, at least fifteen thousand men standing in “oppressive silence,” arrayed in dense columns that formed three sides of a square. At their center were five freshly dug graves. Kuhne had begun the month of August under more hopeful circumstances in Philadelphia, where he enlisted as a substitute in the 118th Pennsylvania. Many of those who signed up as conscripts and substitutes for the regiment had little intention of fulfilling their contracts. When the new recruits straggled into the 118th Pennsylvania’s sweltering camp close to the Rappahannock on August 6, the escort had “lost 50 on the way by desertion.”179 Five of their number were dragged into camp a week later, among them George Kuhne. (By his own account the name was an alias “because he did not wish his parents to know he had become a soldier.”) Caught in civilian clothing, Kuhne denied he had deserted. Instead, he claimed that he had only gone to “bring water, and I went some distance off.” A hasty court-martial ordered Kuhne and his confederates “be shot to death by musketry.”180 Their appeals for clemency were ill timed. General George Meade worried that desertion was hollowing out an Army of the Potomac already depleted over the previous four months by Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. He wished to stiffen the spines of the conscripts and substitutes who were filling the ranks in increasing numbers—replacing volunteers who mustered out, or who left maimed, wounded, or dead—and send a clear warning to those with little commitment to the cause. Lincoln was disinclined to undercut a general who had demonstrated the rare gift of besting Lee in battle.181 Meade did concede to a “respite,” delaying the execution so that a Catholic priest and rabbi could attend to the prisoners.182 The spectacle that followed was seared into the memories of many who witnessed it. Though few sympathized with bounty jumpers, executions were still relatively rare in August 1863, and this one had been marshaled to serve an exemplary purpose.183 Two artists from popular magazines sketched as the macabre processional escorted the prisoners to their graves. The only sound, “slow, measured, sorrowful,” was the Dead March from

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Handel’s Saul played by the army headquarters band. Captain Francis Donaldson, of the 118th Pennsylvania, confided beforehand that the “thought of this bloody execution sickens me. . . . [T]hey will be shot like dogs.” He described the scene in detail in his diary.184 Then came two coffins borne by eight men, then two of the condemned with the rabbi. Major Herring had so arranged as to have the rabbi, representing the oldest faith, on the right. Then another coffin with 4 men and one prisoner, and then two more coffins borne by 8 men, two more prisoners, Priest and Chaplain. Each prisoner’s hands were manacled behind him. Four of the condemned walked steadily and with apparent unconcern, one was weak and tottering and with difficulty borne along, needing heavy support.

Arriving at the graves, the prisoners were seated on their coffins. The firing party halted and stood at “parade rest.” “My God!” despaired Donaldson. Think of the terrible thoughts of these helpless men as they marched to their graves, think of their awful condition as seated on their coffins they gazed at the twelve men standing before them sternly awaiting order to take their lives. Oh! It was a dreadful sight to see them there, swaying backwards and forwards so utterly helpless and forlorn. Our regiment was posted close up to the graves, a little to the right of them, close enough to hear the earnest words and prayers of men of God who pleaded so fervently that God would have mercy on their souls.185

A “much agitated” Kuhne, another eyewitness wrote, now “stood up and recited after the Rabbi a portion of Thilim, Yigdal, and Shimas [psalms and other prayers]. At the close, the minister, much affected, kissed the accused, who convulsively clung to him.”186 “After a few parting words,” Donaldson continued, the ministers of the gospel stood aside and the poor fellows were left alone on the brink of Eternity. They hadn’t long to wait. ‘Attention guard,’ in clear ringing tones called Capt. Orne, ‘shoulder arms.’ ‘Forward march,’ and the solid steady tramp of the detail sounded appalling on the ear. When within 6 paces, ‘Halt,’ ordered the Captain. ‘Ready.’ ‘Aim.’ ‘Fire,’

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and sixty pieces flashed full in the breasts of the deserters, and military justice was satisfied. Four of the men fell back heavily on their coffins and rolled off to the ground, their heads striking the coffin lid making a sounding thud, while the bullets, passing through the bodies, were seen skipping and bounding over the open fields.187

The scene horrified Benjamin Szold. Moments before, he had embraced Kuhne. Now the friendless soldier was confined to an unmarked grave. “The poor Rabbi,” Donaldson wrote, “was sadly cut up. He had never before witnessed such a death scene. Hastening to the Majors tent, he gathered up his few traps and made for the train, anxious and eager to get away from such scenes of blood, as he expressed it. He was in such a hurry to depart that he left his pocket book behind.”188 The next month Szold arranged for the Jewish soldiers stationed around Baltimore to be issued passes so that they could attend High Holy Days services in the city. This was one of the only cases we know of where rabbis actively intervened in this way to provide passes; we can presume that Szold still had Kuhne on his mind. (Frankel obtained passes for convalescing patients to “visit the city to attend public worship” during the “festival season,” and Gotthelf did the same, but both did so as hospital chaplains.)189 When called upon, local rabbis also conducted funerals for soldiers who died in military hospitals, and local synagogues lent their assistance too. The Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, usually reluctant to bury those who were not synagogue members in its cemetery, assented to the interment of a soldier who died in a military hospital in the city.190 Likewise in Philadelphia, the Mount Sinai Cemetery Association “appropriated a lot for the burial of soldiers who might die here friendless.” We know of the circumstances of one of those buried in this section of the cemetery early in 1863. A bristling correspondent complained to the Occident that he was interrupted while writing a letter protesting General Grant’s order “when the minister of one of our Synagogues entered my office to request me to attend the burial of a Hebrew soldier belonging to the 71st New York regiment, who had died unknown and among strangers at the Summit House hospital. . . . [H]is name betrayed him to have been a German Jew, a term of reproach to many a thoughtless native of this country.” The soldier was twenty-eight-year-old Leopold Goldschmidt, whose erratic behavior in hospital in the month before his death lists symptoms that suggest a brain injury. He was first buried in the military plot in the

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Mount Moriah cemetery and then reinterred in a Jewish cemetery once his identity was discovered. The lonely funeral amplified the letter writer’s stone-cold rage against Grant and the supposed injustice of the Emancipation Proclamation. (“Is there to be freedom for the colored races, who have never furnished a genius of towering intellect to the world, while we have produced for Israel and all mankind the greatest of mortals, Moses the son of Amram, and for the Christians the founder of the faith, Jesus of Nazareth?”)191 Three other “friendless” soldiers were buried in this same cemetery by the end of the war.192 Their number included David Zehden, who was shot in the knee at the Battle of Fair Oaks and died a month later in Philadelphia after the limb was amputated and infection set in.193 While in hospital, Zehden received special attention from L. J. Leberman and his wife, who lived close by. Mrs. Leberman, who served on the hospital’s visitors committee, saw him “almost daily” and supplied him with a “kosher, nourishing lunch from our kitchen which,” L. J. Lederman wrote to Zehden’s parents in Berlin, “is preferable and tastes far better to him than the food offered here in the hospital.”194 He later wrote to convey news of their son’s death: [N]othing was left undone during the dying and burial of the blessed one. Two of our fellow-believers, who had been appointed for this by our ‘chevre,’ [burial society] were by his side until the final moment and said the customary prayers for him at his sickbed until all signs of life had fled from him. During his illness, he was visited by a great many of our brothers in faith, particularly by the precentor of the Portuguese congregation (of which I, too, am a member), Mr. S[abato] Morais, who also accepted and carried out the ritual during the burial. . . . The procession as well as the whole ceremony were conducted in the most proper manner in a way it has hardly ever been done for one who is not a local inhabitant.195

Cincinnati followed a similar practice by setting aside a section within the cemetery, and filled its first grave at the end of 1863.196 In Nashville, Michael Schwartz, custodian of the Mogen David Cemetery, went to “great trouble and expense” to have a Jewish soldier who had served in the Tenth Tennessee Infantry disinterred from a military cemetery and reburied, as the press reported, with “all the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish church.”197 Likewise Henry Spitz, the president of the Ohava Emes congregation in that

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AN EXECUTION AT BEVERLY FORD   By late summer 1863, about a third of the Union army wasn’t there. Some of the absent personnel had furloughs, but many of the missing were simply absent without leave. The thought from on high was, by then, to execute deserters in such a fashion as to mark upon all who witnessed it the agony and ignominy of such an end. In early August, the 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers was due to receive 159 draftees and substitutes—all of whom had received some sort of enlistment bonus—when a third of them, on their way to join the regiment in Virginia, deserted. They had signed up for the bounty and then skipped. But five of the men, none of whom spoke English, were apprehended trying to ford the Potomac near Washington. John Folaney (or John Falone, John Faline, or Gion Folaney, alias Geacinto Lerchize) and John Rainese (or Gion Rionese or Gean Reanese, alias George Rionese) were Italians. Charles Walter (alias C. Zene), Emil Lai (or Emil Lae, alias E Duffie), and George Kuhne (or Kuhn, alias G. Weik) were German. They were court-martialed and sentenced to be shot; clemency was appealed for and denied. On the afternoon of August 29, then, the entire Fifth Corps, some fifteen thousand troops, were assembled on a hill at Beverly Ford to watch. This letter tells vividly of how five of those “missing” recreants met their fates, at precisely four o’clock on the afternoon of August 29, 1863—attended, remarkably, by a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi. In its awful way, this marked what was perhaps the first governmental interfaith service. Here First Sergeant Jesse L. Pryer of the Tenth Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry described, in what apparently was a running commentary on camp life addressed to a Miss Sallie “truly and affectionately,” what he saw, and felt, that awful afternoon (overleaf): Next day a different scene was transacted at the camp of the 1st Division 5th Corps the execution of five men for desertion. they belonged to the 11th Regt. Pa. vols. two protestants two catholics & one Jew. their graves had been dug for them several days previously. side by side & only two feet apart are on a little knoll. near a spreading shade tree. the troops were formed on a crescent shaped hill side where every one could see the convicts. They were then brought out accompanied by a brass band playing the dead march & a strong guard. each convict walked at the end of his coffin & was dressed in the uniform pants. uniform caps . . . bandages were placed upon the eyes of the convicts. all withdrawn and left them alone. the capt. of the guard gave the command. ready—aim—fire—which was obeyed & all five fell dead upon their coffins. I was only a few yards from them & I watched every movement thus far but I had seen enough. I couldn’t stand it any longer or didn’t want to stand it any longer. It made me feel worse to see those five men shot that day than to see a thousand men shot down in battle. the awful solemnity of the scene made an impression on my mind which will not soon wear off. I shall remember it to the latest day of my life.

S acred D uties    179 However many shooters and however many shot made no apparent difference to the rate of Union desertion, which only increased. As for Pryor, who swore that the haunting sight of those five men dying would stay with him to the last day of his life, he lived for another quarter-century, dying in 1889. National Archives and Records Administration (below) The Shapell Manuscript Collection (overleaf)

The condemned petition Lincoln: “We each have wives and children, depending on us.”

“I couldn’t stand it any longer”: Jesse L. Pryer recalls the execution

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The scene at Beverly Ford

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same city, arranged for the burial of Prussian-born Julius Littmann, a second lieutenant in the Forty-second Illinois Infantry who fell at the Battle of Stones River. (The Jews of Nashville cared for Jewish soldiers in life as well as death. At least one soldier convalesced in the home of a Jew in that city after he was wounded in battle.)198 It was no accident that we know of these cases in Nashville. The Battle of Stones River was fought thirty miles away from the city in Murfreesboro. And Spitz had formed a personal bond with Littmann, whose regiment was encamped opposite his house for more than three months in the fall of 1862. Littmann accompanied Spitz to synagogue on Yom Kippur, and Spitz was in frequent contact with him and other Jewish soldiers. The relationship had a tragic denouement. Spitz recalled that at the “first opportunity I had, after the battle, I inquired after him and heard he fell on the battle-field. I considered it my duty, if possible, to recover the body, to give him a burial according to the laws of Israel.” Spitz sent word, via the regiment’s sutler, to Pauline Littmann in Chicago asking for instructions about “how to dispose of the remains of her lamented husband.” Unable to locate her, and with intermediaries in Chicago evidently not encouraging him to dispatch the body northward, Spitz proceeded with the burial. On the 9th day after his death, I found him in a plain coffin at the Undertakers. His features were the same as living, smiling in death. With the assistance of friends, we claimed the remains, had them brought to my house and then interred the next day, Friday the 9th of January, on the Burial ground of our congregation Ohavez Emes, with all the honors a Jehuda wishes for.

Spitz wrote to the Israelite in the hopes that Pauline Littmann, now a twenty-eightyear-old widow and, like her husband, far from family in Prussia, “would learn all the facts and it may be a consolation for her to know where his remains rest.” His description of a corpse in contented repose accorded with contemporary notions of a good death, not the more likely horrifying reality.199 Spitz also conveyed that two other Jewish officers were buried on the battlefield. “How many Jewish privates may have died then,” he added wistfully, “God only knows.”200 The deaths of officers garnered attention and action—Adolph Rosengarten was likely one of the two officers that Spitz referred to—but those of little rank were more likely to remain in improvised graves on a lonely field far from home. We can assume that some relatives came in search of their loved ones. Marcus Spiegel, mired

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in pestilent Milliken’s Bend, north of Vicksburg, described how “Many of the Ohio folk come here after bodies of the deceased Soldiers and looking after the sick.”201 While the war soon moved away from Nashville, many of the major battles in the Eastern Theater were fought within relatively easy reach of Washington. Manassas was all of thirty miles from the city, Fredericksburg fifty, Chancellorsville sixty, and Antietam ten miles further. The city swelled dramatically in population during the war, as did the twenty-five military hospitals that served as way stations for the wounded from the Army of the Potomac. So too did the Jewish population of the capital. If contemporary reports are to be believed—and there is good reason for skepticism—it grew tenfold during the war years.202 Certainly, by the last months of the war the Washington Hebrew Congregation could claim to have “looked after the interment of many co-religionists who had no other claim on them than that of brotherhood.” The burden of burying Jewish soldiers was not inconsiderable given that the membership of the congregation remained small. (They grumbled that their sense of obligation went unrewarded; “when they appealed to congregations of other cities to co-operate in the work of enlarging their synagogue accommodations, there was no reply.”)203 Washington’s proximity to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City relieved some of the burden. Parents, siblings, and children from these cities whose sons, brothers, and fathers enlisted in the Army of the Potomac had easier access to their convalescing (or not) relatives in the hospitals that dotted Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria.204 Arnold Fischel, for example, telegraphed word to the family of a Jewish soldier from a Pennsylvania regiment who died in late December 1861; they came to Washington that same week to collect his body.205 He was less complimentary of the efforts of the Jewish community in Washington. “The Jews,” he noted, “are very poor [and] will I presume do little or nothing in the matter.”206 Dying far from home, and alone, was an abiding fear for soldiers, as was concern about what would become of their remains.207 For Jews it also raised the problem of interment in unconsecrated ground and without Jewish burial rites. Arnold Fischel reported that the Jewish soldiers he met in the Army of the Potomac, despairing of any assistance from the Jewish community, “joined the Society of Odd Fellows and other associations, that undertake to return the bodies of the dead to their relatives.”208 Although some corpses were transported home for burial, this was rare given the overwhelming scale

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of death from disease and battle during the war, and the often-improvised arrangements made for dealing with corpses after combat.209 We do know of several cases of the bodies of Jews being repatriated and reburied. After he was killed in a skirmish, the body of Gabriel Netter, the lieutenant colonel of the Fifteenth Kentucky Cavalry, was retrieved from Owensboro, Kentucky, by his brother-inlaw and taken to Evansville, Indiana, where his sister lived.210 Lieutenant Nathan Levy of the Thirty-second Indiana Infantry received permission to transport “the corps of one of his friends, that fell at the fight [at Rowlett’s Station in Kentucky] to the family of the deceased.” His colonel explained that he hastened to grant permission as the “decomposition of the body made delay impossible,” but Levy more likely sought to abide by Jewish law, which demands rapid burial. The soldier, Max Sachs, was buried a few days later in Cincinnati.211 Adolph Rosengarten, who first enlisted as a sergeant and rose to the rank of major in a cavalry regiment, was killed in a skirmish shortly before the Battle of Stones River. His remains were transported more than eight hundred miles for burial in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia.212 Leopold Newman, the Brooklyn-born lieutenant colonel of the Thirty-first New York Infantry (and a lawyer with Democratic political ambitions before the war), was struck by grapeshot in the left foot during one of the charges on the fortified Confederate works at Marye’s Heights during the Chancellorsville campaign. Surgery to amputate the limb in a Washington military hospital proved fatal. His body was transported to New York City for burial in the Union Field Cemetery.213 As if the effort of retrieving the body of a loved one is not indication enough of the meaning attached to burial, an overheard remark at the funeral of Second Lieutenant Louis Reitler suggests the importance of a proper burial close to home. It took more than a month to bring Reitler’s body back to Cincinnati after he fell at South Mountain. Despite the state of the corpse—his sister reported that it was “so much decomposed” that she could not bring herself to look at his body—it was washed and dressed according to Jewish rites before burial. At his funeral, Reitler’s grieving mother was heard to say that “now she was satisfied,” suggesting the solace of knowing that her son was cared for in death.214 Reitler was reburied with elaborate military honors. So too was Captain Jacob Brunn, killed during the Battle of Williamsburg in early May 1862 during McClellan’s halting advance on Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign, and then reburied in a Jewish cemetery in Pittsburgh three weeks after his death.215 That Rosengarten, Newman, Brunn, and Reitler were all officers was no accident. Their families (or erstwhile

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employers) were able to afford the expense and the logistical challenges of locating and transporting their bodies home. Brunn had worked as a clerk in a wholesale clothing business before the war; at least some of the funeral expenses were paid by his former employers.216 This was, however, not enough to ensure his reburial. As with Julius Littmann, who fell at Stones River, the identification and retrieval of Brunn’s corpse were possible only because of the intervention of a well-placed intercessor. Charles Sonnenberg, who served in the same regiment as Brunn, was standing close to the captain “[w]hile the battle was raging most fiercely.” Sonnenberg recalled “personally” knowing Brunn, “he being one of my persuasion,” suggesting how he regarded the bond with a fellow Jew as natural and automatic. As bullets flew, Brunn cautioned, “‘Sonnenberg, it’s very hot here.’” No sooner “had the words [come] out of his mouth than a bullet struck him fairly in the face.” Sonnenberg recalled that later that same day the “roll was called almost at the same spot as where the Colonel had addressed us that morning and with a very sad result. Out of the 800 men who went into the field only 375 answered to their name. Out of the thirty-five officers there were only eight left.”217 Another soldier in the same regiment, assigned to burial detail, reported being deeply affected by the carnage.218 Sonnenberg, distressed by “shocking sights” on the now-quiet battlefield, also recalled this as the moment that he first “realised the horrors of the war.” He found Brunn’s body the morning after the battle and “buried him separately,” the best that could be hoped for given the mass burial pits prepared for others.219 Without this intervention—and connection—Brunn would likely have been lost within the grim statistics of the Peninsula campaign. Unlike Brunn’s and Rosengarten’s relatives who could afford to transport their corpses back home for burial, Abram D’Ancona’s distraught family could not. Pleading that Abram was their “sole stay and support,” they wrote to the Jewish Messenger to ask for assistance to return his body to Brooklyn for burial from the same battlefield where Jacob Brunn met his end. The newspaper lamented that “poor D’Ancona’s case is not an isolated one; we hear of others who have met the same fate,” but offered nothing more than rebukes to its readers for not providing the needed aid to wounded and dying Jewish soldiers.220 Unbeknownst to the press and D’Ancona’s family, there was no body to bury. D’Ancona falsely represented himself as a paroled Union prisoner at the end of April in order to draw double pay; the chaos of battle appears to have provided convenient cover to escape justice.

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Excluding D’Ancona, we know of thirty-two Jews who were killed in action and another twenty who died of wounds sustained in combat in the service of the Union army. They were mortally wounded in a roll call of major battles in the west—Wilson’s Creek (one), Stones River (three), Chickamauga (four), Chattanooga (two), and Kennesaw Mountain (one)—and in the east— Williamsburg (one), Seven Pines (two), Cross Keys (one), Garnett’s Farm (one), Glendale (one), Malvern Hill (one), Cedar Mountain (two), Second Bull Run (two), Chantilly (one), South Mountain (one), Antietam (two), Chancellorsville (three), Gettysburg (four), the Wilderness (one), Spotsylvania Court House (two), North Anna (one), and Petersburg (three)—as well as at other lesser-known skirmishes and engagements.221 Most of those who fell served in the Army of the Potomac, reflecting the preponderance of Jews who fought in the Eastern Theater. At least twenty-seven more died of disease or other causes while in uniform. Many more who returned in one piece were nevertheless profoundly affected by their experience in the army. In a variety of ways, the war reverberated through their lives long after they took off their uniforms. We turn next to the legacies of the war for those who came home.

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A HOUSE DIVIDED   If the proverb “Like father, like son” were to be applied to Rabbi Morris J. Raphall and his son Alfred, the best likeness just might be that both held strong convictions. Morris was one of the most prominent rabbis in antebellum America, famous for being the first to intone the opening prayer in Congress, and infamous for delivering a sermon defending slavery as biblically sanctioned a little less than a year later. To judge from his choices, Alfred might have looked at the issue differently. But come Fort Sumter, the two were apparently in tandem. Rabbi Raphall raised his voice in favor of the “the only Christian nation not stained by spoliation, cruelty or any wrong of any kind committed against the Jew,” and Alfred went off to war a second lieutenant. But not so long after, when Alfred came home from Gettysburg missing an arm and his father was so horrified that he reportedly suffered an “attack of apoplexy,” that didn’t stop Alfred from returning to his regiment. In fact, rather than stopping the rabbi’s dramatic fulminations, Alfred’s “mutilation” only seemed to inspire the rabbi’s vocal wrath about Lincoln’s “needless sectional war” brought on by “demagogues.” But if the father protested the ongoing conflict, the son supported it, rising to the rank of captain in 1864. Military life suited Alfred. He reenlisted in the regular army after the war and served until his retirement in 1886. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

6: LOST AND FOUND Leopold Karpeles, born in Prague in 1838, joined his brother in Texas in 1857. Though more imaginative accounts have him riding with the Texas Rangers and assisting the Underground Railroad, he more soberly recounted spending the following years “engaged in the wholesale dry-goods business” in Brownsville.1 He left for Europe shortly before the war, probably hoping that his prospects would be improved by recrossing the Atlantic rather than in remaining in a country teetering on the brink of calamity.2 He returned more than six months later, this time settling in Springfield, Massachusetts, and finding work as a clerk for a business that sold fancy goods. Karpeles volunteered in late September 1862, opting for nine months in the militia. The bonuses and bounties offered for signing up for this shorter term of service were still significant, and much more than if he was drafted.3 Karpeles spent most of his term of service in North Carolina—the regiment saw little action, and he later complained of “boredom and hostility” and “unhealthful, wretched, living conditions”—and was back in Springfield by July 1863.4 He reenlisted in March 1864. His appointment as color sergeant—the bearer of the regimental standard, which provided a crucial point of orientation and identification for the regiment—suggests a reputation for steadiness. It also hints at how raw the Fifty-seventh Massachusetts Infantry was. Mustered in on April 6, the regiment departed from Camp Wool in Worcester, Massachusetts, less than two weeks later. The colonel conceded that it was “in no condition to take into action”: biting cold and snow had ensured that there was little time for drill, and some companies were but newly formed.5 The Fifty-seventh Massachusetts was to win grisly distinction. Despite serving for only the last year of the conflict, it lost a greater share of men in combat than almost any other regiment.6 The bloodletting began at the Wilderness. The regiment’s first

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experience of combat was a desperate rear-guard action on the Orange Plank Road on May 6, 1864. The regiment was part of a division rushed to support Hancock’s Corps on the Union left as it crumpled under successive waves of attack by Longstreet’s Confederates. Chaos reigned as these regiments were thrown into the melee. In the midst of “considerable disorder” as the Union line gave way—whole brigades stampeded rearward—Karpeles recalled mounting a tree stump to survey the scene, and relaying the news of the unfolding disaster: “Colonel, the rebs are around us.”7 Karpeles recounted how he urged his wavering commander “to stand firm and rally as many of the retreating troops as possible.” The lieutenant colonel—the colonel was incapacitated—reluctantly agreed: “All right, I will stand by you.” Karpeles believed that he carried the only colors left visible on the field. “We,” Karpeles wrote, by every possible exertion, by waving the colors and otherwise were enabled to rally a large number of retreating troops around our Regimental Colors. . . . When they were formed into line and ordered to advance on the advancing Rebels, they, by rapid discharge of fire arms, managed to check the enemy and enabled the disordered Wing [of the corps] to form, thereby . . . saved that portion of the Wing aforesaid from almost total destruction.8

Others remembered the episode differently. Few doubted that the Fifty-seventh Massachusetts and three other regiments briefly delayed the onrushing graycoats. But all recalled a headlong dash for the rear once it became clear that they were soon to be engulfed. A brigade commander described the troops “break[ing] like partridges through the woods for the Brock Road” at his instruction. In the forests of the Wilderness, pursuing Confederates bagged fleeing soldiers as if for sport.9 A group of stragglers was cut off; Sergeant Edwin D. McFarland explained that this was because the regimental colors became entangled in the retreat. By the time he and others had scrambled to pull the flag free, all were out of sight except the dead and wounded that lay on the ground. [Lieutenant] Colonel Chandler gave the order to lie down with them. While we were lying on the ground we could see the rebels going up the plank road. . . . After lying there for a while, expecting to go to Richmond

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as prisoners, we saw some men that were lost from their regiment, the 45th Pennsylvania. They joined us and we started to find our way out. We crawled on our hands and knees a long distance, I don’t know how far, but it was a number of hours before we reached our lines.

Lieutenant Henry Ward remembered instructing Karpeles to furl the regimental flag in order to save it from the disgrace of capture, and then, once the stampede and pursuit receded into the distance, Ward and the stragglers gingerly “work[ed] our way out the best we could toward our own lines.”10 This difference in memory rankled more than thirty years later. In 1896, the regimental historian, who was on the Orange Plank Road that day, placed Karpeles’s account side by side with that of other witnesses. Though Second Lieutenant John Anderson did not openly scorn Karpeles’s version—“Everything was in such a confused state at the time that it would have been hard to give a correct account of it even then” and “The smoke of the battle was so dense, the brush so thick and the disorder so great that we could not all see the same”—Anderson’s repeated disavowals have the ring of one who protests too much. Anderson and others had reason for grievance. Leopold Karpeles, after all, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Wilderness, with the citation recognizing how he “rallied the retreating troops and induced them to check the enemy’s advance.” Anderson did not doubt Karpeles’s virtues as a soldier—he wrote admiringly of “brave Karpeles” at the Battle of North Anna—but preferred to credit the saving of the colors at the Wilderness to collective gallantry and “the dense thicket that partially concealed them.”11 Little more than an hour of combat decimated the Fifty-seventh Massachusetts. Of the 545 men engaged near the Orange Plank Road—one company had the good fortune to be detailed to guard the wagon trains—245 were killed, wounded, or missing. This, however, was only the beginning of a sanguinary period for the regiment and Grant’s army. So battered was the regiment by the end of September that it could muster only about seventy men for battle. Leopold Karpeles was among the many wounded. At North Anna, he was shot in the left thigh when the regiment’s disastrous charge at a Confederate battery turned into a rout.12 He rejoined the Fifty-seventh Massachusetts after a period in hospital, but did so before he was fully healed. In December 1864, Karpeles collapsed on a march and spent the rest of the war convalescing in Washington, first in hospital

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and then at the home of the Mundheim family. (Simon Mundheim was the shochet of the Washington Hebrew Congregation.)13 Karpeles laconically reported that his wounds “troubled me very much” after his discharge from the army in May 1865; his doctors noted that his lower limbs were “almost completely paralysed.” A year after the war ended, he married Sarah Mundheim, the daughter of the couple who had looked after him as he recovered from his wounds. Karpeles and his wife earned a modest income in Washington in the millinery business. Any form of manual labor, he complained, was impossible, and his speech was impaired. The year 1870 was a tumultuous and terrible one for the family. In February, Sarah died soon after giving birth, leaving Leopold with a newborn (named for her mother) and a two-year-old daughter. He was also left with a reduced income as his millinery business had depended on his wife’s needlework. Soon he was obliged to seek employment— once again he became a clerk in a fancy-goods store—and began to petition Congress annually for what he claimed was the unpaid portion of his enlistment bounty.14 Amid this turmoil, Karpeles applied for the Medal of Honor with supporting letters from his commanding officers that offered generic endorsement of his bravery and conduct rather than verification of the events of May 6, 1864.15 He received confirmation of the award less than two weeks later. Karpeles’s wartime heroics and postwar travails went unreported by the Jewish press until the 1890s. There was no mention of his deeds at the Wilderness in 1864, nor of his Medal of Honor in 1870. Remarkably for a figure who would later become central to how Jews remembered the war, Karpeles was not so much unnoticed or forgotten as ignored. Karpeles’s experience was emblematic of broader processes of suppressing and remembering the war among American Jews. Other scholars have identified how the war was mobilized by the Jewish community in the 1890s and afterward, but none have recognized its striking absence—at least overtly—in the decades before.16 Undoubtedly Jewish veterans and others continued to grapple with the repercussions and traumas of the war as individuals, and perhaps even collectively, but open discussion of the war was muted in Jewish public life. Even as some old soldiers remained eager to talk about their experiences—and did so outside the Jewish community—key Jewish communal institutions were not eager to hear them. From 1865 until the early 1890s, Jewish veterans were rendered all but invisible as veterans in the Jewish press. Even the war service of those with storied postwar careers

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like Edward Salomon—elected clerk of Cook County, Illinois, and then appointed governor of the Washington Territory by President Grant, thereby becoming the “first self-identifying Jew to sit in a governor’s chair”—garnered but brief acknowledgment.17 In contrast to the general press, the Jewish Messenger’s only sustained discussion of the experience of veterans was a tetchy complaint about the “nuisance” of their begging on streetcars and endorsement of a product to treat the chronic diarrhea that afflicted some former soldiers.18 This treatment of veterans was emblematic of a broader tendency. Judging by the Jewish press in the years after Appomattox, there was little evidence that the United States had been all but torn asunder, the Union transformed by years of war, and four million men, women, and children liberated from bondage. Instead, the war was so seldom discussed after 1865 as to suggest that newspaper editors hoped it would conveniently disappear if diligently ignored. They were not the only influential Jewish leaders to keep shtum. The Civil War was little spoken of in formal Jewish communal settings in the states that had formed the Union. (Not so, by contrast, in the former Confederacy, where some found comfort in the burgeoning Lost Cause mythology.) At least in part, this silent treatment explains why some efforts to commemorate the sacrifices of those who died in service met with disappointment. Even Decoration Day (and then Memorial Day) was viewed with ambivalence. The effect was to marginalize Union veterans as veterans within Jewish communal life, and to do the same to memory of the war itself. It was much easier for Jewish old soldiers to fade away in communal life than it was for their German and Irish comrades. Veterans constituted but a small and diminishing fraction of a growing Jewish population. Union veterans composed close to six percent of the entire American population in 1865, whereas they made up a smaller percentage— perhaps 2 percent—of the total Jewish population.19 Jewish soldiers had not, moreover, formed discrete units within the Union army, nor had the Jewish community invested in their collective success to the extent that other ethnic communities had for “their” soldiers. For German Americans, Christian Keller argues, German soldiers “were its heroes, its models. The hopes and dreams of northern Germans marched with Blenker’s division, fought at Cross Keys and Second Manassas, and retreated at Chancellorsville. The coverage of these events in the German-language press proved the extent of public interest in the ethnic regiments and their fates during the war.”20 Not so for Jews. Instead, Jewish soldiers had so faded from the pages of Jewish newspapers by 1865 that the later disappearance of veterans was rendered unremarkable.21

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LEOPOLD KARPELES, HERO   The United States Congress awarded 1,523 Medals of Honor for “gallantry in action” during the Civil War, and five (that we know of) went to Jewish soldiers. Of that quintet, two had to do with the Colors—those regimental flags measuring seventy-two by seventy-five inches, affixed to staffs nine feet, ten inches high, containing a brass finial, and fancily tailing blue-and-white tasseled cords. But of those two awardees only Sergeant Leopold Karpeles was an official color bearer: a position, though unarmed, vital to action on the field of battle. The color bearer was a modern equivalent of a tactical communications center. By first leading troops forward and then, by virtue of visibility during combat, directing movement, the color bearer played a most crucial and respected role. It was also dangerous: a color bearer was both a beacon and a target. Yet aside from his tactical necessity, so long as he held the Colors aloft, the color bearer literally stood as a symbol for cause and country. For all this Karpeles, so heroic in many battles, eventually paid the price. Grievously wounded, he was befriended in hospital by Jewish women giving aid, before being taken to the home of the Mundheim family, where he recovered for a year. He married one of the family’s daughters and then, when she died, another. After the war he devoted himself to civic government, veterans affairs, and the Washington, DC, Jewish community. In service to that Jewish community, however, he may have proved less a light than a blight. A founder of the Hebrew Orthodox congregation of Adath Israel, he found fault there and elsewhere. Both the American Israelite and the Jewish Messenger bemoaned his behavior. His complaints, having mostly to do with modes of observance, provoked one periodical to suggest he’d have cause to regret his seemingly single-handed “dismemberment” of the Jewish establishment. Perhaps he did: he eventually petitioned to change his name to “Carp.” For whatever reasons, he did not change his name and indeed, some twenty years later, died revered, not just as a Medal of Honor winner but as a proud color bearer for American Jewry. National Archives and Records Administration

“I remember you carried the colors of the glorious old 57th far beyond any others …”: an old comrade recalls Karpeles’s heroics at the Battle of North Anna

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Though Jews were not alone in remembering the war in ways that suited their changing needs—indeed, they followed broader patterns in wanting to move on in the decade after Appomattox, and then in revisiting the war in the 1890s—the extent of their suppressing and the urgency of their remembering reveal the particular legacies of the war for American Jews.22 For Jewish veterans, this submergence of Civil War memory by Jewish communal institutions presented particular challenges. After Appomattox, there was good reason not to focus on the recent past. Certainly, the subject engendered awkwardness among some and continued ill feeling among others. Isaac Leeser, for example, was distraught when the news of Lee’s surrender was caterwauled through Philadelphia in April 1865. “Mr Leeser was so overcome,” recalled a young friend of the eminent religious leader, that he abruptly left a religious service and walked home “almost without speaking—the strongest possible sign of emotion.”23 Though he kept discussion of the war and its aftermath to a minimum in his newspaper, he revealed the strength of his feelings—and how conflicted they were—six months after Lee’s surrender when he railed against the abolitionists who he believed were responsible for launching a “modern crusade.” This “crusade,” perchance conferring benefits on millions, deprived millions of others of their vested rights, in taking from them property which was forced on them by the former government of America, when it was seated in Great Britain . . . the war, though necessary to eradicate bondage, and therefore in the eyes of the one-idea abolitionists, a blessing, has nevertheless proved itself the source of so much mischief in every sense of the word, that the result, so much coveted, has not compensated the land at large for the cost in life, limbs, treasure, and general liberty.24

Though Isaac Mayer Wise, his Reform rival, had less of a personal connection with the South—Leeser spent a formative five years living in Richmond—he chose to downplay his prior political leanings and tepid support for the Union war effort. His effusive encomiums of Lincoln following the assassination compensated for less kindly sentiments expressed during the war.25 While the editors of Jewish newspapers, such as Wise and Leeser, had particular reason to want to move on, others also preferred not to dwell on the “late unpleasantness.” Repeated appeals from a small group of Jews in Chattanooga in 1867 and 1868

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for assistance with ambitious plans to rebury the bodies of Jewish soldiers of both armies received but little support. They planned to exhume those who fell at Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and other battles within the vicinity of the city, and to reinter them “according to Jewish rites” in a dedicated section of the newly established Jewish cemetery. They allocated space for sixty graves in all. A handful of congregations and fraternal lodges in the North and South responded. But the sums given were far short of the $8,000 needed for landscaping and fencing the site and erecting a planned “Jewish soldiers’ monument.” By May 1868, the organizers admitted defeat. “Our funds are exhausted,” they wrote mournfully, “we are deeply in debt, and in a truly deplorable condition.”26 In Cincinnati, by contrast, a grand monument—sixteen feet high, topped with a bronze eagle, and inscribed “They died for their country”—was unveiled on Thanksgiving Day in 1868. This was wholly paid for by Jacob Elsas, the same clothing manufacturer and wartime contractor who was press-ganged by a provost patrol during the “Siege of Cincinnati.” The monument was erected at a moment when General Orders No. 11 was publicly revisited during the presidential election campaign. Harping on Grant’s infamous order, his Democratic opponents urged Jews to exact retribution at the ballot box. The Israelite made this connection clear when it placed its report on the monument alongside a lengthy review of Grant’s order and wartime antissemitism. In sponsoring the memorial, Elsas may have wished to direct attention to Jewish sacrifice when the less comfortable topic of Jewish profiteers and smugglers was returned to public view.27 Whatever his motives, the brief renascence of General Orders No. 11 was an unwelcome reminder that the war could still make trouble for Jews.28 There was good reason to prefer to move on and hope that America had moved on too. This episode was, however, but forewarning that the conflict would continue to bedevil the Jewish community despite its best efforts not to mention the war. There was diffidence too about Decoration Day, the precursor of Memorial Day. In 1869, the editor of the Jewish Messenger objected to turning the commemoration of the Civil War dead into an annual ritual. He argued that mourning would soon become formalized and mechanical, and that focusing only on the Civil War slighted those who died in the service of the United States at other times. And such occasions were too easily politicized. All of these concerns, however, were secondary. At heart, he “object[ed] to the celebration altogether.” Decoration Day “keeps up the feelings of war time—and cannot in this serve a good purpose—all recollections of hostilities during a civil war

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should, if possible, be obliterated.” Better, he implored, to “bury the hatchet.”29 A focus on the future had intrinsic appeal when the past was liable to generate problems in the present. Others echoed these sentiments over the next decade, approving of “conciliation and fraternity,” but not of recalling that which was unsettling or divisive.30 There were other indications that the community wanted to look forward and not back. The title of the New Era, a Jewish periodical launched in 1870, reflected this same hope of a new dawn in American Jewish life, and resonated in an American culture that associated moving forward—a “go-ahead” spirit—with success (and stagnation with failure).31 The theme of reconciliation, moreover, spoke to Jews. If Union and Confederate could come together, so too could Jew and Christian. And so too could Jews in the North and South. Even before the war was over, Southern Jews, stricken by the immiserating effects of the war, appealed for aid. After the fall of Savannah, for example, congregation Mickve Israel pleaded for “5000 pounds of Passover cakes”—matzah—so that Jews could celebrate the approaching holiday.32 The request itself was an overture, inviting the restoration of ties of mutual obligation that knitted Jews and Jewish communities together. In that same city, the vice-president of the aptly named Harmonie Club—a meeting place for young Jewish men—offered a similar olive branch in October 1865. It was best not to look to the past, intoned Lawrence Lippman, a Confederate veteran. “It is but one year since this country was deluged with the greatest war that the world ever saw, one that needs no history to record it, no monuments to be erected but is engraved in the hearts of every person, each cannot look back without a shadow! without the straining of the whole nervous system, and a ‘thank God’ that they escaped with their lives.” Better to look to a shared future where Jews were not former Confederates or Unionists but a family reconciled. “My father has learned me in my young days a scriptural text one that cannot be old, one that is engraved in the hearts of all true Israelites, it is ‘Coll Israel Achuim’ we are all brothers, no matter from what part it may be, let it be from north, south, east or west, no distinctions.”33 This was a message to Jews in the Union about renewing ethnic solidarity. To dwell on the past was to slap away a hand proffered in peace. When it came to Decoration Day, the aversion of some prominent Jewish leaders did not stop Jewish veterans from participating in commemorative events, nor rabbis from accepting invitations to speak. These activities, however, were exceptional in a community that made little effort to mark the occasion in the 1870s and 1880s. Rabbi Max Lilienthal, for example, delivered a prayer at a citywide Decoration Day event in

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Cincinnati in 1872—his account of the event made much of sharing the honors with Christian divines, what he saw as putting reconciliation into practice—and a sermon on reconciliation at the event the following year.34 Nathan Mayer, who spent his term of service as a surgeon in the Eleventh Connecticut Infantry, wrote and recited poetry to mark the occasion in 1868 and 1872.35 (His novel, Differences, imagined reconciliation in the form of romance between Jews who had formerly thrown in their lot with the Union and Confederacy.)36 His poetry, too, plucked harmonious chords: “What these heroic dead have wrought, / Each bullet held a seed of peace, / They watered it with life-blood spent—/ When God in mercy ripens these / ’Twill be their lasting monument.” In time, his vision of an ennobling “Sacrifice for Liberty” made by the soldiers of both the Union and Confederacy would become commonplace among white Americans. Soldiers, no matter their cause, would be celebrated as noble and heroic.37 In the interim, however, too much talk of who had done what was best avoided. Just a few months after Appomattox, the Jewish Messenger in New York bemoaned the “misrepresentations with which the press has teemed, respecting the conduct of Southern Israelites during the late war.”38 In Philadelphia, Isaac Leeser complained too of a “renewed illiberality” born of wartime prejudice. “In the South,” he reminded his readers, “we were accused of not being hearty in the contest, and Jews and disaffected became convertible terms.” In the North, it “has been the fashion to call all who were engaged in smuggling or blockade running, as it was termed, Jews.” The “greatest sin committed by Israelites . . . was that many favored, as they always have done, the doctrines of the democratic party.” All this, he concluded, left Jews vulnerable. Exultant abolitionists, he feared, would now marshal their zeal to amend the Constitution so as to favor Christianity. Jews, weighed down by the war, would be overswept in this rush to remake America as a Christian country.39 (He was not the only observer pessimistic about the future of Jews in America; others began to compare the trajectory of Jews in the United States unfavorably with those in Germany.)40 Though Isaac Leeser’s concerns about changes to the Constitution proved exaggerated, he was correct in fearing that the sins imagined of Jews during the war would not quickly be forgotten. Indeed, Jews were soon nettled by accusations—of disloyalty, profiteering, social climbing—that had taken root between 1861 and 1865. These weeds proved tenacious. Already in 1864, the Jewish press complained that Jews were made unwelcome in the “favored circles of society.”41 Within a decade, this had seeded a broader pattern of social and economic exclusion.42

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Yet not all the prejudices cultivated during the war yielded their bitter harvest so soon. Such was the case with the canard that Jews had been deficient in their patriotism, if not outright disloyal, during the war. This accusation was rarely made in the two decades after the war. An exception was the New York Herald, which made this claim in July 1865. When the Confederate “Christian went out to slay his brother or be slain by his brother,” a correspondent proclaimed, “the Jew shrugged his shoulder, grinned, kept afar from the fight, picked up the Christian’s valuables, and then bought and occupied the Christian’s houses.”43 The Jewish Messenger tied itself in knots when responding, unsure whether to remind the public that Jews volunteered for Confederate service or to focus on those who had avoided doing so. To do the former was to invite charges of Jewish disloyalty, while doing the latter achieved the same end. Given the dilemma, the editors decided that “we would gladly, if we could, forget that at this era such men were found in the camp of Israel.”44 That ultimately became the preferred course of action for the Jewish Messenger and others: better to leave the soil of the Civil War period unturned. As a result, in the two decades after the war communal leaders rarely spoke in public of Jewish wartime service. There was potential political advantage in reminding the public that “we Israelites stood shoulder to shoulder in the battlefield”—as they did when they protested the proposed Christian amendment to the Constitution—but peril too.45 Unlike their counterparts in Europe who wielded wartime sacrifice as a potent weapon in their battle for equal treatment—or Irish Americans and African Americans who sought to do the same in the United States—Jews in the North handled the Civil War like an unstable grenade.46 All of this left little place for Jewish veterans as veterans in Jewish public life. Outside of this curious lacuna, there was little that was distinct in the everyday experience of Jewish veterans with the exception of their economic mobility.47 As with other veterans, the war broadened their social and geographic horizons.48 Louis A. Gratz, a newly arrived immigrant from Posen who swapped a peddler’s pack for a military knapsack when he enlisted in Harrisburg in April 1861, understood the army to be a vehicle to make good in the New World, and courted those who could speed his progress. He began as a corporal in the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Infantry, rose rapidly in rank, and was commissioned as a major in the Sixth Kentucky Cavalry in August 1862. He boasted from Knoxville in February 1864 that he had

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made the acquaintance and even acquired the friendship of many civil servants of high rank. Questioned by me, these gentlemen promised me solemnly that they would train me within three months after the war, so that I could pass the bar examination. Many distinguished and prominent people have promised to use their influence on my behalf.49

Gratz traded on these wartime connections when he returned to Knoxville at the end of the war. He opened a legal practice—he had studied the law while in uniform with the help of comrades with legal expertise—and married the daughter of a fellow officer. He was elected city attorney, and became the mayor of North Knoxville. There is little evidence that he had much to do with the Jewish community—his five children were raised as Christians—but he did maintain a friendship with fellow soldier and immigrant Julius Ochs.50 The dispersion of Jews within the army, and the resultant isolation from other Jews— Gratz was the only Jew in the Sixth Kentucky Cavalry—immersed them in an environment where Christianity was the default, and habituated them to life at a remove from a Jewish community. Some jettisoned Judaism entirely after the war. Hungarian-born Frederick Knefler, who was commissioned as colonel of the Seventy-ninth Indiana Infantry in September 1862 and then led that regiment at Stones River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga, as well as in the Atlanta campaign, was known as a strict disciplinarian and nicknamed the “Dutch Colonel” by his men. He returned to Indianapolis after the war and too worked as a lawyer. Though he had previously belonged to a synagogue, he now kept himself at a remove from the Jewish community and was reported by his confidants to have “become a believer in Christianity.”51 Much as for Gratz, the army was an important agent of socialization for Julius Schoenfeld. Originally from Poland, he spoke no English or German when he arrived in Philadelphia in the spring of 1862. After a few months of odd jobs—still “green and fresh” and with “no relatives in this country and no friends from the old country”—he enlisted in the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry. He appears to have chosen this regiment after meeting Major Adolph Rosengarten in Philadelphia. The “men of my co[mpany],” Schoenfeld recalled, “were all strangers.” They “sapposed [Schoenfeld] a Dutchman,” one recalled, “because of his imperfect manner of using the English language which was so bad that he could hardly converse with us” and nicknamed him “Shon Schonfield.”

