Marc Wortman

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Marc Wortman says the event is significant for another reason: it was the moment when Jews in the U.S. were first recognized as equal citizens.
As part of the JCC of Greater New Haven Center for Jewish Life and Learning Summer Institute, Wortman will present “A House Divided: Jews and the Civil War”  on Tuesday, July 19, 10:30 a.m. at the JCC of Greater New Haven, and on Monday, July 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven Shoreline Office in Guilford.
A New Haven resident, Wortman is the author of “The Millionaires’ Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power” (2006, PublicAffairs Books)) and “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta” (2009, PublicAffairs Books), now in its third printing.

The Civil War defined American Jewry, says New Haven author

Recipient of Sigma Delta Chi and CASE feature writing awards as a freelance journalist, Wortman has written feature articles for Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Technology Review, among other publications, and is a contributing writer for Start-Up. He has been a columnist for the New Haven Register and an editor at the Yale Alumni Magazine. Wortman has spoken to audiences around the country and appeared on CNN, NPR, C-SPAN BookTV, CPTV, GPB, and many other radio and TV outlets.
He spoke with the Ledger about how the Civil War defined American Jewry.

Sherman in Atlanta

What sparked your interest in the topic of American Jews in the mid-19th century?
A: In doing my book about Atlanta, I wasn’t surprised, but nonetheless noticed, that there were some antisemitic comments made about people in Confederate Atlanta by one of the provost-marshals [military police officers] there, about equating Jews with traitors. At the same time, I saw in Civil War newspapers in Atlanta that the local “Israelite” community had raised a large sum of money to support the Confederate cause.

What was the role of Jews in the Civil War?
A: While researching my book on Atlanta, I discovered that it was a pretty multi-faceted one. While, in our world today, we think of Jews as largely aligned with things like civil rights and liberal and democratic policies, Jews in fact were represented across the widest spectrum of American views of the period. That includes Judah Benjamin, one of the most important government officials and dubbed the “brains of the Confederacy,” and slave-holders.
As a percentage of the population, there were more Jews fighting for the South than the North. A much higher percentage of the male population fought for the Confederacy.
That’s because the South had a smaller Jewish population to begin with, and the war was more all-consuming in the South. Even in the North, opinion was greatly divided among the leading public figures in the Jewish community. There were those who argued for Abolition and those who strongly argued against it.

Judah P. Benjamin

Today’s understanding of Jews, particularly as a result of the civil rights movement as a voice for freedom and rights and equality for all, was not always the case. The Jewish population was only 150,000, and they were new immigrants for the most part, and fairly widely dispersed. They tended to take on the attitudes of their communities.
At the same time, there were many heroic Jewish soldiers on both sides, but there were companies from the North who were mostly Jewish, because companies were formed regionally and often through the leadership of individual officers.
While we can’t be certain of the numbers, it’s been established that some 10,000 Jews fought in the Civil War. When you take the percentages of Americans in general who go to war, it was a substantial number, and when you consider that many of them were very recent arrivals in the U.S.

