The Top Official in the Confederacy Was Jewish
He was also an ex-United States Senator who wound up as an English Barrister
I believe It’s fair to say that most Americans know more about UFO’s than they do about history and more about history in general than about that bloody aberration in their own history known as the Civil War. In an age when high school graduates think Bolivia is the capitol of Venezuela and will tell you that the guy on the $1 dollar bill is George Bush, you can be assured of blank stares at the mention of the Southern Confederacy.
That Confederacy was the hastily organized attempt to make a government out of states as incompatible and indifferent to one another as Mississippi and Virginia and which confidently and tragically went to war against a vastly more powerful United States.
But even those who know that seem not to know that over 4,000 of its Southern soldiers were Jewish nor that a Jew served that government in a variety of its highest offices.
He was Judah Benjamin, former United States senator who left the Senate and Washington along with his colleague, Senator Jefferson Davis, to form a government in defense of the Southern states. It was Davis who appointed Benjamin as Attorney General of the Confederacy and subsequently to other top positions in the government.
But Benjamin was not alone in his status as a high-ranking Jewish Confederate. Abraham Myers was a West Point graduate and classmate of Gen. Robert E.Lee who, despite controversy, served his government as Quartermaster General until dismissed by Davis. The city of Fort Myers, Florida, is named after him.
Simon Baruch, who survived the Battle of Second Manassas, was the Surgeon General of the Confederacy. S.M. Hymans, Edwin Kuncheedt and Ira Moses reached the rank of colonel.
Major Raphael Moses, General Longstreet’s chief commissary officer was charged with delivering the last of the Confederate treasury, $40,000 in gold and silver bullion, to help feed and supply defeated Confederate soldiers in hospitals or straggling toward home. He and some armed guards had to fight off repeated attempts by mobs to steal it.
Northern General William Tecumseh Sherman reportedly stated that if only the North could kill a few thousand slaveholding whites the war would end immediately. The fact is that their numbers were very small and that the overwhelming majority of Southerners were poor farmers and small merchants who had no interest in slavery and for whom owning even a single slave was out of the question economically.
In fact most of the Confederate soldiers who suffered and died in that war tolerated the whole thing as an unjust benefit to those few. The widely held view then was expressed in the popular statement of the time:
“It’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight!”
So, then, why did they leave their homes and loved ones to take up arms and fight in that godawful war? Stephen D. Lee, the youngest general in the Confederacy gave an insightful answer to that:
“The Confederate soldier did not go into battle to vindicate a constitutional argument. He went to war because his country was invaded, because his heart was throbbing for his hearthstone. Here was the land which gave him birth; here was his childhood’s home; here were the graves of his dead. No hostile foot should ever tread this consecrated ground except over his dead body. He could face the line of fire but not the shame of standing back.”
“I am satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
The famous American sculptor, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, of Richmond, Virginia, fought at the Shenandoah Battle of New Market, along with his fellow cadets from Virginia Military Institute. His mother, Catherine Ezekiel said she “would not tolerate a son who declined to fight for the Confederacy.” Ezekiel himself later wrote:
“We were not fighting for the perpetuation of slavery but in defense of our homes which were being ruthlessly invaded.”
Judah Benjamin occupied the highest levels of the Confederate government but it was the ordinary man of that faith who fought alongside his Christian comrades. Their fight was the only response they felt they could make to an invasion of their homeland. After the war ended and President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, Benjamin fled to England, fearing he would be accused as a member of the plot. In 1867, at age 55, he was called to the English bar. In 1883, he retired in failing health and moved to Paris where he died in 1884.
Was the Civil War fought to rid America of slavery? Politically yes, it was. The nation is incomparably better as a result of the terrible price paid on both sides.
But if it had been fought primarily to end slavery, not by politicians but by the ordinary soldier, my guess is it would have been over shortly after the Battle of Bull Run and that Bull Run would not have been a Confederate victory. The ordinary Confederate soldier simply would not have risked his life to perpetuate slavery for rich people.
I believe that was the same assumption held by people in the North, leading them to think the war would be over in a single afternoon. That’s just my opinion.
But those Southern soldiers did, in fact, fight like the very Devil from Hell to save their homeland. For four nasty years.
And that’s NOT just my opinion.
Jewish soldiers fought and died on both sides of America’s Civil War, because they were Americans who, although bitterly divided, chose to support their respective governments. Those who did so for the South fought as valliantly as did their Northern brothers … and their Southern neighbors.