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Despite his isolation—“I did not associate with anybody, and I had no particular friend or company”—and only four months of service, he “acquired the language and learned something of the customs of this country” while in uniform. (What exactly he picked up is less certain. More than thirty years later, a comrade’s abiding memory of Schoenfeld was an exchange of insults when Schoenfeld refused to share a chicken and goose that he had scrounged. Schoenfeld questioned his comrade’s masculinity, and he retorted that Schoenfeld was a “Dutch Hog.” Decades later Schoenfeld sent him a goose to make amends.) After his discharge in 1863, Schoenfeld opened a variety store in Alexandria, Virginia—“his trade was for the soldiers about the city”—but unlike Gratz he was regarded as an “interloper, for coming there and setting up in business, and he being a [P]olish Jew, the other Hebrews were not on intimate terms with him.” This business failed in 1865, and he struck out for Des Moines and then Wisconsin, where he became a traveling salesman.52 Schoenfeld’s peripatetic postwar career was not unusual. Veterans were particularly restless after demobilization.53 Some returned to towns they had tramped through while under arms. More unusually, Jacob C. Cohen resigned his commission as a second lieutenant in 1863 in order to stay put in a place that seemed particularly promising. After months of slogging through Mississippi with the Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry, Cohen left the regiment when it was temporarily quartered in Memphis. There he found work as a clerk for Jacob Menken, one of many merchants from Cincinnati, New York, St. Louis, and elsewhere who had set up shop in that city. Menken had briefly served as captain in the same regiment, and was “well acquainted” with Cohen.54 Like Gratz, Cohen built upon bonds made during the war. Frederick d’Utassy drew upon a different kind of connection to reestablish himself once released from Sing Sing. Between 1865 and 1867 d’Utassy operated a photographic gallery on Broadway in New York City; it was the same studio where he had his portrait taken when still a colonel. D’Utassy still knew something of how to fashion his self-image. Upon his death in 1892, d’Utassy was remembered as a “general,” suggesting that he had not surrendered his roguish ways.55 He was one of several Jewish entrepreneurs involved in early forms of photography during and after the war.56 The tide of war deposited Jews where they otherwise might not have ventured. Frail Abraham Ruhman, shielded by Marcus Spiegel and then supplied with an honorable discharge, returned to Mississippi even before the war ended, and prospered in the

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clothing business in Vicksburg.57 Similarly, Henry Frank and Isaac Lowenburg began the war in St. Joseph, Missouri, and ended it in Natchez, Mississippi. Attached to Grant’s army (or possibly following in its wake as traders), they had far more freedom to come and go as they pleased, and far more occasion to assess local opportunities than those who wore uniform did. Both liked what they saw in Natchez. According to family lore, the two ingratiated themselves with local Jews by intervening on behalf of twenty-yearold Ophelia Mayer, the daughter of a prominent shopkeeper, who was discovered in possession of letters expressing anti-Union sentiments. (Her parents were sufficiently committed to the Confederate cause to name a son Joseph Eggleston Johnston Mayer, after the Confederate general.) Isaac married Ophelia in 1865, and Henry married her sister three years later. If Frank and Lowenburg were not unusual in setting down roots far from where they started the war, their economic mobility set them apart from most other Jewish veterans. Within a handful of decades, Frank and Lowenburg owned the largest dry-goods store in Natchez, and the largest plantation supply and commission house in the town, respectively.58 As Michael Cohen has argued, Jewish settlers in the South were able to tap into an ethnic credit network that placed them at a considerable advantage in a region recovering from the ravages of war.59 But this trajectory was not distinctive of the South. Joseph Spiegel, who had served as sutler in his brother’s regiment, returned to Chicago after time in a Confederate prison. He made good on the plan he had formed with his brother, Marcus, to open a dry-goods store. His enterprise ultimately grew into the Spiegel Catalog Company. Joseph Greenhut, formerly a captain in the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, earned a fortune in the distillery business in Peoria. By the 1890s he was a kingpin in the Whiskey Trust, which sought to monopolize the production and sale of that spirit—upon his death he was remembered as “King Alcohol”—and then more sedately settled into the ownership of a grand New York department store.60 Though few were as successful as Frank, Lowenburg, Spiegel, and Greenhut, the economic position of Jews as a group was catapulted ahead by the war. This, however, was not particular to Jewish veterans; indeed, those who went off to war were likely at a disadvantage to their Jewish peers who never left home.61 Wartime demand, for example, redounded to the benefit of Jews in the dry-goods and clothing trades who turned to sewing uniforms for the Union army. After the war, those involved in the making and marketing of consumer goods—as many Jews were—were beneficiaries of a dramatic expansion

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of the American market.62 Yet a labile national economy and misfortune tripped up even the most assiduous of strivers. False starts, frustration, and failure were common. After struggling for a decade after the war in the millinery trade, Leopold Karpeles achieved financial stability by securing a position in the United States Post Office, which he filled until his death in 1909. Joseph A. Joel experienced a similar trajectory, but in reverse. He was appointed to the Post Office soon after the war through the intervention of Rutherford B. Hayes. The Post Office was a favored redoubt for political patronage, and Hayes was a powerful patron. Joel was obliged to appeal to Hayes when he sought a raise (“I need a little more salary, for my expenses are heavier now”) and reinstatement after he was fired.63 Though his letters to Hayes reveal his dedication to his champion (“I look up to you as a good Son to his Father, and I really next to my Darling Wife and children, regard you the most of all I know”), this was not a relationship of equals.64 Joel’s dependence diminished once he left government service, first taking up farming, then trying his hand at serving the nostalgia of old soldiers. As editor and publisher of the Grand Army Gazette, a monthly that he started in 1873, and as purveyor of badges, flags, banners, bunting, uniforms, tassels, books, and mementos to Grand Army of the Republic posts that served as fraternal lodges for Union veterans, Joel was a pioneer in marketing memory of the war to old soldiers.65 Even as Karpeles and Joel were eventually able to right themselves, others floundered. In the two years after he mustered out and returned to his farm in Kansas, August Bondi opened and closed a small business in the hamlet of Greeley (he “was not very successful,” he reported), sold his farm and moved to Leavenworth to start a grocery store (“For a few months business was encouraging”), quit Leavenworth and his business for Salina (more than 160 miles away), prospered, and then went bankrupt (“Keen competition. Business went from bad to worse.”). By March 1867 he was again eking out a living as a farmer. (“During the winter of 1868–69 we had two buffalo hams and some beef heads for meat. We lived on the money realized by hauling firewood to Salina.”) His autobiography catalogs a continuing “streak of bad luck”: hail destroyed his corn, his cows were stolen by Texan herders, and dry weather killed his wheat. He was little more successful after swapping farming for politics, holding a series of local offices that depended on the whims of voters and the patronage of, first the Republican Party and then the Democrats (he paired his party activism with membership of the Anti-Papal League). The military pension that he received from 1898 provided a measure of stability after more than three

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decades of scraping by (“I worried along as best I could”), and probably explains how he was able to visit Vienna for the first time since he had left in 1848.66 Pension applications abound with accounts of distress and failure. Moritz Rosenthal, for example, died in the poorhouse in St. Louis after a postwar career poxed by hardship—he failed as a peddler and storekeeper—and mental illness. Abraham Newman, who described himself as a “strong Republican but a poor Jew,” earned a tenuous living as a merchant in rural Lycoming, Pennsylvania. Starting in his late thirties, he scrabbled for a military pension—he was still affected by illness contracted while in uniform—eager for the financial security it promised. Thwarted, he blamed his doctor (“he is or used to be a Dem[o]cr[a]t”) for denying him “his proper intidlement.”67 Others complained that their applications were denied, or treated with particular scrutiny, because they were Jews. Given the anxieties about fraud in the pension process, and prevailing doubts about the probity of Jews, it is unsurprising that there is evidence of such prejudice in some pension files.68 The postscript of a special examiner’s report on Joseph Herman’s pension application from February 1887 is illustrative: Client and his family are Jews. His mother is quite old and infirm and cannot speak English while his brother + sister were too young to know of his physical condition before the war. Their non-committed manner of testifying gave me unfavorable impressions of them. Certainly their religion does not teach them much respect for the prescribed oath.

Newman was one of many veterans who carried visible and invisible marks of war into peacetime.69 Long after the last men were demobilized, the war continued to exact a physical and mental toll. Polish-born Samuel Brilliantowski, who had served as a brigade surgeon in the Eleventh Corps, died in early 1866 of a disease that it was assumed he contracted while at arms.70 So too did fellow surgeon Louis Emanuel, who succumbed to tuberculosis, thought to be brought on by “arduous exertions” and “great exposure” during the Peninsula campaign.71 Jacob C. Cohen died of the same disease after returning from Memphis to Cincinnati.72 Others suffered from the lingering effects of traumatic injury. After Antietam, Leopold Blumenberg experienced “years of intense and unremitting” pain from his wounds.73 Louis Hirsch, shot in the right shoulder at Chancellorsville and slashed across his face by a saber at Gettysburg, lived the rest of his life with partial paralysis of his right arm and impaired sight.74 Louisa Joel confided to Rutherford B.

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Hayes in 1891 that her husband, Joseph, was hobbled by “inflammatory rheumatism in both his feet, the effect of the wounds in his legs.” This had implications for his ability to earn a living, as “he complains of his arms and cannot do much writing in consequence of it.”75 Robert Hess also struggled with an injury that became more debilitating with time. A tailor before the war, he was in uniform for all of three months before receiving a serious head wound in a skirmish with Confederate cavalry close to Washington. After a stay of five months in military hospitals, Hess recuperated at home in New York, cared for by doctors from Mount Sinai Hospital. Initially able to work, he “remained subject to paralitic spells, which in time increased in violence and frequency.” By 1880 he was no longer able to earn a living.76 Others suffered from less visible scars borne of the stresses of military service.77 Though Jewish welfare organizations provided succor to some of those in distress, other Jewish institutions were less interested in publicly revisiting the past. This impulse to move on left Jewish veterans without an outlet within the community to develop and express a collective identity until the 1890s. They may have sought one another out in synagogues and in fraternal organizations like the B’nai B’rith, but there is no evidence that Jewish veterans formalized and institutionalized these bonds until much later. Instead, those who sought recognition, support, and fellowship rooted in their wartime experience initially did so outside the Jewish community. In an age when fraternal orders were popular, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a national organization of Union veterans, offered prestige as well as an opportunity to cultivate a sense of camaraderie and common cause. Membership was deeply meaningful to Leopold Karpeles. According to his daughter, “On Reunion Days for the G.A.R., we always had open house for his comrades,—coffee, sandwiches, etc. was served to all who came.”78 Joseph Greenhut concretized his commitment to the GAR, and his pride in his war record, by sponsoring the construction of a GAR hall in Peoria—replete with stained-glass windows and imposing columns—which is still known as the Greenhut Memorial.79 The autonomy granted to local posts, as well as considerable variation in their composition, meant that the experience of Jews in the GAR varied. Major Philip Horwitz, for example, feared that antisemitism would stymie his admission to a GAR post in Milwaukee.80 On the whole, Germans and other ethnic veterans were underrepresented within the organization, and in some instances formed their own posts and associations when they were made unwelcome.81 The national organization, moreover, had a “strongly Protestant

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flavor.”82 In New York, Jews joined a variety of posts, including the Steinwehr Post, popular with German veterans, and the Manhattan-based H. B. Claflin Post. When veterans had a choice about which post to join, their decision often reinforced existing social and economic connections.83 In some instances, Jews became involved in the leadership of local posts. Edward Salomon was commander of one of the first posts established in Chicago, and then held the same office in San Francisco. Isidor Eisenstaedt, who briefly joined the “squirrel hunters” mobilized to defend Cincinnati in September 1862 and was then drafted into the army for a hundred days of garrison and guard duty when Ohio National Guard units were federalized in 1864, described his election as commander of a GAR post in Chicago as the “greatest honor that has and ever may come to me.”84 The formation of the Hebrew Union Veterans Association (HUVA), the first and only such organization for Jewish soldiers of the Civil War, in March 1896 was not the result of exclusion of Jews from the GAR.85 Indeed, the Claflin Post appealed to the leaders of the new Association to remain within the fold, and itself held a memorial service at New York City’s Temple Beth-El just two months after HUVA was formed.86 Some opposed the creation of HUVA as an act of separatism. The Jewish Messenger regarded the move as “unwise and mischievous” and offering the unwanted “appearance of clannishness.”87 A Jewish veteran wrote to the American Hebrew to urge his comrades to “stop this foolishness.”88 Others thought differently, instead seeing opportunity to spotlight, commemorate, and celebrate the service of Jewish soldiers. Two prominent synagogues immediately offered to host memorial services for HUVA, and thereafter Memorial Day became an annual ritual at patrician Temple Emanu-El in New York City. Simon Wolf often appeared in a starring role; his omnibus, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, was published the year before HUVA was formed.89 In reality, he had banged the drum of Jewish wartime service since 1864 but now finally had a receptive audience.90 Jewish veterans, who may themselves have been ready, after the delay of decades, to revisit traumatic memories of the war, and perhaps previously been put off by the community’s seeming uninterest in their wartime service, now too had reason to again rally around the flag. There were other signs of new interest in an old war, including public discussion of Jewish soldiers and a prolonged campaign to raise funds for a memorial to Jews who had fallen in the service of the Union.91 The latter effort was led by the department store magnate Nathan Straus (born in 1848, and whose family had been subject to a discriminatory statute in a small town in Georgia during the war) and Jacob W. Mack (born in

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ADOLPH MAYER, LONG SUFFERING SOLDIER   “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously observed. “It’s not even past.” This sentiment is never quite so true as when applied to the Civil War. Today monuments and markers are at the front line of heated debate about what America should remember about its history. But for the actual survivors of those Northern and Southern battlefields, this dictum held true too. All too often those hobbled mentally and physically found no respite at war’s end. Such a soldier was the German-born Jew Adolph Mayer. Rising from private to sergeant over the course of more than two years in the Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry, he spent the remainder of his term of enlistment as a clerk in the Pay Department. Having served honorably, he returned to his native land, there to go mad from, his family believed, all that he had seen during the war. A close German relative of his recollected “Mr. Adolph Mayer had acquired his sickness of the nerves in the American war. I know by [my] own contemplation that Mr. Mayer was not able to lead alone a business . . . but has only done most simple works. He suffered of constant convulsions of the figure and went never in society. It was often spoken in my presence that not only the death of Mr. Mayer was due to a disease, contracted in his military service during four years, but also his mournful life.” The effects of his three years’ service in the Twenty-seventh Ohio lasted until his death, in 1907. National Archives and Records Administration

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ISIDORE ISAACS, COFOUNDER OF THE HEBREW UNION VETERANS ASSOCIATION   Anyone who thinks death ends with burial has clearly never dealt with the government. The Civil War, for instance, ended in 1865, and yet the veterans department was paying out pension claims for the next 155 years. But if death and bureaucracy seem eternal, so are promises of love. Enter then, on July 14, 1862, the United States government. With the passage that day of an “Act to grant Pensions,” the Pension Office would heretofore provide pensions to all Union military personnel who sustained war-related disabilities, as well as to their wives, minor children, and even their dependent orphan sisters. Over time this meant, for the government, well over a hundred grades of pensions; and it meant, for the widows of Jewish soldiers, often producing a ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract. The ketubah not only speaks to what a husband must give his wife but also documents, with its signing by two witnesses, proof of marriage itself. Such was the case for Mrs. Isidore Isaacs, née Rosa Nathan, who applied for a widow’s pension two days after the death of her husband in 1924. This process, which merely required proof of marriage to Isaacs, would indubitably have been simpler if her husband had not been so ardent a patriot. Enlisting at fifteen, legally underage, he used the alias “Barwood”—an Anglicized version of his mother’s German maiden name—to prevent his parents from stopping him. Private Barwood served from November 1861 until July 1865 in three different regiments—infantry, national guard, and cavalry—and, military scribes being what they were, was listed as “Baker” in 1864. Hence poor Rosa Isaacs, whose husband used an alias only during the war, had to prove that Barwood was Baker and that both were, Isidore Isaacs in Grand Army of the Republic uniform. He served that organization as Commander of the Department of New York in 1921.

really, Isaacs. She began at the beginning, with the ketubah for her 1871 marriage to Isidore Isaacs.

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Isidore Isaacs, once so eager to serve the Union cause, had likewise been proud to help organize the Hebrew Union Veterans Association in 1896. He was propelled, the American Hebrew reported, by Simon Wolf’s “labors to show the active part taken by Jews in defense of the United States” in his seminal 1895 work, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, which chronicled the valiant service of Jewish Americans in militarily supporting the United States. That support did not begin or end with the Civil War, Wolf pointed out. Indeed, with ever more wars on the horizon, the Hebrew Union Veterans Association became, in the twenties, the Jewish War Veterans of America, a patriotic organization still active today. Courtesy, The National Museum of American Jewish Military History (opposite) National Archives and Records Administration (above)

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1876 and scion of the family implicated in General Orders No. 11), as well as other luminaries like Lyman Bloomingdale.92 As with the newly formed American Jewish Historical Society, the rooting of Jews in American history had become a patrician project, and one embraced by those born after the war or those too young to serve when it was fought.93 Through public subscriptions, supplemented by hefty donations from their elite circle, these men achieved what others had been unable and unwilling to do forty years before. In 1905 a fifty-foot-tall Civil War monument was unveiled at Salem Fields cemetery, in Brooklyn, by General Nelson Miles, recently retired as the commanding general of the United States army.94 Though Goldwin Smith was not in the audience, Miles’s words were a clear riposte to those who questioned the fidelity of American Jews to their country. “While other people and nations that were contemporaneous with the Hebrew people have long since disappeared,” he intoned, “that of the Jewish faith has produced eminent men in every age and maintained a loyalty to every Government where they have lived.”95 Miles listed Jewish exemplars—Joseph, Moses, David, and Solomon—as well as more recent Jewish champions—Judah Touro, Benjamin Disraeli, Baron de Hirsch—as proof positive of Jewish patriotism and distinction. But he reserved special status for seven more names: putative Jews who had won the Medal of Honor. Atop that list was Leopold Karpeles. The seven, drawn from Wolf’s book, were named as Karpeles, Benjamin B. Levy, Abraham Cohn, David Obranski (really Orbansky/Urbansky), Henry Heller, Isaac Gans (really Gause), and Abraham Grunwalt (really Greenawalt.) The last three were not Jewish. The list has been much repeated since 1895. Only in his dotage did Karpeles become a flag bearer for his people, paraded in the Jewish press and on the pages of popular histories, and achieving a celebrity that has only increased with time. The discovery of Karpeles as a Jewish hero, and the return of the Civil War to American Jewish life, reflected broader processes well under way by the 1890s. Foremost was a revival of interest in the war, exemplified in part by the erection of new monuments and battlefield markers. (Joseph Greenhut was prominently involved in adding a monument to the Eighty-second Illinois Infantry at Gettysburg, and then represented Illinois at the reunion held to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.) Other signs of this revival of interest included the increasing popularity of staged reunions between Confederate and Union veterans; the dramatic growth in the size of the GAR; the publication of regimental histories, popular chronicles of the war, and memoirs and

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reminiscences; and the heaping of attention on veterans whose bravery was called upon to inspire young men in an age that seemed far removed from the romance imagined of the Civil War era.96 Typical of the last mentioned was the creation of the Medal of Honor Legion in 1890. Leopold Karpeles was among those who founded the organization; he occupied the titular office of surgeon general on its first board. Ironically, the Medal of Honor caused trouble for Karpeles precisely because the Legion added luster to the award. Open only to those who had received the medal (and their children), the Legion sought to remind the public of “old soldiers of which the country has not heard a great deal.” “[P]ossession of the medal,” they insisted, “must be regarded as a distinction of the first order.” “Each medal represents a story or series of stories calculated to make the heart beat quicker and the eye dilate with interest and admiration.” Along with buffing reputations, such heady language was designed to remove any doubts about the worthiness of the medal’s recipients. In actuality, the criteria for this award had initially been subjective and imprecise, and some recipients, including Karpeles, had nominated themselves for the medal.97 Among the stories that the Legion promoted in the press and in print was Karpeles’s retelling of events at the Wilderness.98 He cited as proof of his heroics a letter from John Anderson, the future regimental historian, that spoke of his bravery at North Anna.99 All of this invited attention to Karpeles and his claims; former comrades who might have cared little for the award now had motive to publicly challenge his version. They did so in the regimental history published a few years later. Karpeles’s comrades were not the only ones struck by the tales he told. Simon Wolf pushed Karpeles to the front of the legion of loyal Jews that he marshaled in the pages of The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen.100 Karpeles was a particularly useful addition to the old soldiers that Wolf mustered into service against Goldwin Smith and others who questioned Jewish patriotism. What better illustration that Jews were willing to bleed for their country than one who had done so while clasping a Union flag? Indeed, Wolf implied that Karpeles won the Medal of Honor for his actions at North Anna when “seriously wounded, he held the colors aloft until through weakness from loss of blood he had at last to give them to a comrade.”101 Wolf’s fidelity to historical accuracy declined over time. By 1915, he described how Karpeles “snatched a rebel flag in the midst of the carnage and bore it triumphantly to the Union side.” Karpeles at least had it better than Leopold Blumenberg. In Wolf’s

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retelling, Blumenberg was elevated to the rank of general, but shorn of a leg at Antietam to which the Baltimorean was in fact still very much attached. Edward Salomon, raised to a generalship by Wolf, also had his past rewritten. At Gettysburg, he would be flattered to learn, he “had stood solitary and alone, smoking his cigar, with a bravado that inspired the admiration of the whole army” as “the guns of Lee were thundering down on the plains,” and as Pickett prepared his “great charge.”102 Wolf may have borrowed the image of a clench-jawed Jew at Gettysburg calmly smoking a cigar while others quaked—the very image of manly sangfroid—from a description of Adolph Proskauer, a major in the Confederate army, who was recalled by a subordinate to have “smoked his cigars calmly and coolly in the thickest of the fight.”103 Or it may have been inflected by the popular, and probably apocryphal, account of General Dan Sickles carried off from the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg flamboyantly smoking a cigar. Wolf was far from alone in writing a glorious new history of the war that celebrated the bravery of soldiers on both sides. Nor was he the only one to champion the contribution of a particular group. Indeed, because of their earlier reluctance to talk about the war, Jews were late to this game. German Americans and Irish Americans never stopped writing about the war—to push back against their critics, to celebrate those who served, and to advance their claim to inclusion—but they too took up the charge anew in the 1890s in response to renewed nativism. (Like its Jewish counterpart, the American Irish Historical Society, founded in 1897, spooned out generous helpings of history that highlighted the contributions of the Irish on the battlefield and in public life).104 Underlying this broad revival of interest in the war was a triumphant national narrative that emphasized reconciliation and regeneration to the exclusion of the war’s unfulfilled promise to Black Americans. In 1890, Leopold Karpeles echoed what had become a prevailing sentiment when he delighted in his chance encounter with Confederate veterans while on vacation: “I tell you, it makes an old soldier feel that the war is really over when you find the men you fought against acting as these good people down in Maryland acted toward me . . . how completely they recognize the fact that we are all brothers and that the past is dead forever.”105 For Jews, however, the 1890s heralded not the death of the past, but rather its vivification. After more than two decades in which some key Jewish individuals and institutions had sought to bury the war, it instead returned to haunt them. Goldwin Smith’s canard, that Jews routinely shirked their patriotic duties and were incapable of being loyal citizens,

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  In this c.1880 photograph of Medal of Honor recipients, most of whom earned their medals during the Civil War, Leopold Karpeles can be seen in the third row from the bottom, third from the right. The Shapell Manuscript Collection

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was particularly troubling precisely because of this broad new interest in the Civil War and because the accusation was picked up by others, including Mark Twain.106 Instead of writing Jews into the national narrative, as the founders of the American Jewish Historical Society and others hoped to do, Smith threatened to write them out for good, starting with a conflict that had come to define how many Americans thought about patriotism, gallantry, and nationhood. Instead of associating them with a glorious and pure past, he would forever imprint them with the ills—“sordid expertness in money getting,” self-seeking, materialism, and excess—imagined of the present.107 This threat of exclusion compelled the Jewish community to embrace the war as never before. What better way to counter those who questioned their patriotism—and their values—than by demonstrating that Jews had done more than their share in America’s great national conflict? By the 1890s they had come full circle. Discomfort with wartime antisemitism appears to have persuaded Jews to move on after 1865. Now a surge of ugly claims against Jews—foremost that Jews, whether native born or newcomers, were unworthy of citizenship—and the return of the Civil War to popular consciousness persuaded them to deploy the deeds of Jewish veterans to do battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. As David Blight has put it, “nations rarely commemorate their disasters and tragedies, unless compelled by forces that will not let the politics of memory rest.”108 The same was true of Jews in America. They had good reason to act quickly. Smith’s claims were layered atop hostile ideas about Jews that calcified in the 1870s and 1880s. At their core, many of these ideas were rooted in wartime prejudice. Contrary to what several historians have argued, wartime antisemitism was not a passing fancy that was banished as quickly as it had come.109 Instead, motifs that surfaced during the war burrowed deeply into the American imagination.110 During the war, the shoddy contractor, smuggler, speculator, and shirker were imagined as the creators and unjust beneficiaries of an amoral economic and social order. This “shoddy aristocracy”—whose morals and manners marked them as undesirable, whose profits were ill gained, and whose power derived from money alone—was imagined to lord it over a new social heap summoned into being by the chaos and disruption of war. These upstarts did not know their place. They upset the natural order in the city and despoiled the most desirable resorts. Supposedly uncouth behavior at Saratoga, New York, received particular notice.111 Yet even as the invective of the war years receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed for action and were returned to service in the Gilded Age. Amid the disruptive changes and intense social anxieties wrought

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by industrial capitalism and mass immigration, the shoddy aristocrat resonated anew.112 The negative stereotypes of the war years—the Jew as self-seeking, self-promoting, and self-aggrandizing— made possible the imagining of the Jew as the engineer and profiteer of a new economic and social order in which wheeler-dealers, loyal only to lucre and of dubious origin, rigged the system to their advantage. It was no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as inaugurating this new wave of antisemitism—the exclusion of Joseph Seligman from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga in 1877—had at its center a man who made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the Civil War.113 Seligman was known to be a friend of President Grant’s, and was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was remaking America. Instead of representing a fresh departure, Seligman’s humiliation was but the Lazarus-like return of ideas that had awaited their second coming since the Civil War. In targeting Seligman, a member of the mannered elite, his antagonists made it clear that not even the most celebrated of Jews was worthy of social acceptance and inclusion. More than a decade later, Goldwin Smith carried this idea several steps further: no Jew could be ever truly trusted as a citizen of the United States. This, however, was but one of the legacies of wartime antisemitism. Indeed, its indirect effects were no less consequential. Contrary to the claim made by Bertram Korn and other historians that the war speeded the integration of a largely immigrant community into American society, the war may have slowed rather than hastened that process.114 In parallel with similar developments among German and Irish immigrants, wartime prejudice strengthened a sense of ethnic consciousness and collective identity among Jews.115 This was in part driven by a sense of disillusionment. Instead of fulfilling the initial hopes of some that the war might be good for the Jews, there came abundant evidence of the opposite.116 It also reflected the practical effects of wartime prejudice. The chaplaincy controversy and Grant’s order required collective action and common cause on the home front, obliging a diverse population of immigrants to plaster over internal differences in order to express their grievances as a singular ethnic group. This hastened the transformation of Jews from Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, Posen, Bohemia, and elsewhere into American Jews—albeit still fractured by religious and other differences—as well as the consolidation and coalescence of a sense of community. These trends were reinforced after the war as alternative forms of identification—as German Americans, for example—became so much harder for Jews to claim because of the solidification of the

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boundaries of other ethnic groups and heightened prejudice from these groups against Jews. German associational life in America, for instance, on the whole became less welcoming of Jews following the unification of Germany in 1871.117 The war also propelled a turn inward within American Jewish life, encouraging some to assert their identity as Jews. This trend was driven less by a new confidence and prosperity than by chastening memories of a conflict that had demonstrated the uncertain position of Jews in American society, as well as by postwar prejudice that reminded them of their precarity. This inward turn and these processes of coalescence and consolidation were reflected in the cascade of local and national Jewish organizations, institutions, and initiatives—cultural, literary, welfare, and religious—formed in the decades after the war.118 Whereas before the war efforts to create, consolidate, and centralize were often frustrated or resisted—particularly at the national level—this was an era of building. Jonathan D. Sarna has described this period as a “late nineteenth-century American Jewish awakening” and as a “renaissance.”119 In the 1890s, this renaissance took an historical turn. A community, so recently knitted together, sought a common history. Wolf’s book was but the most prominent example of works published in that decade that demonstrated the rootedness of Jews in American society.120 This was meant to prove to outside observers that Jews were not interlopers and to create among Jews a self-conscious attachment to being American Jews. Those who picked up on Wolf’s themes and added others in the years that followed unwittingly transformed the Civil War from a source of hurt into the subject of pride. This included celebrating Jews who could plausibly claim connection with Abraham Lincoln, as well as those present at key moments in the war; presenting the chaplaincy controversy and the General Orders No. 11 as redemptive episodes that ultimately reinforced American values; and adding new heroes, including Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, to an expanded Jewish pantheon.121 In the twentieth century, freed from embarrassment and discomfort, Jews fully reimagined their role in the Civil War. Simon Wolf, who, in keeping with his times, described the Civil War in 1895 as “a struggle which has ended so beneficently,” may well have thought the same of his own campaign.122 He may not have quieted antisemites—their fantasies were impervious to fact—but he did restore the Civil War to Jewish memory, and the Jew to Civil War history. Yet so often lost in the fire and smoke of polemic and memory were the real lives and real struggles of Jewish soldiers at war and at peace.

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“THE CONTRACTOR”   The stalwart service of the soldier is counterposed with the dubious dealings of the shoddy contractor in this cartoon in Harper’s Weekly. In a world gone topsy-turvy, the soldier’s wife struggles to pay her bills while the contractor’s wife shops for jewels. Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collection, Harold Lee Library, Brigham Young University

C ONC LUSI ON Aged and idled in Salina, Kansas, August Bondi reflected on his past. His had been an eventful life intertwined with rebellion and freedom on both sides of the Atlantic. As a teenager he had joined the ill-fated liberal uprising in Vienna. Before he was thirty, he had ridden with John Brown in Kansas and joined a Union cavalry troop active in Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas. He looked back on an unsatisfactory career as a farmer and merchant, and a slightly more successful one in local politics. But now, he complained, “I often feel superfluous. . . . My children are all amply able to care for themselves. Hating to rust out I keep on busy with Democratic politics trying my best to end the reign of Republican boodlers.” Anticipating the end of his eventful life, he left careful instructions about how he wished to be buried. His funeral service was to be conducted by his Masonic brethren. If not enough of the above can be present, my children may employ a Rabbi, such services to be held at the Masonic Temple . . . Kaddish to be said by my children at the grave after the Masonic burial service. During the burial service I wish that mention be made of my being in the front March 13th, 1848; likewise in Kansas in 1856, actively participated June 2nd and August 30th, 1856, at Blackjack and Osawatomie and did my full duty in military service of the U.S. for over three years, leaving the same with two ounces of lead in my body.1

He was intensely proud of being a Freemason, a Jew, and a Forty-Eighter, of having fought in Bleeding Kansas, and of having served in the Civil War. As a Jew in antebellum America, August Bondi was unusual in being a farmer, but not in living far from other Jews. The demands of making a living scattered peddlers,

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storekeepers, and strivers across the rural hinterland. Outside a handful of cities where Jews clustered in larger numbers, this dispersion was characteristic of Jewish life before the war, and established a geographic pattern atypical of other ethnic and minority religious groups. When war came, this same pattern shaped the experience of many of those who enlisted. Bondi joined a locally raised regiment. “Never orthodox but a consistent Jew nevertheless,” he clung to this identity despite being all but alone as a Jew in the Fifth Kansas Cavalry. Two of his Jewish comrades responded differently, disclaiming any connection to Judaism. In reality, even Bondi had little latitude to maintain basic religious practices relating to diet, the calendar, and worship that marked Jews as different. His experience was unexceptional. For although isolation from fellow Jews was particularly acute for those who enlisted in rural areas or far from Jewish population centers, even those who signed up in larger cities almost invariably served alongside relatively few Jewish comrades. The American Jewish population, after all, was modest in size. But their modest footprint in the ranks also reflected their reluctance, relative to other ethnic groups, to enlist, born of misgivings about the war, as well as their particular economic profile. They knew full well, too, that the Union army made few allowances for pious Christians, never mind for Jews. The dispersion of Jews through the army and the absence of ethnic units shaped their experience of the war. On the one hand, as Jews they were denied the support, solidarity, and sense of collective purpose bred by companies and regiments that mustered in men of the same backgrounds, as well as the encouragement and political intervention that this produced on the home front. The lack of advancement experienced by some Jewish officers, particularly those of field rank, was likely a consequence of this tepid home-front support. On the other hand, the absence of real Jewish units—Company C of the 82nd Illinois and Company A of the 149th New York were sponsored by Jews rather than filled with them—spared Jews the often unwanted attention generated by German and Irish regiments. There was prejudice enough against Jews. Older ideas about Jews, transformed by wartime, were embodied in the figures of the contractor, smuggler, shirker, speculator, and sutler. Yet the day-to-day experience of soldiers varied considerably. Some chose to veil their Jewishness entirely. Others were the subject of benign curiosity or to vicious bullying. In an environment where so much was new and demanding, Jewishness more

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typically seems to have been rendered unremarkable by time and close contact. Wearying months in the field turned Jews into messmates, tentmates, and comrades. For all the discomfort that wartime antisemitism caused for Jews on the home front, Bondi appears to have been little troubled by prejudice within the Fifth Kansas Cavalry. Instead he formed intense bonds of comradeship that lasted long after the fighting ended. The highlight of a visit to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon—a rare trip out of Kansas undertaken at the age of seventy—was meeting with his former captain and another comrade from the regiment, as well as encounters with two of John Brown’s sons. Such was Bondi’s devotion to the memory of those who did not return from the field of battle that in August 1900 he chose not to go to the circus with his grandchildren and his ailing wife “as it was the anniversary of the Wilson’s Creek Battle [of August 10, 1861] where so many of my friends of the early 50’s and a few of the Vienna Legion sacrificed their lives to uphold the Stars and Stripes.”2 When he died, seven years later, his will parceled out to his children the items he held precious: his discharge papers from the army, his warrant as first sergeant, his pension certificate, his old dress sword, and his army pistol.3 His other legacy was even rarer than these mementos. August Bondi left behind a memoir that described his Civil War service in great detail. Unlike Jewish veterans of the Confederacy, those who fought for the Union wrote little about their time in uniform. The long silence about the war within the Jewish communities of the North may well have encouraged their reticence. Paradoxically, this same silence, by veterans and those who lived through these tumultuous years, made possible the extravagant mythmaking that followed. Such mythmaking was not inevitable. Indeed, in August 1865, barely three months after Appomattox, Isaac Leeser called for modesty in how the role of Jewish soldiers in the war ought to be remembered. The “reports circulated through European Jewish journals, based perhaps on reports originating on this side of the Atlantic, relative to the number of Jews in the service of the United States,” he wrote, “are ridiculously exaggerated.” Thus it is stated that there were at least 60,000 Israelites in the ranks of the federal troops, among whom 12,000 came from Ohio, 5000 from Illinois, and 3000 from Michigan, when it is certain that the whole Jewish

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population in those states, men, women, and children, scarcely exceeds, if it equals, these figures. We do not see any sense in publishing such unreliable matter to the world. . . . So also with the ranks which the Jewish soldiers attained. We do not believe that more than one, a lieutenant-colonel when wounded, was promoted to a brigadier-general, just before his death, when his decease was imminent, and we heard of but three others who attained the rank of colonel, and if there had been many in this position, we think we should have learned it.

