By Adam D. Mendelsohn
An immigrant from Hungary, Max Glass had an unhappy Civil War. Serving in the Union army’s 8th Connecticut Infantry, he wrote he was “abused for reason [sic] that I never understand” by members of his regiment.
“It may have been because I did not make them my companions in drinking, or as I am a Jew,” he speculated. “If I went in the street or anywhere I was called Jew. Christ Killer and such names. I also had stones, and dirt thrown at me.”
Glass complained to his commanding officer, 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 sentenced to hard labor.
Glass was not the only Jewish soldier to be mistreated while 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 soldiers in the Union army. What I found was indifference, benign curiosity and comradeship appear to have been much more common for the majority of Jewish soldiers.
For every Max Glass, there was a Louis A. Gratz. Born in Prussia, Gratz scraped by as a peddler in America. Enlisting just days after the start of the Civil War, he took to military life and became an officer by August of 1861.
“I have now become a respected man in a respected position, one filled by very few Jews,” Gratz wrote to his family. “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 Glass, his letters whisper not a word about prejudice, and Gratz’s experience was not unusual.
Ultimately, Glass escaped his abysmal start in the army through the intercession of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler. After reading about Glass’ tale of woe, the general pardoned the hapless Hungarian.
But this story doesn’t have a redemptive ending. Even as he was pardoning Glass, Butler was locked in a heated public exchange that reveals how wartime warped attitudes toward Jews. The imbroglio began when Butler took note that a small group of smugglers, recently detained by the Union army, were Jewish.
When challenged, the general refused to apologize. He countered that deceit and disloyalty were among the defining characteristics of Jews, and avarice was a particularly Jewish avocation. According to his logic, Jews could never become loyal Americans because they preferred profit to patriotism.
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 scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear as soldiers shivered in the field.
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 speculators who profited at the expense of the common good and as smugglers who traded with the enemy.
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. 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 is no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as initiating modern antisemitism 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 made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the war. Seligman, a friend of President Ulysses S. Grant, was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism remaking America.
Hilton slandered Seligman as a “shoddy — false — squeezing — unmanly” social climber who “has to push himself upon the polite.” In short, the “Seligman Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.
In an age of inequality and excess, the antisemite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was wrong with American capitalism. And during an age of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, they soon added another theme familiar from Butler’s wartime diatribe: The Jew could not be trusted to become fully American.
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.
Adam D. Mendelsohn is author of “Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War” (NYU Press). This article was provided by the JTA global Jewish news source.
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