How did the Civil War impact upon the collective identity of Jews in the U.S. at the time?
A: There are a couple of very important things that happened for Jews during the Civil War that stand out, both negative and positive.
In 1862, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who eventually became the head of the Union Army and President of the United States, issued General Order No.  11, expelling all Jews within his military district, with 24-hour notice.
This was pure antisemitism. Jews were identified with speculators in cotton, and trading with the enemy for southern cotton was identified as a traitorous fact. There’s lots and lots behind what happened but it was, to my knowledge, the only time the Federal government acted in that way until the interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Jews in many places were driven out of their homes. A group went to see President Lincoln soon after the order was issued, and to his eternal praise, he on the instant revoked the order and said that no group should be tarred with the sins of the few.
The second major event that affected American Jewry was at the start of the war, when it was decided that chaplains in the Union army should be Christian. There was a Jewish regiment, largely from Philadelphia, that had a Jewish chaplain who lost his position as chaplain for that regiment.
At that point, it became a significant issue and the matter was taken up by the army and Congress and the rules were revised so that Jews could serve as chaplains. That basically established the ecumenical status of chaplains in the U.S. Armed Forces that holds until today.
These were two very specific military and administrative issues that for the first time established the fact that Jews were a presence in the U.S. and needed to be acknowledged as such. The U.S. wasn’t a Christian nation but a nation of laws that recognized the value of all of its citizens.
Wartime focuses a light on a nation’s values, as it does today, and while we principally see it as a war that freed the slaves, it was also a war that established all the different communities of the U.S. as Americans, and that includes Jews. That was true for the Irish and Germans, and ultimately for Blacks.
Antisemitism actually was not a general problem or issue until the Civil War – this is the good and bad that went hand-in-hand. But you find scapegoats and there were a number of problems that the army was facing as it moved deeper into the South and as the war went along. They were scapegoating people who were profiteering on war contracts, and those people were identified as Jews.
Wartime tends to stir up antisemitism because you have all of these issues that are bubbling up – everything from who is loyal and who is not, who is profiteering and who is contributing to the war effort. Historically, that tends to end up focusing on Jews, and antisemitism bubbles up even when there is a tiny number of Jews in the country.
And yet, at the same time, the drives that were behind the war – questions about freedom and race and oppression – those too take on an importance that they don’t outside of wartime. A group that had historically been oppressed in Europe found itself the beneficiary of America’s new-found commitment to freedom.
What was behind the General Order No.  11 was that the North needed southern cotton and there was enormous profit to be made in selling southern cotton to the North, and there were profiteers of every stripe involved. It was a huge problem for the army: they were trying to conquer a rebellion while this trade was going on in their midst, often by officers. Gen. Grant’s own father got involved with a group of Cincinnati Jews who used him as their agent to purchase cotton.
So Gen. Grant basically, in a fit, took it out on the Jews and threw man, woman, and child out of his district throughout the Mississippi Valley, western Tennessee, Kentucky, northern Mississippi, even up into Illinois.
He issued the order on Dec. 17, 1862 and, after several Jewish organizations lodged formal protests with the President, Lincoln revoked it on Jan 6, 1863.

Isachar Zacharie

Aside from Judah Benjamin, were there other Jewish figures who played a significant role in the Civil War?
A: Lincoln’s podiatrist, Isachar Zacharie, was Jewish, and ended up being one of the President’s closest friends and confidants, and a kind of personal envoy and spy for him, whom he completely trusted.
Lincoln sent Zacharie to meet with the Confederate leaders, including Judah Benjamin, to try to negotiate a peace settlement. He was used as a spy in occupied New Orleans to see what the conditions were there.
Judah Benjamin played a somewhat similar role for Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. Because he was Jewish, Benjamin could never aspire to national elected office and so he became for Davis a kind of confidant and the person whose loyalty and intelligence were trusted more than any other in the government.

With Independence Day upon us, how do you see the two periods – Revolutionary War and Civil War – related, for American Jewry?
A: We’re in the 150th anniversary year of the start of the war and it’s a war that really established America as a true nation. In the same way, it established Jews as a true part of that nation. The country went through huge changes as a result of immigration from the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, but in the Civil War, the foundation was laid that established America as a land that welcomed the oppressed and allowed Jews the freedoms they couldn’t experience in the countries they came from.
In the famous ceremonial letter that Pres. Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790, he said, “The government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It was really the Civil War that put that into force.
The Revolution established the ideals of the nation and the Civil War put those ideals to the fire and for the Jews, this was the first time in which their presence and active part of the U.S. were made real and perpetual. While Jews ultimately played an extremely small role reflecting an extremely small percentage of the population, as for every American, the Civil War influences what it means for all of us to be citizens today and forever.

Marc Wortman presents “A House Divided: Jews and the Civil War:”
Tuesday, July 19, 10:30 a.m., JCC of Greater New Haven, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge. For information call (203) 387-2522, ext. 300 or email rwalter@jewishnewhaven.org
Monday, July 25, 7:30 p.m., Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven Shoreline Office, 705 Boston Post Road (behind Planet Fitness), Guilford | Cost: $10/person | Info: Jill Weyler Lesage: (203) 903-1901 / jwlesage@jewishnewhaven.org
Walk-ins welcome, or register online: www.jccnh.org