“Perhaps,” he concluded, “when full statistics, if they be attainable, shall have been gathered up, something more may be made public.” In the meanwhile, “we would caution writers not to venture on vague assertions which will not redound to our credit, if their erroneousness is made manifest.”4 Until the 1890s his plea was heeded, but only because the war was studiously avoided in Jewish public life. But once that taboo was broken, much of what Leeser warned against came to pass. We live still with the “full statistics” provided by Simon Wolf—albeit now corrected by the Shapell Roster—as well as the tendency to trumpery within Jewish memory of the war, which he initiated. Leeser’s and Wolf’s motives were apologetic. Leeser saw statistics about Jewish soldiers as a source of embarrassment (if found to be inflated); Wolf understood them as a defense (if deployed against those who criticized Jews.) Absent was any sustained effort to see Jewish soldiers as more than just numbers. We have inherited this legacy too. When Jewish soldiers were paraded in communal memory and in popular histories, they all too often appeared as ciphers. These tin soldiers lived in memory on our terms, not on theirs. Any unease we feel about their motivations, their numbers, their interactions with their fellow soldiers, and their efforts (or not) to live as Jews in Union uniform tells us more about ourselves than about them. For they were not the modern-day Maccabees of the mythmakers, but instead mortal men in momentous times, grappling with the complexities of being Jews in the Union army.

AC K N OW L ED G M EN TS Civil War historians often credit a childhood visit to Gettysburg, Antietam, or one of the many other battlefields of 1861–1865 for initiating a lifelong fascination with the conflict. It takes but little imagination to conjure the desperate drama of close-quarters combat when standing on Little Round Top and near the Sunken Lane. My origin story begins farther afield. Imprinted on my memory is a boyhood scramble on to a koppie above Magersfontein. Looking down upon trenchworks and the sparse veld below, I could easily visualize broiling Highlanders pinned down by Mauser fire and the unrelenting African sun during the South African War. This fascination with matters military was nurtured over years by an enthusiastic father and indulgent mother on pilgrimages to battlefields and military museums in Europe, America, and South Africa. (She allowed her sons to dig a trench in her backyard—even supplying plastic grocery bags for use as sandbags—but a full-day tour of Gettysburg, led by an overeager Park Service guide and crammed with arcana, tested even her limits.) Stories told by grandparents and relatives left their imprint too. Louis Resnick’s tales of Manchester during the Blitz. Raymie Rabinowitz’s stories of sailing from Durban with a transport of seasick mules destined for Slim’s army in India. Leonard Mendelsohn’s descriptions of the ghastly detritus—leavings of the sharks and the sea—washed ashore from the troopship Nova Scotia, sunk by a U-boat off Natal. The relics they brought home—Leonard’s dress uniform and swagger stick, Louis’s gas mask—fueled many childhood games. These enthusiasms might have amounted to little but for fate. Though I was inspired by memorable lectures on the social history of warfare by Bill Nasson at the University of Cape Town, my choice of modern Jewish history at Brandeis University—and the influence of another gifted teacher, Jonathan D. Sarna—seemingly relegated matters military to the area of idle interest rather than serious research. Yet my graduate school essay on the historiography of the Civil War, and later a book that collected the best writing about the Jewish experience of the conflict (coedited with Jonathan D. Sarna), combined my

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older and newer interests. Six years of teaching at the College of Charleston in South Carolina—a period that overlapped with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—helped too. So too did obliging in-laws who lived within driving distance of Gettysburg and Antietam. But the intervention of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation—an invitation to use the Shapell Roster as the basis for a book about the Civil War, as well as support to do so—proved decisive. The Roster, many years in the making, is audacious in scale and ambition. Without the carefully vetted records that it assembles, this book, and so much future research, would not be possible. Many, many future scholars, Civil War buffs, descendants of Civil War soldiers, and I owe Benjamin Shapell our gratitude. Adrienne DeArmas has skillfully stewarded the Roster research team since 2016. I am indebted to her and her predecessors in that role: Robert D. Marcus and Dr. John R. Sellers. They have worked with a team of dogged and enterprising researchers—Caitlin Winkler, Alexandra Apito, Adam Geibel, Janice Parente, Vonnie Zullo, Jennifer Schansberg—who have done the foundational work over more than a decade to assemble the Roster. They have been ably assisted by interns and volunteers (Jason Denklau, Brian Wirth, Lori Miller, Dr. Richard Kane, and Jim Simmons), as well as by the staff of the National Archives and Records Administration (particularly Dennis Edelin, Officer Apache Martin, and Trevor Plante) and of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation (Eliza Kolander, Jamie Feiner Levavi, Ariane Weisel Margalit, Sara Willen, Dyon Maki, Michal Gorlin Becker, Dr. Naomi Weiss, and Dr. Kenny Kolander.) My thanks to Ariane Weisel Margalit and Thea Wieseltier, who have guided this book on behalf of the Foundation. I am grateful too for the assistance of many archivists and librarians who have answered research queries, tracked down records, and scanned documents on my behalf. Special thanks to Dr. Dana Herman, Kevin Proffitt, and Elisa Ho at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Julie Mayle at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, Kate-Lynne Laroche at the Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association, Margaret Humberston at the Wood Museum of Springfield History, Joanna Church at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Shannon S. Schwaller at the U.S. Army War College Library, Katie Garrun at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, and the staffs of the interlibrary loan department at the University of Cape Town and of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Many others helped too. Anton Hieke trawled the German Jewish press and translated articles relating to the Civil War. Allen Mikaelian and Martin Lorenz-Meyer generously

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shared their work with me. Alex Myers and Ryan White strained their eyes to read and transcribe Civil War–era newspapers, military records, and census data. A number of friends—Shari Rabin, Jonathan D. Sarna, Tobias Brinkman, Michael Cohen, Leonard Rogoff, and Mark Bauman—read and commented on the manuscript. Their thoughtful comments and suggestions were invaluable, as was the input of Russell Martin. As someone who has previously written about Jews and business, I see in this project all the signs of a family enterprise. I have benefited from the unpaid labors of my brother, Simon Mendelsohn, who assisted with statistical analysis, and of my father, Richard Mendelsohn, who offered much encouragement and feedback (and who, by coincidence, has previously written about Jewish soldiers who fought for the Boers and the British in the South African War.) Aside from indulging my interest in visiting sites near their home, my in-laws, Ellen and Richard Finkelman, have schlepped many, many suitcases filled with books to South Africa for me. My wife, Andrea, does not share my interest in military matters, but has never shown it. I am endlessly grateful for her support (and forbearance). Her patience will undoubtedly be tested in future. Encouraged by their grandfather, Sam (aged nine) and Emma (six) have discovered the family relics and been gripped by retellings of their great-grandparents’ tales. How far off can their first visits to Magersfontein (and Gettysburg) be? Adam Mendelsohn Cape Town, August 2021

AP P E N DIX 1 : T H E G EN ES I S O F TH E S H A P EL L RO STER Adrienne DeArmas The Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War, a documentary project begun in 2009, is an ongoing reappraisal of the military service of Jews in the Civil War. The endeavor uses stringent academic research methodology and unprecedented access to millions of primary source documents, discovered in both brick-andmortar and online repositories. The goal: identify every Jewish soldier who served for the Union, Confederacy, or both.1 The process: find primary source proof of both military service and Jewishness for each name in Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen and the numerous names he incorrectly identified or omitted. The result: an online database containing nearly one hundred searchable fields of data, ten thousand soldier records, a bibliography of more than twenty-five hundred primary and secondary sources, and more than fifty thousand historical documents. The purpose: to change the conversation from “How many?” to a more personalized and in-depth story of Jewish participation in an extraordinary period in American history. The goal of the Shapell Roster has never wavered since its inception, but the process, purpose, and result have evolved in response to the wealth of information we continue to discover. Our methodology, as outlined in the following pages, is rigorous and intentionally transparent.

SIMON WOLF’S ROSTER Since 1895, Simon Wolf’s roster of Jewish service during the Civil War, contained in The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, has been widely regarded as the standard-bearer on the topic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish American military history. Despite the fact that Wolf listed just over eight thousand names, he is

230    A ppendix 1: T he G enesis of the S hapell R oster

often credited as the source of widely repeated claim aim that “10,000 Jews served in the Civil War.” This discrepancy is likely a result of Wolf’s own disclaimer: [T]his compilation must therefore, in the very nature of the case, be more or less imperfect and incomplete[.] Several hundred names of soldiers from Indiana alone were finally excluded from my present lists, notwithstanding their pronounced Jewish character, such as Marks, Abrahams, Isaacs and others of a similar strain, whose owners were ascertained by my correspondents to be non-Jews, while on the other hand many soldiers bearing names of decidedly non-Jewish derivation were authenticated as Jews.2

Archivist Sylvan Morris Dubow attempted, in 1970, to point out the flaws in Wolf’s tome, but he refrained from exploring how Wolf’s listing was assembled or correcting its known inaccuracies.3 As Simon Wolf’s personal papers are not extant, his methodology for compiling his Civil War roster is somewhat of a mystery. What could have prevented someone heralded as the “Nestor of American Jewry,” who spent fifty years advocating for Jewish causes, from donating his life’s work to one of the many Jewish, German, or American preservation institutions with which he was closely affiliated?4 Wolf died unexpectedly in 1923, and his estate, which included his noteworthy library, passed into the hands of his widow.5 There is nothing in the historical record that indicates what happened to his personal papers, which almost assuredly were part of his library, and would presumably have included correspondence related to The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. What little we do know about Wolf’s process has been gleaned from his own publications, newspaper clippings, and ephemera found in various archives. We know that the secretary of war detailed an officer to search the Union archives for Wolf, and that Eugene Henry Levy, a Confederate veteran, was tasked by Wolf with identifying Jews who fought for the Confederacy. We know that Wolf wrote letters and appealed to his extensive network of contacts, and newspapers across the country alerted their readership to the venture and his request for names of Jewish soldiers, Union and Confederate.6 Levy, who worked for the New York Tribune, reported that several Grand Army of the Republic Post commanders sent in lists of their Hebrew members.7 Four years after he began, Simon Wolf published a list of 8,115 names that he claimed were Jews who served in the Civil War.

A ppendix 1: T he G enesis of the S hapell R oster    231

MAKING A MODERN ROSTER Benjamin Shapell drew upon The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen when collecting Civil War–era manuscripts, but the structural hierarchy (organized first by state in alphabetical order, then regiment by ordinal number, and finally, name in alphabetical order) rendered it cumbersome and time-consuming. More important, it was incomplete and riddled with errors. Shapell envisioned a sortable roster that was userfriendly and accurate. When good friend and fellow collector Robert Marcus suggested that Shapell transform the decades of meticulous notes in a particularly dog-eared copy of Wolf’s book into a searchable database, Shapell began the extensive process of creating what would become much more than a list. Initially, the scope of work was limited to verifying service for the names in Wolf’s book and adding any soldiers Wolf omitted. Within the first year of the project, it became very clear that more than just a few of the soldiers in the book were not Jewish. Expanding the project scope to collect primary (and/or secondary, as required) sources as documented proof of both military service and Jewishness resulted in the creation of a

A CALL TO RECORD   Noting that “criticisms upon the loyalty and courage of the Hebrews” has prompted a new book to be written about Jewish patriotism, this clipping in the Meridian Daily Journal’s December 23, 1891, edition requests that “Hebrew veterans” in Connecticut be in touch with “Lawyer Wolf.” Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library

232    A ppendix 1: T he G enesis of the S hapell R oster

flexible, powerful database, and a shift in focus that more accurately reflects the Shapell Manuscript Foundation’s mission of making historical documents, and the evidence of human vulnerability they contain, more accessible to the public. The Shapell Roster team, initially created by Dr. John R. Sellers and now led by director Adrienne DeArmas, consists of lead researchers Caitlin Winkler and Alexandra Apito, with additional support from Janice Parente. Together, we conduct genealogical and military history research, employing multiple strategies to reduce subjective interpretation of data (including the Genealogical Proof Standard and Karl Popper’s Falsifiability Principle) as part of our methodology. We have a lengthy Standardized Operating Procedures document that details, with examples, when and how every field in the database should be populated, with sample text for free-form text fields, as a means of ensuring uniformity without compromising the unique details of each soldier’s experience. All records are reviewed against these standards before they are made available to the public. As of this writing, the Shapell Roster has more than nine thousand records, 84 percent of which are from Wolf. We have confirmed service for 89 percent of the Union names in Wolf, determined conclusively that nearly eight hundred of them are not Jewish, and identified more than four hundred as duplicate listings.8 Nearly a thousand of the Union names have not yet been uniquely identified in the historical record, and more than four thousand are “Jewish According to Wolf.” We retain all of the “Wolf Names” as part of our reappraisal of Jewish service in the American Civil War and provide the page number where a name appears in The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen as a reference point. We have added nearly fifteen hundred Union and Confederate soldiers and have hundreds of candidates in the queue to research before official inclusion in the Roster.

AP P E N DIX 2 : T H E ME TH O D O LO GY O F TH E S H A P EL L RO STER Adrienne DeArmas

Every verified name in the Shapell Roster must meet two requirements: Verifiable service in a federally or state recognized regiment, militia, or home guard unit in the Union or Confederate Army or Navy from April 12, 1861–April 9, 1865 Substantiated evidence of Jewishness (Judaism, Jewish origins, or substantive affiliation with a Jewish community)1 Since this is a roster of military service, finding proof of service is the first priority, followed by proof of Jewishness. Once both are acquired according to our criteria (explained below), we collect the following data for each soldier, if available: ŝ

Date and location of birth and death

ŝ

Detailed accounting of his Civil War military service

ŝ

Marriage, residence, and occupation details

ŝ

Connections, if any, between him and other individuals in the database

ŝ

Historical documents that provide insight into his life, before, during, and after the war

RESEARCHING MILITARY SERVICE The records of federally recognized Union and Confederate regiments, known as Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs), are physically housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC. An increasing number of these records are accessible online, via subscription, at fold3.com. If we cannot locate

234    A ppendix 2 : T he M ethodology of the S hapell R oster

a CMSR, we then look to state and local archives for muster rolls or other primary military sources. Secondary sources, such as any of the multivolume state Adjutant General reports generated after the war, obituaries, newspaper articles, or a previous author’s compilation (for example, Wolf) are helpful, but do not provide the detailed service history data we collect. Most Union soldiers have service records, and some have pension files (also located at various NARA facilities, and in some cases, available at fold3.com). Every soldier in the Shapell Roster requires at least one specified regiment as the foundation for their military service history, which includes, if applicable, enlistment, discharge, transfers, detachments, commissions, promotions, reductions, desertions, and whether the soldier was a prisoner of war (POW), wounded in action (WIA), missing in action (MIA), or killed in action (KIA).2 The Shapell Roster focuses on soldier history, not regimental history, so we record enlistment, as opposed to muster in data, but if a soldier’s discharge is due to being mustered out, we do record that. In addition to designating a record as Service Confirmed or Did Not Serve, we have adopted a third service status called Inferred Service, which allows us to include soldiers whose official service records are not extant. If multiple nonmilitary record sources provide consistent and specific details about a soldier’s service (for example, he served in a named regiment, such as the Seventy-fourth New York Infantry, as opposed to the Excelsior Brigade), and those sources are independent and not cross-referential, then we will accept nonmilitary service records as proof of service on a case-by-case basis.3

EVIDENCE OF JEWISHNESS Similar to the Military Service status, each record in the database has a Jewish status: Jewish, Not Jewish, or “Jewish According to Wolf.”4 Finding documentation that proves a soldier was Jewish is a much more dynamic endeavor than confirming military service. Owing to limitations of both the content and our access to the historical record, we depend upon what is currently available, and how many footprints a soldier left for us to discover. The evidence we collect reflects the broad inclusiveness of the Shapell Roster, as outlined in the following categories. Genealogical Proof A soldier is Jewish by matrilineal or patrilineal descent, even if one or more in the family tree converted to another faith. This also includes those who converted to Judaism.

A ppendix 2 : T he M ethodology of the S hapell R oster    235

For example, a soldier is found on the genealogy charts in Malcolm Stern’s First American Jewish Families or a soldier’s parents were found buried in a Jewish cemetery. Self-Identification A soldier is identified as Jewish by his own words or actions, either privately or publicly. For example, the soldier responds to a question on his pension application asking for details about his marriage by explaining that he was married by a rabbi. Testament by His Contemporaries A soldier is identified as Jewish by anyone other than himself. For example, in a published narrative drawn from a Civil War soldier’s personal diary, we read the following: “Jack Sheppard’s real name was Victor Aarons [sic]. He was a full blooded Jew. At eleven years of age he had shipped as a common sailor and had led a life of adventure until he enlisted with us in the summer of 1861.”5 Any documentary evidence that supports our claim that a soldier was Jewish may meet all three definitions, but in most cases, a soldier needs only one to be included in the Shapell Roster. A caveat to this is if the proof is antisemitic in nature. For example, if a soldier is subjected to antisemitic slurs in a newspaper article, we would need additional proof to rule out misinformation on the part of the antisemite. The following are broad categories of documents we use to prove a soldier was Jewish: ŝ

Municipal birth, marriage, or death records

ŝ

Synagogue or church records

ŝ

Burial location

ŝ

Family trees and genealogical charts

ŝ

Pension documents: affidavits, statements, questionnaires

ŝ

Diaries, correspondence, personal papers, wills

ŝ

Obituaries, biographies, newspaper articles

ŝ

Evidence of affiliation with Jewish organizations

During the nineteenth century, name profiling as a research methodology was a respected practice, which is why Simon Wolf employed this approach to create his roster. That is no longer the case, so we do not use name profiling as a proof of Judaism. However,

236    A ppendix 2 : T he M ethodology of the S hapell R oster

there are some names that are more likely to be Jewish, and warrant consideration—see appendix 3 for a list of the most common Jewish names in the Shapell Roster. In contrast, soldiers William Ford, Solomon Smith, and Patrick Hamilton were Jewish but serving under aliases. Had Myer Raphael, Bernard Rosenblatt, and Simon Adamsky not applied for Union pensions, we might never have found them.6 And then there’s Adam Brown, Beverly Jefferson, and Edgar Johnson—also Jewish, but without an alias. Not every Cohen is Jewish, and not every Jew is buried in a Jewish cemetery. The Shapell Roster database, accessible at shapell.org/civil-war-soldier-database/ search consists of a search engine, individual soldier pages, and an extensive bibliography of resources. The advanced search component features more than a hundred searchable fields, including drop-down lists, free-form text fields, date ranges, and tags. Each soldier page offers date and location fields for birth, death, and military service events. Freeform text fields offer unique, but still searchable, details specific to each soldier, including connections to other soldiers in the database, genealogical and burial information. Status fields (for example, Jewish, service and research), “connected to other soldiers,” soldier record origin, and document tags enable searching by broad or narrow criteria. Additionally, fully cited historical documents are attached to every soldier’s record.

AP P E N DIX 3: DATA F RO M TH E S H A P EL L RO STER Soldier by soldier, the researchers of the Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War have painstakingly assembled the service records and biographical data that tell the individual stories of those who enlisted for the Union. When grouped together, this army of individuals reveals broader patterns. This appendix highlights a selection of datapoints derived from the Roster’s digital database: the birthplaces of Jewish soldiers, the number that enlisted in each state, their distribution by regiment across the army, the most common surnames found among Jewish enlistees, and some of the more specialized roles that they filled. Included too are the names of the highest-ranking Jewish officers in the Union army, and a listing of those Jewish soldiers who received the Medal of Honor along with the citations describing their acts of extraordinary heroism. The data presented in this appendix reflects only those confirmed as Jewish.

1. JEWISH SOLDIERS BY PLACE OF BIRTH

1

PROVINCE O F C A N A DA

294

U N I T E D S TAT E S

171

UNKNOWN

3

AT S E A

2

JAMAIC A

1

COLONY OF SURINAME

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    239

3

1

SCOTL AND

1

DENMARK

67

WA L E S

17

NETHERL ANDS

ENGLAND

2

BELGIUM

50

FR ANCE

6

979 GERMAN C O N F E D E R AT I O N

SWITZERL AND

18

56

RUSSIA

POL AND

22

HUNGARY

1

PORTUGAL

1

GREECE

1

1

FRENCH ALGERIA

SYRIA

SOLDIERS BORN WITHIN THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION 1

284 253 UNKNOWN

36

E L E C T O R AT E OF HESSE

6

PRUSSIA

32

AUS TRIAN EMPIRE

5

DUCHY OF NA SSAU

135

B AVA R I A

38

GRAND DUCHY OF HESSE AND BY RHINE

21

WÜRT TEMBERG

FR ANKFURT AM MAIN, K ING DOM OF G A LICI A A N D LODOM E RI A

2

26

39

GRAND D U C H Y  O F B A D E N

L A N D G R AV I AT E OF HESSE-HOMBURG

4

GRAND DUCHY OF MECKLENBURG -SCHWERIN, H A M B U R G , H E S S E  2

DUCHY OF SA XE- COBURG AND GOTHA , DUCHY OF SA XEMEININGEN, DUCHY OF SCHLESWIG, DUCHY OF BR AUNSCHWEIG, D U C H Y O F A N H A LT- D E S S A U , HOHENZOLLERN - HECHINGEN

1

37

BOHEMIA

14

HANOVER

3

GRAND DUCHY OF SA XE-WEIMARE I S E N AC H , S A XO N Y

HOHENZOLLERN -SIGMARINGEN, GR AND DUCHY OF MECKLENBURG -STRELITZ, GR AND DUCHY OF OLDENBURG, D U C H Y O F A N H A LT- KÖ T H E N , D U C H Y O F A N H A LT- B E R N B U R G , K R A KÓ W, L Ü B E C K , WA L D E C K A N D P Y R M O N T

2. WHERE JEWISH SOLDIERS ENLISTED

2

WA S H I N G T O N

(Washington Territory)

2

N E VA DA

1

(Utah Territory)

COLOR ADO

19

(Utah/Kansas/New Mexico/ Nebraska Territories)

C ALIFORNIA

2

ARIZONA

(New Mexico Territory)

5

NEW ME XICO

(New Mexico Territory)

11

K ANSAS

(Kansas Territory)

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    241

694

1

M I N N E S O TA

21

WISCONSIN

212

MICHIGAN

I O WA

192

63

90

INDIANA

OHIO

ILLINOIS

10

DC

6

10

NH

26

48

CT

4

RI

NJ

P E N N S Y LVA N I A

WEST VIRGINIA

57

3

VT

N E W YO R K

17

10

2

MAINE

2

16

DE

MARYL AND

35

KENTUCK Y

MISSOURI

3

TENNESSEE

234

2

MISSISSIPPI

6

U N I T E D S TAT E S R E G U L A R A R M Y

LOUISIANA

1

F L O R I DA

53 MA

N E W   YO R K 89

3. JEWISH SOLDIERS BY REGIMENT 6th NY State Militia: 74 | 66th NY Infantry: 33 | 31st NY Infantry: 23 Les Enfants Perdus NY Infantry: 22 | 8th NY Infantry, 39th NY Infantry: 21 149th NY Infantry: 20 | 20th NY Infantry: 15 | 7th NY Infantry: 13 | 68th NY Infantry,

1st NY Infantry: 12 | 103rd NY Infantry, 52nd NY Infantry, 58th NY Infantry, 59th NY Infantry: 11 54th NY Infantry, 55th NY Infantry, 7th NY Veteran Infantry : 10 | 72nd NY Infantry, NY Light Artillery, 45th NY Infantry, 4th NY Infantry, 15th NY Heavy Artillery: 9 | 175th NY Infantry, 19th IL Infantry, 32nd IN Infantry, 29th NY Infantry, 62nd NY Infantry: 8 | 40th NY Infantry: 7 | 38th NY Infantry, 90th NY Infantry, 2nd NY Cavalry: 6 | 11th NY Infantry, 119th NY Infantry, 9th NY Infantry, 73rd NY Infantry, 46th NY Infantry, | 4th NY Heavy Artillery: 5 | 47th NY Infantry, 42nd NY Infantry, 61st NY Infantry, 1st NY Cavalry, 1st NY Engineers, 102nd NY Infantry: 4 | 178th NY Infantry,

28th OH Infantry, 106th OH Infantry, 13th OH Infantry: 6 108th OH Infantry, 27th OH Infantry, 9th OH Infantry: 5 37th OH Infantry: 4 | 23rd OH Infantry, 15th MO Infantry, 103rd OH Infantry, 35th OH Infantry, 58th OH Infantry: 3 47th OH Infantry, 46th OH Infantry, 5th OH Infantry, 63rd OH Infantry, 61st OH Infantry, 78th OH Infantry, 72nd OH Infantry, 83rd OH Infantry, 34th OH Infantry, 22nd OH Infantry, 107th OH Infantry, 14th OH Infantry: 2 15th OH Infantry, 188th OH Infantry, 10th OH Cavalry, 13th OH Cavalry, 25th OH Infantry, 1st OH Infantry, 29th OH Infantry, 32nd OH Infantry, 94th OH Infantry, 81st OH Infantry, 82nd OH Infantry, 75th OH Infantry, 56th OH Infantry, 4th OH Infantry, 50th OH Infantry: 1

24 ILLINOIS

23rd PA Infantry, 12th PA Cavalry: 6 | 3rd PA Heavy Artillery, 74th PA Infantry, 83rd PA Infantry, 99th PA Infantry, 90th PA Infantry: 4 | 11th PA Infantry, 32nd NY Infantry, 72nd PA Infantry, 61st PA Infantry, 6th PA Cavalry: 3 82nd PA Infantry, 198th PA Infantry, 106th PA Infantry, 109th PA Infantry: 2 | 151st PA Infantry, 18th PA Cavalry, 19th PA Cavalry, 111th PA Infantry, 115th PA Infantry, 100th PA Infantry, 13th PA Reserve Infantry, 25th PA Infantry, 26th PA Militia Infantry, 28th PA Infantry, 81st PA Infantry, 87th PA Infantry, 73rd PA Infantry, 3rd PA Cavalry: 1

11

27th PA Infantry: 43 | 5th PA Cavalry: 18

INDIANA

OHIO

39

PE N N S Y LVA N I A

32

131st NY Infantry, 132nd NY Infantry, 22nd NY State Militia, 99th NY Infantry, 91st NY Infantry, 7th NY Heavy Artillery, 65th NY Infantry, 71st NY Infantry, 5th NY Infantry, 49th NY Infantry, 51st NY Infantry: 3 | 4th NY Cavalry, 3rd NY Cavalry, 3rd NY Infantry, 6th NY Cavalry, 6th NY Heavy Artillery, 74th NY Infantry, 80th NY Infantry, 95th NY Infantry, 106th NY Infantry, 25th NY Cavalry, 17th NY Infantry, 17th NY Veteran Infantry, 165th NY Infantry, 16th NY Cavalry, 18th NY Cavalry: 2 | 14th NY Cavalry, 156th NY Infantry, 185th NY Infantry, 10th NY Heavy Artillery, 100th NY Infantry, 140th NY Infantry, 121st NY Infantry, 12th NY Cavalry, 1st NY Light Artillery, 97th NY Infantry, 9th NY Cavalry, 82nd NY Infantry, 86th NY Infantry, 76th NY Infantry, 78th NY Infantry, 5th NY Veteran Infantry, 56th NY Infantry, 3rd NY Light Artillery: 1

82nd IL Infantry: 23

19th IL Infantry: 8 | 24th IL Infantry: 6 16th IL Cavalry, 12th IL Cavalry, 13th IL Cavalry: 3 | 51st IL Infantry, 72nd IL Infantry, 9th IL Infantry, 1st IL Light Artillery, 24th IN Infantry, 10th IL Infantry, 14th IL Infantry: 2 16th IL Infantry, 18th IL Infantry, 117th IL Infantry, 107th IL Infantry, 27th IL Infantry, 28th IL Infantry, 37th IL Infantry, IL Light Artillery, 8th IL Cavalry, 42nd IL Infantry, 50th IL Infantry: 1

32nd IN Infantry: 8 3rd IN Cavalry: 3 24th IN Infantry: 2 14th IN Infantry, 133rd IN Infantry, 11th IN Infantry, 1st IN Heavy Artillery, IN Light Artillery, 86th IN Infantry, 7th IN Cavalry, 48th IN Infantry: 1

26th WI Infantry: 4 24th WI Infantry, 2nd WI Cavalry: 2 2nd WI Infantry, 9th WI Infantry, 5th WI Infantry: 1

8th MD Infantry: 2 1st MD Infantry, 2nd MD Infantry Potomac Home Brigade, 3rd MD Cavalry: 1

3rd CA Infantry, 2nd CA Infantry: 2 6th CA Infantry: 1 16th CT Infantry: 3 13th CT Infantry, 5th CT Infantry: 1 6th NH Infantry: 3 11th NH Infantry, 1st NH Cavalry: 1 16th IA Infantry, 31st IA Infantry, 8th IA Infantry: 1

7

15

7th NJ Infantry: 5 8th NJ Infantry: 4 1st NJ Cavalry, 3rd NJ Cavalry: 3 15th NJ Infantry: 2 12th NJ Infantry, 9th NJ Infantry, 1st NJ Infantry, 2nd NJ Cavalry, 2nd NJ Infantry, 33rd NJ Infantry, NJ Light Artillery, 5th NJ Infantry, 4th NJ Infantry: 1

1st MO Light Artillery: 5 41st MO Infantry: 4 17th MO Infantry: 3 2nd US Reserve Corps,  MO Infantry, 5th MO Infantry, 2nd MO Light Artillery: 2 10th MO Infantry, 21st MO Infantry, 1st US Reserve Corps, MO Infantry, 7th MO State Militia Cavalry, 5th MO State Militia Cavalry, 3rd MO Infantry, 4th MO Cavalry: 1

MICHIGAN

NEW JERSEY 18

4th MA Cavalry: 5 | 20th MA Infantry, 30th MA Infantry, 3rd MA Cavalry: 3 18th MA Infantry: 2 | 24th MA Infantry, 28th MA Infantry, 31st MA Infantry, 32nd MA Infantry, 9th MA Infantry, MA Light Artillery, 56th MA Infantry, 57th MA Infantry: 1

13

10th Veteran Reserve Corps, 14th US Infantry: 4 10th US Infantry, 11th US Infantry, US Marine Corps, 5th US Infantry, 6th Veteran Reserve Corps, 4th US Infantry: 3 5th US Cavalry, 1st US Artillery, 1st US Cavalry, 15th US Infantry, 1st Veteran Reserve Corps: 2 14th Veteran Reserve Corps, 11th US Infantry, 2nd Battalion, 20th Veteran Reserve Corps, 1st US Veteran Volunteer Infantry, 2nd Battalion Veteran Reserve Corps, US Revenue Marine, 7th US Infantry, 7th Veteran Reserve Corps, 5th US Artillery, 4th US Cavalry, 4th US Volunteer Infantry: 1

MISSOURI

US Army: 47 | US Navy: 43 | 2nd US Artillery: 5

O T H E R S TAT E S

M A RY L A N D

4

W I S CO N S I N

6

M A S S AC H U S E T T S

13

FEDER AL

28

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    243

1st MI Light Artillery: 2 1st MI Cavalry, 2nd MI Infantry, 9th MI Cavalry, 8th MI Infantry, 7th MI Cavalry, 5th MI Infantry: 1

MS Marine Brigade: 2 1st LA Cavalry: 2 1st DE Cavalry: 1 1st NM Cavalry: 1 2nd RI Infantry: 1 7th WV Infantry: 1

4. THE MOST COMMON SURNAMES

LOEWENTHAL  5 FRIEDMAN 5 KATZ 5 ROSE 5 WENK  6 DAVIS 7 SCHLOSS 7 HELLER 6 BENJAMIN 5 LOWENSTEIN 6 BLOCK 5

SCHLESINGER 5

OPPENHEIMER  7 HESS 6 JOSEPH  8 LOEB 9 WOLFF 8 BROWN 5 HIRSCH 9 ROSENBERG  10 MARX 8 NATHAN 8 KOHN 6

GRATZ 9

ISAACS 15

WOLF 10 COHN 14

GOLDSMITH 11 LAZARUS 9

JACOBS 8 FRANKEL 7

COHEN 24

LEVY 31

ROSENTHAL 16

MAYER 10

STRAUSS 12

STERN 15

ADLER 8

WEIL 11 HARRIS 9 NEWMAN 10

KAHN 9 SIMON 9 ROTHSCHILD 8

LEVI 7

MEYER 7

KLEIN 6 HART 7 FRANK  7 LOWENTHAL 5 MOSES  6 MICHAELIS 6 ULMAN 5 BERNAYS 5 BLUMENTHAL 5 JACOBSON 5 ETTING 5

Library of Congress

5 . U N U S U A L S E R V I C E O C C U P AT I O N S When enlisting in the army or navy during the Civil War, every recruit was assigned a job. Most of these jobs were not unique, and went unspecified on muster rolls, because if a soldier served in an infantry regiment, there was no need to denote that he was an “Infantryman.” Soldiers and sailors who came to the service with specialized skills and training were often singled out and their knowledge put to use to best serve their regiment and the U.S. military as a whole. This list records the specialized occupations that Jews filled in the Union army and navy, reflecting the particular needs these men could fill, and the varied demands created by this conflict.

BUTCHERS 3

INSPECTORS GENERAL 5

ENGINEERS 2

FARRIERS  2 DETECTIVES 1

CHAPLAINS 4

CHIEFS OF ORDNANCE & ORDNANCE OFFICERS 6

RECRUITING AIDES-DE-CAMP 12 CLERKS 26 OFFICERS & NURSES AND RECRUITING HOSPITAL SERVICE 44 STEWARDS 33

MUSICIANS 58 QUARTERMASTERS & SURGEONS & ASSISTANT SURGEONS 24

QUARTERMASTER SERGEANTS 37 OFCOMMISSARIES SUBSISTENCE DRUMMERS 14 & COMMISSARY PROVOST SCOUTS  4 MARSHALS 5 SERGEANTS 22 BAKERS 3 ARTIFICERS  3 PAYMASTERS 3 SADDLERS  3 VETERINARY SURGEONS 2 TOPOGRAPHICAL ENGINEERS  2 PHOTOGRAPHERS 1

6. HIGH RANKING OFFICERS Judah, Henry Moses

d’Utassy, Frederick George

Highest ranking Union officer of Jewish descent during the Civil War; had previously served in the Mexican-American War and was a classmate of Ulysses S. Grant’s at West Point.3

Dismissed and sentenced to one year of hard labor at Sing-Sing Prison for “[u]nlawfully selling and disposing of Government horses for his own benefit” and “[c]onduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline.”

Blumenberg, Leopold

Einstein, Max

Wounded at Antietam; appointed Provost Marshal of Maryland’s Third District after he resigned because of these wounds. Awarded the ranks of Brevet Colonel and Brevet Brigadier General.

Discharged after the First Battle of Bull Run.

Brigadier General | 4th CA Infantry; F&S US Army

Brevet Brigadier General | 5th MD Infantry; C, F&S

Frankle, Jones

Brevet Brigadier General | 17th MA Infantry; F&S 2nd MA Heavy Artillery; F&S

Colonel | 39th NY Infantry; F&S

Colonel | 27th PA Infantry; F&S

Friedman, Max

Colonel | 5th PA Cavalry; F&S

Investigated for padding the rolls of his regiment; resigned before he could be charged with any crime.

Awarded the rank of Brevet Brigadier General “for gallant and meritorious services in the Department of North Carolina.”

Jefferson, John Wayles

Knefler, Frederick

Spiegel, Marcus M.

Brevet Brigadier General | 11th IN Infantry (3 Months, 1861); H 11th IN Infantry; H 79th IN Infantry; F&S

Charged Missionary Ridge during the Third Battle of Chattanooga; awarded the rank of Brevet Brigadier General “for gallant and meritorious services during the war” on August 22, 1865, to date from March 13,1865.

Mundee, Charles

Brevet Brigadier General | US Army

Wounded at Spotsylvania Court House; awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel for “gallant and meritorious services throughout the . . . campaign before Richmond, Va.[,]” Brevet Colonel for “gallant and meritorious conduct in the battles of Winchester, Fisher’s Hill and Cedar Creek, Va.[,]” and Brevet Brigadier General for “gallant and meritorious services before Petersburg, Va.”

Salomon, Edward Selig

Brevet Brigadier General | 24th IL Infantry; H 82nd IL Infantry; F&S

Wounded at Gettysburg; awarded the ranks of Brevet Colonel and Brevet Brigadier General “for distinguished gallantry and meritorious services during the war.”

Colonel | 8th WI Infantry; F&S

Wounded during the Siege of Vicksburg. Colonel | 67th OH Infantry; C 120th OH Infantry; F&S

Wounded twice: first during the Siege of Jackson; second when the steamer City Belle was ambushed by Confederates at Snaggy Point, along the Red River, LA. Died of wounds the day following the ambush.

Rosengarten, Adolph George

Brevet Colonel | PA Cavalry (Anderson Troop); Palmer’s Independent Company 4th KY Cavalry; B 15th PA Cavalry; F&S

Killed at Wilkinson’s Cross Roads during Stones River; posthumously awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel “for gallant and meritorious services in charging and defeating with his battalion of cavalry a superior force of rebel cavalry, and for having in a personal rencontre disarmed and captured a captain of Texas Rangers” and Brevet Colonel “for gallant and meritorious services in the battle of Stone [sic] River, Tenn.”

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    247 Etting, Henry

Commander and Paymaster | US Navy

First enlisted in the US Navy in 1818; was granted the rank of Commodore and Paymaster upon retirement in 1871 after over fifty years of continuous service.

Hays, A. D.

Lieutenant Colonel | 73rd NY Infantry; F&S

Attached to his regiment from June 8, 1861 to August 1, 1861 when he was voted out of his position in the regiment’s election of field officers.

Hershfield, Reuben N.

Lieutenant Colonel | 7th KS State Militia; F&S

Appointed by the Governor of Kansas; regiment formed to protect Kansas during General Price’s Raid.

Moses, Israel

Lieutenant Colonel | 72nd NY Infantry; F&S US Army; Medical Department

Previously served as a Surgeon during the Mexican American War; appointed Lieutenant Colonel in the 72nd NY Infantry, then returned to the US Army to serve again as a Surgeon. Awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel “for faithful and meritorious service” after the war.

Moss, Joseph Lafayette

Lieutenant Colonel | 5th PA Cavalry; F&S 12th PA Cavalry; F&S

Served as Major in the 5th PA Cavalry, was appointed Lieutenant Colonel, but the promotion was ruled invalid. Resigned from the 5th PA and was appointed as Lieutenant Colonel of the 12th PA Cavalry five months later.

Netter, Gabriel

Joachimsen, Philip Joseph

Lieutenant Colonel | 26th KY Infantry; B 15th KY Cavalry; F&S

Resigned from active service due to physical disability; served as Judge Advocate for 2nd Brigade, NY State National Guard from 1864-1868.

KIA at Owensboro, KY on September 19, 1862, before his regiment was mustered into federal service.

Levy, Simon

Newman, Leopold C.

Lieutenant Colonel | 59th NY Infantry; F&S

Lieutenant Colonel | Les Enfants Perdus NY Infantry (Independent Battalion); F&S

His sons, Ferdinand and Alfred, served under him; a third son, Benjamin C., served in the 14th US Infantry.

Lichtenstein, Philip George

Lieutenant Colonel | 52nd NY Infantry; F&S

Lieutenant Colonel | 31st NY Infantry; B, F&S

Wounded during Chancellorsville; discharged for disability a month later, dying three days after being discharged. Lincoln allegedly visited him shortly before his death and commissioned him as a Brigadier General, but there is no official evidence corroborating this story.

Wounded at Seven Pines and Antietam; discharged for disability two months after Antietam.

Schwartz, Bernard

Mayer, William

  Appointed Captain of the 6th New York State Militia in 1857, and Lieutenant Colonel in 1862; served with the regiment on both occasions it was called up for federal service during the Civil War.

Lieutenant Colonel | 175th NY Infantry; F&S

Authorized to raise a regiment, the 171st NY Infantry, which did not fill and was thus combined with the 175th NY Infantry. Lincoln recommended soldier for a commission to Brigadier General after he played a pivotal role in putting down the New York City Draft Riots of 1863.

Lieutenant Colonel | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861); H 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863); F&S

Seligson, Herman Arthur

Lieutenant Colonel | 1st VT Infantry (3 Months, 1861); H 9th VT Infantry; C, F&S

First enlisted in as a Private and then commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in the 9th VT Infantry, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

248    A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster Thoman, Max A.

Lieutenant Colonel | 59th NY Infantry; C, F&S

Served as a soldier in Europe and Central America before coming to America. Wounded at Antietam and Gettysburg; died from wounds received at Gettysburg after purportedly requesting to be “buried as near the spot where he fell as possible.”

Bernays, Charles Louis

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | US Army; Pay Department

Appointed by Lincoln; awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel after the war.

Etting, Frank Marx

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | US Army; Pay Department

Awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel “for faithful and meritorious services during the war.”

Joel, Ephraim M.

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | 4th US Reserve Corps, MO Infantry (3 Months, 1861); F&S 29th MO Infantry; F&SUS Army

Awarded the ranks of Brevet Major and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel “for faithful and meritorious services during the war.”

