opinion
What I Learned About Antisemitism
From Jewish Civil War Soldiers
BY ADAM MENDELSOHN
M ax Glass, a recent immigrant from Hungary,
had an unhappy Civil War.

Tricked out of his enlistment bonus when he
joined the Eighth Connecticut Infantry — recent
arrivals were soft touches for scam artists — Glass
was then “abused for reason [sic] that I never
understand” by men in his regiment. “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.”
He complained to his commanding officer, beg-
ging to be transferred, because “no man that
had feeling could stand such treatment,” but to
no avail. Finally, Glass fled his regiment, hoping
to receive better treatment if he enlisted in the
Navy. Instead he was tried as a deserter and sen-
tenced to hard labor.

Glass was not the only Jewish soldier to be cru-
elly mistreated when serving in the Union Army.

But as the new Shapell Roster of Jewish Service
in the Civil War demonstrates, his experience was
far from typical.

I explored the Shapell Roster while working on
my new book, on the experience of Jewish sol-
diers in the Union army. What I learned from the
vast collection of documents and data was that
indifference, benign curiosity and comradeship
appear to have been much more common than
conflict for the majority of Jewish soldiers in the
Union army.

For every Max Glass there was a Louis Gratz.

Born in Posen, Prussia, Gratz scraped by as a ped-
dler before the war. Enlisting in April 1861 — just
days after the war started — he took to military
life. By August he had become an officer. As he
proudly wrote to 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.

In contrast to Max Glass, his letters whisper not
a word about prejudice. As my new book on the
experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army
demonstrates, Gratz’s experience was not unusual.

Max Glass ultimately escaped his sorry start
in the army through the intercession of General
Benjamin Butler. After reading Glass’ tale of woe,
the general pardoned the hapless Hungarian. In
doing so, Butler seemingly followed Abraham
Lincoln’s lead when confronted by antisemitism
within the Union army. The president, after all,
had quickly countermanded Ulysses S. Grant’s
General Orders Number 11 expelling Jews from
the districts under his command, the “most notori-
ous anti-Jewish official order in American history,”
But alas this story does not have a redemptive
ending. Beyond the rank and file, Jews felt the sting
of prejudice. The damage done in wartime left a
legacy of antisemitism that continues to this day.

For even as General Butler was pardoning Max
Glass, he was locked in a heated public exchange
that reveals how wartime warped attitudes toward
Jews. The imbroglio began when Butler took spe-
cial note of the fact that a small group of smug-
glers, recently detained by the Union army, were
Jewish. When challenged, the combative general
refused to apologize. Instead, he countered that
deceit and disloyalty were among the defining
characteristics of Jews, and that avarice was a par-
ticularly Jewish avocation. According to his logic,
Jews could never become loyal Americans because
they preferred profit to patriotism.

An 1877 cartoon from the satirical newspaper
Puck illustrates the antisemitic practices of the
Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. The
cartoon compares the corrupt gentile clients
favored by the hotel, center, with respectable
(albeit stereotypical) Jewish figures, including
Jesus. (Library of Congress)
Butler’s corrosive claims reflected a steady drip
of acid on the homefront that began in 1861.

In the first year of the war, Jews 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 as soldiers
shivered in the field for want of decent clothing.

In seeking to explain the profiteering and cor-
ruption that attended the rush to war, the press
summoned the specter of the venal and disloyal
Jew. Cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as
the archetypal cunning contractors, who not only
refused to enlist but also actively undermined the
war effort. Jews were also imagined as the specu-
lators who profited at the expense of the common
good and as smugglers who traded with the enemy.

Butler, in other words, was drawing on calumnies
that became common currency during wartime.

The contractor, smuggler, speculator and
shirker, however, were more than just figures of
scorn. Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” came
to be seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the
new economic and social order produced by the
war. 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 and unjust social heap summoned into
being by the chaos and disruption of war.

Even as the heated rhetoric of the war years
receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed
for action. They were returned to service in the
Gilded Age.

It was no coincidence that the episode tradi-
tionally identified as initiating modern antisem-
itism in America — the exclusion of Joseph
Seligman by Henry Hilton from the Grand Union
Hotel in Saratoga Springs on May 31, 1877 — had
at its center a man who had made a fortune as
a contractor and banker during the Civil War.

Seligman, a friend of President Grant, was viewed
as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was
remaking America.

Henry Hilton slandered Seligman as “shoddy—
false—squeezing—unmanly,” a social climber who
“has to push himself upon the polite.” Hilton drew
upon themes familiar from wartime antisemitism:
the Jew as speculator who trafficked in credit
and debt; the Jew as obsequious ingratiator who
attached himself to the powerful; the Jew as prof-
iteer who advanced by improper means; the Jew
as vulgarian who flaunted his (and her) obscene
wealth and did not know his (or her) place; and
the Jew as overlord whose money allowed him
(or her) to displace others. In short, the “Seligman
Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.

In an age of inequality and excess, the antisem-
ite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was
wrong with American capitalism. And during an
age of mass immigration from Romania and the
Russian Empire, they soon added another theme
familiar from General Butler’s wartime diatribe:
The Jew could not be trusted to become fully
American. Sadly, even as Louis Gratz, Max Glass and many
other Jewish soldiers became American by serv-
ing in the Union army, the Civil War produced a
range of pernicious ideas about Jews that have
proven remarkably durable. We have escaped the
everyday torments that afflicted Max Glass, but
are still haunted in the present by the fantasies of
Benjamin Butler and Henry Hilton. JE
Adam Mendelsohn is the author of “Jewish Soldiers in
the Civil War: The Union Army.“
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