Jonas, Edward

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | 50th IL Infantry; C, K US Army

First enlisted as a Private at seventeen. Captured at the Battle of Shiloh. Served on General Benjamin Prentiss’s staff and as Aide-de-Camp to General Stephen A. Hurlbut and General Grenville Dodge. Awarded the ranks of Brevet Major and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel “for faithful and meritorious services during the war.”

Mordecai, Alfred Jr.

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | US Army

A Cadet at West Point when the war began; graduated in the same class as George Armstrong Custer. First assigned to the Corps of Topographical Engineers, then transferred to the Ordnance Department. Awarded the rank of Brevet Major for gallant and meritorious service in the siege of Fort Wagner, and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel for distinguished service in the field and faithful and meritorious service in the Ordnance Department during the war. Continued in the

Army until his retirement in 1904 upon which he was granted the rank of Brigadier General.

Moses, Isaac

Brevet Lieutenant Colonel | US Army

Wounded at Fredericksburg; awarded the ranks of Brevet Major and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel after he resigned from the service for “gallant and meritorious services during the Peninsular Campaign, Va., in 1862.”

Alman, Justinian

Major | 1st PA Cavalry; I 5th PA Cavalry; K, G, E, F&S

Commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in the 4th US Infantry after the war.

Friedlander, David

Major | 25th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861); F&S 25th NY National Guard (3 Months, 1862); F&S

Veteran of the Prussian Army; joined the 25th NY State Militia before the war and served on both ocassions that the regiment was called up for federal service. Continued to be a member after the war; appointed Colonel of the regiment in 1867.

Gratz, Louis Alexander

Major | 15th PA Infantry (3 Months, 1861); C 9th PA Cavalry; B 6th KY Cavalry (US); F&S

Served as Assistant Adjutant General on General Samuel P. Carter’s staff.

Horwitz, Philip Moritz

Major | 1st WI Infantry (3 Months, 1861); H 26th WI Infantry; F&S

Previously served during the Mexican-American War.

Lichtenhein, Theodore

Major | 58th NY Infantry; F&S

Dismissed from the service for “Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman” and “Disobedience of Orders.”

Mandell, Kaufman

Major | 3rd MA Cavalry; Read’s Company 1st LA Cavalry (US); A 2nd LA Cavalry (US); F&S

First enlisted as a Private; served under the alias “Henry F. Williamson” so his parents in Europe and relatives in the US would not find out.

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    249 Mayer, Adolph H.

Major | 4th NM Infantry; F&S 1st NM Cavalry; F&S

Detached with the 3rd US Cavalry in Philadelphia on provost duty because of ill health. Allegedly this assignment was made “by the personal direction of President Lincoln, in order that he could have skillful medical attendance.”

Meyer, Lorenz

Major | 20th NY Infantry; A, F&S 7th NY Veteran Infantry; C, E

Brilliantowski, Samuel

Major and Surgeon | 41st NY Infantry; F&S

Served as Medical Director, Gordon’s Division, Department of the South.

Emanuel, Louis Manly

Major and Surgeon | 82nd PA Infantry; F&S

Enlisted with his brother, Lyon Levy Emanuel, who was the Captain of Company A of the 82nd PA Infantry. A third brother, Jonathan Manly Emanuel, served as an Assistant Engineer in the US Navy.

Enlisted as a Captain in the 20th NY Infantry, promoted to Major; then re-enlisted as a 1st Lieutenant in the 7th NY Veteran Infantry and promoted to Captain.

Heller, Henry

Mordecai, Alfred Sr.

Major and Surgeon | 27th PA Infantry; F&S

Major | US Army

A West Point Graduate and Mexican-American War veteran; resigned from the service less than a month into the war, on May 5, 1861, because he did not want to fight against the Confederacy.

Morrison, Arthur

Major | 1st NM Infantry (Old Organization); B 1st NM Cavalry; F&S

Was a sutler at Fort Union in the 1850s before receiving a commission as Captain of Company B of the 1st NM Infantry in February 1861, two months before the Civil War began.

Rowland, Ephraim Adolph

Major | 5th PA Cavalry; H, C, F&S

Resigned from the service in 1862.

Tobias, Joseph Franklin Major | US Army

Served as Aide-de-Camp on General David B. Birney’s Staff

Bendell, Herman

Major and Surgeon | 39th NY Infantry; F&S 6th NY Heavy Artillery; F&S 86th NY Infantry; F&S

First enlisted as a Hospital Steward; rose up the ranks to Assistant Surgeon, then Surgeon.

Bettleheim, Bernard J.

Major and Surgeon | 106th IL Infantry; F&S

Resigned from the service in 1864 because he did not approve of his commanding officer’s drinking.

Major and Surgeon | 27th PA Infantry; F&S

Served with his son, Maximillian.

Heller, Maximillian

Served with his father, Henry; took the father’s place as Surgeon for the regiment when Henry resigned.

Mayer, Nathan

Major and Surgeon | 11th CT Infantry; F&S 16th CT Infantry; F&S

Captured at Plymouth.

Moss, William

Major and Surgeon | 6th PA Cavalry; F&S US Army

Resigned as Surgeon of the 6th PA Cavalry to accept a commission as Assistant Surgeon, and later Surgeon, in the US Army.

Shoyer, Charles C.

Major and Surgeon | 1st TN Mounted Infantry; F&S 8th TN Mounted Infantry; F&S

Commissioned in the 1st TN Mounted Infantry for a year in 1864; re-enlisted in the 8th TN Mounted Infantry in April 1865, after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Wolff, Arthur S.

Major and Surgeon | US Army

Veteran of the French Army, recipient of the Legion of Honor.

250    A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster Wolff, Solomon Baird

Asch, Myer J.

First enlisted as a Hospital Steward; rose up the ranks to Assistant Surgeon, then Surgeon. His son, S. Herbert Wolfe, was a Brigadier General in the US Army Reserve Corps who served during World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Honor.

Served as Aide-de-Camp on General John Pope’s staff; Chief of Cavalry for the Department of the Northwest; Inspector of Horses for the Cavalry Division; and Assistant Adjutant General on General August Kautz’s staff. Captured at the Battle of Darbytown and New Market Roads; awarded the rank of Brevet Major for “gallant and meritorious services.”

Major and Surgeon | US Army 7th KY Cavalry; F&S 165th OH Infantry (National Guard); F&S 181st OH Infantry; F&S

Cohen, Andrew J.

Major and Assistant Inspector General | PA Home Guard; F&S US Army

A Major and Assistant Inspector General in the PA Home Guard, then commissioned as a Captain and Assistant Adjutant General in the Army of the Potomac.

Gratz, Edward

Major and Additional Paymaster | 121st PA Infantry; H US Army; Pay Department

Resigned as a 1st Lieutenant in the 121st PA Infantry because of ill health, and accepted a commission as Major and Additional Paymaster in the US Army.

Horwitz, Phineas Jonathan

Lieutenant Commander and Surgeon | US Navy

Previously served during the Mexican-American War; retired from the Navy in 1884.

Asch, Morris Joseph Brevet Major | US Army

Awarded the ranks of Brevet Captain and Brevet Major “for faithful and meritorious services during the war.” Served until he resigned in 1873.

Brevet Major | 1st NJ Cavalry; H, F&S

Hart, Daniel Seixas

Brevet Major | US Army

Awarded the rank of Brevet Major for “meritorious service” in the Subsistence Department.

Levy, Benjamin J.

Brevet Major | 21st PA Cavalry (6 Months, 1863-4); F&S 21st PA Cavalry; F&S US Army

Awarded the rank of Brevet Major for “efficient and meritorious service” in the Subsistence Department.

Loewenthal, Hermann Brevet Major | US Army

Assistant Surgeon at City Point, VA, and Douglas General Hospital in Washington, DC. Awarded the rank of Brevet Major for “faithful and meritorious service.”

Raphall, Alfred Morris

Brevet Major | 40th NY Infantry; A, B, F, H, K, F&S 6th Veteran Reserve Corps; A

Wounded at Gettysburg; served as Aide-de-Camp on General Daniel Sickles’ staff. Awarded the ranks of Brevet Captain “for gallant services at the battle of Gettysburg, Pa” and Brevet Major “for highly meritorious services while in the field and on detached duty with General Sickles in South America.”

7. J E W I S H R E C I P I E N T S O F T H E M E D A L O F H O N O R The U.S. Congress created the Medal of Honor for both the army and the navy during the Civil War. First conceived to “promote the efficiency of the Navy,” it became, and continues to be, the highest award in the U.S. military for valor in action. Only 1,523 of the more than 2.1 million Union soldiers and sailors who served in the Civil War were awarded the Medal of Honor. While many still rely on Simon Wolf’s list of Jewish recipients, the Shapell Roster’s research has shown that only four of the seven awardees he included were actually Jewish. A fifth recipient, Eugene Philip Jacobson, has been confirmed by the Shapell Roster as Jewish and added to this illustrious list.

Abraham Cohn

Benjamin Bennett Levy

“The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Major Abraham Cohn, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism on 6 May 1864, while serving with 6th New Hampshire Infantry. During [the] Battle of the Wilderness Sergeant Major Cohn rallied and formed, under heavy fire, disorganized and fleeing troops of different regiments. At Petersburg, Virginia, 30 July 1864, he bravely and coolly carried orders to the advanced line under severe fire.”

“The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Private Benjamin Bennett Levy, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism on 30 June 1862, while serving with Company G, 1st New York Infantry, in action at Glendale, Virginia. Private Levy, a drummer boy, took the gun of a sick comrade, went into the fight, and when the Color Bearers were shot down, carried the colors and saved them from capture.”

Eugene P. Jacobson

David Urbansky

“The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Major Eugene Philip Jacobson, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism on 2 May 1863, while serving with 74th New York Infantry, in action at Chancellorsville, Virginia, for bravery in conducting a scouting party in front of the enemy.”

“The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Private David Orbansky, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism in 1862 & 1863, while serving with Company B, 58th Ohio Infantry, in action at Shiloh, Tennessee & Vicksburg, Mississippi, for gallantry in actions.”

Leopold Karpeles “The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Leopold Karpeles, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism on 6 May 1864, while serving with Company E, 57th Massachusetts Infantry, in action during the Wilderness Campaign, Virginia. While Color Bearer, Sergeant Karpeles rallied the retreating troops and induced them to check the enemy’s advance.”

  Civil War-era Congressional Medal of Honor United States Army

8 . T H E H E B R E W U N I O N V E T E R A N S A S S O C I AT I O N Seven prominent Jewish Grand Army of the Republic members came together in 1896 to found the Hebrew Union Veterans Association, initially to address the lack of Memorial Day services being organized in synagogues to honor Civil War soldiers. Such services were a common practice for Protestant and Catholic churches and conducted in conjunction with the GAR. The HUVA quickly transformed into an important social network, where members would visit and help care for aged and sick fellow Jewish veterans; help pay for, organize, and attend the funerals of deceased members; hold regular meetings and put together lectures and social events; and build a monument to the Jews who served in the Civil War. As the first fraternal organization and community where a person’s military service and faith served as coequal foundations, the HUVA only continued to grow and flourish, adding service members from other wars and later times, eventually developing into what is today the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, now the oldest active national veterans service organization in America. Below is a list of Civil War soldiers identified as members of the Hebrew Union Veterans Association. Many of the organization’s original rolls and documentation were destroyed, so rebuilding their membership register is an ongoing process.

Isaac Adamsky | 37th OH Infantry

Simon Blank | 6th NY Cavalry, 90th NY Infantry

Simon Adamsky | 7th CT Infantry

Heinrich Block | Regiment Unknown

Jastrow Alexander | 27th PA Infantry

Henry Block | 165th NY Infantry

Max Altschul | 26th Independent Company NY

Louis L. Block | 1st AR Cavalry (U.S.)

Infantry

Gustave Arnold | Regiment Unknown Nathan Arnow | 47th NY Infantry Oswald Samuel Asch | 7th NY Veteran Infantry Julius Ascher | 9th IL Infantry (3 Months, 1861), 17th MO Infantry

Jacob Bacharach | Regiment Unknown Jacob Bachenheimer | 51st PA Infantry Adolph Bader | 7th NY Infantry Adolph Bargebuhr | 39th NY Infantry Charles Baum | 80th OH Infantry Morris J. Baumgarten | 4th MA Cavalry Morris Behrend | 8th NY Infantry, 4th NY Cavalry David Bennett | 9th NY Cavalry David Mendes Bensabat | 90th NY Infantry Mayer Berliner | 6th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861), 103rd NY Infantry

Samuel Blank | 145th NY Infantry, 150th NY

Infantry

Emil Bloomington | 119th NY Infantry, 2nd

Battalion Veteran Reserve Corps, 9th Veteran Reserve Corps

Solomon Blumenthal | 6th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861)

Morris Bornstein | 22nd NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1862)

Adam Brown | 4th NJ Infantry Isaac Brown | 102nd NY National Guard (100 Days, 1864) Coleman Cohen | 28th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861), 13th NY State Militia Heavy Artillery (3 Months, 1862)

Adolph Cohn | 13th MA Infantry, 1st NJ Cavalry Israel Cohn | 26th MA Infantry L. Cohn | Regiment Unknown Samuel Coleman | 2nd NY Cavalry, 10th Veteran Reserve Corps

Isaac Costa | U.S. Navy, 3rd U.S. Artillery Moritz David | 8th NY Infantry, 17th NY Veteran Infantry

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    253 Michael Davis | 1st Battalion NV Cavalry L. S. De Vries | Regiment Unknown S. Deutsch | Regiment Unknown —Dias | Regiment Unknown —Dreyfuss | Regiment Unknown Isaac Eckstein | 12th MO Cavalry Samuel Eckstein | 1st NY Infantry Levi Ehrenreich | 62nd PA Infantry Simon Eichengruen | 52nd NY Infantry Leopold Enoch | 41st NY Infantry Albert Falk | 10th VT Infantry Dey Falk | 39th NY Infantry J. M. Falk | Regiment Unknown Alexander Falke | 8th NY Infantry, 68th NY Infantry

Adolph Henry Feeder | 66th NY Infantry,

7th NJ Infantry

Jacob Feist | 1st KY Infantry, 10th TN Cavalry Henry Ferris | Regiment Unknown Morris Fisher | 18th MA Infantry,

32nd MA Infantry

Harris Franklin | 31st NY Infantry David Friedman | 2nd OH Infantry (3 Months, 1861), 108th OH Infantry Leopold Friedman | Regiment Unknown Ludolph Friedman | Regiment Unknown Charles Gambitz | 119th NY Infantry Adolf Gershel | 6th PA Cavalry Jacob Gluckauf | 8th NJ Infantry Henry Gold | 41st NY Infantry Michael Gold | 52nd NY Infantry Samuel Goldberg | 40th NY Infantry Adolph Goldfisch | 31st NY Infantry John S. Goldsmith | Regiment Unknown Simon Greenstine | 7th NY Heavy Artillery Fisher Grossman | 31st NY Infantry

  The original HUVA badge, produced in 1896. The design draws on elements common to veteran’s badges of the period. Collection of American Jewish Militaria of Joseph S. Topek

254    A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster Salomon S. Guggenheim | 198th PA Infantry Leonard J. Haas | 7th NY State Militia

(30 days, 1863)

Martin Hambert | U.S. Navy, 7th NY Veteran Infantry

Simpson Hamburger | 25th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 91st NY Infantry

Louis Harmon | 1st WA Territory Infantry Daniel Harris | U.S. Navy John Harris | 102nd NY Infantry Joseph A. Hart | 37th NY State Militia

(3 Months,), 37th NY National Guard (30 days, 1864), 93rd NY National Guard (100 Days, 1864)

Simon H. Heimerdinger | 12th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861)

Abraham Heller | 15th NY Heavy Artillery Jacob Hess | 66th NY Infantry Louis Hess | 2nd CA Cavalry Louis S. Hirsch | 79th U.S. Colored Infantry, 3rd NJ Cavalry, 21st Veteran Reserve Corps

S. Hirsch | Regiment Unknown Meier Hoexter | 66th NY Infantry, 19th Veteran Reserve Corps

Albert Hohenstein | 8th NY Infantry Charles S. Isaacs | U.S. Navy Isidore Isaacs | 59th NY Infantry, 6th NY National Guard (30 days, 1863), 12th NY Cavalry

Jacob Jacobs | 83rd NY Infantry Edward Emanuel Joseff | 4th NJ Infantry (3 Months, 1861), 20th MA Infantry

Lehman Josephson | 6th NH Infantry   A bronze badge issued in 1905 to mark the erection of the memorial at Salem Fields in honor of Jews who fell in service of the Union. Collection of American Jewish Militaria of Joseph S. Topek

Aaron Kahn | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 6th NY National Guard (30 days, 1863) Isidor Kahn | 2nd MO Infantry (3 Months, 1861), 2nd U.S. Reserve Corps, MO Infantry William Kahn | 27th CT Infantry Charles Kalvarinsky | 13th CT Infantry Julius Willliam Kaskel | 1st IA Infantry (3 Months, 1861)

A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster    255 Henry Katzenberg | 8th PA Infantry

Philip Loewenthal | 12th NY State Militia

Emil Katzenstein | 52nd NY Infantry,

Morris J. Lovey | 121st NY Infantry

(3 Months, 1861)

20th Veteran Reserve Corps

Newman Kauffman | Regiment Unknown Joseph Kaufmann | 62nd NY Infantry Levy Kessler | 7th NY Veteran Infantry Edward Klapper | 6th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861), 58th NY Infantry

Henry L. Klein | 25th NY Cavalry Samuel Klineberg | 4th PA Infantry

(3 Months, 1861), 68th NY Infantry, 19th PA Cavalry

Isaac Kohn | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 66th NY Infantry, 10th Veteran Reserve Corps Abraham Kuhn | 27th PA Infantry William Langer | Regiment Unknown

(3 Months, 1861)

Leopold Lowenstein | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861)

Henry Lowenthal | 7th NY Infantry, 7th NY Veteran Infantry

Lewis Lyons | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863)

Moritz Mainsfield | 103rd NY Infantry Martin Manheimer | 1st NY Infantry David Marx | 27th PA Infantry, 109th PA Infantry Leopold Masius | 66th NY Infantry H. Mendes | Regiment Unknown Maurice D. Mendoza | 55th NY State Militia (30 Days, 1863), U.S. Navy

Otto Lassner | 29th NY Infantry, 68th NY Infantry

Haskel Michael | 31st NY Infantry

Henry Layman | 77th NY National Guard

Samuel H. Mildenberg | 102nd NY National

Alexander A. Lazarus | U.S. Navy

Judah Mintz | 31st NY Infantry

David Lazarus | 23rd PA Infantry

Sigismund Mosauer | 6th NY State Militia

(100 Days, 1864)

Jacob Lazarus | 119th NY Infantry Levi Lazarus | 125th NY Infantry Max Lehmann | 16th IL Cavalry Simon Lesser | 8th NY Infantry

Guard (100 Days, 1864)

(3 Months, 1861), 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863)

Louis Mundheim | 8th Battalion DC Militia Infantry (3 Months, 1861) Morris Naarden | 1st CT Heavy Artillery

Benjamin Bennett Levy | 1st NY Infantry,

Max Neisner | 16th CT Infantry

Henry Levy | Regiment Unknown

Gustav Newman | 18th MA Infantry

40th NY Infantry

Robert Levy | 58th NY Infantry Sussmann Lewek | 1st CA Infantry Lewis Lewin | 99th NY Infantry J. Lewis | Regiment Unknown Jacob Lewy | 8th NY Infantry Isidor Lindemann | 31st NY Infantry Max Loewenstein | 6th NY Cavalry, 2nd NY Provisional Cavalry

Adolph Loewenthal | 72nd NY Infantry

Alexander Newburger | 4th NY Cavalry Marx Newstadt | 66th NY Infantry, 20th Veteran

Reserve Corps

David G. Noah | 20th NY Infantry Jacob Oppenheimer | 1st NY Infantry, Battery C NJ Light Artillery

Moses Osterman | Les Enfants Perdus NY Infantry (Independent Battalion), 1st NY Engineers, 1st U.S. Artillery

Isidor Pincksohn | 59th NY Infantry Adolph Pincus | 66th NY Infantry, 7th NJ Infantry

256    A ppendix 3 : data from the shape L l roster David Judah Polak | 96th NY Infantry Henry Redwitz | U.S. Navy George L. Rich | 39th NY Infantry Herman Rosenberg | 8th NY Infantry, 15th NY Heavy Artillery

Samuel Rosenberg | 41st NY Infantry, 103rd NY Infantry, U.S. Army

Solomon Rosenberg | 23rd NY Cavalry Adolph Rosenstern | 7th NY Infantry Moses Rosenstock | 58th NY Infantry Morris Rosenthal | 31st NY Infantry

Solomon Simon | 6th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861)

Louis Stein | 27th PA Infantry, 3rd U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry (1st Army Corps) Simon L. Steinhardt | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 66th NY Infantry

—Stern | Regiment Unknown Moritz Sternberg | 20th NY Infantry Joseph Henry Stiner | 9th NY Infantry, 59th NY Infantry

Martin Stork | 62nd NY Infantry,

115th NY Infantry

Isadore Roskopf | 86th OH Infantry

Isadore Strumpf | 79th PA Infantry

Samuel Rothschild | 74th PA Infantry

Leonard Teller | 31st NY Infantry

(3 Months, 1862)

Sigismund Rothschild | 5th NY State Militia

(3 Months, 1861)

Alfred A. Russell | 32nd Independent Battery NY Light Artillery

Leopold Salomon | 20th NY Infantry George Samuels | 9th PA Cavalry Max Samuels | 1st NY Engineers Bernard Schayer | 66th NY Infantry Herman Scheideberg | 54th NY Infantry,

H. Sussman | Regiment Unknown Wolfgang Teschner | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861)

Joseph M. Tobias | 71st NY State Militia (3 Months, 1862)

Reuben Isaac Turckheim | 2nd MA Cavalry Jacob Uhlfelder | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months, 1861), 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863)

Joseph Unger | 20th NY Infantry Henry Wachsmann | 31st NY Infantry

2nd Battalion Veteran Reserve Corps, 11th Veteran Reserve Corps

Bernhard Weichselbaum | Les Enfants Perdus

Ignatz Scheier | 6th NY State Militia (3 Months,

Samson Wells | 68th NY Infantry

1861), 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863)

Martin Schloss | 121st PA Infantry Adolph Schnapp | 3rd NJ Cavalry Lafey Schulum | 12th NY State Militia

NY Infantry (Independent Battalion), 47th NY Infantry

Aaron Wenk | 66th NY Infantry Joseph Wenk | 66th NY Infantry Julius Wenk | 42nd NY Infantry

(3 Months, 1861)

Edward Wertheimer | 54th NY Infantry

Moses Schuman | 6th NY National Guard

Charles Wimpfheimer | 4th MA Cavalry

Isidor J. Schwarzkopf | 17th NY Veteran Infantry

1864)

(30 Days, 1863)

Solomon Seide | 2nd CA Infantry Simon Seligman | 14th US Infantry Simon Seligmann | 1st NY Engineers Simon Silverstein | 38th NY Infantry Michael Silverstone | 8th NJ Infantry

Emanuel Wolf | 138th IN Infantry (100 Days,

Herman Wolf | 6th NY National Guard (30 Days, 1863), U.S. Navy Joseph C. Wolff | 2nd NY Cavalry Samuel Wolff | Regiment Unknown Joseph Zeimer | 1st Battalion MA Heavy Artillery

N OTES FO REWORD 1

Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia: Levytype, 1895), 10.

2

For a more in-depth explanation of our rigorous vetting process and commitment to transparency, refer to appendix 2 in this book.

I NTRODUCTION 1

Der Israelit 6, no. 22 (May 30, 1865): 309–10. The editor credited the Wiener Fremdenblatt as the source of his story; these quotes come from that newspaper. On coverage of the war in the Jewish press in Europe see Asaf Yedidya, “The Emancipation of Slaves and the Auto-Emancipation of the Jews: The Impact of the American Civil War and the Abolition of Slavery on the Precursors of Zionism,” Jewish History 33 (2020): 464–468. On the Maccabees as a reference point and analogy, see Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 69–70.

2

See Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 166–167. For the horrors of the battlefield see Michael C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 60–83. Quotes from Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 240.

3

See David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 198, 216–217. Quote from Clarke, War Stories, 1. For a more recent critique of this narrative see Peter S. Carmichael, “Relevance, Resonance, and Historiography: Interpreting the Lives and Experiences of Civil War Soldiers,” Civil War History 62, no. 2 (June 2016): 170–185. On sentimentalism see Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 94–96.

4

Jewish Messenger, August 9, 1861, 21. On the popularity of stories of this kind see Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 75–77.

5

Other groups presented their willingness to bleed for the body politic as evidence of their worthiness of inclusion within the national family. On this theme see Penslar, Jews and the Military, 13, 36, 51, 53, 127, 132.

6

Jewish Messenger, August 18, 1861, 28.

258    N otes

7

On Jewish memory of the war see Adam Mendelsohn, “Before Korn: A Century of Jewish Historical Writing about the American Civil War,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1–26. For a recent iteration of this trope see Eli Evans, “Overview: The War between Jewish Brothers in America,” in Jews and the Civil War, 27–46.

8

Goldwin Smith’s article was preceded by an essay in the January 1891 issue by Representative Henry Cabot Lodge calling for the restriction of immigration. Goldwin Smith, “New Light on the Jewish Question,” North American Review 153, no. 417 (1891): 129–143; J. M. Rogers, “Jewish Soldiers in the Union Army,” North American Review 153, no. 421 (1891): 761–762; Isaac Bendavid, “Goldwin Smith and the Jews,” North American Review 153, no. 418 (1891): 257–271. The exchange is discussed at length in Sylvan Morris Dubow, “Identifying the Jewish Servicemen in the Civil War: A Re-appraisal of Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 59 (1969): 357–369. See also Esther Panitz, Simon Wolf: Private Conscience and Public Image (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 178–179; Nils Roemer, “Outside and inside the Nations: Changing Borders in the Study of the Jewish Past in the Nineteenth Century,” in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Boston: Brill, 2007), 44–45; Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Cautious Defenders,” American Jewish History 81, no. 2 (Winter 1993/4): 168–169. On Goldwin Smith, see Gerald Tulchinsky, “Goldwin Smith: Victorian Canadian Antisemite,” in The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader, ed. Richard Menkis and Norman Ravvin (Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2004); Colin Holmes, “Goldwin Smith (1823–1910): A ‘Liberal’ Antisemite,” Patterns of Prejudice 6, no. 5 (1972): 25–30. On the North American Review and Jews see Pamela Nadell, “Defender of Her Sex and Her People: Nina Morais Cohen,” in Yearning to Breathe Free: Jews in Gilded Age America, ed. Adam Mendelsohn and Jonathan D. Sarna (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 2022).

9

Wise was not the first to call for such a project. The idea of collecting and publishing statistical information about Jewish soldiers was proposed as an antidote to antisemitism during the war. See Israelite, July 4, 1862, 5.

10 Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia: Levytype Company, 1895). 11 Isaac Markens and Max Raisin, authors of important early works of American Jewish history, insisted that Wolf had underestimated the number of Jewish soldiers by at least half. Max Raisin, A History of Jews in Modern Times (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1919), 278; Isaac Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 17 (1909): 157. 12 Wolf’s undertaking echoed that of contemporaneous African American historians who “sought to solidify black claims to citizenship and equal rights by celebrating the role African-American soldiers played in the Union and ending slavery,” as well as echoing other ethnic historians with similar motives. Wolf also had analogues in Europe. Ludwig Phillipson initiated a similar enterprise during the Franco-Prussian War, and later volumes performed a similar function during and after the First World War. See Andre M. Fleche, “African-American Soldiering,” in A Companion to the Civil War, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 298–299; Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 370; David T. Gleeson, “Ethnicity,” in Companion to the Civil War, 765; Penslar, Jews and the Military, 71, 132, 178. 13 Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell have significantly revised what we know of Lincoln’s relationship with Jews, demonstrating, for example, that Isaachar Zacharie played a larger wartime role than imagined by previous historians. See Lincoln and the Jews, 124–145. On Edward Rosewater, the telegraphist, see 123–124. For evidence that Rosewater only reported to the War Department telegraph office for “night duty” at 10:30 p.m. on January 1, 1863—more than two hours after the Proclamation was dispatched—and then read of the Proclamation in the Evening Star newspaper, see Daily Journal, January 1, 1863, Rosewater Family Papers, MS503, box 4, folder 4, American Jewish Archives (AJA). For the likely roots of this myth,

N otes    259 see Albert A. Woldman, “Clevelander Announces Emancipation Proclamation to World,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 12, 1939. For an example of how this story has entered the canon see John Hope Franklin, “The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice,” Prologue Magazine 25, no. 2 (Summer 1993); for its repetition see Kathryn Hellerstein, “A Letter from Lincoln’s Jewish Telegrapher,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 625, 631. 14 For a discussion of Jews and the modern military, see Penslar, Jews and the Military, particularly chap. 2. 15 For the influence of Wolf on writing about Jews and the war see Mendelsohn, “Before Korn,” 1–26. 16 For population estimates see Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 375; Jacob Rader Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990). 17 This account draws on the recollection of Joseph Goldsmith, who accompanied Rev. Maximillian Michelbacher to the meeting, and is supported by correspondence between Michelbacher and Robert E. Lee. See Wolf, American Jew, 102–103. 18 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. See, for example, Henry Hart’s letter to the War Department arguing for the appointment of a Jewish chaplain. Occident 20, no.5 (August 1862): 214–215. For estimates see Jewish Messenger, December 27, 1861, 100–101; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 29 (1865): 170. 19 Quoted in William C. Davis, A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003), xi. 20 Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 114. On the role of Jews in antebellum popular culture see Heather S. Nathans, Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). 21 For indication of how Jews (and their biblical forebears) were “good to think with” for Evangelicals during and after the war see Grant R. Brodrecht, Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 34–40, 77, 103, 152. 22 See Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006); David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Ryan W. Keating, Shades of Green: Irish Regiments, American Soldiers, and Local Communities in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Ian Michael Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Brian Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press: 2006); Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); James O. Lehman and Steven M. Nolt, Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Susannah J. Bruce, Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Christian G. Samito, Becoming Americans under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). See also Christian B. Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History and Their Implications for Twenty-First-Century Scholarship,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). An exception, discussed later, is the work of Robert Rosen.

260    N otes

23 For an overview of previous efforts to use quantitative data to analyze Civil War soldiering see Earl J. Hess, “The Early Indicators Project: Using Massive Data and Statistical Analysis to Understand the Life Cycle of Civil War Soldiers,” Civil War History 63, no. 4 (December 2017): 377–399. For examples of studies that draw upon quantitative methods see William Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018); Joseph T. Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac and Their Cultures,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 3 (September 2016): 316; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For studies that combine qualitative and quantitative methods for understanding particular units see Susannah J. Ural, Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); Ryan W. Keating, Shades of Green: Irish Regiments, American Soldiers, and Local Communities in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). For the value of quantitative methods in ensuring that otherwise underrepresented groups are fairly represented see Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies,” 339. 24 As Arthur Koestler wrote about a very different time and context, “Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts. . . . [W]e can only focus on little lumps of reality.” The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), 97. 25 On the legal basis for appointing chaplains see Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 2–8. 26 Karen Abbott, “Rabbi-Chaplains of the Civil War,” New York Times, December 11, 2011, https:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. Abbott’s version draws heavily on Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001), 66–115. The most thorough recent accounting of the controversy is supplied by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell in Lincoln and the Jews: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 100–109. The episode, and particularly the role of Lincoln, has been central to Jewish memory of the war. See Mendelsohn, “Before Korn,” 10–12. An imagined version of the episode was even performed as an NBC radio drama in 1962. See Michael Mitchell Allen Papers, SC203, American Jewish Archives (AJA). This was less fanciful than a recent account that implies that “Rabbi Michael Allen” offered prayer services “for anyone from the Army of the Potomac” at Gettysburg. See Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177. 27 Baltimore Sun, November 6, 1861, 1. 28 Korn and others claim that Allen was forced to resign after a representative of the YMCA discovered that the chaplain was Jewish, and “created such an agitation in the public press that ultimately the assistant adjutant general of the army, George D. Ruggles, was forced to state in writing that ‘any person mustered into service, who is not a regularly ordained clergyman of a Christian denomination, will be at once discharged without pay or allowance.’” Allen resigned on September 23, 1861, five days before Ruggles issued this statement, and after he received a furlough for reasons of ill health. Despite much searching, I could find no evidence in the press to corroborate the visit of the YMCA worker and the supposed agitation that followed. The episode is mentioned neither in Vincent Colyer’s detailed report on the YMCA’s activities nor in the history that the Christian Commission produced after the war. The original YMCA petition focused only on chaplains in Pennsylvania regiments “entirely disqualified morally and intellectually” from service, and failed to mention Jewish chaplains. The petition was part of a larger and ongoing campaign by the YMCA to discredit the military chaplaincy that began in July 1861. Allen’s resignation thus appears coincidental, rather than causally connected, with the YMCA’s petition. For the YMCA petition and

N otes    261 Ruggles’s response see Philadelphia Inquirer, October 12, 1861, 8. For the YMCA’s campaign see Benedict Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” in Faith in the Fight: Civil War Chaplains, ed. John W. Brinsfield, William C. David, Benedict Maryniak, and James I. Robertson, Jr. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), 28–30. For accounts of the Christian Commission’s activities in 1861 see Lemuel Moss, Annals of the United States Christian Commission (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868); Vincent Colyer, Report of the Christian Commission to the United States Army from April 1861 to August 1862 (New York: George A. Whitehorn, n.d.). For Allen’s letter of resignation see Allen to Friedman, September 23, 1861, War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762–1984, NARA. For his medical furlough see Yarrow to M. Friedman, September 9, 1861, “Papers, 1861,” SC204, AJA. For chaplains’ resigning because of ill health see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 111. For Korn’s version of the events see American Jewry and the Civil War, 68–69. Those interviewed by Turner and Baker nonetheless thought Allen the “best Jew in the regiment.” He served for a little over three weeks as chaplain. After resigning his commission on the grounds of ill health, Allen received an honorable discharge from the army. For the quote see 2062 Friedman, Max, roll 54, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865 M797, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). 29 How Fischel heard about the vacant position in the Fifth PA Cavalry is unclear. A brief summary of his original letter to the secretary of war indicates that Fischel discovered the restrictive law only after having made “arrangements to act as chaplain.” This negates the claim that Fischel knowingly applied for the position to test the law. See entry 173, October 16, 1861, Register of Letters Received by the Secretary of War 1800–1870, M22, NARA. The Board of Delegates of American Israelites formally resolved to push to change the law more than a month after Fischel’s application was rejected. For evidence that Fischel began to coordinate with the Board of Delegates of American Israelites only at the end of November 1861 see Myer S. Isaacs to Arnold Fischel, November 29, 1861, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). There is no evidence that Fischel was in contact with the board prior to this point. The board first became aware of the problem because of the publication of Cameron’s letter to Fischel in the Tribune, and only resolved to become involved in the issue at a meeting in late November 1861. Fischel “explained the circumstances” by which he received the letter from Cameron at a meeting of the board in early December 1861. See Minutes of Meeting November 26, 1861, December 5, 1861, Minute Ledgers, box 1, folder 6, Board of Delegates. 30 Fischel wrote three letters in quick succession to the secretary of war in October and November 1861. See entries 173 (October 16), 175 (October 17), 192 (November 1) in Register of Letters Received by the Secretary of War 1800–1870, M22, NARA. The only extant letter from Fischel to Cameron included an endorsement written by Frederick Conkling, the congressman representing Fischel’s home district. See Fischel to Simon Cameron, October 17, 1861, Letters Received by the Secretary of War, microfilm publication M221, NARA. Weeks after his rejection, Fischel wrote a somewhat desperate letter to the secretary of war appealing for appointment as a hospital chaplain, suggesting that his primary motivation was stable employment rather than a desire to challenge the law. He was simultaneously pursuing other alternatives to the military chaplaincy. Fischel may have heard about the vacancy through his connections with the Jewish Messenger (he was a regular contributor). See Fischel to Cameron, November 1, 1861, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General, NARA; Jonathan Waxman, “Arnold Fischel: ‘Unsung Hero’ in American Israel,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 60, no. 4 (June 1971): 337–338. On the pay of regimental chaplains see Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 8. 31 For the accusations leveled against Friedman see 1756 Friedman, M., roll 49, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865 M797, NARA; 2062 Friedman, Max, roll 54, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865 M797, NARA;

262    N otes

2085 Adolphus Salinger, roll 55, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865, M797, NARA. In 1858 Michael Allen operated a liquor store in Philadelphia. See McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory (Philadelphia: A. McElroy, 1858), 8. For the practice of distributing staff positions as patronage see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 36. 32 See Edward J. Longacre, “The Most Inept Regiment,” Civil War Times Illustrated 8, no. 7 (November 1969): 4–7. For an early indication that Friedman’s military judgment was not sound see Montpelier Daily Journal, October 3, 1861, 2. For his imprisonment see the Rock Island Argus, November 27, 1862, 2. For colonels filling the position of chaplain with their friends, see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 111. 33 This push did not enjoy universal support among Jews. See, for example, Occident 20, no. 7 (October 1862): 328. 34 These points are made well in Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 61. A Turner was a member of a turnverein, an athletics fraternity. 35 See Bruce, Harp and Eagle, 69–83; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 73–111; Keating, Shades of Green, 105; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 76–91; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 103–133. 36 On the characteristics of preimmigrant Jewish life prior to 1870 see Steven Lowenstein, The Mechanics of Change: Essays in the Social History of German Jewry (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), chaps. 1 and 5. On the nature of the immigrants and immigrant society see Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), chap. 1; Tobias Brinkmann, “Jews, Germans, or Americans? German-Jewish Immigrants in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, ed. Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 111–140. 37 For the intersection of religious and regional differences in Chicago see Tobias Brinkmann, “Charity on Parade: Chicago’s Jews and the Construction of Ethnic and Civic ‘Gemeinschaft’ in the 1860s,” in Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century, ed. Jürgen Heideking, Geneviève Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 161–163. For the intersection of such differences in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, see Ava F. Kahn and Ellen Eisenberg, “Western Reality: Jewish Diversity during the ‘German’ Period,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (December 2004): 464, 475–479. 38 On the dispersion of Jews and their economic profile, see Adam Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 58–90; Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 36–50; Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 26–32; Zev Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue? Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 39 For indication of the distribution of Jews, see Marcus, To Count a People; Weissbach, Jewish Life in SmallTown America, 338–348. 40 Anabaptists, for example, formed discrete settlements. See Lehman and Nolt, Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War, 8–16.

N otes    263 1. M USTE RIN G IN 1

Bertram W. Korn, “Jewish 48’ers in America,” American Jewish Archives 2, no.1 (June 1949): 3–20. For Jewish participation in the uprisings of 1848 see Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 58–61. For the debate about the influence of Forty-Eighters in the United States see Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Alison Clark Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016); Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Patrick J. Kelly, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 431-443; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “‘Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei warden’: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on Political Conditions in Germany,” in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1997): 87-107.

2

Autobiography of August Bondi: 1833–1907 (Galesburg, IL: Wagoner Printing Company, 1910), 33. For a biography of Bondi see Martin Litvin, The Journey (Galesburg, IL: Galesburg Historical Society, 1981). For a detailed discussion of sentiment among Midwestern Germans to the Kansas-Nebraska Act see Levine, Spirit of 1848, 191–209; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 44–79.

3

Bondi was married to Henrietta Einstein, a Bavarian immigrant who appears to have shared his staunch abolitionism. Autobiography of August Bondi, 72.

4

For a lengthy contemporary account see Antietam to Appomattox with 118th Penna. Vols., Corn Exchange Regiment (Philadelphia: J. L. Smith, 1892), 294–302. For Meade’s thinking on the case see George Meade to Abraham Lincoln, August 27, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers: Series 1 General Correspondence, LOC. For reporting in the Jewish press, see Jewish Record, September 11, 1863; Der Israelit 4 (1863), supplement to no. 38: 473; Jewish Messenger, September 4, 1863, 69. For a detailed discussion of this episode see Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 190–196 (for quote see 193). Carmichael misidentifies the Jewish soldier. For discussion of desertion see Steven J. Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 219–263 (for bounty jumpers see 258–261).

5

For an example of an appeal to masculine virtue, see Letters from the Officers of the DeKalb Regiment in New York City, May 10, 1861, and June 27, 1861, M. Wise correspondence 1861, P-132, AJHS. Little if any pronounced difference appears in how Jews referenced masculinity. On immigrant soldiers and gender see Mischa Honeck, “Men of Principle: Gender and the German American War for the Union,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015). The classic text on the motivations of Civil War soldiers remains James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

6

Autobiography of August Bondi, 71.

7

Autobiography of August Bondi, 122.

8

See Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 23.

9 Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 156–157.

264    A bout the S hapell M anuscript F oundation

10 Occident 19, no.9 December 1861): 423–424. For the financial struggle of relief organizations see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 76–77. 11 Joseph Kline to his parents, April 1, 1862, P-254, AJHS; Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–5; Prepared in Compliance with Acts of the Legislature, vol. 2 (Harrisburg: B. Singerly, 1869), 445; Case of Johanna Klein, case 123249, May 16, 1876, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications, NARA. 12 Kline petitioned in 1884, 1887, 1888, 1890, and 1892 to have the charge reversed. In 1890 and 1892, bills were (unsuccessfully) introduced in Congress to direct the secretary of war to do so. A final request in 1910—more than a year after Kline’s death—suggests that this quest for an honorable discharge may have been motivated by a desire to acquire the residual benefits of a military pension. See H.R. 4982, A Bill for the Relief of William Kline, January 14, 1890; H.R. 5429, A Bill for the Relief of William D. Kline, February 4, 1982; Declaration for the Removal of the Charge of Desertion, January 5, 1884; Adjutant General to M. E. Olmsted, January 28, 1910, Document File 442-C-884, Collection 94, box 3032, Adjutant General’s Office Enlisted Branch Files, NARA. 13 Costa and Kahn calculate that 9 percent of all Union soldiers deserted whereas Carmichael estimates that the figure was around 14 percent. Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Deserters, Social Norms, and Migration,” Journal of Law and Economics 50, no. 2 (May 2007): 323–4, 328, 334, 338; Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 2 (May 2003): 525, 529; Chris Walsh, “‘Cowardice Weakness or Infirmity, Whichever It May be Termed’: A Shadow History of the Civil War,” Civil War History 59, no. 4 (December 2013): 501, 518; Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 177, 180, 182. 14 For discussion of the pecuniary advantages for army surgeons see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 137–139 15 Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19, no. 3 (July 1964): 272–286. 16 His novel, Differences, was published in Cincinnati in 1867. On the novel see Karen A. Keely, “Reform Judaism, Reconciliation Romance, and the Civil War: Nathan Mayer’s Differences and Nineteenth-Century Reform Jewish American Life,” American Jewish History 104, nos. 2/3 (2020): 265–286. 17 The bulk on April 19 were members of prewar state militias—the Sixth New York State Militia, Twenty-fifth New York State Militia, and Twelfth New York State Militia—that were mustered into United States service on that date. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 18 The same pattern was found within the general population. See Kurt Hackemer, “Response to War: Civil War Enlistment Patterns in Kenosha County, Wisconsin,” Military History of the West 29, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 37. 19 On the role of financial incentives in early 1864 see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 206–208. 20 Volunteering by Jews closely matched broader trends. For calls for recruits, see Frederick Phisterer, Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 3–10. On general enlistment patters see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 17. 21 All enlistment data referenced in this and the preceding paragraphs derived from the Shapell Roster. 22 Here and in the pages below I differentiate between Jews and Germans although many Jews came from German-speaking lands and, in some cases, thought of themselves as German. But, as we will see, in aggregate the enlistment patterns of Jews differed from non-Jewish German immigrants in a variety of ways. By “Germans” I refer specifically to non-Jewish German immigrants.

N otes    265 23 Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis,” Civil War History 37, no. 3 (September 1991) : 244–5. The number of Germans used by Kamphoefner is from A. B. Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of the American Soldiers, 2nd ed. (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869) via Wilhelm Kaufmann, The Germans in the American Civil War (Carlisle, PA: John Kallmann Publishers, 1999), 70. The German-born population figures are from the 1860 census. Population numbers are the total population regardless of sex. 24 The divergence was even greater with the response of African Americans. Brian Taylor estimates that “more than 70 percent of the black males of military age living in states in which slavery had ended before the Civil War” served during the Civil War. See Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship, 94. 25 Aaron Friedenwald, Life, Letters, and Addresses of Aaron Friedenwald (Baltimore: Lord Baltimore Press, 1906), 57–58, 66. 26 Aaron Friedenwald to Moses Friedenwald, June 2, 1861, Harry Friedenwald Papers, MS404, AJA; Alexandra Lee Levin, Vision: A Biography of Harry Friedenwald (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964), 20; Friedenwald, Life, Letters, and Addresses, 85. For the political dynamics of Baltimore and Maryland in the early weeks of the war see Michael D. Robinson, A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 161–169. 27 Thirty-five out of an estimated Jewish population of 2,500. All the figures cited in this and the preceding paragraph are of those confirmed in the Shapell Roster to be Jewish and to have served. These figures exclude those whose religion and/or service status remains uncertain. 28 Such calculations are fraught. Germans were listed in the 1860 census, but Jews were not, necessitating reliance on less exact estimates. Some Jews who served may have evaded the researchers who created the Shapell Roster. Others who may have been Jewish could not be positively proven to be so. Jewish population estimates were drawn from Marcus, To Count a People. The contrast with native-born white Northerners is even more striking. Of those born between 1822 and 1845, 41 percent served in the Union army. Sixty percent of those born between 1837 and 1845 served. James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 4. For a discussion of the methodology used by the Roster team, see appendix 2. 29 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 15. 30 On the contracting scandals and the “shoddy aristocracy” see J. Matthew Gallman, Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 91–122 31 Gallman argues that at the end of 1863, a “crucial new wrinkle” was added to the stereotype of the shoddy aristocrat: the stereotype of the “Irish contractor.” In particular, the Irish contractor’s wife was made into a figure of fun. Gallman, Defining Duty, 105–109, 113. 32 Surveying cartoons that appeared in the illustrated press, Bunker and Appel argue that antisemitic depictions peaked in 1861 and 1864. See Gary Bunker and John Appel, “Shoddy, Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War: The Visual Image,” American Jewish History 82 nos. 1-4 (1994): 45. On Jews and contracting scandals see Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 164–172. For an overview of antisemitism on the home front see Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 188–209. 33 On the role of the home community in shaping the attitudes of soldiers see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 13, 24–25; Costa and Kahn, “Deserters, Social Norms, and Migration,” 328; W.J. Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War? Concord, Massachusetts, Enlistments,” Journal of American History 73, no. 3 (December 1986): 695-701; Thomas R. Kemp, “Community and War: The Civil War

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Experience of Two New Hampshire Towns,” in Toward a Social History of the American Civil War, ed. Mark A. Vinovskis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 31–77; Emily J. Harris, “Sons and Soldiers: Deerfield, Massachusetts and the Civil War,” Civil War History 30, no. 2 (1984): 157–171. 34 Israelite, April 19, 1861, 334. See also Korn, “Isaac Wise on the Civil War,” 635–658. Wise did not shy away from engaging in the political fray either. In August 1864 he raged against Lincoln’s “imbecility” and denounced a political climate that demanded that “[e]ither one must believe the Negro was created to be a beast of burden to others or you must say he is just as good as you are. . . .” Israelite, August 19, 1864, 60. See also Israelite, August 26, 1864, 68; Gary Zola, We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry, A Documentary History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 4; Bertram W. Korn, “The Jews of the Union,” American Jewish Archives 13 no. 2 (November 1861): 143–148. 35 Occident 22, no. 6 (September 1864): 284. On Leeser’s approach during the war see Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 218–227. 36 Jewish Messenger, April 26, 1861, 124. On the political leanings of its editor see Howard Rock, “Upheaval, Innovation, and Transformation: New York City and the Civil War,” American Jewish Archives Journal 64, nos. 1 & 2 (2012): 9. 37 See Kurtz, “‘Let Us Hear No More ‘Nativism,’” 7, 13, 23, 26, 28–29. 38 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 83, 87. 39 Robert J. Chandler, “Some Political and Cultural Pressures on the Jewish Image in Civil War San Francisco,” Western States Jewish History 20, no. 2 (1988): 150–151. 40 Korn, “Jews of the Union,” 136. 41 Analysis of the many sermons listed by Bertram Korn (American Jewry and the Civil War, 262–264) found only two that engaged in overt discussion of the politics of the war. 42 Jewish Messenger, May 3, 1861. On the debate about whether it was appropriate for a rabbi to preach on the political issues of the day see Marc Saperstein, “‘Rabbis, Stay Out of Politics’: Social Justice Preaching and Its Opponents, 1848–2014,” Jewish Culture and History 16, no. 2 (September 2015): 127–141. 43 Occident 18, no. 45 (January 1861): 274. 44 Sinai 6 (July 1861): 169–173, reprinted in American Jewish Archives 13, no. 2 (November 1961): 156–161 (quote on 158). For Einhorn’s public position on slavery see Robert F. Southard, “The Debate on Slavery: David Einhorn and the Jewish Political Turn,” American Jewish Archives Journal 64, nos. 1 & 2 (2012): 137–155. 45 Israelite, October 17, 1862, 116–117; October 31, 1862, 130. 46 See the marginal notes in Sabato Morais’s Ledger, 23, University of Pennsylvania Libraries. My thanks to Arthur Kiron for pointing me toward this text. 47 For his support of the war in private see Israelite, November 1, 1861, 141. For his sermons see David Philipson, Max Lilienthal: American Rabbi, Life and Writings (New York: Bloch, 1915), 398–414; Israelite, April 28, 1865, 349–350. 48 For analysis of Civil War sermons see Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching in Times of War 1800–2001 (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 142–221. For an exposition of Raphall’s milieu see Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 230–234. For how it echoed the Southern defense of slavery see Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University

N otes    267 Press of Kansas, 2001), 16, 18. Bernard Illowy in Baltimore and Raphael J. de Cordova at Temple Emanu-El in New York City both preached in favor of political compromise that same week. See Goldstein and Weiner, On Middle Ground, 89–90; Israelite, January 18, 1861, 228–229. 49 Raphael J. de Cordova, an “immensely successful lecturer and writer of humorous verse,” packed “large halls with paying audiences.” On his speaking tour and his message see Adam I. P. Smith, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 167–168. 50 Quoted in Rock, Haven of Liberty, 240–241, 248. For the raising of a United States flag over the Green Street Synagogue in May 1861 and Raphall’s patriotic sermon on the occasion, see New York Daily Herald, May 15, 1861, 3. Notably, even as he called for the support of the Union cause, his language echoed his earlier theme: “We take up arms to protect peaceful citizens South as well as North, and to oppose men who madly rush in to destroy the fairest form of government that human knowledge ever devised.” Raphall’s son-in-law, Cherrie (Cheme) Moise Levy, was appointed an assistant quartermaster in November 1862. (In supporting the appointment, Lincoln wrote to the secretary of war that “I believe we have not yet appointed a Hebrew.”) As Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell note, Levy “was different” from other Jewish officers: “being Orthodox and well respected in New York, he was a public and visible Jew.” Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 92–97. 51 The Ladies’ Hebrew Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded, for example, was organized only in May 1863, after an appeal from the Sanitary Commission branch in Philadelphia and an exhortation from the pulpit by Sabato Morais. By contrast, Southern-born Georgia Nathans, who spent the war years in Philadelphia (“the Yankees didn’t cause me any trouble”), joined the “many other southern girls” in a “regular society that sent all the provisions and clothing we could make . . . on to the southern boys” imprisoned in Fort Delaware. Sheftall Family Scrapbook, box 6, folder 1, Bertram Korn Papers, MS99, AJA; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 119; Jewish Messenger, May 22, 1863, 171. On home-front voluntarism in Philadelphia see Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 117–145, and on the Sanitary Fair see 146–169. 52 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 124, 135; Jewish Messenger, July 4, 1862: 2 October 8, 1862, 11–12. 53 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 136–137 (quote on 136). 54 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 95; Jewish Messenger, May 16, 1862, 144; July 4, 1862, 2. See also Jonathan Waxman, “Arnold Fischel: ‘Unsung Hero’ in American Israel,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 60, no. 4 (June 1971): 340–342. 55 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 127–128; Jewish Messenger, June 28, 1861, 196; November 21, 1862, 156; Occident 22, no. 8 (November 1864): 368. On relief efforts among German Americans see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 15–20. 56 See, for example, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 27 (1863): 493. 57 Quote from Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 124. 58 Jewish Record, September 24, 1862, 3–4. 59 For examples see Mark H. Dunkelman, Patrick Henry Jones: Irish American, Civil War General, and Gilded Age Politician (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015); Sabine Freitag, Frederich Hecker: Two Lives for Liberty (St. Louis: St. Louis Mercantile Library, 2006); Stephen D. Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,” in Yearbook of GermanAmerican Studies, vol. 34 (1999), 6–7; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 21–23; Keating, Shades of Green, 29–30, 50–51.

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60 See Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 69–75; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 94. 61 Quote from McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 24, 28. 62 Israelite, November 1, 1861, 141. See also Jewish Messenger, April 24, 1863, 135. 63 Kurtz, “‘Let Us Hear No More ‘Nativism,’” 28. 64 On contractors in Cincinnati and wartime military supply see Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 169–176. On the siege see William Howard Neff, “The Siege of Cincinnati by a Pearl Street Rifle,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 20, no. 4 (October 1962): 259, 265; Whitelaw Reed, Ohio in the War: Her Statesmen, Her Generals, and Soldiers, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1868), 83–98; Clinton W. Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People’: Cincinnati, the Civil War, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1861-1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2002): 97–122. For an analogous wave of emergency recruiting in Philadelphia before Antietam see Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 20–21. 65 Reed, Ohio in the War, 93. On nativism and temperance see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 106. 66 Of all June 1863 recruits, fifty-five of fifty-eight enlisted after the Confederates crossed the Potomac. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 67 On defense of the homeland as motivation see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 21. Gallman notes a striking degree of apathy in Philadelphia despite the crisis. Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 22–25. 68 Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 11, 95–96, 214; Hackemer, “Response to War,” 42. Marcus Spiegel, A Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, ed. Jean Powers Soman and Frank L. Byrne (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 306 (quotation). 69 For attacks on Jewish-owned stores see Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 34. For a description of an Irishman’s protecting his Jewish neighbor during the riots see Henry Hofheimer recollection, SC 5139, AJA. 70 Unsurprisingly, Taylor finds the opposite dynamic among African Americans within the Union. See Fighting for Citizenship, 93–94. 71 See Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 76–91. 72 On Irish disillusionment see Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 231–233; Bruce, Harp and Eagle; Joseph M. Hernon, Jr., Celts, Catholics, and Copperheads (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1968). On discontent amongst Democrats see J. Matthew Gallman, The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). 73 The casualty list from the Jewish Record, December 19, 1862, was reprinted in Israelite, December 26, 1862, 194. The Jewish Messenger had “not the heart to place before our readers the names of the Jewish dead.” Jewish Messenger, December 19, 1862, 188. The Jewish Record also listed Jewish casualties at Gettysburg on July 10, 1863. 74 Contemporary readers of the Jewish press did not know that these twin lists were singularly unreliable in their identification of Jews. Fewer than 20 percent of those listed as wounded and dead at Fredericksburg were Jewish, indicating that the newspaper most likely relied upon Jewish-sounding names to derive its list. The draft list, most likely from the Jewish Record, is available in box 6, folder 4, MS99, Bertram W. Korn Papers, AJA. For indications of Jewish sentiment toward the draft see Jewish Messenger, September 4, 1863, 69; March 2, 1866, 2. In New York City, the Jewish Record reprinted the forms required for draft exemption

N otes    269 in the pages of the newspaper on September 11, 1863. For the extraordinarily low rate at which drafted men from New York and elsewhere served see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 10, 187. 75 Those of German origin made up 62 percent of all first-time enlistees in 1861, 51.5 percent in 1862, 55.2 percent in 1863, 51 percent in 1864, and 55 percent in 1865. American-born enlistees made up 18.5 percent of all new Jewish recruits in 1861, 19.37 percent in 1862, 18.42 percent in 1863, 29.9 percent in 1864, and 15 percent in 1865. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 76 American-born Jews, perhaps less inured to the sting of antisemitism than were their foreign-born peers, appear to have felt a particular sense of betrayal after Grant’s General Orders No. 11. 77 See Jonathan D. Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (New York: Nextbook, 2012); Jewish Messenger, January 23, 1863. 78 Jewish Messenger, May 8, 1863, 154. 79 See Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, . 80 This total excludes June 1863, when enlistment spiked in the weeks before Gettysburg. On the misgivings of German Americans about emancipation, see Zachary Stuart Garrison, German Americans on the Middle Border: From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 1830–1877 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). For the lively debate about the politics of German immigrants see chap. 1, note 1. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 2. TH E JE WISH RE CRUIT 1

Surveying more than ten thousand letters, James McPherson found that four-fifths of officers expressed patriotic sentiment. Helbich, examining a small sample of letters written by German soldiers, found similar rates among officers. McPherson, What They Fought For 1861–1865 (New York: Anchor, 1995), 35; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 183; Wolfgang Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization” in German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Wolfgang Helbich and Walter Kamphoefner (Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for GermanAmerican Studies, 2004), 310.

2

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 7, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 62.

3

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, June 25, 1862 and May 9, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 112, 276.

4

On the economic crisis in Ohio during the early months of the war see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 65–66. On the exemption for execution of civil judgments see 67, 166–167.

5

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, December 29, 1861, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 20.

6

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 3, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 22; January 30, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 31; Marcus Spiegel to Moses Spiegel, February 13, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel,37.

7

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 30, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 32

8

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 45.

9

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 25, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 50.

10 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 19, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 49. 11 See Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries. 12 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 22, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 257.

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13 For examples, see Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 22, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 73-80 and May 8, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 108. For “coolness” in battle as a marker of masculinity see Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 14 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 8, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 35 15 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, April 27, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 98–99. Cf. Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 48, 63. 16 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, July 24, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 136 and August 6, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 149. 17 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, December 17, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 194. 18 Marcus Spiegel to Dear Friend yea Brother, December 14, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 188. 19 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 24, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 263. This progression toward a sense of professional duty accords with what Carmichael describes in War for the Common Soldier, 6, 8. 20 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 9, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 276. 21 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, December 13, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 309. See also Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 3, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 310. 22 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 12, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 322. 23 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 2, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 235; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1863,Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 238 and June 29, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 296–297. 24 On his attentiveness to how he was described in the press see Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 250; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 25, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 288. On paying off debt as a theme in soldiers’ letters see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 166–167. 25 Marcus Spiegel to Messrs. Estill, June 26, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 114–115. 26 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 7, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 62. 27 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 25, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 225, 230. 28 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 8, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 218–219. For a description of the misery faced by the 120th Ohio and other regiments see Mary Bobbitt Townsend, Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010), 75–77. For a discussion of how German (and Irish) soldiers responded to the Proclamation, see Christian B. Keller, “Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers,” Journal of Military History 73, no. 1 (January 2009): 128. Given how few letters and diaries written by Jewish soldiers reflected on the Emancipation Proclamation—and on slavery more broadly—we do not know how representative Spiegel’s views were. 29 Spiegel, Jewish Colonel,243–244. 30 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 25, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 226. 31 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, April 27, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 269. 32 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 31, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 289.

N otes    271 33 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 8, 1861, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 108; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, November 16, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 178 and Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 3, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 311. 34 His use of the term “antidemocratic” is telling, suggesting that he could accept Southern claims of states, and property rights in support of slavery, and reject the federal government’s constitutional authority to abolish it, on the basis of the popular sovereignty of Southern voters. My thanks to Mark Bauman for suggesting this point. Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 22, 1864, and February 12, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 315–316, 320. For the shift of political views of soldiers see Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 170. 35 Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 36 See Diner, Time for Gathering, 49–56. 37 Christian B. Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History and Their Implications for Twenty-firstCentury Scholarship,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 127. 38 On average native-born Jews were four years the junior of Jews born abroad when they first enlisted. American-born Jews in their thirties and forties enlisted in a markedly smaller proportion than did foreignborn Jews of the equivalent age. The median age of Jews was 23 years old and the mean 24.6, as compared with 23.5 and 25.8 for all Union recruits. The median age of native-born recruits was 20 and the mean 21; for foreigners the median age was 23 and the mean 25. Among those under twenty, 80 percent first enlisted for periods of one year or more; among those in their twenties, 76 percent did, as did 70 percent of those who first enlisted at age 30 and older. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. For Union averages see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, viii. Keller and Keating describe a similar dynamic among German and Irish enlistees. See Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 25; Keating, Shades of Green, 37. 39 In the first year of the war approximately one in five of those who donned the coarse fabric of the Union uniform for the first time was younger than twenty. In 1864 almost every second new soldier was a teenager. In that tortured year close to one in three new enrollees was American by birth; the norm in previous years had been fewer than one in five. The same phenomenon was noted in a microstudy of enlistment within the general population. See Hackemer, “Response to War,” 45–46, 51. Such fears were not unfounded. Joseph T. Glatthaar calculates that “three of every eight (34.4%) men in the Army of the Potomac” died, were wounded, or became prisoners of war. Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies,” 334–335. 40 On the particular appeal of enlistment for the young see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 31. 41 On Sigel see Stephen Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,” in Yearbook of German-American Studies, vol. 34 (1999), 1–18; Stephen Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 42 Among all Jewish recruits whose nativity is known, roughly one signed up for one hundred days or fewer upon initial enlistment for every three who first signed contracts for three years of service. Among those born in Prussia, the ratio was in excess of one to four. Among Hessians and Bohemians, the ratio was closer to one to two. Data on variations among Jewish enlistees derived from the Shapell Roster. 43 Among native New Yorkers, 45.34 percent were nineteen or younger, 47.6 percent were aged 20 through 29, and 4.6 percent were older than thirty at first enlistment. The corresponding percentages among those born in Pennsylvania were 30.98 percent, 57.7 percent, and 9.8 percent. Among Ohioans, the figures were 68.5 percent, 31.4 percent, and 0 percent. Data derived from the Shapell Roster.

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44 On the importance of the local environment in shaping Jewish life, see Weissbach, Jewish Life in SmallTown America, 8–9. 45 According to the 1860 census, 35 percent of all Germans in Cincinnati were of Bavarian origin. They made up the single largest portion of the German-born population. For geographical clustering see Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 163, 165. 46 Stephen G. Mostov, “A ‘Jerusalem’ on the Ohio: The Social and Economic History of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community, 1840–1875” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1981), 75–80. 47 Joseph Michael White, “Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814–1870” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1980), 1; Clinton W. Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People’: Cincinnati, the Civil War, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism, 1861–1865” (PhD diss., Ohio University, 2002), 5. 48 Marc Lee Raphael, Jews and Judaism in a Midwestern Community (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1979), 17; Lloyd Gartner, History of the Jews in Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1981), 8–11. 49 See Lloyd Gartner, The History of Jews in Milwaukee (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1963), 467– 468; Stephen G. Mostov, “A Sociological Portrait of German Jewish Immigrants in Boston, 1845–1861,” AJS Review 3 (April 1978): 150; Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 56. 50 Estimates for the size of the Jewish population of Cincinnati in the late 1850s and early 1860s range from six thousand to ten thousand. Mostov estimates seventy-five hundred in 1860. The only contemporary estimate from that period (1859) pegged the statewide total at nine thousand. See Jacob Rader Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 171–173; Mostov, “‘Jerusalem’ on the Ohio,” 76. 51 See Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, and Michael A. Meyer, eds. Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871, vol. 2 of German-Jewish History in Modern Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 47, 295–297; Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Beginnings of Integration, 1780–1870,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 101. 52 On the surface, the growth pattern of Jewish Cincinnati does not bear this out. Close to two-thirds of all Jewish residents in Cincinnati in 1860 settled there in the preceding decade, but a significant percentage had probably lived elsewhere in Ohio or the United States before making the city their home. Mostov, “‘Jerusalem’ on the Ohio,” 76, 101–103. 53 Diner, Time for Gathering, 46. 54 Scholars have eschewed the once dominant “ethnocultural thesis” for an approach more sensitive to local political dynamics. Similarly, Glatthaar found a higher rate of enlistment in the Army of the Potomac from counties that voted for Lincoln in 1860. See Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies,” 323. On the ethnocultural thesis see Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis,” Civil War History 37, no. 3 (September 1991): 232–234, 236–238, 243–244 (quote on 243); Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History,” 128; Lesley Ann Kawaguchi, “Diverging Political Affiliations and Ethnic Perspectives: Philadelphia Germans and Antebellum Politics,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 3–4; Kamphoefner, “‘Auch unser Deutschland,’” 97–98. 55 For his admiration of Douglas see Marcus Spiegel to Messrs. Estill, June 26, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel, 114–115.

N otes    273 56 For examples of immigrants who mouthed pro-Union sentiment but resisted urgings to enlist see Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 311. 57 Among Germans, for example, support shifted significantly toward the Republican Party during the late 1850s. See Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 242. 58 This could occasionally create complications for Jews. In the wake of the Mortara affair, Isaac Mayer Wise lamented to Stephen Douglas in 1858, “The Democratic Party is too much identified with Jesuitism and Catholicism. . . . The Israelites especially have lately been frightened away.” Isaac Mayer Wise to Stephen A. Douglas, December 9, 1858, Isaac Mayer Wise Digital Archive, AJA. On nativism in the antebellum period see Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 40–154 and Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 59 See Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 5; Dale T. Knobel, “‘Native Soil’: Nativists, Colonizationists, and the Rhetoric of Nationality,” Civil War History 27, no. 4 (December 1981), 314; Kurtz, “‘Let Us Hear No More ‘Nativism,’” 11, 20. On Jews and abolitionism, see Jayme A. Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform: The Antebellum Jewish Abolitionists” and Louis Ruchames, “The Abolitionists and the Jews: Some Further Thoughts,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam D. Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 125–159. 60 Kawaguchi, “Diverging Political Affiliations,” 3–4. See also Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 233–234, 236–238. 61 For an indication of internal divisions within German communities over politics and political loyalties see Andrew P. Yox, “Bonds of Community: Buffalo’s German Element, 1853–1871,” New York History 66, no. 2 (April 1985): 155; Robert A. Rockaway, “Anti-Semitism in an American City: Detroit, 1850–1914,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (September 1974): 43. 62 Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People,’” 14, 25–26. 63 Kamphoefner “German-Americans and Civil War Politics,” 239, 241; Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People,’” 15–16, 25–27, 140. 64 The Jewish populations of Chicago (fifteen hundred) and Cleveland (a thousand) trailed far behind in size. 65 On the strength of the Democratic Party in California see Glenna Matthew, The Golden State and the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–4, 36–39, 80–81. 66 Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 2; Christian B. Keller, “Diverse German Immigrants and Ethnic Identity on the Eve of the Civil War,” in Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg, ed. David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2010), 14; Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 262–263. 67 For New York City figures see Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 1825–1863 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 198–199. On Jewish sentiment in San Francisco see Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 38–39; Robert J. Chandler, “Some Political and Cultural Pressures on the Jewish Image in Civil War San Francisco,” Western States Jewish History 20, no. 2 (1988): 145–170. For the wartime apathy of Germans in California about the war see Kamphoefner, “‘Auch unser Deutschland,’” 102. 68 On Jews and nativism in Baltimore see Goldstein and Weiner, On Middle Ground, 66 (on their political preferences see 68, 70–71, 88, 90–91, 93); Isaac M. Fein, “Baltimore Jews during the Civil War,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (December 1961): 68–70. On Jews and prewar nativism see

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Bertram W. Korn, Eventful Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth Century American Jewish History (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1954), 58–78; Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 120. On nativism in Philadelphia see Kawaguchi, “Diverging Political Affiliations,” 5–11. On nativist attitudes toward Jews in New York City see Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 199 (quotation). For evidence that some Jews voted for KnowNothing candidates in New York see Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 168. On German voting patterns in 1864 see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 143. 69 On political behavior and nativism in Baltimore see Martin Lorenz-Meyer, “United in Difference: The German Community in Nativist Baltimore and the Presidential Elections of 1860,” in Yearbook of GermanAmerican Studies, vol. 35 (2000): 1–26; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “Comments and Context,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 72. 70 See Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 229–240, 248–251 (quotation on 229). On ethnic politics in New York City see Nadel, Little Germany, 131–136, 148–149; Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 162–171; Anbinder, City of Dreams, 189–207. On German voting patterns in 1864 see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 143. 71 Abram J. Dittenhoefer, How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 6. 72 Rock, Haven of Liberty, 230, 232. 73 Belmont, an agent for the Rothschild banking family, had little to do with Jews and married an Episcopalian. He was, however, in the august audience that heard Morris Raphall repeat his infamous sermon on slavery at the New-York Historical Society in January 1861. Some of his critics harped upon Belmont’s Jewish origins. The Jewish Messenger (November 4, 1864, 132), by contrast, noted that he was “universally repudiated as a Jew.” Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 1, 113, 143–146, 165, 201. For his importance as a banker see Kathryn Boodry, “August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 163–178. 74 That more Jews were merchants than manufacturers mattered; the latter were more likely to support the Republican Party. On Jews and the clothing trade in New York City see Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 37–57. On the politics of New York merchants and manufacturers see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–97; Anbinder, City of Dreams, 210–211. 75 On the mindset of Democrats after the election of Lincoln see Smith, Stormy Present, 168–178. 76 Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People,’” 76, 91, 93. 77 Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People,’” 29, 127, 139, 147, 149. On Copperheadism see Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 78 On Wise’s earlier flirtation with politics, see Sefton D. Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism: The Life and Times of Isaac Mayer Wise (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 171–173. On Wise and the war see Bertram W. Korn, “Isaac Mayer Wise on the Civil War,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 20 (1947); Sefton D. Temkin, “Isaac Mayer Wise and the Civil War,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 161-180. For indication of his congregation’s earlier unhappiness with his political position see Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism, 173. On the context within Ohio see Weber, Copperheads, 118–120.

N otes    275 On Vallandigham’s position on issues of concern to Jews see Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham & the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 29, 76, 237, 314–215. For analogous cases of political division within churches in Ohio see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 230–232, and in the Union more broadly see Timothy L. Wesley, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 60–92. On the peace movement within the Union see Weber, Copperheads. On the concern among Democrats about limitation of civil liberties see Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983), 148, 151. On the dynamics of the Democratic party see Gallman, Cacophony of Politics. 79 For the size of the German-speaking population see White, “Religion and Community,” 41. 80 On the ethnic press and enlistment see, for example, Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, xiii; Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 308 (on soldiers’ motivations see 310–11). For the importance of financial considerations among German recruits, see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 27–28. For a brief discussion of the interplay between age and occupation among Irish recruits see W. J. Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War? Concord, Massachusetts, Enlistments,” Journal of American History 73, no. 3 (December 1986): 696–697. 81 So too were professionals, but this represented their light footprint in Cincinnati. For the occupational profile of Jews in Cincinnati see Mostov, “‘Jerusalem’ on the Ohio,” 105–141. For the working-class character of the Army of the Potomac see Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies,” 329–330. 82 This data is derived from analysis of all enlistees from these three states who are identifiable in the 1860 census. 83 Peter Blanck and Chen Song found that lower-paying “professionals and proprietors” (barbers, clerks, peddlers, and saloonkeepers) were the single largest occupational category among German enlistees. As described above, a similar pattern was present among Jews. By contrast, Blanck and Song found that among the native born and foreigners as a whole, professionals and proprietors—particularly merchants, attorneys, engineers, physicians, and teachers—were poorly represented relative to those involved in agriculture, manual labor, and artisan occupations. See “‘With Malice toward None, with Charity toward All’: Civil War Pensions for Native and Foreign-born Veterans,” Transactional Law and Contemporary Problems 11, no. 1 (2001): 19–30. On the occupational profile of recruits see Dora L. Costa, “Leaders: Privilege, Sacrifice, Opportunity, and Personnel Economics in the American Civil War,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 30, no. 3 (June 2013): 440; Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War?,” 699–700; Hackemer, “Response to War,” 46. 84 This echoes Rorabaugh’s findings from Concord, Massachusetts, that enlistees were “disproportionately propertyless youths and young men from all occupations except the mercantile and professional elite.” Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War?,” 699. 85 Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 209–210. 86 Julius Ochs, A Memoir of Julius Ochs: An Autobiography (n.d.), 32, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 44–45. 87 For the occupational profile of German recruits see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 25. For Irish recruits see Keating, Shades of Green, 38, 47–49, 57–58. For all foreign-born recruits see Blanck and Song, “‘With Malice toward None, with Charity toward All,’” 19–30. 88 See Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, xii. 89 Jacob R. Marcus, “From Peddler to Regimental Commander in Two Years: The Civil War Career of Major Louis A. Gratz,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38, no. 1 (September 1948): 36.

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90 Abraham Zehden and Rebecca Zehden, Leben und Tod Unseres in Philadelphia Verstorbenen Sohnes David (Berlin: F.W. Baade, 1864), 3–4. (Life and death of our son David who passed away in Philadelphia.) All quotes are from a translation in the Mel Young Personal Papers, Shapell Manuscript Foundation, Beverly Hills, CA. 91 Ibid., 5. 92 Ibid., 7. 93 Jonathan S. Mesinger, “Peddlers and Merchants: The Geography of Work in a Nineteenth Century Jewish Community” (Department of Geography, Syracuse University Discussion Paper Series 38, 1977), 9–11, 28, 30. 94 Pulitzer discovered that he could earn more as a substitute, and enlisted as a cavalryman for the last months of the war. James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). On economic need as a motivation in the early months of the war see Edward G. Everett, “Pennsylvania Raises an Army, 1861,” Western Pennsylvania Magazine 39, no. 2 (Summer 1956): 92. On efforts to entice “unemployed Europeans” see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 195–196. 95 On the importance of bounties as incentives see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries. 96 See Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 162–178. 97 See Terry, “‘The Most Commercial of People,’” 30–31, 156–157, 192. 98 Reed, Ohio in the War, 97. 3. I N TH E COMPA N Y OF JE W S 1

For a firsthand account of the early months of the regiment see Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam, Civil War Documents Collection, box 13, folder 15, U.S. Army War College Library (quotation from entry for February 12, 1863).

2

Soldiers in the regiment did not universally admire Greenhut’s action. See An American Apprenticeship: The Letters of Emil Frey 1860–1965, ed. Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 144. Greenhut and Salomon were Jewish; Hecker and Rolshausen were not.

3

Eric Benjaminson, “A Regiment of Immigrants: The 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the Letters of Captain Rudolph Mueller,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 139, 152–153; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 96.

4

The regiment left Chicago with 853 officers and enlisted men. By December 1862, it numbered only 618 on active duty as a result of resignations, desertion, and discharge for disability. By Emil Frey’s estimate, it started Chancellorsville with 450 men. For the regiment’s strength (and its losses) see William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Albany: Albany Publishing Co., 1889), 371; Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam; Rappolt, American Apprenticeship, 193. For the regiment at Chancellorsville see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 63–65, 68–69, 74; Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 150–151; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 242–243; Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry, ed. and trans. Joseph R. Reinhart (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), 9, 67–83; Marc A. Dluger, “A Regimental Community: The Men of the 82nd Illinois Infantry before, during, and after the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2009), 223–233, quote on 237. For accounts in the Jewish press see Israelite, May 23, 1863, 363; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 27 (1863): 435.

5 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 95, 103 (quotation).

N otes    277 6

Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 154–155, 157; Edward S. Salomon, “Gettysburg”: Read before the California Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (San Francisco: Shannon-Conmy Printing, 1913), 6. For an account of the engagement see Harry W. Pfanz, Gettysburg: The First Day (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 217–226.

7

On the retreat through the town see Pfanz, Gettysburg, 322–330 (for the Eighty-second Illinois, see 323). Hecker returned to the regiment on the last day of the battle.

8 Salomon, “Gettysburg,” 7. 9

Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 158. On the role of Cemetery Hill on the first day of the battle see Pfanz, Gettysburg, 331–349. For his description see Salomon, “Gettysburg,” 7.

10 For Greenhut’s recollections of the battle, see Illinois Monuments at Gettysburg, ed. John L. Beveridge, David B. Vaughan, and Joseph B. Greenhut (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1892), 34–35. For Salomon’s account of the regiment’s engagements see “Gettysburg,” 9–14. His account borrowed heavily from Greenhut’s. For an account of one of those taken prisoner during the flight through Gettysburg on July 1, see Rappolt, American Apprenticeship, 155–164, 180, 193–194. For a description of the regiment at Gettysburg see Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 84–98; Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 255–282 (quotation on 283). 11 Eugene Weigel quoted in Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 159; Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 244. 12 On the regiment at Chattanooga see Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 100–108; Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 307–316. 13 On Hecker’s temper see Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam. On Hecker’s style of command see Sabine Freitag, Friedrich Hecker: Two Lives for Liberty (St. Louis: St. Louis Mercantile Library, 2006), 227, 235. 14 At Resaca, the extreme left of Sherman’s line was left “in the air” in the late afternoon on May 14. Identifying the danger, the Union division commander sent for reinforcements to aid the isolated Indiana battery that anchored the line. At 4 p.m. Hood ordered an assault designed to turn this exposed flank. Union reserves rushed the entire length of the battlefield, from the right wing to the left, and deployed on a wooded ridge behind the battery. The artillerymen abandoned their battery when Hood’s veterans “swarmed out of the woods” in a mass charge. With the reserve brigade not yet in line, the Eighty-second, the rightmost regiment, launched a desperate counterattack. “At this critical moment,” Salomon reported, “I ordered the regiment to charge, although the brigade was not yet in line. I led the regiment in doublequick down the bank of the creek, and charged with a hurrah across open field, giving the enemy a full volley as we drove them back. The balance of the brigade soon joined us, and after a brisk fire of fifteen minutes the enemy fell back and the battery was saved.” On the Eighty-second at Resaca see Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 137–138; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 122–125; Philip L. Secrist, The Battle of Resaca: Atlanta Campaign, 1864 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), 36–37; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 38 part 2, 84–86, 96–97. For the Eighty-second at Bentonville see Mark L. Bradley, The Last Stand in the Carolinas: The Battle of Bentonville (Campbell, CA: Savas Woodbury Publishers, 1996), 271–272, 280–282, 288–290; Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 171; Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 176; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 180–190. 15 With the start of the new campaign in sight, the Eleventh Corps was dismantled and its remnants assigned to different divisions. The Eighty-second Illinois left the third brigade of the third division and joined the third brigade of the first division of the Twentieth Corps. Wickesberg quoted in Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 160. Presumably Wickesberg did not know that a soldier within his own company was

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Jewish, or that he himself had served under a Jewish officer, Major Philip Horwitz, when he first enlisted. His sentiments must be understood within the context of unit rivalries. On this theme see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 83. On interethnic tensions between regiments in the Eleventh Corps see Mark Dunkelman, “Hardtack and Sauerkraut Stew: Ethnic Tensions in the 154th New York Volunteers, Eleventh Corps, during the Civil War,” in Yearbook of German-American Studies, vol. 36 (2001), 69–90. On the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin see James S. Pula, The Sigel Regiment: A History of the 26th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865 (Campbell, CA: Savas Publishing, 1998). On Wickesberg see “Guide to the Sergeant Charles Wickesberg Archival Collection, Company H., 26th Infantry of Wisconsin Volunteers,” Civil War Museum, Jackson D. Michaels Resource Center, Kenosha, Wisconsin. 16 One of Salomon’s officers dismissed the Forty-fifth New York as “scaredy-cats” who had grown soft because their military service amounted to serving as train guards. See Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 170. 17 Twelve of the Jewish soldiers served in Company C. The regiment counted 245 men when it entered battle at New Hope Church in late May. 18 See, for example, Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 141; Brinkmann, “Jews, Germans, or Americans?,” 120. An otherwise exemplary recent history of the regiment also identifies Company C as Jewish. Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 2, 205n6. 19 On the ethnic composition of the regiment see Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 210n32. 20 See for example, Buffalo Commercial, August 16, 1862, 2; Pittsburgh Daily Post, August 20, 1862, 2; Louisville Daily Journal, August 19, 1862, 1. 21 White Cloud Kansas Chief, October 9, 1862, 2. 22 Sacramento Bee, September 8, 1862, 2. For reporting on the regiment in the Jewish press in Europe see Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 26 (1862): 588; Der Israelit 3 (1862), supplement to no. 42: 172. 23 Appleton Motor, August 20, 1862, 2. 24 Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1862, 4. For language that made clear that the regiment was “raised under the auspices of the Israelites of Chicago” see Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1862, 4; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 24–25. The generosity of the bounty created unanticipated problems. Veterans of the company later complained that the rate of desertion from the unit was high because the bounty lured in those with shallow commitment to the cause. See Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 450. 25 Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1862, 4. 26 On Hecker, see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker. 27 Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1862, 4; Reinhart., Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 25. 28 Rappolt, American Apprenticeship, 56. 29 On the flag and the inscription see Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 37–38 (for an account of the visit of a “Committee” of “Israelite Women” and men to the regiment’s camp, 39–44). The visitors emphasized the German values they shared with the soldiers. 30 Two contemporary sources estimate the Jewish population of Chicago as fifteen hundred in 1861 and 1862. See Marcus, To Count a People, 57. The number of Jewish enlistees is derived from the Shapell Roster. 31 For the occupational profile see Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 142; Reinhart., Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 12. Additional occupation data extracted from the 1860 census.

N otes    279 32 Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 114–116 (quotation on 116). For similar initiatives in Philadelphia see Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 18–19. 33 For examples that appeared alongside news of the formation of the Concordia Guards, see Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1862, 4; August 15, 1862, 4; August 16, 1862, 4; August 19, 1862, 4. See also Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 25–26. 34 Seventy-two mustered into service in Company A. See Muster-In Roll of Captain Solomon Light’s Company (A), in the 149th Regiment of New York (Foot) Volunteers. 35 Syracuse Daily Courier and Union, August 26, 1862, 2. 36 Light resigned in January 1863, and Bronner in February. Israelite, September 19, 1862, 83; October 17, 1862, 116–17; October 31, 1862, 130. See also Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 117–119. 37 Unlike the Eighty-second Illinois, the 149th New York served in the Twelfth Corps until it too joined the Twentieth Corps. The regiments served in different divisions in the Twentieth Corps. For another example of the presentation of a flag by women see Mischa Honeck, “Men of Principle: Gender and the German American War for the Union,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 53 38 In American Jewry and the Civil War (138–139), Korn indicates that William Mayer sought the support of the Jewish community in raising a regiment in September 1862. The evidence, however, is somewhat contradictory (see Israelite, October 24, 1862, 125). As he was unable to enlist sufficient recruits, Mayer’s efforts were suspended in November, and he and his men joined the 175th New York. Mayer later played a leading role in the suppression of the New York draft riots. See Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots, 59; Frederick Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion, 1861 to 1865 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1890). 39 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 141. 40 Keating similarly describes how in Wisconsin the absence of Irish leaders stymied the formation of an Irish regiment. See Shades of Green, 75–76. On the role of ethnic leadership within the German community see Christian B. Keller, “Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers,” Journal of Military History 73, no. 1 (January 2009): 125; Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 301, 306. 41 According to the Shapell Roster, ninety Jews served in Illinois regiments. 42 This calculation is derived from the Shapell Roster. 43 According to data derived from the Shapell Roster, in 121 regiments Jews served alone. 44 One hundred forty-seven of 239 (61.5 percent) Jewish enlistees known to have been born in America first enlisted in units where there are no other first-time Jewish enlistees. By contrast, 274 of 985 (27.8 percent) Jewish soldiers known to have been born abroad did so. Three hundred ninety-eight of 985 (40.4 percent) of the latter first enlisted in regiments that had five or more foreign-born Jewish first-time enlistees. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 45 See William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 36–38, 42–48; Keller, “Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen,” 125; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 29; Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, xi-xiii; Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 302; Susannah Ural Bruce, “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit’: Irish Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 2 (April 2005): 334. 46 Levi C.Turner to Secretary of War, October 16, 1862, 2062, Friedman, Max, roll 54, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865 M797, NARA.

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47 On the appeal of ethnic units see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 29, 32, 34; Helbich, “GermanBorn Union Soldiers,” 299–300, 303–306; Kamphoefner, “‘Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei warden,’” 105. 48 Brinkmann, “Jews, Germans, or Americans?,” 111–140; Goldstein and Weiner, On Middle Ground, chap. 2. 49 See Jewish Messenger, January 27, 1860, 27. 50 The Jewish Messenger (February 5, 1864, 35) also credited Company H as “Jewish.” 51 For Greenhut’s background see Dluger, “A Regimental Community,” 138. 52 Data on family connections derived from the Shapell Roster. On siblings who served in the opposing armies see Taylor, Divided Family, chap. 3. 53 On the political orientation of Turners, see Levine, Spirit of 1848, 93–94. The Eighty-second Illinois also drew upon Turners, but few appear to have been Jews. See Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 19–20, 216n7. 54 See Joseph T. Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac and Their Cultures,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 3 (September 2016): 331. See also Keating, Shades of Green, 22, 31, 46–47, 49, 53–55. New York’s militia was nominally larger than the regular army in January 1861. Gus Person, “Answering the Call: The New York State Militia Responds to the Crisis of 1861,” Civil War History Journal (May-June 2008), 1–2; Richard F. Miller, ed., A Reference Guide for New York in the Civil War , vol. 2 of States at War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 109, 342n112. See Keating, Shades of Green, 54; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 26. 55 See Israelite, December 14, 1860, 190; December 28, 1860, 202; Jewish Messenger, December 21, 1860, 188. 56 Jews displayed less eagerness for reenlistment than described by Keating and Keller for Irish and German militiamen. Seventeen Jewish members of the Sixth New York State Militia regiment responded again in 1863, when the militia was called up for thirty days around the time period of Gettysburg, and reentered active service as the Sixth New York National Guard for thirty days in 1863. 57 On Einstein see Richard F. Miller, ed., A Reference Guide for Pennsylvania in the Civil War, vol. 3 of States at War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 144, 333n114; 2085 Adolphus Salinger, roll 55, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865, M797, NARA; Max Einstein to Brigadier General Mansfield, June 29, 1861, RG-94, Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Unbound Regimental Papers Filed with Muster Rolls, box 4259, NARA. 58 See Thoman to Daniel Butterfield, February 20, 1863, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, NARA. 59 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. 60 See Material on Jones Frankl, SC3622, AJA. 61 The secretary of war deemed it of “great importance that their services should be secured.” Simon Cameron, December 23, 1861, quoted in Kevin J. Weddle, “Ethnic Discrimination in Minnesota Volunteer Regiments during the Civil War,” Civil War History 35, no. 3 (1989): 246. 62 On the nature of the conflict within the German Confederation see Mark Hewitson, The People’s Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820–1888 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

N otes    281 63 On d’Utassy and the Thirty-ninth New York see Michael Bacarella, Lincoln’s Foreign Legion: The 39th New York Infantry, the Garibaldi Guard (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Company, 1996); Catherine Catalfamo, “The Thorny Rose: The Americanization of an Urban, Immigrant, Working Class Regiment in the Civil War: A Social History of the 39th New York Volunteer Infantry” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1989), chap. 10 (on his purported military credentials, see 84; on the composition of the regiment see 82–84; on the collapse of its reputation see chap. 4). Quotation from National Republican, November 20, 1861, 2. 64 George Waring cited in Catalfamo, “Thorny Rose,” 90. See also Bacarella, Lincoln’s Foreign Legion, 31. 65 For an early example of this rumor, see press clipping in Catalfamo, “Thorny Rose,” 111. Quote from 356. 66 See Bacarella, Lincoln’s Foreign Legion, 6, 18–19; Caitlin Eichner, “International Man of Mystery— Colonel Frederick George d’Utassy,” History Source (November 23, 2014), https://primarysourcehistory. wordpress.com/2014/11/23/international-man-of-mystery-colonel-frederick-george-dutassy/comment-page-1/. 67 The article also relayed the (inaccurate) news of Simon Levy’s selection as colonel of a newly formed New York regiment. He became the lieutenant colonel of the New York Independent Battalion in May 1863. If correct, Wise’s claims of personal familiarity with Strasser belies d’Utassy’s account of his career after leaving Hungary. Israelite, October 25, 1861, 134. See also Jewish Messenger, May 31, 1861, 164. 68 For a listing see Bacarella, Lincoln’s Foreign Legion, 268–270. 69 For the “statement of grievances” see Max Einstein and others to George McClellan, August 19, 1861, RG-94, Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Unbound Regimental Papers Filed with Muster Rolls, box 4259, NARA. An investigation by the chief commissary officer of the Army of the Potomac yielded no valid “cause of complaint with regard to quantity or quality of bread. The German portion of the Regiment do not like wheat bread but prefer a kind of brown bread which I think is the cause of the complaint.” Captain A. P. Porter to Major H. Clarke, September 10, 1861. RG-94, Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Unbound Regimental Papers Filed with Muster Rolls, box 4259, NARA. 70 Blenker to McDowell, August 21, 1861, RG-94, Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Unbound Regimental Papers Filed with Muster Rolls, box 4259, NARA. Blenker’s credentials were also disputed. See Murray M. Horowitz, “Ethnicity and Command: The Civil War Experience,” Military Affairs 42, no. 4 (December 1978): 186. 71 Miller, Reference Guide for Pennsylvania, 334n114; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1861, 1; October 8, 1861, 1; October 14, 1861, 1; October 30, 1861, 1. 72 As Sarna and Shapell note, soon after, Lincoln nominated Einstein to become U.S. consul to Germany at Nuremberg. The appointment was rejected by the Senate. Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 87. 73 On his early career in Chicago see Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 103–104. 74 On the formation of the first regiment see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 221–223. 75 On the internal strife within the regiment see Freitag, Friedrich Hecker, 226–233; David Graham, “A Fight for a Principle: The 24th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 104, nos. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 2011): 38–42; Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 72–77. 76 See Theodore J. Karamanski, Rally ’Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 106–107. 77 See Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam; Dluger, “Regimental Community,” 143; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 19. For the regiment’s struggles to fill its ranks and the role of Henry Greenebaum in recruiting see 173. See also Rappolt, American Apprenticeship, 130–131.

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78 On Salomon’s recruitment efforts see Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 22, 35. 79 In the Eighty-second Illinois, Scandinavian soldiers quaked at the prospect of serving under a German. “[S]end them to a regiment commanded by an American and not a German,” they pleaded. See Dluger, “A Regimental Community,” 175. 80 For an account of the raising of the regiment see 2085 Adolphus Salinger, roll 55, Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, compiled 1862–1865, M797, NARA. 81 The incident is described in Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 30. Contrary to Keller, Goodman remained in the regiment and won promotion two months later. He was discharged for disability—caused by “piles and rupture” as a result of “exposures, hard service, forced marches” to “overtake ‘Jackson’”—after Cross Keys, in October 1862. 82 Henry Florsheim to Lieutenant Colonel Bushbeck, September 30, 1861, Record Group 94: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762–1984. See also Bruce, “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit,’” 340. On “pluralistic ethnic competition” within the army see Wolfgang Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization,’” in German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, ed. Wolfgang Helbich and Walter Kamphoefner (Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), 307. For Helbich’s sagacious warning of the need to exercise caution in generalizing from these examples see 312. 83 In 1860, immigrants made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population. For a recent estimate of the proportion of soldiers who were immigrants see Christian B. Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History and Their Implications for Twenty-first-Century Scholarship,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 127. 84 Salomon was brevetted as a colonel in August 1865, with the appointment backdated to March 1865. In June 1867 this appointment was upgraded to brevet brigadier general. 85 Marcus Spiegel was gifted a sword and a horse. Jews in Milwaukee gave Philip Horwitz a horse. Einstein was presented with pistols, and Captain Lasalle (of Company C of the Eighty-second Illinois) a sword, sash, and belt. 86 See Earl J. Hess, “Sigel’s Resignation: A Study in German-Americanism and the Civil War,” Civil War History 26, no. 1 (March 1980): 13–16; Murray M. Horowitz, “Ethnicity and Command: The Civil War Experience,” Military Affairs 42, no. 4 (December 1978): 184–185; Stephen D. Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,” in Yearbook of GermanAmerican Studies, vol. 34 (1999), 6–8. 87 David Michael Delo, Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 103–110. For the prescribed list of wares, see Francis A. Lord, Civil War Sutlers and Their Wares (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1969), 39, 67. For the regulations governing sutlers see War of the Rebellion, series 3, volume 1, 938–940. 88 This account draws heavily on Adam Mendelsohn, “Beyond the Battlefield: Reevaluating the Legacy of the Civil War for American Jews,” American Jewish Archives Journal 64, nos. 1&2 (2012): 99–103. For nepotism see Lord, Civil War Sutlers, 68–69. For quote, see Marcus Spiegel to Moses Joseph, February 19, 1862, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 47. 89 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1863, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 240. 90 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 18, 1863, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 252–254.

N otes    283 91 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, June 29, 1863, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 297. 92 In the absence of reliable data, it is unclear whether Jews made up a disproportionate share of the sutlers in the Union army. Given that Jews may have been drawn to this occupation because of familiarity with itinerant trade—we know of Jewish sutlers who supplied armies as far back as the Thirty Years’ War—and concentration in commercial endeavors before the war, it is likely that they were overrepresented. Every indication suggests, however, that they made up no more than a small share of the total number of sutlers attached to the Union army. 93 The telegrams were sent by Brigadier General Grenville Dodge, commander of the District of Mississippi; Colonel Robert C. Murphy, commander of the supply depot at Holly Springs; as well as the colonel of the Second Iowa and the lieutenant colonel of the 106th Illinois. See John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 7 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 53. 94 For a fuller account of Jewish sutlers see Mendelsohn, “Beyond the Battlefield,” 99–103. 4. FI G HTIN G TOGE THE R 1

Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, May 21, 1873, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. On the perception of Jews by Irish and other immigrants see Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 27.

2

It is difficult to determine whether discrimination against Jews differed in the Eastern and Western theaters at the regimental and company level. On the whole, nativism may have been less acute in the Army of the Tennessee because of the ethnic composition of that army, as well as the absence of anything equivalent to the ignominy heaped upon the Eleventh Corps in the Army of the Potomac. But the figure of the “Jew” featured in the Western Theater in ways unlike in the east because of particular concerns about cotton speculators and traders.

3

Though there is no comparable data on name changing among other ethnic enlistees, an unrepresentative sample by the Shapell Roster of non-Jewish Germans enlistees indicates considerable overlap in motivations with Jews.

4

Kirsten Fermaglich reveals similar impulses, as well as the impact of war, on name changing in the twentieth century. See A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2018). By way of contrast, we know of only two Jewish soldiers who petitioned to change their names after the war: Simon and Marcus Witkowski (Witmark).

5

Moses Wasserman to R. Warner, February 12, 1908, Moses Wasserman File, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA.

6

Affidavit of Samuel R. Thorne, Israel Highhill case files, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, NARA.

7

See the affidavit from Frederick Gotthold, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA.

8

Affidavit of Fisher Grossman, Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Benefits Administration, Case Files of Pension Applications, NARA.

9

Jacob R. Marcus, “From Peddler to Regimental Commander in Two Years: The Civil War Career of Major Louis A. Gratz,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38, no. 1 (September 1948): 42. For a particularly evocative example of parental disapproval see Jewish Messenger, April 3, 1868, 2.

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10 Penslar, Jews and the Military, 2, 11, chap. 2. 11 See affidavit of Esther Delevie, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 12 Testimony of Belle Klauber, Louis Reitler case file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 13 Israelite, May 24, 1867, 6; June 14, 1867, 6. The officer, named as the “Colonel of a colored regiment,” has not been identified. For references to him in the German press, see Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 31 (1867): 368. 14 Autobiography of August Bondi: 1833–1907 (Galesburg, IL: Wagoner Printing Company, 1910), 87–88. 15 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. 16 Jewish Messenger, December 27, 1861, 101. 17 Occident 20, no. 7 (October 1862), 327. 18 Leeser used his wartime experience as argument for the establishment of Jewish hospitals. Occident 23, no. 7 (October 1865), 293-294. 19 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. 20 On prewar nativism see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 322–325; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings & the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 21 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans; Keller, “Flying Dutchmen,” 133–140; Dunkelman, “Hardtack and Sauerkraut Stew,” 69–90; Bruce, Harp and Eagle, 80–81, 189, 232; Bruce, “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit,’” 349, 356; Kurtz, “‘Let Us Hear No More ‘Nativism,’’’ 27. 22 Netter was from Alsace. “The Jews of the Union,” American Jewish Archives 13, no. 2, (November 1961): 184. 23 Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 17–18, 21-22, 28; Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 170–241. For the varied representations of Jews onstage see Nathans, Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans. 24 Quote from Jonathan Judaken, “Jewish Capitalists, Jewish Bolsheviks: Conspiracy Thinking and Modern Judeophobia,” Modern Intellectual History 18, no. 3 (September 2021): 880. 25 For the dualistic nature of stereotypes of Jews see John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 99–101. 26 Jonathan D. Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” in AntiSemitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987): 57–78. 27 Regimental Order No. 4, December 8, 1862, Twenty-seventh PA, Special and General Orders, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, NARA. 28 Heller to Lt. Col. Cantador, March 23, 1863, Adjutant General’s Office, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Records Group 94, NARA. 29 G. W. Lewis, The Campaigns of the 124th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Akron: Werner, 1894), 85.

N otes    285 30 On the protean nature of antisemitism see Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). For an overview of antisemitism on the home front see Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 188–209, and Jaher, Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, 190–198. For the view that the Jew was arch-beneficiary of wartime circumstances see Louisville Courier-Journal, November 6, 1863, 1. 31 For hostile sentiment expressed by other military officials see Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 148–149, 122, 153–154; Jaher, Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, 198–200. On Grant’s Order see Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, 7, 31–32, 44–45. For the campaign to rescind the order see 12–23. On Grant’s nativism see Tyler Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” Civil War History 43, no. 2 (1997), 119–141. See 124n11 for the suggestion that Grant viewed Jewish traders as a persistent “nuisance” before the expulsion order. For an example of how the press picked up on Grant’s theme see the discussion in the Detroit Commercial Advertiser, in March 1863, of “the tribe of gold speculators . . . exclusively of the people who look up to Abraham as their father.” These “hooked nose wretches speculate on disasters and a battle lost to our army is chuckled over by them, as it puts money in their purse.” Quoted in Rockaway, “AntiSemitism in an American City,” 44. 32 In addition to these ideas, August Belmont was described by hostile observers as “this Israelite Belmont” in the same breath in which they denounced Valladingham. See, for example, Frank Moore, ed., Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, vol. 3 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 114; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 190. For accusations of a conspiracy of Jews involved in smuggling across enemy lines, see for example, Nashville Daily Union, October 8, 1864, 1. For Jews as spies see John Fitch, Annals of the Army of the Cumberland (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864), 457–466. For representations of the Jew as reluctant recruit see Bunker and Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Antisemitism and the Civil War,” 48, 62. On the idea of “corruption” in the Union see Michael T. Smith, The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). 33 Brian P. Luskey, “Economic and Social Values in the Civil War,” in Cambridge History of the American Civil War, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), quotes from 92 and 97. 34 See Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 169–172; Bunker and Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Antisemitism and the Civil War,” 43–71; Gallman, Defining Duty in the Civil War, 102–104. Isaac Mayer Wise and others did not dispute that the social order had been inverted. But in a twist on this, he argued that the real fault lay with the “lower stratum” that brought all of its “vices,” including antisemitism, with it when it rose to the top of society. See Naomi W. Cohen, “Antisemitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” Jewish Social Studies 41, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn 1979): 189, 200. 35 On sutlers and Jews, see Mendelsohn, “Beyond the Battlefield,” 99–103; Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 177–178, 198. On their depiction in the press see Bunker and Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Antisemitism and the Civil War,” 57–59. For the example of slippage between Jew and sutler see Liberator, June 19, 1863, 2; Detroit Free Press, January 15, 1862, 4. 36 For examples see Military History and Reminiscences of the Thirteenth Regiment of the Illinois Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War in the United States 1861–1865 (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1892), 223–229; Alan S. Brown, ed., A Soldier’s Life: The Civil War Experiences of Ben C. Johnson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1962), 60–62; W. L. Curry, Four Years in the Saddle: History of the First Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Cavalry (Columbus: Champlin, 1898), 318–319; W. A. Neal, An Illustrated History of the Missouri Engineer and the 25th Infantry (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1889), 21–22; William P. Hopkins, The Seventh Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Providence: Snow & Farnham, 1903), 277; Thomas H. Parker, History of the 51st

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Regiment of P.V. and V.V. (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1869), 260–261; Rudolf Glanz, The Jew in Early American Wit and Graphic Humor (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973), 72. At least some such episodes are borne out in other sources. See, for example, House of Representatives Executive Document 23: Trial of Henry Wirz (Washington: Government Publishing Office, 1868): 598. 37 Aaron Hirsch Autobiographical Excerpts, SC5022, AJA. 38 The dispatch was printed in full in the Daily Milwaukee News, January 27, 1864, 1. 39 On the blockade runners, see Jonathan D. Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, 43n; Julius Louis Correspondence SC7475, AJA. 40 Much of the exchange was reprinted in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 29 (1925): 117–128, but it continued for several months longer. For additional letters see folder 2, box 2, series 2, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 41 For a fuller description of his thinking about Jews and blood, see Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiographical and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1892), 33–34. See also Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 194–197; Jaher, Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, 192, 198. 42 See, for example, the claim that Thomas C. Reynolds, the South Carolina–born Confederate lieutenant governor of Missouri and “chief conspirator” for secession in that state, was really Thomas C. Reinhold, a German-born Jew. James Packham, General Nathaniel Lyon, and Missouri in 1861 (New York: American News Company, 1866), 27; Moore, Rebellion Record, 18; Louisville Courier-Journal, August 9, 1861, 2. 43 A Mr. A. S. Cohen of New York sought proof from General George B. McClellan that Jews had loyally served in the Army of the Potomac. Though McClellan demurred that his “attention never happened to be called to the peculiarities of Jewish soldiers, when he was in command,” he “never had any reason to suppose them inferior to their comrades of other races and religion, or to their decidedly belligerent ancestors.” New Orleans Times-Democrat, April 7, 1864, 8. 44 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, August 7, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 151. 45 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, July 27, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 139. 46 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 2, 1863 and March 22, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 234, 260. 47 Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 57, 83, 143, 160. On notions of manliness see Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs. 48 Another soldier recalled the nickname as “Coffee.” Depositions of Joseph Pershing, Oliver Powleson, and Frank McMurray, Charles Baum file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca. 1861–ca. 1910, Bureau of Pensions, NARA. Henry Herman was described in a similar fashion as “one of these light contracted timmid Jews.” See Henry Herman file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca. 1861– ca. 1910, Bureau of Pensions, NARA. 49 “Sheeny” (sometimes spelled “sheney”) is a derogatory term for “Jew.” 50 The corporal misidentified this second person as Rosenranz, not Rosenberg. The description comes from an affidavit relating to Geigerman’s application for a pension. Deposition A, David Geigerman file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca. 1861–ca. 1910, Bureau of Pensions, NARA.

N otes    287 51 Statement of Anthony P. Zyla, Records of the Court Martial of Frederick d’Utassy, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA. 52 Jerome Mushkat, ed., A Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War: The Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 25. 53 Mushkat, Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War, quote on 20. See also 58. 54 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 58, 85, 87; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 79; Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 31–32; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 111, 113–122. 55 Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, quote on 63, see also 213; Keating, Shades of Green, 115–117; Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 7.passim. 56 Keating, Shades of Green, 113–115; Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 313. 57 Müller to Hecker, June 24, 1864, Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 167. See also Müller to Hecker, July 9, 1864, Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 169; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 113, 124, 148, 154, 159–161. 58 Müller to Hecker, August 13, 1864, Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 173. Both Benjaminson and Reinhart assumed that Bechstein was Jewish. See Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 151. For Bechstein’s background see 219n17. 59 Müller to Hecker, June 24, 1864, Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 167. See also Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 119. 60 Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 16. 61 As explained earlier, he was brevetted as colonel in August 1865, and brigadier general in 1867. In both instances, the appointment was backdated to March 13, 1865. 62 Quoted in Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 170n75. 63 Israelite, April 20, 1866, 333. 64 Writing about the very public execution of George Kuhne and four other foreign-born deserters in 1864, Peter Carmichael has noted the striking absence of pejorative reporting on their ethnic identities. See War for the Common Soldier, 195. For the persistence of the trope of the foreigner as deserter see Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics, 29. On discipline in the Union army see Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs; Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand. 65 According to the Shapell Roster, twenty-four Jews served as captains in New York regiments, eleven in Pennsylvania regiments, and nine in Ohio regiments. This despite more than three times as many Jews enlisting in New York than in Pennsylvania. The data is similar for first lieutenants. There were no appreciable differences in the occupational profile of Jewish recruits in New York and Pennsylvania, a potential source of differences in the rate of promotions and appointments. (Professionals, for example, were more likely to receive commissions.) All calculations in this paragraph are derived from Roster data. 66 On losses within the regiment see Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 238. 67 The decision-making process involved in individual cases of promotion and appointment was usually poorly documented, if at all. Dora L. Costa, “Leaders: Privilege, Sacrifice, Opportunity, and Personnel Economics in the American Civil War,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 30, no. 3 (June 2013): 446. Kevin J. Weddle describes “very definite patterns of strong discrimination both in officer appointments and promotions” in Minnesota regiments in “Ethnic Discrimination,” 240, 241n7, 256–257. For claims of the

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underrepresentation of ethnic officers see Horowitz, “Ethnicity and Command,” 188. By contrast, there is clear evidence of barriers to the appointment and promotion of Jewish officers in much of Europe during this same period. See Penslar, Jews and the Military, 84–94. I am not aware of any discussion by Jewish soldiers of superior treatment in the Union Army vis-à-vis European armies. 68 For financial incentives see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 197–204. On “sustaining motivations” see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 12. 69 According to the Shapell Roster, Jewish soldiers in their thirties were significantly more likely to reenlist than those in their twenties and forties. By contrast those who first enlisted as teenagers reenlisted at rates only marginally higher than average. The fidelity of thirtysomethings to the flag may reflect their relative seniority in terms of rank. 70 Jacob R. Marcus, “From Peddler to Regimental Commander in Two Years: The Civil War Career of Major Louis A. Gratz,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38, no. 1 (September 1948): 36. 71 Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 357. See also McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 82; Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 37–42, 204. Data on reenlistment derived from the Shapell Roster. 72 Even this figure is more flattering than it seems. According to data from the Shapell Roster, 449 first enlisted into three-year regiments in 1861. Of these 134 (29.8 percent) reenlisted, but only 43 (9.6 percent) reenlisted in 1864. This suggests that they either chose not to reenlist with their regiments, changed their terms of enlistment prior to 1864, or reenlisted in the last months of the war. The group that returned in greatest proportion for a second stint in uniform comprised those who initially signed up for three months of service in 1861; half mustered back in again at some point in the war. 73 Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 2 (May 2003): 539. Chancellorsville suppressed reenlistment by Germans. See Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 120–121, 134. 74 Jewish Messenger, August 9, 1861, 21. 75 In aggregate there was no significant difference between the willingness of foreigners and the native born to reenlist. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 76 For fraud by bounty brokers see Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 190. For an account of a Jew preying upon a fellow German immigrant and scamming him out of his enlistment bonuses see N. D. Preston, History of the Tenth Regiment of Cavalry New York State Volunteers (New York: D. Appleton, 1892), 437. 77 Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 63, 71, 191. 78 For examples of equivalent actions by Irish soldiers see Keating, Shades of Green, 127. 79 Max Glass letter, April 12, 1864, with Butler’s notations, SC3957, AJA. 80 For the tricking of men like Glass by substitute brokers see Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 191–192. 81 Testimony of Johanna Rosenthal, Moritz Rosenthal case file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, NARA. 82 Report of the Special Examiner, File on Philip Horwitz, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. See also Deposition of William Steinmeyer.

N otes    289 83 See Pula, Sigel Regiment, 47, 49, 78. 84 On the filtering of letters sent home see Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 45. 85 James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47. 86 This figure excludes those who were promoted, returned from a prolonged absence (a period of detached service, convalescence, or desertion), or were reduced in rank (indicating a disciplinary issue), all events that might precipitate assignment to a different company. I could find no comparable data about other groups to confirm whether this rate of transfer was particularly high. Data derived from the Shapell Roster. 87 According to the Shapell Roster, the eighty-six men known to have deserted made up around 5 percent of enlistees confirmed to be Jews. The overall rate of desertion in the Union army is estimated to be closer to 10 percent of all soldiers. See Costa and Kahn, Heroes & Cowards, 13. 88 For a detailed description of the tensions within the regiment, see Timothy M. Burke, The Fifth Ohio Volunteer Cavalry: A Story of Citizen Soldiers, Civil War Politics and Southwest Ohio (Raleigh: Lulu, 2010), 73–75, 87–93. For the charges against Trounstine and his letter of resignation see Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762–1984, Record Group 94, NARA. 89 Salomon’s commission as lieutenant colonel predated Spiegel’s by a week, but the Eighty-second Illinois was initially attached to the Army of the Potomac. Colonel Frederick and the Seventy-Nineth Indiana were in Nashville in December 1862, but attached to the Army of the Cumberland. 90 Marcus Spiegel to Moses Spiegel, December 21, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 198. 91 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 25, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 226. His sentiments were similar to those expressed by some Irish soldiers. See Bruce, “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit,’” 349. 92 Quoted in Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 250. 93 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 25, 1863 and July 4, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 283, 300. 94 Cohen was referring to Grant’s efforts to bypass Vicksburg by diverting the Mississippi. Jewish Messenger, May 22, 1863, 170. 95 Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863, 20. 96 See Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 96, 105–113. 97 On this point see Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 4, 6. 98 Earlier in 1863 the same columnist compared popular prejudice against Jews in Europe with racism in the Union. Harper’s Weekly, March 7, 1863, 146. For the offensive column see August 1, 1863, 482; see also August 22, 1863, 531. 99 See, for example, the editorial in Israelite, August 14, 1863, 53; Occident 22, no. 7 (October 1864): 368; Occident 22, no. 6 (September 1864): 284. 100 Israelite, August 14, 1863, 53. We know of 26 Jews in his battalion. 101 Jewish Messenger, January 16, 1863, 20.

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5. S ACRED DUTIE S 1

Israelite, July 29, 1864, 37. On religious services in the trenches around Petersburg see Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 244–246. For a similar request for a prayer book and phylacteries by a soldier in the field see Jewish Messenger, April 3, 1868, 2.

2

Quotes from Howard Ashton, History and Roster of the Fourth and Fifth Independent Battalions and Thirteenth Regiment Ohio Cavalry Volunteers (Columbus: F. J. Heer, 1902), 15–20.

3

By contrast, the Habsburg and French armies provided religious accommodations that the Union army did not. See Penslar, Jews and the Military, 61–62.

4

See Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 40, 47, 91; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 180–185.

5

Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41.

6 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 90–106, 126, 304; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 208–209. 7

Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 2, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 101.

8

On honor see Lorien Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs.

9

Quoted in Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 217.

10 Some regiments received beer after this date. See Benjaminson, “Regiment of Immigrants,” 163. 11 See Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 32–34, quote from 177n17. 12 On denominational diversity in the army see Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 224. 13 Jewish Messenger, May 22, 1863, 171. 14 See entry for October 5, 1862, Diary of Friedrich August Braeutigam, Civil War Documents Collection, box 13, folder 15, U.S. Army War College Library. 15 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 136–137. 16 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 138–139; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 112–113. On sermons see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 124–125. 17 Quoted in Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 4. 18 Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 66–67. See also McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 63–64, 68. 19 For religious indifference and the estimate of religiously committed soldiers see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 125, 127, 145. For religious revivals see 204–207, 304–305; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, chaps. 10–12. 20 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. 21 Autobiography of Charles Sonnenberg, 40–41, box A4, BC1087 Sonnenberg Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Cape Town. 22 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 238. 23 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, September 6, 1862 Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 161.

N otes    291 24 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 19, 1862; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, November 16, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 48, 48n42, 180. 25 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 145. For a discussion of the theological views of soldiers see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 67–72. 26 Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 30, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 89. On “providential pragmatism” see Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 67. 27 Marcus Spiegel to his mother, February 22, 1863; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 24, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 246–247. 28 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 31, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 323. 29 Autobiography of August Bondi, 72. 30 Autobiography of August Bondi, 133, quotes on 123. 31 See Rabin, Jews on the Frontier, 26–32; Hasia Diner, Roads Taken, 206–209. 32 See Rabin, Jews on the Frontier, 32, for the complicated nature of community and identity among Jews in mid-nineteenth–century America. 33 See Sarna, American Judaism, 118. On folk religion in the Union army see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 62–63. 34 The army supplied considerably more bacon, ham, and salt pork than beef. See Palmer H. Boeger, “Hardtack and Burned Bean,” Civil War History 4, no. 1 (March 1958): 90n45. See also Davis, Taste for War, 23, 45, quote on xiv. 35 Autobiography of August Bondi, 70, 72, 73, 74, 84, 94, 98, 113. 36 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 8, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 54. For his descriptions of eating pork see 39, 43, 92, 154, 166. 37 Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19, no. 3 (July 1964): 280–281. 38 Alexander M. Appel, Reminiscences of Andersonville Prison (privately printed, 1916), 11–12. James Gillespie warns of the unreliability and tendentious nature of prison memoirs such as Appel’s. See James Gillespie, “Prisons,” in A Companion to the U.S. Civil War, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 463. On captivity narratives see also Angela M. Riotto, “Remembering ‘That Dark Episide’: Union and Confederate Ex-Prisoners of War and Their Captivity Narratives,” in The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, ed. Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 122–136. 39 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 19, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 48. 40 Jewish Messenger, June 20, 1862, 185. For a visual depiction of the dietary challenges of the “Hebrew volunteer” see New York Illustrated News, September 9, 1861, 304. 41 Picking up on this theme, a correspondent with the Brooklyn Daily Times suggested that Jews be exempted from the draft because “[p]ork, which constitutes a large part of the army rations, is forbidden to them.” See the Louisville Courier-Journal, September 2, 1862, 1. 42 Zehden, Life and Death of Our Son David, 5, 11, 13. By May 1862, he was no longer enamored of army food (and its paucity).

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43 See Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 32, 44. 44 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 46. 45 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 2, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 54. 46 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 13, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 72. For food sent from home see Boeger, “Hardtack and Burned Bean,” 76, 88. 47 David Michael Delo, Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 103–110; Boeger, “Hardtack and Burned Bean,” 77, 88. For the prescribed list of wares, see Francis A. Lord, Civil War Sutlers and Their Wares (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1969), 39, 67. 48 For the regulations governing sutlers, see War of the Rebellion, series 3, vol. 1: 938–940; David Michael Delo, Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: Kingfisher, 1992), 103– 110. For contemporary descriptions of (and complaints about) sutlers, see William B. Styple, ed., Writing and Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury (Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove, 2000): 50–51, 69–70, 250, 308, 319, 349. 49 The episode, discussed in detail below, is recounted by Joseph A. Joel in “Passover: A Reminiscence of the War,” Jewish Messenger, March 30, 1866, 2. 50 Autobiography of August Bondi, 75, 89. 51 On sharing food and mess culture see Kathryn S. Meier, “‘No Place for the Sick’: Nature’s War on Civil War Soldier Mental and Physical Health in the 1862 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley Campaigns,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 2 (June 2011): 196; Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 42–43. 52 See Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 95–96; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 188. 53 Autobiography of August Bondi, 87–88. 54 Diary of Jacob Lyons, SC7579, AJA. 55 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, September 1, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 163. 56 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 22, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 259. 57 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, September 1, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 163. 58 Israelite, October 17, 1862, 118. 59 See Faust, Mothers of Invention, 196–202. 60 Israelite, October 17, 1862, 118. On the treatment of refugees see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 256 61 Charles H. Smith, The History of Fuller’s Ohio Brigade, 1861–1865 (Cleveland: A. J. Watt, 1909), 133–134. On Union soldiers’ attending church in territory taken from the Confederacy see Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 200–201, 205. 62 Jewish Messenger, June 12, 1863, 195; February 12, 1864, 42–43; Affidavit January 22, 1891, by Jacob Menken, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca. 1861–ca. 1910. 63 Israelite, November 1, 1861, 5. Originally the Fifth Virginia Infantry, the regiment became the Fifth West Virginia after the formation of that state. 64 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, November 22, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 181. 65 Autobiography of August Bondi, 123.

N otes    293 66 This seeking of privacy in the woods is described in accounts of Christian soldiers too. In addition to avoiding mockery, such behavior may have reflected ideas about finding religious communion in nature. See Brett Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). 67 Jewish Messenger, February 7, 1862, 41. This same account described how Dutch Jews formed their own regiments in the Napoleonic Wars, received orders in Hebrew, and, in the case of one soldier, cried out “Shma Israel” before firing lest he shoot a Jew in the enemy’s ranks. By the end of the war, the same newspaper expressed its doubts about the reliability of such stories. See Jewish Messenger, May 19, 1865, 156. 68 The only evidence for Passover celebration comes from Israelite, April 10, 1863, 315. For indications of trouble at the barracks see Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 27 (1863): 463. For evidence of the Levys’ strong identification as Jews, see Israelite, August 14, 1863, 53. See Ferdinand Levy, Simon Levy, and Alfred Levy in the Independent Battalion of Infantry—Les Enfants Perdu in the New York Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, New York State Archives; Special Order 2966, December 6, 1862, Adjutant-General’s Office of the General Headquarters of the State of New York, Adjutant General’s Office, War Department, NARA. 69 See, for example, Jewish Messenger, January 29, 1864, 26. 70 On chapel building see Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 228–229. 71 “An Episode of the War,” Israelite, September 29, 1865, 102. 72 “Passover in Camp: A Reminiscence of War,” Jewish Messenger, March 30, 1866, 2. 73 Curiously, Wolf omitted Joel from his roster. 74 The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, ed. Charles Richard Williams, vol. 2 (Columbus: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, 1922), 208–209, 216. 75 Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, 220, 229; Lucy Hayes to Rutherford Hayes, April 12, 1862, Hayes 2, Hayes Family Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library; The Civil War Memoir of Russell Hastings (1901), Manuscripts Collections, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, chap. 3. 76 Joseph A. Joel to Rutherford B. Hayes, May 21, 1873, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. 77 For Joel’s description of the charge and the destruction it wrought on the Twenty-third Ohio, see Joseph A. Joel and Lewis R. Stegman, Rifle Shots and Bugle Notes (New York: Grand Army Gazette, 1884), 501–502; Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, October 18, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. See also David S. Hartwig, To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 324–325. 78 Joe Grinspan, “‘Sorrowfully Amusing’: The Popular Comedy of the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (September 2011): 314. See also Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 79 Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, 378. 80 See, for example, Joseph A. Joel to Rutherford B. Hayes, August 10, 1877, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. 81 Korn, “Jews of the Union,” 132. 82 Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 110.

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83 Mel Young, Where They Lie (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 124; Albert Isaac Solomovitz, The Fighting Rabbis: Jewish Military Chaplains and American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 21; Sarna, American Judaism, 118. 84 See Israelite, May 12, 1865, 363. It seems plausible that the story of Max’s demise aboard a steamboat drew upon the disaster of the Sultana, which exploded in April 1865. 85 Deposition of Simon Seligmann, Max Samuels case file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veteran, NARA. 86 Zehden, Life and Death of Our Son David, 10. 87 This was also the hometown of August Belmont. Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, September 1, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 163. Spiegel named the officer “Lieutenant Biroker.” 88 Marcus Spiegel to Dear Friend yea Brother, December 14, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 190. 89 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 25, 1863, and February 2, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 230. 90 See his successful efforts to secure discharge of Ezra Sebrell. Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, November 22, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 181. 91 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 17, 1863, and March 24, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 239, 263. 92 Autobiography of August Bondi, 87–88. 93 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, February 2, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 233. 94 Israelite, July 29, 1864, 37. 95 For an example of a Jewish soldier marking the site where a fellow Jew was buried so it can be reinterred later see Jewish Messenger, April 3, 1868, 2. 96 On the “communication grapevine” see Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier, 21. 97 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, September 1, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 163. 98 Jewish Messenger, June 12, 1863, 195; February 12, 1864, 42–43. 99 For equivalent examples of the reassertion of ethnic ties see the friendly reception of the Irish Ninth Connecticut in New Orleans, as well as of the Eighty-second Illinois by the German community in Savannah. Keating, Shades of Green, 100–101; Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 169–171. 100 Reinhart, Yankee Dutchmen under Fire, 154, 156, 160–161, 164. For the regiment’s sojourn in Atlanta see Dluger, “A Regimental Community,” 343–347. 101 Autobiography of August Bondi, 107. 102 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, May 2, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 106. 103 See Mushkat, Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War, 26. 104 Marcus Spiegel to Moses Joseph, December 21, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 202. 105 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 25, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 227. 106 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, April 23, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 331.

N otes    295 107 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, April 23, 1864, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 331. 108 See Jonathan M. Berkey, “In the Very Midst of the War Track: The Valley’s Civilians and the Shenandoah Campaign,” in The Shenandoah Campaign of 1862, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 88–89, 100, 108. On the pragmatism of Southern civilians under occupation see Judkin Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). On the destructiveness of Civil War armies see Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 109 Berkey, “In the Very Midst of the War Track,” 95–98. 110 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, January 9, 1862, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 24–25. 111 Autobiography of August Bondi, 115, 120. 112 Autobiography of August Bondi, 133. 113 See Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 14, 18; Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” 43–44. On the military chaplaincy for Jews in European armies see Penslar, Jews and the Military, 64–66. 114 See Scott D. Pickard, “Co-Workers in the Field of Souls: The Civil War Partnership between Union Chaplains and the U.S. Christian Commission, 1861–1865” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2013); Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 160–164; James O. Henry, “The United States Christian Commission in the Civil War,” Civil War History 6, no. 4 (December 1960): 374–388. 115 For the comparison with sutlers see Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” 28. 116 Autobiography of August Bondi, 82, 101. 117 On criticism of chaplains see Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying, 55–59; Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 112, 116–119; Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” 17, 28–30. 118 Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 90. 119 On the statute and efforts to have it changed see Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 100–110. 120 See Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” 45. For a persuasive explanation see Randall M. Miller, “Catholic Religion, Irish Ethnicity, and the Civil War,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 265–266. 121 See Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 107–111; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 150; quotes from 147–148. 122 On the ill-defined role of the chaplain see Quimby, “Chaplain’s Predicament,” 25–37; Maryniak, “Union Military Chaplains,” 5; Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 114. 123 D. de Sola Poole, “The Diary of Chaplain Michael M. Allen, September 1861,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 39, no. 2 (December 1949). 124 By comparison, a conscientious chaplain “would preach several times a week or at least hold prayer meetings in between Sabbath services.” See Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 119. 125 Journal of Mr. M. Allen, Michael Mitchell Allen Papers, SC203, AJA. 126 See clauses 1 to 3 of the Constitution and By-Laws of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, box 1, folder 3, Records of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, AJHS.

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127 Pickard, “Co-Workers in the Field of Souls,” 102–108. 128 On Fischel and the Board of Delegates see Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 105–107. 129 Myer S. Isaacs to Arnold Fischel, November 29, 1861; Myer Isaacs to Arnold Fischel, December 6, 1861; Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, January 2, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS; Buffalo Commercial, December 13, 1861, 2; National Republican, December 13, 1861, 2. 130 Correspondence to Joseph Abraham, December 19, 1861, box 2, folder 13, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 131 Occident 20, no. 5 (August 1, 1862): 215. 132 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, December 13, 1861, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 133 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, December 27, 1861, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 134 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, January 2, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. On the mass availability of Christian Bibles among the troops see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 130–131; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 166–167. 135 Unsurprisingly, Fischel’s reports reveal all the signs of his eagerness to ensure that his position became permanent. Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, December 20, 1861, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 136 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, December 27, 1861; January 2, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 137 Pickard, “Co-Workers in the Field of Souls,” 108–109. 138 Jewish Messenger, January 24, 1862, 23. 139 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, April 3, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 140 See, for example, Isaac Mayer Wise’s fulminations in Israelite, October 10, 1862. 141 See Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 167, 170, 179–180; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 162. 142 Israelite, November 1, 1861, 5. Korn identifies the visitor as Herman Kuhn. 143 Jewish Messenger, January 19, 1866, 2. 144 Max L. Rossvally recorded his life story in A Sketch of the Life and Conversion of a Jew (New York: James Huggins, 1876). The account is an unreliable guide to a particularly checkered career. 145 Correspondence from Arnold Fischel to the Board of Delegates, March 10, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 146 Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 3–5. 147 In June 1862, 395 out of the 676 regiments in the Union army had chaplains. Cited in Woodworth, While God Is Marching On, 148; see also Rollin W. Quimby, “The Chaplain’s Predicament,” Civil War History 8, no. 1 (March 1962): 30. 148 Isaac Leeser to Abraham Lincoln, August 21, 1862, Abraham Lincoln papers: Series 1, NARA.

N otes    297 149 See Jacob Frankel to Julius P. Garesche, September 18, 1862, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA. For a detailed description of his appointment, see Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 107–109 and Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 91–95. 150 Jacob Frankel to Abraham Lincoln, July 6, 1864, F337 Frankel, Jacob, Letters Received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1863–1870, NARA; William Hammond to the Adjutant General, April 20, 1863, S286, Letters Received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1863– 1870; Jacob Frankel to the Adjutant General, July 13, 1864, Jacob Frankel to the Adjutant General, August 18, 1864, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA. For a complaint lodged against Frankel see Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, xx. For general criticism of hospital chaplains along these same lines see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 173. On the duties of a hospital chaplain see Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying, 36–41. 151 Occident 20, no. 7 (October 1862): 327. Some volunteered their names in order to solicit support. See for example Charleston Martin, of Company D of the Fourth New Hampshire, who wrote to the Jewish Messenger (June 24, 1864, 190) to alert readers that he was at Macon House Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia: “Disabled by serious wounds received in recent battles. He writes us to bring his case to the notice of our readers. Any contributions for his benefit may be sent to our charge, and will be promptly forwarded.” 152 Henry I. Hart and Myer J. Isaacs to Abraham Lincoln, October 6, 1862; Thomas F. Perley to William A. Hammond, October 27, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LOC. 153 See Robert Mallory to John Nicolay, March 30, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, LOC; Israelite, June 10, 1864: 397; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 97–98. During the public campaign to persuade Congress to broaden the statute so as to allow for the appointment of Jewish military chaplains, Gotthelf wrote a public letter calling for the law to be changed. He was also in contact with Mallory about this issue. For his public letter see Louisville Courier-Journal, January 13, 1862, 3. For his contact with Mallory see Cincinnati Enquirer, January 20, 1862, 3. 154 Memorandum of Papers in Case of Rev. Bernhard Henry Gotthelf Late Hospital Chaplain, G497 Gotthelf, Bernhard Henry, Letters Received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1863–1870, NARA. 155 Bernhard Gotthelf to the Adjutant General, June 30, 1864, G341, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA. 156 Bernhard Gotthelf to the Adjutant General, June 30, 1864, G341, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA. 157 Bernhard Gotthelf to the Adjutant General, May 31, 1864, G284, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA. 158 Bernhard Gotthelf to the Adjutant General, May 31, 1864, G284; Gotthelf to Joseph Barnes, December 15, 1864, G846, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, NARA; Israelite, May 15, 1863, 357. Louisville had a substantial German population in 1860. See Joseph R. Reinhart, “Louisville’s Germans in the Civil War Era,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 117, nos. 3&4 (Autumn 2019): 437, 443. 159 M. Goldsmith to N. H. Hammond, June 16, 1863; Bernhard Gotthelf to Joseph Barnes, April 1, 1865, Gotthelf to Barnes, May 31, 1865, Bernhard H. Gotthelf papers, MS248, box 1, folder 6, AJA; Israelite, January 20, 1865, 237; Israelite, February 17, 1865, 269. 160 Hospital and regimental chaplains were paid at the same rate as captains. 161 Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 175–176.

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162 Israelite, September 23, 1859, 94; May 4, 1860, 347; Jewish Messenger, June 8, 1860, 173; May 11, 1861, 141. Sarner’s career is described, with some errors, by Korn in American Jewry and the Civil War, 99–103. 163 Shreveport Daily News, May 2, 1861, 3; October 30, 1861, 1; Israelite, February 22, 1861, 270; The SouthWestern, June 1, 1870, 2; Shreveport Semi-Weekly News, July 8, 1861, 1. 164 Israelite, November 1, 1861, 141; Reading Times (PA), July 4, 1862, 2; Hartford Courant, July 30, 1862, 2. 165 See War Department General Orders 126 (1862): 3. 166 See Regimental Diary of Colonel Eugene A. Kozlay, January 11, 1862, https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/ civil/infantry/Inf/54thInfKozlayJournal2.htm. 167 Israelite, May 1, 1863, 338. 168 Israelite, May 1, 1863, 341. 169 On the Fifty-fourth at Chancellorsville see Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 52, 56–58. 170 See Harry W. Pfanz, Gettysburg: The First Day (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 231–232. Korn suggests that Sarner was wounded at Gettysburg, but his sources are unreliable. The Jewish Record reported the injury six months after the battle, and the Archives Israelite almost certainly confused Sarner for Edward Salomon. See Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 101. 171 Congress required these reports from April 1864. See Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 14, 17–19. 172 Ferdinand Sarner to the Adjutant General, May 31, 1864, S1111; June 30, 1864, S1347, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, Main Series, 1861–1870, M619, NARA. 173 Regimental Diary of Colonel Eugene A. Kozlay, August 1, 1864, https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/ infantry/54thInf/54thInfKozlayJournal2.htm. 174 See Regimental Diary of Colonel Eugene A. Kozlay, January 11, 1862, https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/ civil/infantry/54thInf/54thInfKozlayJournal2.htm. 175 Special Orders 384, War Department, November 4, 1864; Special Orders 63, Headquarters of the Army, March 18, 1869; Regimental Diary of Colonel Eugene A. Kozlay, September 9, 1864. 176 Israelite, January 27, 1865, 244; February 17, 1865, 269. On frauds of this kind see Marten, Sing Not War, 221. 177 See, for example, Jewish Messenger, June 26, 1863, 211. On home-front voluntarism see Rable, God’s Almost Chosen People, 210–215, 219–220. 178 For the claim that Kuhne was Hungarian see Jewish Messenger, September 4, 1863, 69. This may explain why Szold was selected to attend to the prisoner. 179 J. Gregory Acken, ed., Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson (Lanham, MD: Stackpole Books, 2017), 324. For desertion rates see Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand, 220 180 File MM687, George Kuhne, Proceedings of U.S. Army Courts-Martial and Military Commissions of Union Soldiers Executed by U.S. Military Authorities, 1861–1866. Record Group 153: Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), 1792–2010, NARA.

N otes    299 181 Until March 1863, military regulations required that the president confirm all death sentences. Thereafter approval could be granted by the general commanding the army or the commander of the district where the court-martial took place. See Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand, 253. 182 Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac, 332. 183 On executions see Chris Walsh, “‘Cowardice Weakness or Infirmity, Whichever It May be Termed’: A Shadow History of the Civil War,” Civil War History 59, no. 4 (December 2013): 518; Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand, 368–384. On attitudes to bounty jumpers see Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand, 258–261, 373– 374. For attitudes in this case see Antietam to Appomattox with 118th Penna. Vols., Corn Exchange Regiment (Philadelphia: J. L. Smith, 1892), 296. 184 Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac, 333. 185 Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac, 333–335. 186 Jewish Record, September 4, 1863, 2, cited in Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 130. No extant copy of this issue of the newspaper could be found. 187 Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac., 333–335. The scene, and reactions to it, are described in detail by Peter S. Carmichael in War for the Common Soldier, 190–196, though he misidentifies Kuhne. For another evocative retelling see Sarna and Shapell, Lincoln and the Jews, 152–156. Korn claims that Szold met Kuhne prior to the execution and then traveled to Washington to personally seek an audience with Lincoln, but there is no evidence to support this. See Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 129–130. 188 Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac, 336. 189 Occident 23, no. 5 (August 1865): 234. 190 Lawrence A. Forman, “Congregational Life during the Civil War as Reflected in the Following Minute Books 1861–1865: Temple Emanuel, New York; Baltimore Hebrew Congregation; Anshe Chesed Congregation, New York,” Hebrew Union College term paper, n.d., 32. 191 “[W]hy,” Leeser continued, “are tears shed for the sufferings of the African in bondage, by which his moral condition has been immensely improved, in spite of all that may be alleged to the contrary, whereas for the Hebrews everyone has words of contempt or violence?” Occident 20, no. 11 (February 1863): 498–499. For Leeser’s views on slavery see Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 221–222. 192 Occident 23, no. 5 (August 1865): 234. 193 Zehden, Life and Death of Our Son David, 15–16 194 Zehden, Life and Death of Our Son David, 19. 195 Zehden, Life and Death of Our Son David, 21–22. Leberman and the synagogue were anxious to recoup the cost of the burial and sought to claim against pay owed to Zehden. 196 Israelite, December 4, 1863, 179. 197 Israelite, November 11, 1864, 157; Fedora Small Frank, “Nashville Jewry during the Civil War,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 320. The soldier is not named in the Israelite. 198 Jewish Messenger, January 19, 1866, 2. 199 On the good death see Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 6–9. For the effects of sun, neglect, and decay on corpses after battles see 66–68.

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200 Israelite, January 30, 1863: 234. 201 Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, March 24, 1863, Spiegel, Jewish Colonel in the Civil War, 263. On the efforts of families to recover their loved ones see Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 85, 89. 202 Jewish Messenger, January 24, 1862, 23–24. 203 Jewish Messenger, February 24, 1865, 58. On Jews in Washington during the war see Robert Shosteck, “The Jewish Community of Washington, D.C., during the Civil War,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (March 1967): 319–347 and Laura Cohen Apelbaum and Claire Uziel, Jewish Life in Mr. Lincoln’s City (Washington, DC: Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, 2009); Marc Lee Raphael, Towards a ‘National Shrine’: A Centennial History of Washington Hebrew Congregation, 1855–1955 (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2005). 204 See, for example, Israelite, November 1, 1861, 5. 205 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, December 27, 1861, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. The soldier is not named in the letter. 206 Correspondence from Arnold Fischel, January 8, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 207 This was not an idle concern. Of the seventy-six Jewish Union soldiers identified by the Shapell Roster as having died during the war, the burial location of twenty-one is listed as unknown. 208 Arnold Fischel to Henry I. Hart, April 3, 1862, box 2, folder 5, Board of Delegates of American Israelites Records, AJHS. 209 See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 61–101; Michael C. C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 100–103. 210 “The Jews of the Union,” American Jewish Archives 13, no. 2, American Jewish Archives (November 1961): 188. 211 See August Willich to Captain H. Clay, January 9, 1862, Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers, Adjutant General’s Office, NARA; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, December 22, 1861, 2. On this engagement see Joseph R. Reinhart, ed. and trans., August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 42–51. 212 Jewish Messenger, January 30, 1863, 13, 4, 37; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 27 (1863): 199. 213 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 27 (1863): 463–464; New York, Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, 1861–1900. 214 Israelite, October 31, 1862, 131; Exhibit A, Testimony of Minnie Ullman, Testimony of Louis Eppinger, Louis Reitler case file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 215 Jewish Messenger, June 6, 1862, 11, 21, 168; Pittsburgh Daily Post, May 16, 1862, 3. 216 Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 3, 1861, 3; Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 1861, 2. 217 Autobiography of Charles Sonnenberg, 52, 54. 218 Indiana Weekly Messenger, May 21, 1862, 1.

N otes    301 219 Autobiography of Charles Sonnenberg, 54, 56. Sonnenberg recalled, “Two days afterwards his wife arrived, had the body exhumed and took it back with her to Pennsylvania.” Instead the corpse seems to have been retrieved later. Sonnenberg was soon habituated to the sights of the battlefield. He describes sleeping among corpses later that month. 220 Jewish Messenger, May 16, 1862, 11, 18, 144; New York, Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, 1861–1900. The CMSR lists him as Abram (and Abraham) D. Ancona, while the Jewish Messenger indicates D’Ancona. 221 These figures are drawn from the Shapell Roster. 6. LO ST A N D F OUN D 1

Robert Shosteck, who relied on Karpeles’s daughter for this and other information of dubious reliability— they corresponded in 1959, when she was 92—indicates that Karpeles arrived in 1849. This is contradicted by his naturalization records. Shosteck’s article has formed the basis of several later accounts. For Shosteck’s article see “Leopold Karpeles: Civil War Hero,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (March 1963). For Shostek’s correspondence with Theresa Karpeles Taussig see SC06136, AJA. For claims of his prewar adventures see, for example, Washington, DC, Evening Star, February 24, 1909, 8; Washington Post, February 24, 1909, 11; Allen Mikaelian, Medal of Honor: Profiles of America’s Military Heroes from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 23–25; handwritten manuscript attributed to Theresa Karpeles Taussig, Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association. For Karpeles’s account of his military service see his affidavit of February 6, 1880, in the Leopold Karpeles file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veteran, NARA. For his naturalization records, see Declaration of Leopold Karpeles, August 12, 1858, New York, State and Federal Naturalization Records, 1794–1943, Ancestry.com. For the phenomenon of claiming an abolitionist past see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 232–234.

2

For his passport application in March 1861 see U.S. Passport Applications, 1795–1925, Ancestry.com For his return to New York see New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (Including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957, Ancestry.com.

3

See Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 157–161.

4

Quoted in Mikaelian, Medal of Honor, 28.

5

Bartlett quoted in John Anderson, The Fifty-seventh Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Boston: E. B. Stillings, 1896), 49.

6 Fox, Regimental Losses, 175. 7

Karpeles quoted in Anderson, Fifty-seventh Regiment, 38. Anderson’s account makes clear that the regiment was not involved in the earlier assault on Hill’s corps, and only moved into position once Longstreet’s troops counterattacked and pushed Hancock’s corps into retreat.

8

Leopold Karpeles to Major General Edward D. Townsend, April 18, 1870, reprinted in Shostek, “Leopold Karpeles,” 225–226.

9

See Gordon C. Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 363–366, for quote (from Brigadier General Alex Webb) and hunting bluecoats for sport see 366; Report of Alex S. Webb, War of the Rebellion, 36, pt. 1: 437–438.

10 See Anderson, Fifty-seventh Regiment. Ward quoted on 38, McFarland on 39.

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11 See Anderson, Fifty-seventh Regiment, 37, 101. See also John Anderson to Leopold Karpeles, June 1, 1888, Leopold Karpeles file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications, NARA; Shostek, “Leopold Karpeles,” 228. On the importance attached by veterans to recalling the details of past battles see Blight, Race and Reunion, 186–187; Jonathan A. Noyalas, “‘It Is Natural That Each Comrade Should Think His Corps the Best’: Sheridan’s Veterans Refight the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign,” in The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, ed. Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press) 157–172. 12 Anderson, Fifty-seventh Regiment, 104–105; Fox, Regimental Losses, 175. 13 The family was newly settled in the city; they arrived from Hanover in September 1863. Simon’s son Louis, served in the militia for three months in 1861. See Baltimore, Passenger Lists, 1820–1964, Ancestry. com. On Karpeles’s injuries and recuperation see Leopold Karpeles file, Compiled Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Massachusetts, RG94-CMSRMA-57INF-Bx3393, NARA; affidavit of February 6, 1880, and Certificate of Disability for Discharge in the Leopold Karpeles file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications, NARA. 14 Journal of the House of Representative of the United States, United States Congressional serial set, vol. 1410, July 5, 1870, 1144; Journal of the House of Representative of the United States, United States Congressional serial set, vol. 2367, May 24, 1886: 1692. 15 For the letters see Shostek, “Leopold Karpeles,” 228. 16 See Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 100–101, 120–125; Adam Mendelsohn, “Before Korn: A Century of Jewish Historical Writing about the American Civil War,” in Jews and the Civil War, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1–26. 17 For Salomon’s appointment see Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, 89–92, quote on 89. Wise presented the appointment as vindication: “The appointment shows that President Grant has revoked General Grant’s notorious order No. 11, exactly as we stated, on good authority, he would.” Israelite, January 14, 1870, 10. See also Jewish Messenger, March 18, 1870, 2; May 13, 1870, 2. 18 Jewish Messenger, August 16, 1867, 4; May 23, 1884, 6. For popular prejudice against veterans see Marten, Sing Not War, 18–20. On coverage of veterans in the general press see Larry M. Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 89. 19 Marten, Sing Not War, 29. 20 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 164–165. 21 This reticence did not extend to all wars and all soldiers. American Jewish newspapers were fascinated by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. 22 Not all agree with the conventional view that newly demobilized Union veterans “showed little inclination to dwell on the war” and entered a period of “hibernation” when it came to speaking and reflecting on the war. For a contrasting position see Brian Matthew Jordan, “‘Our Work Is Not Yet Finished’: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, 1865–1872,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 4 (December 2015): 484– 503. For quotes see McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 20; Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 266. 23 Rosa Mordecai speculated that his devotion to the Confederacy shortened his life. She also indicated that Leeser heard the news on April 9, 1865, incorrectly indicating that this was the first night of Passover. See Rosa Mordecai, “Reminiscences,” 20, LSTCAT item 76, Gershwind-Bennett Isaac Leeser Digitization Project.

N otes    303 24 Occident 23, no. 7 (October 1865): 317–318. 25 See Adam Mendelsohn, “Abraham Lincoln the Jew,” Forward, November 22, 2012, https://forward.com/ opinion/166698/abraham-lincoln-the-jew/. Isaac Leeser could muster only modest praise for Lincoln, lauding the president’s “goodness of heart” and “sense of justice.” Occident 23, no. 3 (June 1865): 118–119. 26 Israelite, September 13, 1867, 6; November 22, 1867, 6; November 29, 1867, 2; December 13, 1867, 6; December 20, 1867, 2; May 22, 1868, 2; Der Israelit 9 (1868): 95. Even if the money had been successfully raised, the project may have been stymied by a want of bodies. Of the seventy-six Jewish Union soldiers listed in the Shapell Roster as having died during the war (killed in action or died of wounds or other causes), twenty-four died in the Western Theater. On reburial see Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 219– 238, Blight, Race and Reunion, 68. 27 Israelite, November 27, 1868, 6; December 4, 1868, 4; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 33 (1869): 92. 28 On the erection of monuments during and immediately after the war see Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), chap. 1. On General Orders No. 11 in the 1868 election see Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, 50–79. 29 This statement may have been intended to signal disapproval of radical Reconstruction, another subject that the Jewish press studiously avoided. Jewish Messenger, June 4, 1869, 4. On voices calling for reconciliation in the political sphere at this time see Blight, Race and Reunion, chap. 2. On reconciliation “as a method of forgetting” see 96. On the emergence of Decoration Day as a ritual see 71–76. 30 Isaac Mayer Wise, for example, disapproved of Decoration Day as “a semi-political cheap picnic.” Israelite, June 6, 1873: 6. See also Jewish Messenger, December 6, 1867, 1; May 28, 1875, 1; June 4, 1880, 4; Occident 24, no. 5 (August 1866) 239. For quote see Jewish Messenger, June 1, 1877, 4. 31 On the New Era see Sarna, American Judaism, 124. On “go ahead” see Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 84–92. 32 London Jewish Chronicle, April 7, 1865, 1–2; July 21, 1865, 5–6; Jewish Messenger, August 4, 1865, 36. 33 Lawrence Lippman, the vice-president of the club, addressed the members on October 22, 1865. Savannah Harmonie Club Minutes, 1865–1876, microfilm AJA. 34 Israelite, June 28, 1872, 8; June 6, 1873, 2. 35 Israelite, July 31, 1868, 2; Israelite, June 14, 1872, 8. 36 On Differences see Keely, “Reform Judaism, Reconciliation Romance, and the Civil War,” 265–286. On reconciliation romances see Blight, Race and Reunion, 151, 216–217. 37 On the rise of the notion that “devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong” see Blight, Race and Reunion. Quote on 4. For the popularity of poetry with similar themes see 84–85. 38 Jewish Messenger, August 4, 1865, 36. 39 Occident 24, no. 7 (October 1865): 313–319. 40 London Jewish Chronicle, April 28, 1865, 1–2. 41 Jewish Messenger, September 16, 1864, 84. 42 On the manifestation of prejudice in the postwar period see Naomi W. Cohen, “Antisemitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” Jewish Social Studies 41, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn 1979): 187–210.

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43 New York Herald, July 31, 1865, 2. 44 Jewish Messenger, August 4, 1865, 36. 45 Jewish Messenger, November 13, 1868, 4. For the push for a “Christian America” and sentiment toward Jews and other religious outsiders see Brodrecht, Our Country, chap. 6. 46 On military service as currency in emancipation debates in Europe see Penslar, Jews and the Military, 36–37, 53. For evidence of how the Irish and African Americans used their record of service to lay claim to national citizenship rights see Christian Samito, Becoming Americans under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), chaps. 6–7; Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 370–371; Erik Mathisen, The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Brian Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship, 131, 149. On how loyalty and service became central to the concept of citizenship during the war see Mathisen, Loyal Republic. 47 Relatively little work has been done on the economic effects of the war on foreign-born soldiers. See Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries, 227, 279n6. 48 On this point see Chulhee Lee, “Health, Information, and Migration: Geographic Mobility of Union Army Veterans, 1860–1880,” Journal of Economic History 68, no. 3 (2008): 862–899. 49 Jacob R. Marcus, “From Peddler to Regimental Commander in Two Years: The Civil War Career of Major Louis A. Gratz,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38, no. 1 (September 1948): 39. 50 Marcus, “From Peddler to Regimental Commander in Two Years,” 22–44. 51 Indianapolis Journal, June 15, 1901, 12; Indianapolis News, June 15, 1901, 6. 52 Certificate of Disability for Discharge, January 20, 1863; Schoenfeld to General P. Guthrie, September 4, 1885; Deposition A, Case of Julius Schoenfeld, April 16, 1894; Deposition C, Case of Julius Schoenfeld, March 12, 1894; Investigators Report of April 17, 1894; Investigators Report of January 2, 1895; General Affidavit of Everett W. Anderson, February 12, 1900; Deposition A, Case of Julius Schoenfeld, April 29, 1901, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Veterans, NARA. 53 For the high rate of geographical mobility among all Federal veterans see Earl J. Hess, “The Early Indicators Project: Using Massive Data and Statistical Analysis to Understand the Life Cycle of Civil War Soldiers,” Civil War History 63, no. 4 (December 2017): 386; Marten, Sing Not War, 55. For mobility among Irish veterans see Keating, Shades of Green, 196. 54 Jewish Messenger, June 12, 1863, 195; February 12, 1864, 42–43; Affidavit January 22, 1891, by Jacob Menken, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca. 1861–ca. 1910. 55 Catalfamo, “Thorny Rose,” 386. 56 Others include David Bachrach, Phillip Haas, Gustave Moses, Cornelius Levy, Leon Solis-Cohen, Theo Lilienthal, and Adolphus Solomons. 57 Vicksburg Evening Post, December 14, 1893, 4. See Stark County Democrat (Canton, OH), March 8, 1877, 5, for indication that his business may have been part of a broader family enterprise. 58 Wendy Machlowitz, ed., Clara Lowenburg Moses: Memoirs of a Southern Jewish Woman (Jackson, MS: Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, 2000), 9, 43; Aaron D. Anderson, Builders of a New South

N otes    305 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 75, 77–79, 82–90; Leo Turitz and Evelyn Turitz, Jews in Early Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 16; Stuart Wayne, “Ante-Bellum Planters in the Post-Bellum South: The Natchez District, 1860–1880” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1979), 250. 59 See Michael R. Cohen, Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 60 New-York Tribune, November 18, 1918, 9; Indianapolis Star, February 1, 1919, 31; Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1895, 1; June 5, 1895, 7; Peter Caldwell, “Amalgamation or Trust: Anglo-Scottish and American Comparative Legal Institutions and How They Shaped the Nations’ Whiskey Industries, 1870–1900,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 481–486. 61 See Marten, Sing Not War, 54. 62 See Mendelsohn, Rag Race, 180–203. For patterns of economic mobility among all Union veterans see Chulhee Lee, “Military Positions and Post-service Occupational Mobility of Union Army Veterans, 1861– 1880,” Explorations in Economic History 44 (2007): 68–698. 63 Quote from Joseph A. Joel to Rutherford Hayes, December 22, 1869. For his appeal for assistance winning reinstatement see Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, August 16, 1871, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. 64 Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, June 21, 1871, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. 65 J. A. Joel Advertising Card; Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, April 5, 1873; Joseph A. Joel to R. B. Hayes, May 21, 1873, Joseph A. Joel Papers. On his role in the GAR see Summit County Beacon (Akron, OH), May 26, 1875, 3. Once Hayes was president, Joel sought appointment as consul in Melbourne. See Abstract of Letters Received by the President of the United States, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. On the “commodification of veterans and veteranhood” see Marten, Sing Not War, chap. 3 and for veterans’ newspapers see, 147–152. 66 Autobiography of August Bondi, 123–134. 67 Newman served in the Sixty-sixth New York Infantry. Declaration for Original Invalid Pension, May 23, 1881; Abraham Newman to William Dudley, 1881; Abraham Newman to William Dudley, August 11, 1882; Fanny Newman to Commissioner Baum, March 21, 1892; Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. His interpretations were not far wrong. For impact of pensions see Earl J. Hess, “Early Indicators Project,” 394. 68 Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veteran, NARA. On political and social arguments around the pension system see Marten, Sing Not War, chap. 5. On discrimination against foreign-born pension applicants see Blanck and Song, “‘With Malice toward None, with Charity toward All,’” 54–69. They present evidence that German-born pension applicants were 19.09 percent less likely to receive a pension than were native-born applicants. On discrimination against Black pension applicants see Donald R. Shaffer, “I Do Not Suppose That Uncle Sam Looks at the Skin,” Civil War History 46, no. 2 (2002): 132–147. 69 On disability among veterans see Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness, and Suicide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Marten, Sing Not War, chap. 2. 70 Der Israelit 7 (1866): 301. 71 Jewish Messenger, January 8, 1869, 2.

306    N otes

72 Jewish Messenger, November 4, 1870, 6. 73 Leopold Blumenberg Papers, SC1143, AJA. 74 Hirsch served in the Seventy-first New York Infantry. Louis Light file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 75 Louise Joel to Rutherford B. Hayes, January 28, 1891, Joseph A. Joel Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. 76 File of Robert Hess, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 77 See, for example, the case files of Simon Green and Camillus Nathans, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, NARA. 78 Robert Shosteck, “Leopold Karpeles: Civil War Hero,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (March 1963): 231. 79 New York Herald, November 18, 1918, 7. On the place of these halls in civic life see Jonathan D. Neu, “A Building Very Useful: The Grand Army Memorial Hall in US Civic Life, 1880–1920,” in War Went On, 170–190. 80 Deposition D, Philip Horwitz case file, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents, NARA. 81 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 54–55, 71, 222; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 155–156; Bruce, Harp and the Eagle, 236. 82 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 79. On the “limited involvement” of Irish Americans in the GAR, and “tensions between the GAR leadership and Irish-American veterans” see Bruce, Harp and the Eagle, 234–236. 83 The Claflin Post was formed in 1888. See New York Evening World, May 15, 1888, 3. 84 Isidor Eisenstaedt speech, January 10, 1097, SC-3152, AJA. 85 The title Union Veterans Hebrew Association was confirmed at a meeting on April 19, 1896, but the organization became known as the Hebrew Union Veterans Association. Very little has been written about HUVA. For a rare exception see Joseph S. Topek, “Jewish Veterans Badges of the Civil War,” JOMSA 65, no. 2 (March–April 2014): 31–34. 86 Minutes of the Hebrew Union Veterans Association, May 3, 1896, National Museum of American Jewish Military History (hereafter HUVA minutes). For evidence of other branches’ holding commemorative services at synagogues see McConnell, Glorious Contentment, chap. 3, n66. 87 Jewish Messenger, May 29, 1896, 4. 88 American Hebrew, April 17, 1896, 699. The letter is signed “An Old U.S. Soldier.” 89 HUVA minutes, May 25, 1896. In 1896, Simon Wolf volunteered to travel from Washington to give a talk to “convince the audience that there is nothing incompatible with good citizenship and an American soldier of Jewish faith.” 90 See, for example, New Orleans Times-Democrat, December 11, 1864, 8; Jewish Messenger, July 24, 1868, 5; December 18, 1891, 2. Wolf was not the first to give serious attention to Jewish soldiers during the war— Isaac Schwab did so in 1878, also in response to Goldwin Smith!—but those few pages received little of the attention and traction of Wolf’s 1895 book. See Isaac Schwab, Can Jews Be Patriots? An Historical Study (New York: Industrial School of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 1878), 33–36.

N otes    307 91 See, for example, Jewish Messenger, June 5, 1896, 3; March 12, 1897, 6. 92 During the war the Mack family firm entered into a partnership with Jesse R. Grant to trade in cotton (and to trade off his connections with his son, the general). Jesse’s arrival at his Mississippi headquarters, accompanied by the Macks, may have been the proximate cause of the issuing of General Orders No. 11. See Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, 47–48. 93 Jonathan D. Sarna describes this phenomenon as seeking “legitimation in history.” See “‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” 70, quote on 73. For a similar process among Irish Americans see Bruce, Harp and Eagle, 257–258. 94 New York Sun, May 8, 1905, 12; Jewish Messenger, December 22, 1899, 6; HUVA minutes, January 7, 1900; HUVA minutes, September 4, 1904. 95 Nathan Straus made the point more bluntly in his speech when he described how “the Jewish population furnished one brave soldier to every twenty-nine persons of its entire population” during the Civil War. American Hebrew, May 12, 1905, 762. 96 On Greenhut’s role in the memorial at Gettysburg see New York Herald, November 18, 1918, 7; Illinois Monuments at Gettysburg, ed. John L. Beveridge, David B. Vaughan, and Joseph B. Greenhut (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1892). On battlefield monuments see Timothy B. Smith, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008). On memoirs and reminiscences see Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 160. On visits to the battlefields see 185–190. On the growth of the GAR in the 1880s and their increasing assertiveness in the 1890s see Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). On memory in the 1890s see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Blight, Race and Reunion, chap. 6. On the appeal of Civil War gallantry in “an age increasingly characterized by cynical politics, amoral machines, and the impersonal leviathan of industrialization” see Blight, Race and Reunion, 89 (for quote), 95, 129, 208–211. 97 On the sensitivity of self-nomination see Washington Sunday Herald, July 13, 1890, 7. On the Medal of Honor, see G. Kurt Piehler, ed., The Encyclopedia of Military Science (Los Angeles: Sage Reference, 2013), 455–456. 98 Washington Sunday Herald, July 6, 1890, 7; The Story of American Heroism: Thrilling Narratives of Personal Adventures during the Great Civil War, as Told by the Medal Winners and Roll of Honor Men (Springfield, OR: J. W. Jones, 1897), 383. 99 Washington Sunday Herald, July 13, 1890, 7. 100 Tellingly, Karpeles went unmentioned in the chapter that Isaac Markens devoted to Jewish soldiers in The Hebrews in America, the chronicle of noteworthy American Jews that he self-published in 1888. 101 Wolf, American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, 106, 204–206. 102 Blumenberg and Salomon were breveted as brigadier generals. Blumenberg, who served as a major until his discharge in May 1863, was brevetted in 1869 for “gallant and meritorious services during the war” (with the appointment dated to March 1865). For Blumenberg’s wound see Surgeon Certificate for sick leave, February 20, 1863, Leopold Blumenberg file, Compiled military service records of volunteer Union soldiers belonging to units organized for service from the State of Maryland, NARA 384. For Wolf quotes see American Israelite, October 28, 1915, 4. Wolf was describing the grand review held in Washington at the end of the war, and identifies Blumenberg, Salomon, Karpeles, and Greenhut as participants. Salomon and Blumberg were described as generals, not as brevet brigadier generals.

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103 See War Diary of Capt. Robert Emory Park, Twelfth Alabama Regiment. January 28th, 1863–January 27th, 1864, Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 26, 1898; Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 90. 104 Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 148–155; Gleeson, “Ethnicity,” 765–766, 772. 105 Washington Sunday Herald, August 31, 1890, 4. 106 In an essay published in 1899, Twain noted the “unpatriotic disinclination [of the Jew] to stand by the flag as a soldier.” He later recanted by adding a postscript that sought to counter the “common reproach” of Jewish disloyalty by referencing “figures from the War Department.” See Mark Twain, “Concerning the Jews,” Harper’s Monthly, September 1899, 530. 107 For quote see Blight, Race and Reunion, 95. As the Civil War as a foil for the present, see 208–210, 222. 108 Blight, Race and Reunion, 9. 109 David Gerber, for example, argued that “the brief Civil War experience of Jew-baiting by public official failed to survive the war, and analysis of the development of ideological anti-Semitism and its political manifestations and of the breakdown of the usual moral, political, and cultural sanctions against the acceptance of anti-Semitic views among growing sectors of the population is best restricted to the period 1890 to 1950.” “Anti-Semitism and Jewish Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 29. See also Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 260. Similarly, John Higham locates the origins of antisemitism in the Gilded Age in the economic and social competition of that period. By contrast, Naomi Cohen has argued for the significance of wartime antisemitism, proposing that postwar discrimination against Jews was rooted in deep-seated religious prejudices that bubbled to the surface during the Civil War. I instead contend that the Civil War was a transition point—after the war, American antisemitism increasingly focused on the economic and social ills imagined to be wrought by Jews—but also the progenitor of many of these ideas. See Naomi W. Cohen, “Antisemitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” Jewish Social Studies 41, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn 1979): 187–210. 110 The immediate legacy was evident in 1866 when a consortium of fire insurance companies adopted a policy designed to limit exposure to Jewish clients. When challenged, the policy of limiting “Jew Risk” was justified as referring to “itinerant venders of stocks (their only property) so largely released lately from following the army as sutlers, contractors, speculators, and adventurers,” and not to the “better class” of Jews (Charleston Daily News, March 29, 1867, 4). The policy generated considerable protest from the Jewish community. For another example of the hold that these ideas maintained see the poem “No More Pensions,” published in Ellsworth Reporter (Kansas), January 19, 1882, 1. Protesting the mistreatment of veterans, the poem reminded readers of a litany of indignities they had already endured when in the army. They were paid, but not with gold, In the muster, march and line— Paid with suffering, curse, and blow, Borne with fortitude divine. Paid with loathsome, tainted food; Paid with shoddy coat and shoe; In the tent, the camp, the field, Robbed by sutler, fleeced by Jew. The postscript was telling. “Jew in this connection,” the poet noted, “has no reference to the Israelite, but to swindling camp-followers.” The idea of the Jew, in other words, had taken on a symbolic life of its own.

N otes    309 111 The latter complaint was directed at Jews in the late 1870s. For grumbling about the presence of the shoddy aristocracy at resorts during and immediately after the war see Gallman, Defining Duty in the Civil War, 105, 112, 114–115. For an example of the wartime complaint that Jews and other “coarse men and rude women” had despoiled the “grace and gallantry of a cultivated society,” see Nashville Republican Banner, January 10, 1862, 1. 112 On Jews as a convenient foil for the social ills of the age see Eric Goldstein, “Roundtable on Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19, no. 3 (July 2020): 477-478, 482-484, 495-497, . 113 For a detailed description of the episode see Lee Livney, “Let Us Now Praise Self-Made Men: A Reexamination of the Hilton-Seligman Affair,” New York History 75, no. 1 (January 1994): 66–98. For a more extensive discussion of how it reflected the legacy of wartime antisemitism see Adam Mendelsohn, “The Legacies of the Civil War for American Jews,” in Jews in Gilded Age America, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 2022). 114 Korn detected an “increase in Jewish self-respect which grew out of the victories for Jewish equality won during the war” and “the indefinable maturity as Americans attained by so many young Jewish immigrants who had fought in the armed forces and had emerged from the crucible of the battlefield as Americans in an experiential sense.” He made an even stronger case for Americanization in American Jewry and the Civil War, 258–259. Howard Rock made a similar argument in Haven of Liberty, 252. Quote from Korn, “Jews of the Union,” 135. Their position mirrored that of John Higham and several other influential historians who wrote about the effects of the war. For a discussion of the origins of the argument that the war spurred Americanization see Keller, “Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen,” 140; Gleeson, “Ethnicity,” 769. For Higham’s position see Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 13–14. Engle makes a compelling case that the war had contradictory effects: “the German community gave evidence of moving in both directions (towards assimilation and towards constructing an ethnic identity) simultaneously—creating firmer ethnic solidarity, on the one hand, and acting effectively in the public sphere, on the other hand.” This was true too of Jews. 115 Nira Yuval-Davis has noted that belonging “becomes articulated, formally structured, and politicized only when it is threatened in some way.” Wartime appears to have provided this impulse for American Jews. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 10. For the argument that the war bolstered processes of ethnicization within immigrant communities see Engle, “A Raised Consciousness,” 10 (quote on 1); Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 10, 77, 93, 105, 113, 123; Christian B. Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History and Their Implications for Twenty-firstCentury Scholarship,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 131–133, 138–139; Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, xiii; Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 320–321; Kurtz, “‘Let Us Hear No More ‘Nativism,’’’ 9. For local studies that demonstrate this ethnicization in action see Joseph R. Reinhart, “Louisville’s Germans in the Civil War Era,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 117, nos. 3&4 (Autumn 2019): 478; Andrew P. Yox, “Bonds of Community: Buffalo’s German Element, 1853–1871,” New York History 66, no. 2 (April 1985): 152–153. On the assertion of identity among Irish Americans in the postwar decades see Bruce, Harp and Eagle, 249–250. 116 For evidence of these expectations see Jewish Messenger, January 17, 1862, 15; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 26 (1862): 660. 117 Tobias Brinkmann writes about this process of ethnicization in Chicago. “Charity on Parade: Chicago’s Jews and the Construction of Ethnic and Civic ‘Gemeinschaft’ in the 1860s,” in Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century, ed. Geneviève

310    N otes

Fabre, Jürgen Heideking, and Kai Dreisbach (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 156–174; “Jews, Germans, or Americans? German Jewish Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century United States,” in The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, ed. Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 131–132; “‘We Are Brothers! Let Us Separate!’: Jewish Immigrants in Chicago between Gemeinde and Network Community before 1880,” in German-Jewish Identities in America, ed. Christof Mauch and Joseph Salmons (Madison: Studies for the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies, 2003), 54–58. 118 On the building of new synagogues see Sarna, American Judaism, 124–125. 119 Sarna, American Judaism,138. See also Jonathan D. Sarna, introduction to Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America, ed. Eitan P. Fishbane and Jonathan D. Sarna (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 5–10. 120 See, for example, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, which first appeared in 1893. Many of the articles related to the earliest period of Jewish settlement in the United States, reminding readers that Jews were not recent interlopers. In 1892, Jews participated enthusiastically in the celebrations to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World. Some even claimed Columbus as a Jew. See Jonathan D. Sarna, “Columbus and the Jews,” Commentary 94, no. 5 (November 1992): 38–41. 121 These are themes I explored in “Before Korn,” 1–26. 122 Wolf, American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, 10. CO NCLUS I O N 1

Autobiography of August Bondi, 133. For detailed discussion of his postwar career see Litvin, Journey, 373–432.

2

Autobiography of August Bondi, 131.

3

Autobiography of August Bondi, 133.

4

Occident 23, no. 5 (August 1865): 235.

APPEND I X 1 1

In the context of this methodology, the word “soldier” represents soldiers and sailors, as Service in the American Civil War represents Service in the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies.

2

Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia: Levytype, 1895), 9.

3

Sylvan Morris Dubow, “Identifying the Jewish Serviceman in the Civil War: A Re-appraisal of Simon Wolf’s The American Jew As Patriot, Soldier and Citizen,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 59, no. 3 (March 1, 1970): 357–369.

4

“Simon Wolf,” Reform Advocate 65, no. 20 (June 16, 1923): 726.

5

“Sleep and Don’t Worry, Simon Wolf Says at 86,” Washington Herald, October 27, 1922, 3.

6

“Hebrew Veterans,” Meriden Journal, December 23, 1891, 4; “Hebrews in the Civil War,” New York Times, December 17, 1891, 6.

7

“Grand Army Bugle Notes,” New York Tribune, March 28, 1892, 11.

8

Typically these were soldiers who served in multiple regiments. Instead of noting that each served in more than one regiment, the same soldier was listed multiple times as serving in only one regiment.

N otes    311 APPEN DIX 2 1

Because the foundation of the Shapell Roster is Simon Wolf’s roster, all names from Wolf, regardless of whether they meet these requirements, are represented in the Shapell Roster.

2

The exceptions to this rule are names in Wolf’s roster that are listed as “Unclassified as to Command” and that we have not yet identified.

3

For example, if a soldier is a documented member of the United Confederate Veterans organization and appears on the 1890 Veterans Census, and his obituary also states he served in a specific regiment and company during the Civil War, his service would be confirmed as inferred even if no official military record of his service can be found.

4

“Jewish According to Wolf” is reserved for names in Wolf’s book that we have not yet been able to definitively confirm as either Jewish or not Jewish. We are not in the business of knowing the hearts and minds of men long deceased, so we do not label these men as apostates. Some left few or no footprints in the historical record; for many immigrants, their birth records were lost during the Holocaust; and for others, we do not have enough information that distinguishes them from others who share the same name.

5

Thomas Francis Galwey, The Valiant Hours, ed. W. S. Nye (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1961), 41–2.

6

https://roster.shapell.org/soldier/13616; https://roster.shapell.org/soldier/13402; https://roster.shapell.org/ soldier/13324.

APPEN DIX 3 1

Many soldiers self-identified as German or were identified as German by others during and after the Civil War, although the country of Germany did not exist when these soldiers were born. The region was divided up into kingdoms, duchys, principalities, sovereign city-states, and so on, and the borders and designations changed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a combination of factors, including a desire for more community based on a shared language, shifting geopolitical boundaries, and simplifications of European geography by their American counterparts, many soldiers accepted the designation of their birthplace as Germany, even though it was incorrect. For the purposes of the Shapell Roster, a soldier’s birthplace is listed as what the location would have been known as at the time of the soldier’s birth. The specificity and accuracy of this information depend on what sources can be found for each soldier—from the precision of a city and state given on a birth record to the ambiguity of a regional designation chosen by a census taker many decades later. If a city or more specific region is identified for a soldier’s birthplace, it is a simple matter of tracing that location’s history to the time of the soldier’s birth. But for soldiers whose only documented birthplace is “Germany,” there is no way to determine the location or its designation at the time of their birth.

2

Soldiers whose birth location was given only as “Hesse” could have been born in the Electorate of Hesse (also known as Hesse-Kassel) or the Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine (also known as Hesse-Darmstadt); without additional information, there is no way to determine the soldier’s nativity.

3

Judah was the son of a Christian minister and is listed on the “Christian” side of the Judah family in Malcolm H. Stern’s authoritative First Jewish Families: 600 Genealogies, 1654–1977, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Ottenheimer, 1991), 140.

I N D EX Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. Abolitionism, 30, 43, 56, 57, 58–59 Adams, John Quincy, 66 Adath Israel Congregation, 194 Albany, New York, 172 Alcohol consumption by immigrants, 37, 55, 140–41 Aliases, adoption of, 98–102 Allen, Michael, 13–14, 82, 165, 262–28 American Hebrew (newspaper), 207 American Irish Historical Society, 214 The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Wolf), 4, 6–7, 207, 211, 213, 218, 229–31 American Jewish Historical Society, 212, 216 American Party, 55 Anderson, Second Lieutenant John, 191, 213 Andersonville prison, 144 Antietam, Maryland, 24, 183 Anti-Papal League, 204 Antisemitism: and adoption of aliases, 98–102; after Civil War, 197, 199, 200, 216–17, 307–114; increase during Civil War, 28–29, 285–31, 306–109; and Mark Twain, 7; and “shoddy patriotism”, 28–29; and stereotypes, 105, 108, 114–17, 306–7–110. See also General Orders No. 11 (Grant) Apito, Alexandra, 232 Appel, Alexander, 144 Armory Square Hospital (Washington, DC), 122–23 Army of Northern Virginia, 37–38, 72 Army of the Potomac, 19–20, 37, 71, 72, 87, 121, 124, 166–67, 168, 174, 183, 186 Atlanta, Georgia, campaign, 201 Auerbach, Henry, 137–38, 158–59 Aver, Louis (Eppenstein), 99 Baden, immigrants from, 52, 53, 54, 60, 217; reenlistment rates, 124; uprisings (1848), 75 Bagby, George, 9

Baltimore, Maryland, 16, 30, 35, 54, 56, 57, 183; Oheb Shalom Congregation, 173 Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, 176 Banks, General Nathaniel P., 25 Baptist College Hospital, 167 Bargebuhr, Adolph, 128 Basch, Simon, 36 Batesville, Arkansas, 110 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 163 Battle of Antietam, 24, 27, 37, 144, 186, 205, 214 Battle of Cedar Mountain, 25, 186 Battle of Chancellorsville, 37, 39, 41, 43, 72, 115, 171–72, 184, 205 Battle of Chantilly, 186 Battle of Chattanooga, 25, 73, 186, 201 Battle of Chickamauga, 9, 12, 186, 197, 201 Battle of Cold Harbor, 124, 126 Battle of the Crater, 138 Battle of Cross Keys, 186 Battle of Fair Oaks, 21, 177 Battle of Fredericksburg, 24, 26, 38–39, 42 Battle of Garnett’s Farm, 186 Battle of Gettysburg, 31, 38, 41, 71–73, 92, 172, 186, 205, 214 Battle of Glendale, 186 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, 186 Battle of Kernstown, 46, 142 Battle of Lookout Mountain, 197 Battle of Malvern Hill, 21, 186 Battle of Nashville, 167 Battle of North Anna, 124, 186, 191, 213 Battle of Peachtree Creek, 119 Battle of Perryville, 37 Battle of Petersburg, 186 Battle of Port Republic, 147 Battle of Seven Pines, 186 Battle of Shiloh, 129, 254

314    I N D E X

Battle of South Mountain, 24, 102, 130, 144, 154, 184, 186 Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 124, 186 Battle of Stones River, 182, 184, 186, 201 Battle of the Wilderness, 71, 122, 186, 189–92 Battle of Williamsburg, 184, 186 Battle of Wilson’s Creek, 160, 186, 223 Battle of Winchester, 147 Baum, Herman, 115 Baum, Kauffman, 115 Bavaria, immigrants from, 15, 52–53, 54, 57, 60, 108, 124, 217 Bechstein, Frederick, 119 Belmont, August, 56, 134 Benjamin, Judah P., 9, 218 Bentonville, North Carolina, 73 Beverly Ford, Virginia, 173, 178–80, 181 Bixby letter, 62 Black Hussars/Black Rifles (Fifty-fourth New York Infantry), 41, 170, 171–72 Blenker, Brigadier General Louis (Ludwig), 52, 86–87 Blight, David, 216 Blockade running, 111, 112, 114, 116–17, 199 Bloomingdale, Lyman, 212 Blumenberg, Leopold, 85, 205, 213–14, 306–102 B’nai B’rith, 4, 206 Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 34, 103, 106, 111, 166, 168, 169 Bohemia, immigration from, 52–53, 54, 217 Bondi, August: camp life, 146; identifying fellow Jews, 103, 158–59, 162–64; personal background prior to Civil War, 19; postCivil War activities, 204, 221–23; reaction to Emancipation Proclamation, 43; religious practices, 142–43, 148 Boos, John E., 10 Booth, John Wilkes, 6 Boston, Massachusetts, 54 Bounties, 76 Bounty jumpers, 20, 135, 174–75, 178 Braeutigam, Private Friedrich, 71 Bragg, General Braxton, 36, 37 Breckinridge, John C., 56 Brilliantowski, Samuel, 205 Bronner, First Lieutenant Samuel, 76 Brooke Station, Virginia, 171 Brown, John, 19 Brownsville, Texas, 189

Brucker, Simon, 147, 155, 158, 159 Brunn, Captain Jacob, 184–85 Burials, 176–77, 182–84, 197 Burnside, General Ambrose, 71 Buschbeck Line, 71 Butler, General Benjamin, 110–11, 114, 116–17, 126, 128 Cahn, Jacob, 109 Cameron, Simon, 84–85 Cameron Dragoons (Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry), 82–83 Camp Belgar, 144 Camp Hayes, 152 Carbondale, Pennsylvania, 65, 121 Catholics and Catholicism, suspicion of, 140–41 Cemeteries, 176–77, 182–84, 197 Ceredo, West Virginia, 148 Chain migration, 53 Chancellorsville, Virginia, 183 Chandler, Lieutenant Colonel, 190 Chaplains, 103, 141; hospital chaplains, 168–170; Jewish chaplains, 13–14, 82, 106–7, 164–67, 170–73 Charleston, South Carolina, 30, 32, 172 Chattanooga, Tennessee: Jewish congregations postwar, 196–97; siege of, 109 Chicago, Illinois, 16, 34, 35, 74–77, 87, 90, 207; sponsorship of units, 76. See also Concordia Guards (Eighty-second Illinois) Christianity, as predominant religion, 8, 105, 140– 41, 201; denominational diversity, 140–41 Cincinnati, Ohio: Jewish cemeteries, 177; Jewish population, 16; Jews in mercantile occupations, 60–61; lack of enlistment among Jewish population, 35, 38; local elections, 55; militia, 84; monument erected (1868), 197; race riots, 57; reconciliation post-war, 198–99; settlement patterns, 53–54, 57, 273–50; sermons in synagogues, 31; siege of, 36–37; as supply center for Western Theater, 69 Civilian support for soldiers, 31, 34 Civil War era, revival of interest in (1890s), 212–14, 216 Claflin Post (New York), 207 Clay, Major General Cassius Marcellus, 58 Cleveland, Ohio, 16, 53–54 Clothing industry, 36, 68–69, 203–4 Cohen, Isaac, 2–3

I N D E X    315 Cohen, Jacob C., 133–34, 141, 148, 159, 201, 205 Cohen, Michael, 203 Cohn, Abraham, 212, 253 Colors (regimental flags), 75, 78–79, 189–91, 194 Columbus, Ohio, 53–54 Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs), 233–34 Compulsory service, 38, 39, 61, 76, 163 Concordia Guards (Eighty-second Illinois), 71–75, 76, 77, 80, 87, 90–91, 119, 141, 162, 212, 222 Confederacy: Confederate civilians and Jewish soldiers, 160; Jewish support for, 9, 27, 30, 193, 230; and reconciliation post-war, 198 Conscription, 38, 39, 61, 76, 163 Cooper, General Samuel, 9 Copperheads (Peace Democrats), 31, 57 Corinth, Mississippi, 133 Costa, Dora L., 121 Cromelien, Alfred, 81 Cromelien, James Monroe, 81 Cromelien, Miss (Friedman), 82 Cromelien, Washington, 81 Crosby, Frank, 112 Culp’s Hill, 73 Cumberland Valley, 37 Daguerreotypes, 66 D’Ancona, Abram, 185 Davis, Jefferson, 9 Davis, William C., 143–44 DeArmas, Adrienne, 232; foreword to this work, ix-xi Decoration Day (Memorial Day), 197–99 Delbanco, Rabbi Max, 155 Delevie, Isaac (James Delevin), 102 Democratic Party: loyalty of Jews to, 55–57; in Ohio, 47, 51, 54–55, 57 Department of the Tennessee, 132 Department of Virginia and North Carolina, 110–11 Deserters, 20, 24, 126, 128–29, 174–75, 178–81, 287–64 Deutsch, Rabbi Solomon, 31 Dewey, Edward, 173 Dietary laws, 8, 143–46. See also Food rations Differences (Mayer), 199, 265–16 Disraeli, Benjamin, 212 Doctors, army service of, 24, 122–23. See also Hospitals, battlefield Dodge, Brigadier General Grenville, 10–11 Donaldson, Captain Francis, 175–76

Douglas, Stephen, 54, 57 Draft, 38, 39, 40, 61, 76, 163 Draft riots, 38, 124, 134 Dreyfus Affair, 7 Dreyfuss, Marx (Mark Travis), 99 Drukker, Isaac (Samuel Wilson), 99 Dubow, Sylvan Morris, 230 D’Utassy, Anthony, 81, 88 d’Utassy, Frederick George (Strasser): and antisemitism, 118; d’Utassy brothers, 81; identity and deception, 85–86, 88–89, 89, 99; leadership, challenges of, 90, 120; post-war activity, 202; Thirty-ninth New York Infantry recruitment, 22–23, 201 Eastern Theater, 183, 186 Eber, Louis (Eppenstein), 99 Eckman, Rabbi Julius, 30 Economic hardship and enlistment, 20–21, 24, 45–46, 60–61, 64–65 Eighth Connecticut Infantry, 125 Eighth New York State militia, 2 Eightieth Ohio Infantry, 115 Eighty-second Illinois Infantry, 71–75, 76, 77, 80, 87, 90–91, 119, 141, 162, 212, 222 Einhorn, Rabbi David, 30 Einstein, Colonel Max, 84–85, 86–87, 90, 140 Eisenstaedt, Isidor, 207 Eleventh Army Corps, 39, 43, 115, 171–72, 205 Eleventh Connecticut Infantry, 24, 199 Elsas, Jacob, 197 Emancipation Proclamation: myth concerning telegram, 5; resentment of, 38–40, 43, 47, 50, 57, 114, 133 Emanuel, Louis, 205 Emmitsburg, Maryland, 72 Enlistment: decline in, 40, 43; and economic hardship, 20–21, 24, 45–46, 60–61, 64–65; incentivization of, 68; Jews and reluctance to volunteer, 26–27, 35; length of enlistment contracts, 52–53; rates of, 25–27, 40; reasons for, 20–21, 24–26, 38; regional differences, 35–36; seasonal patterns, 26 Eppenstein, Louis, 99 Ethnic identity, 14–15 Ethnic units, 80–81, 84, 90–91 Evansville, Indiana, 184 Execution for desertion, 20, 174–75, 178–81

316    I N D E X

Fayette, West Virginia, 150–55 “Featherbed” volunteers, 38 Fechheimer brothers, 61 Feder brothers, 81 Fifteenth Kentucky Cavalry, 105, 184 Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, 201 Fifteenth Pennsylvania Infantry, 121, 200 Fifth Kansas Cavalry, 19, 103, 143, 147, 222–23 Fifth Maryland Infantry, 85 Fifth Ohio Cavalry, 129 Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, 13–14, 34, 80–81, 85, 86, 155, 156, 157, 165 Fifth West Virginia Infantry, 35, 148 Fifty-fourth New York Infantry, 41, 170, 171–72 Fifty-second New York Infantry, 155 Fifty-ninth New York Infantry, 85 Fifty-seventh Massachusetts Infantry, 189–91 First American Jewish Families (Stern), 235 First Battle of Bull Run, 2, 25, 84, 87 First New York Engineers, 66, 155 Fischel, Arnold: chaplaincy, 13–14, 166–67, 168, 169, 170, 262–63–29, 263–30; contact with soldiers’ families, 183; funding for chaplaincy, 34; identifying Jews, 103 Fisher, John (Fisher Grossman), 102 Flags, regimental, 75, 78–79, 189–91, 194 Florsheim, Captain Henry, 91 Folaney, John, 178 Folly Island, South Carolina, 172 Food rations, 139, 143–46 Forbes, G. W., 153 Fort Wagner, 41, 66, 67 Fortieth New York Infantry, 31 Forty-Eighters, 19, 85, 221, 264–1 Forty-fifth New York Infantry, 73–74 Forty-first New York Infantry, 80 Forty-second Illinois Infantry, 182 Forty-sixth New York State Militia, 99 Fourth New York Infantry, 100 Fowler, Theodosia Secor, 123 Frank, Captain Mayer, 74 Frank, Henry, 203 Frankel, Jacob, 168–70, 176, 296–150 Frankle, Jones, 85 Fraternal struggle, Civil War as, 2–3, 32, 81 Fraud, 14, 87, 88 Fredericksburg, Virginia, 24, 183 Freemasons and freemasonry, 163, 221 French language, recruitment in, 22

Frey, Emil, 75 Friedenwald, Aaron, 27 Friedenwald, Isaac, 27 Friedenwald, Joe, 27 Friedenwald, Moses, 27 Friedman, Colonel Max, 13–14, 80–81, 82–83, 84–85, 86 Funeral services, 176–77 Gambling, 140–41 Gans, Isaac, 212 Garibaldi Guards (Thirty-ninth New York), 22–23, 81, 85–86, 88–89, 118, 155 Gartner, Lloyd, 53–54 Geigerman, David, 118 General Orders No. 11 (Grant), 12, 40, 42, 95, 109, 112–13, 129, 135–36, 197 General Orders No. 15, 13 German Confederation, 15, 51, 239 German Eleventh Army Corps, 39, 43 German immigrants: and alcohol restrictions in Cincinnati, 37; Bavarians, 52, 53–54, 57, 60; criticism of after Chancellorsville defeat, 39, 43; cultural societies, 81, 84; enlistment, 26–27; Fifty-fourth New York Infantry, 41; German ethnic units, 22, 39, 43, 80–81, 90–91, 140, 172; Hessians, 53, 108, 124; overlap with Jewish community, 8, 39, 51–52, 81, 98, 105, 114–15, 217–18, 238; treatment of veterans, 193, 214 German language, 15, 170; German language press, 134; German-speaking regiments, 22, 39, 41, 90–91, 163 German surnames, and identification of Jews, 9 Gibson, Reverend Ella E., 164 Gettysburg: monument dedication (1890), 41 Glass, Max, 125–26, 128 Goldschmidt, Leopold, 176–77 Goodman, Benjamin, 90–91 Goshen, New York, 172 Gotthelf, Rabbi Bernhard, 169–70, 176 Gotthold, Ellis, 102 Grand Army Gazette (periodical), 155, 204 Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), 206–7, 212 Grand Union Hotel (Saratoga, New York), 217 Grant, General Ulysses S., 12, 40, 109, 112–14, 133–34 Gratz, Louis A., 65, 102, 121, 200–1 Greeley, Horace, 13–14 Greeley, Kansas, 204

I N D E X    317 Greenhut, Captain Joseph, 71, 72, 74, 81, 119, 203, 206, 212 Greenhut Memorial, 206 Greenthal, Samuel, 99 Grossman, Fisher, 102 Grün, Colonel (in Hesse newspaper article), 1–2 Grunwalt, Abraham, 212 Guggenheimer, Simon (Charles Brown), 99, 102 Haas, Philip, 66–67 Hamlin, Caroline (Spiegel), 45–51, 49, 60 Harmonie Club (Savannah, Georgia), 198 Harper’s Weekly (periodical), 134–35 Hayes, Major C. S., 129, 132 Hayes, Rutherford B., 97, 126, 130, 131, 152–53, 154, 204, 205–6 H. B. Claflin Post (New York), 207 Hebrew Relief Association, Philadelphia, 21 Hebrew Union Veterans Association (HUVA), 207, 211, 255–58 Hecker, Colonel Friedrich, 71, 72, 73, 75–76, 87, 90, 119 Heinzmann, George, 73 Heller, Henry, 81, 212 Heller, Maximillian, 81, 108 Herman, Joseph, 205 Herring, Major, 175 Hess, Robert, 206 Hesse, immigrants from, 14, 15, 51, 52–53, 60, 62, 108, 124, 158, 170, 217 Highhill, Israel (Charles Johnson), 99 Hiram Barney Rifles (Fifty-fourth New York), 41, 170, 171–72 Hirsch, Aaron, 110 Hirsch, Baron de, 212 Hirsch, Louis, 205 Holmes County, Ohio, 47, 50, 54–55 Hooker, General Joseph, 71 Horn, William (Isaac Cohen), 99 Horwitz, Major Philip, 126, 206 Hospital chaplains, 167, 168–73 Hospitals, battlefield, 122–23, 158, 167, 173, 183 Hungarian language, recruitment in, 22 Hungary, immigrants from, 19, 22, 85–86, 125, 174. See also d’Utassy, Frederick George (Strasser); Kuhne, George HUVA (Hebrew Union Veterans Association), 207, 211, 255–58

Illinois, enlistment rates, 26, 27 Immigration: from Bavaria, 53–54; army regiments, 80–81, 84, 90–91; chain migration, 53; immigrants and political party affiliation, 55–56; and Jewish identity, 15–16; and Jewish settlement patterns in U.S., 16; to U.S., 1890s, 3. See also German immigrants; Irish-Americans Indiana: Newburgh Raid and enlistment, 35–36 Irish Americans, 8, 35, 39, 75, 98, 214; and enlistment, 27 Irish Brigade, 39 Isaacs, Isidore, 210–11 Isaacs, Myer, 111, 114, 126 Isaacs, Rabbi Samuel, 30 Is Jesus the Messiah?, 167 Israelite (newspaper), 29, 127 Italian language, recruitment in, 22 Jackson, General Stonewall, 25, 162, 163, 171 Jackson, Mississippi, 50 Jacobson, Eugene P., 253 James River, blockade running, 111 Jeffersonville, Indiana, 169 Jewish identity: attitudes post-war, 193, 196–97, 217–18; concealment of, 102–4; evidence of, in Shapell Roster, 234–36; and immigrant status, 15–16; names, verification of, ix-xi; personal identity, 14–15; and stereotypes, 114–15 Jewish Ladies of Syracuse, 76, 78 Jewish Messenger (newspaper), 2–3, 30, 111, 124, 133–34, 193, 197, 200 Jewish Record (newspaper), 34, 39, 42 Jewish Sanitary Commission, call for, 31, 34, 137, 173 Jewish soldiers: army veterans post-war, 192–93; camp life, 8, 12, 118–19; commissions and promotions in army, 84–85, 120–21; comradeship among, 141–42, 146; and conscription, 40; demographic data on enlistees, 51–52; dispersed within army ranks, 77, 80, 201, 222, 280–44; exclusively Jewish units, 74–75; high ranking officers, 247–51; invisibility of within army ranks, 8–9, 158; Jewish units, myth of, 71–75, 77, 95; killed in action, 186; mistreatment of, 126–29; reenlistment rates, 121, 124; regiments in which they served, 242–45; specialized occupations, 252; statistics by place of birth,

318    I N D E X

237–38; statistics by state, 240; surnames, most common, 246 Jewish welfare organizations, post-war, 206–7 Jews: acts of discrimination against, 12, 97–98, 124– 27; conversion attempts by Christians, 167–68; impressions of, in popular imagination, 9, 12–13, 94–95, 105, 108–11, 120, 216–18, 222– 23; Jewish responses to acts of discrimination, 128–29; in mercantile occupations, 16, 60–61, 64, 65, 68, 95, 202–4; and national patriotism, 4–5, 270–1; patriotism questioned, 134–35, 212, 216, 219, 231; stereotypes, negative, 115, 118–19, 216–17; in working-class occupations, 61, 65, 276–83 Joachimsen, Philip, 85 Joel, Benjamin, 160–61 Joel, Ephraim M., 160 Joel, Joseph A.: encounters with antisemitism, 97, 124–25, 128; Passover observance, 140, 150–55; post-war activities, 206; and Rutherford B. Hayes, 126–27, 130, 131, 204 Joel, Louisa, 205–6 Joel, Rutherford B. Hayes, 131 Johnson, Andrew, 32 Johnston, Joseph E., 168 Jonas, Abraham, 10, 32 Jonas, Edward, 10–11 Judaism: congregationalist structure of, 171; High Holy Days, 147, 165; Jewish burial rites, 183–84; Orthodoxy contrasted with Reform, 171; prayer and religious ritual in army life, 9, 137–39, 142–50 Kamphoefner, Walter D., 54 Kappelman, Private Friedrich, 72 Karpeles, Leopold, 189–192, 194, 195, 204, 206, 212–13, 215, 253 Kearny, Brigadier General Philip, Jr., 58 Keller, Christian, 193 Kelly, Hugh, 141 Kentucky: enlistment rates, 27; Lexington, capture of, 36–37 Kirby Smith, General Edmund, 36 Kline, Joseph, 21 Kline, William, 21, 24 Knefler, Frederick, 201 Know-Nothing party, 55–56 Knoxville, Tennessee, 64, 200–1 Korn, Bertram, 76, 170–71, 217, 262–28

Kozlay, Colonel Eugene, 172–73 Kuhn, Herman, 167 Kuhne, George, 19–20, 24, 43, 174–76, 178, 298–187 Lai, Emil, 178 Languages: recruitment in, 22; spoken by immigrants, 15; Yiddish, 15, 21 Leavenworth, Kansas, 204 Leberman, L. J., Mr. and Mrs., 177 Lee, General Robert E., 25, 37–38 Leeser, Isaac, 29, 30, 103, 106, 169, 196, 199, 223–24 Levi, Joseph C., 144 Levy, Benjamin B. (Bennett), 212, 253–54 Levy, Captain Ferdinand, 134–35, 149 Levy, Cherrie M. (Captain C. M.), 32–33 Levy, Clarence, 32 Levy, Eugene Henry, 230 Levy, Joseph (Joseph Reese), 100 Levy, Lieutenant Nathan, 184 Levy, Myer, 155 Levy, Simon, 149 Lexington, Kentucky, capture of, 36 Light, Captain Solomon, 76, 81 Light, Lewis, 81 Lilienthal, Rabbi Max, 31, 148, 198–99 Lincoln, Abraham: appointment of hospital chaplains, 169; battlefield hospital visits, 122–23; Bixby letter, 62; Cherrie Levy case, 32; election (1860), 56; friendship with Abraham Jonas, 10–11; meeting with Arnold Fischel, 106–7; meeting with Simon Wolf, 6 Lippman, Lawrence, 198 Littmann, Julius, 182, 185 Littmann, Pauline, 182 Loeb, Second Lieutenant William, 74 Lost Cause mythology, 193 Louisville, Kentucky, 169 Löventhal, Mrs., 162 Lowenburg, Isaac, 203 Luskey, Brian, 110 Lycoming, Pennsylvania, 205 Lyons, Jacob, 147 Mack, Jacob W., 207, 212 Mallory, Robert, 169 Manassas, Virginia, 149, 168, 183 Mandell, Kaufman (Henry Williamson), 99 Marcus, Robert, ix, 231

I N D E X    319 Marvel, William, 38, 46, 76 Maryland, enlistment rates, 26–27 Masons (Freemasons), 163, 221 Matrikel laws, Bavaria, 54 Mayer, Adolph, 208, 209 Mayer, Daniel, 35, 148 Mayer, Joseph Eggleston Johnston, 203 Mayer, Nathan, 24, 53, 144, 199 Mayer, Ophelia, 203 McClellan, General George B., 21, 25, 37, 86–87 McCook, General Alexander M., 9, 12 McFarland, Sergeant Edwin D., 190 McKinley, William, 152 McMurray, Sergeant Frank, 115 McPherson, James M., 127–28 Meade, General George, 20, 25, 174 Medal of Honor, 192, 194, 195, 212; recipients, 212, 215, 253–54 Medal of Honor Legion, 213 Memorial Day (Decoration Day), 197–99 Memphis, Tennessee, 64, 148, 159, 162, 163 Menken, Jacob, 60, 201 Menken, Nathan, 60 Michaelis, August, 62 Michaelis, Charles, 62 Michaelis, Minna, 62 Michaelis, Moritz, 62, 63 Miles, General Nelson, 212 Militia Act (1862), 164 Militias, 84–85 Millersburg, Ohio, 45, 46, 55, 60, 80 Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, 94, 183 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 54, 206 Mogen David Cemetery, Nashville, 177 Monuments: Salem Fields cemetery, 212 Morais, Rabbi Sabato, 31, 177 Mostov, Stephen, 53 Mount Sinai Cemetery Association, 176 Mount Sinai Hospital (New York), 206 Mundheim, Sarah (Karpeles), 192 Mundheim, Simon, 192 Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 182 Names: adoption of aliases, 98–102, 283–3; Jewish soldiers, most common surnames, 246; verification of, ix-xi Nashville, Tennessee, 177, 182 Natchez, Mississippi, 203 Nathan, Rosa (Isaacs), 210–11

Nativism, 39, 55, 57, 98, 283–2 Netter, Gabriel, 105, 184 New Albany, Indiana, 169 Newark, New Jersey, 170 Newburgh Raid, 35 New Era (periodical), 198 Newman, Abraham, 205 Newman, Leopold, 184 New Market, Virginia, 162 New Mexican regiments, 120 New Orleans, Louisiana, 16 New York (city): fraternal organizations, 207; German-speaking regiment, 170–71; Jewish population, 16; Jewish Sanitary Commission, call for, 34; Jews in clothing industry, 69; Manhattan draft riots, 38; militia, 84; Mount Sinai Hospital, 206; political parties and immigrants, 56, 57; proximity to Washington, DC, 183; recruitment efforts, 34; reenlistment rates, 124; Salem Fields cemetery, 212; sermons in synagogues, 31; Shearith Israel Congregation, 106; Sprague Barracks, Staten Island, 149; Temple Beth-El, 207; Temple Emanu-El, 207; Union Field Cemetery, 184 New York Herald (newspaper), 200 New York Independent Battalion, 135 New York (state): enlistment rates, 26, 27, 38, 53, 124; commissions and promotions, 120 Ninth Pennsylvania Cavalry, 121 Norfolk, Virginia, 147–148 North American Review (periodical), 3, 6 Obranski, David, 212 Ochs, Julius, 64, 201 Ohava Emes Congregation (Nashville, Tennessee), 177 Oheb Shalom Congregation, 173 Ohio: enlistment rates, 26, 27, 36, 53, 124; immigration patterns, 53–54; political parties, 57. See also Millersburg, Ohio; Spiegel, Marcus Ohio National Guard, 207 118th Pennsylvania Infantry, 174–75, 178 120th Ohio Infantry, 46–47, 50, 94, 133 124th Ohio Infantry, 109 131st New York Infantry, 118 149th New York Infantry, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 120–21, 222. See also Deutsch, Rabbi Solomon; Syracuse, New York; Temple Concord (Syracuse, New York)

320    I N D E X

Orange Plank Road (Battle of the Wilderness), 190–91 Orne, Captain, 175 Osterhaus, Major General Peter, 115, 158 Osterthal, August, 172–73 Overland campaign, 9, 26, 124 Owensboro, Kentucky, 184 Palatinate, immigration from, 53 Parente, Janice, 232 Passover, 146, 149, 150–55, 198, 292–68 Patriotism: Jewish Messenger’s encouragement of, 30; questioning of Jewish patriotism, 212–13, 214, 216 Patronage, political, 204–5 Peace Democrats (Copperheads), 31, 55, 57 Peale, Washington, 66–67 Peddlers, Jewish, 60, 65, 68, 69, 80, 95, 121, 143 Peninsula campaign, 21, 25, 37, 168, 184, 205 Pennsylvania, enlistment rates, 26, 27, 53, 124 Pennsylvania Militia, 84 Pensions, military, 99, 205, 210–11, 304–68 Peoria, Illinois, 206 Perley, General Thomas F., 169 Pershing, Sergeant Joseph, 115 Petersburg, Virginia, 137–38 Phelan, Captain, 142 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 16, 21, 31, 56, 57, 61, 81; Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 168; Mount Sinai Cemetery Association, 176; proximity to Washington, DC, 183 Phillips, Wendell, 57, 58 Photographers, 66–67 Physicians, army service of, 24, 122–23. See also Hospitals, battlefield Pincus brothers, 81 Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 162 Pinner, Moritz, 58–59 Pork, consumption of, 143–45. See also Dietary laws; Food rations Posen, immigration from, 217 Post-war illness and trauma, 205–6, 208–9 Princeton, West Virginia, 152–53 Prisoner swaps, 111 Profiteering, 28, 36, 107–10 Proskauer, Adolph, 214 Prussia, immigration from, 52, 53, 54, 108 Pryer, Jesse L., 178–80 Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 7 Pulitzer, Joseph, 68

Quartermaster Department, 68, 160 Rable, George C., 164 Rainese, John, 178 Raleigh County, West Virginia, 146, 152 Raphael, Marc Lee, 53–54 Raphall, Alfred, 31, 187 Raphall, Rabbi Morris, 31, 32, 187 Rathburn, John, 125 Ration system, food, 139, 143–46. See also Dietary laws Reconciliation, post-war, 197–99 Recruitment: in Europe, 68; recruitment drives, 76; recruitment posters, 22–23, 82–83. See also Enlistment Reese, Joseph (Levy), 100 Regimental flags, 75, 78–79, 189–91, 194 Reichhelm, Emanuel, 74, 141 Reiss, Nathan, 101 Reitler, Louis (Wright), 102, 184 Republican Party, 25, 55, 56, 58 Resaca, Georgia, 73 Richmond, Virginia: defense of, and High Holiday services, 9; McClellan’s advance on, 21, 25 Rifle Shots and Bugle Notes (Joel), 155 Rochester, New York, 170 Rock, Howard, 56 Rolshausen, Major Ferdinand, 71 Roosevelt, Theodore, 6 Rosecrans, General William S., 9, 12 Rosenberg, Max, 172–73 Rosengarten, Adolph, 182, 184, 201 Rosenthal, Moritz (Samuelsohn), 205, 126 Rosewater, Edward, 5 Rosh Hashanah observances, 147, 162 Rowlett’s Station, Kentucky, 184 Ruhman, Abraham, 129, 158, 201–2 Sabbath observances, 146–47, 148–49, 150–51, 156–57, 162–63 Sachs, Max, 184 Salem Fields cemetery, 212 Salina, Kansas, 204, 221 Salomon, Lieutenant Colonel Edward S.: background, 87; Eighty-second Illinois, 71, 72, 73, 74, 81, 91; military career, 90, 92–93; Mrs. Löventhal, 162; post-war activities, 193, 207, 214 Samuels, Max, 155 Samuelsohn, Moritz (Rosenthal), 126

I N D E X    321 San Francisco, California, 15, 30, 56, 57, 207 Saratoga, New York, 216, 217 Sarna, Jonathan D., 108, 218 Sarner, Ferdinand, 170–73 Savannah, Georgia, 198 Schleswig, Duchy of, 87 Schoenfeld, Julius, 201–2 Schoney, Lazarus, 122–23 Schroder, Gustave (Samuel Greenthal), 99 Schurz, Carl, 71, 72, 92 Schwartz, Michael, 177 Second Battle of Bull Run, 25, 37, 41, 186 Second New York Cavalry, 101 Seligman, Joseph, 217 Seligmann, Simon, 155 Sellers, John R., 232 Seventeenth Massachusetts Infantry, 85 Seventy-first New York Militia, 99, 176 Seventy-ninth Indiana Infantry, 201 Seward, William, 58 Shapell, Benjamin, ix, 231–32 Shapell Roster, ix-x, 13–14, 224, 229–36; methodology, 233–36 Shenandoah Valley, 41, 147, 159, 162, 163 “shoddy aristocracy,” 28, 110, 216–17 “shoddy contractors,” 219 “shoddy patriotism,” 29 Shreveport, Louisiana, 170 Sickles, General Dan, 214 Sigel, Franz, 52, 91 Silverstein, Simon (John Donnelly), 99 Sinsheimer, Aaron, 94–95 Sixth Kentucky Cavalry, 200, 201 Sixth New York State Militia, 84 Sixty-seventh Ohio Infantry, 46, 80, 118 Sixty-sixth New York Infantry, 81, 84 Slavery, 30, 43, 58; Jewish attitudes toward, 16, 31, 50 Smith, Goldwin, 3, 4, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217 Soldiers’ Aid Society, 24 Sonnenberg, Charles, 141, 185 South Carolina Heavy Artillery, 32 South Mountain battlefield, Maryland, 24 Speculation and profiteering, 109–10 Spiegel, Caroline Hamlin, 45–51, 49, 60 Spiegel, Joseph, 46, 94–95, 203 Spiegel, Marcus: brother of, 94; on Emancipation Proclamation, 132–33; fellowship with other Jews, 155, 158, 159, 162–63; isolation in army,

80; letters to family, 45–51; and mercantile pursuits, 60, 61; moral and religious character and practices, 140, 142–43, 144–45, 147; as older recruit, 52, 53; opinion of German soldiers, 114–15; photo of, 49 Spiegel Catalog Company, 203 Spitz, Henry, 177, 182 Sprague Barracks, Staten Island, 149 Springfield, Massachusetts, 189 Stafford, Virginia, 171 Steinwehr Post, 207 Stereotypes, ethnic, 104–5, 108–9 Stern, Malcolm, 235 Strasser, David (d’Utassy), 86 Straus, Nathan, 207 Substitutes, 20, 61, 125, 174 Suffolk, Virginia, 159 Surnames, changing, to protect identity, 98–102 Sutlers, 91, 94–95, 110, 146, 153, 283–92 Syracuse, New York, 31, 34, 35, 68, 76, 78–79. See also Deutsch, Rabbi Solomon, Temple Concord (Syracuse, New York) Szold, Benjamin, 173–76, 298–187 Temperance movement, 37 Temple Beth-El (New York), 207 Temple Concord (Syracuse, New York), 78–79. See also Deutsch, Rabbi Solomon; Syracuse, New York Temple Emanu-El (New York), 207 Tenth Iowa Infantry, 112 Tenth Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry, 178 Tenth Tennessee Infantry, 177 Texas Rangers, 189 Thirteenth Ohio Cavalry, 137–38 Thirty-first New York Infantry, 184 Thirty-ninth Illinois Infantry, 155 Thirty-ninth New York Infantry, 22–23, 81, 85–86, 88–89, 118, 128, 155 Thirty-second Indiana Infantry, 80, 184 Thoman, Max, 85 Touro, Judah, 212 Trounstine, Philip, 129, 132 Turners and Turnvereinde, 84, 85; Turn Gemeinde (Chicago), 92 Twain, Mark, 6–7, 216, 306–106 Twelfth Maine Infantry, 126 Twentieth New York Infantry, 84 Twentieth New York State Militia, 99

322    I N D E X

Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry, 120 Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry, 87, 90 Twenty-seventh Ohio Infantry, 133, 141, 148, 208 Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 90, 108–9, 140. See also Einstein, Colonel Max Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Infantry, 73–74, 126 Twenty-third Ohio Infantry, 97, 128, 130–31, 146, 150, 152, 153. See also Hayes, Rutherford B.; Joel, Joseph A. Ulman brothers, 81 United States Christian Commission, 164, 166, 167, 172 United States Post Office, appointments in, 204 United States Sanitary Commission, 164 Upper Franconia, immigration from, 53 Urbansky, David, 254 Vallandigham, Clement, 57 Veterans, 200, 202–7; fraternal organizations, 206–7; military pensions, 204–5; post-war illness and trauma, 205–6, 208–9; treatment in Jewish press, 192–93 Vicksburg, Mississippi, 155, 160, 163, 183 Vicksburg campaign, 47, 50, 132–33 Von Utassy, Carl, 81, 88–89, 89 Voris, Alvin C., 118, 119 Walker, W. E., 90 Wallace, General Lew, 69 Walter, Charles, 178 Ward, Lieutenant Henry, 102, 191

Warrenton Junction, Virginia, 73 Washington, DC, 183 Washington Hebrew Congregation, 183, 192 Wasserman, Moses, 99 Weekly Gleaner (newspaper), 30 Wenk brothers, 81 Wertheimer, Edward, 41, 171, 172–73 Western Theater, 124 Whiskey Trust, 203 Whiteside, Tennessee, 71, 73 Whitman, Walt, 122–23 Wickesberg, Sergeant Carl, 74, 95 Wilderness campaign, 71, 124, 186, 189–90, 213 Wilderness Church, 39, 71 Winkler, Caitlin, 232 Wise, Rabbi Isaac Mayer: as editor of Israelite, 29, 86, 92, 127, 137, 138; and political activity, 57; as rabbi, 148, 196 Wise, Rabbi Stephen S., 4 Witkowsky, Emanuel, 103 Wittenberg, Marcus, 103, 147, 158–59 Wolf, Simon, 4, 6–7, 6, 9, 207, 211, 213–14, 218, 224, 229–31 Woydechowsky, Gustavus, 74 Württemberg, immigration from, 52, 53, 54, 124 Yiddish language, 15, 21 Yom Kippur observances, 1, 147, 152 Young’s Point, Louisiana, 142 Zachrisson (blockade runner), 116 Zehden, David, 65, 68, 144–45, 155, 177 Zyla, Antony P., 118

A B O U T TH E AU TH O R Adam D. Mendelsohn is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Kaplan Cen-

tre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire and co-editor of Jews and the Civil War: A Reader and Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History. He was chief historian of the exhibition The First Jewish Americans at the New-York Historical Society, and co-curator of By Dawn’s Early Light at the Princeton University Museum of Art.

AB OUT T H E S H A P EL L M A N U S C RI P T F O U N DATI O N A passion nearly 50 years in the making, the Shapell Manuscript Collection began with Benjamin Shapell collecting handwritten presidential manuscripts in the 1970s. This carefully curated collection has grown to include scores of original letters and documents relating to historical figures and world events, spanning as far back as the late 1700s up to the end of the 20th century. With a devotion to educating the public and showcasing primary source materials, Shapell founded the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, which has initiated and produced groundbreaking research, books, articles, exhibitions, documentary films and videos, teaching resources, and digital archives. In 2015, Shapell co-authored with Jonathan D. Sarna Lincoln and the Jews: A History, published by St. Martin’s Press. The book was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and in 2016 was translated into Hebrew. The Foundation’s extensive holdings include manuscripts of American presidents, especially Abraham Lincoln; and of Mark Twain; Albert Einstein; and Theodor Herzl; as well as diverse subjects as Custer and the Little Bighorn. The manuscripts bring out aspects of the human side of history, including moments of dramatic irony and the fragility of the human condition. In 2009, the Foundation began one of its core, ongoing research projects, The Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War. The Foundation has partnered in exhibitions with both private and government institutions, such as the New-York Historical Society, Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives, the Morgan Library and Museum, the National Library of Israel, and various presidential libraries.