Passover this year comes with a singularly interesting accompaniment. It occurs within the secular calendar month in which, 150 years ago, this country began “a great civil war.” Moreover, that war’s causes and results fit with the Jewish holiday’s themes — the end of slavery and creation of “a new birth of freedom,” as President Abraham Lincoln put it in his great Gettysburg Address.
Sad to say, some people today strive to deny that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. They point to other issues of contention between the northern and southern states — tariffs, state’s rights, desires for territorial expansion.
They also point to the paradoxes within the combatants and the war’s story — that the majority of the southern population and Confederate soldiers did not own slaves; that the U.S. government at first denied that it wanted to abolish slavery; that some slavery-permitting border states took the Union side; that Lincoln’s much vaunted Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 actually didn’t free a single slave; and so on.
All these statements are true. But to make too much of them is like saying that because the majority of German people during World War II were neither Nazi Party members nor dedicated anti-Semites, therefore German anti-Semitism didn’t cause the Holocaust.
While I would not call myself a true Civil War expert, I have been reading off-and-on about that fascinating topic ever since the centennial commemoration in the 1960s. I think the evidence in favor of the following overall description is overwhelming.
The Confederate States of America seceded from the United States and went to war primarily to defend slavery — and not just slavery, but slavery founded on racism, a factually baseless but emotionally held belief that black human beings were not truly human beings, and should be forcibly subordinated to serve white human beings.
I do not see how anybody can deny this who has read accounts of the events and statements leading to the war; who has read editorials in the southern newspapers and the statements of the Confederate political leaders from President Jefferson Davis on down; or who knows of the behavior of Confederate soldiers and officials toward black U.S. soldiers.
The federal government did eventually go to war against slavery. It did so slowly, reluctantly, ambivalently, in a strange hesitation dance of two or three steps forward and one or two steps back. Still, by the beginning of 1865, with the passage in Congress of the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, the Lincoln administration had made restoring the union and abolishing slavery its war aims.
The problem was that the federal government never went to war against racism. This, to me, is the great tragedy and the true missed opportunity of the Civil War. If this could have been done, we would live in a far different country today.
But it probably couldn’t have been done, principally because such a war would have involved fighting many people in the northern states as well as in the southern states. People don’t generally know that the majority of the northern states had laws discriminating against free blacks — not allowing them to vote or serve on juries, and so on. Indeed, three Union states — Indiana, Iowa, and Illinois — actually had laws forbidding black people, free or slave, from living within their borders at all.
Racism was endemic to the whole country, north and south, before and after the war. I believe that is principally why, as superb Civil War historian Bruce Catton put it in his book “This Hallowed Ground,” “The blame for the chance that was missed after the war ended is like the blame for the war itself; a common national possession.”
As for the country’s tiny Jewish community, it too shared in the “common national possession.” Despite the anti-slavery example of the Passover story — an example so inspiring to African Americans that they created one of their greatest spiritual songs about it, “Go Down, Moses” — American Jews were as divided about slavery as other American groups.
Indeed, American Jewry, mostly immigrants from the anti-Semitic German states, felt such a deep hunger for acceptance and belonging that they for the most part readily followed their neighbors’ lead. Southern Jews largely became Rebels, northern ones Yankees. Moreover, despite a few anti-Semitic incidents — most notoriously General Grant’s Special Order No. 11 of 1862 — Jews attained high positions on both sides, politically and militarily.
Yet, at a time when passionate disagreement ran high and literally became organized violence, some people could still see the humanity of their supposed enemies. Jews especially on the two sides seemed to see beyond the sectional divide.
Bertram W. Korn recounted several such incidents in his book “American Jewry and the Civil War” (1961). My favorite is this: One day during a Passover, Union soldier Myer Levy of Philadelphia was walking through a captured Virginia town, when he saw a boy sitting on the steps of his house and eating matzah. When Levy asked for some, the boy leaped up and ran into the house shouting, “Mother, there’s a damn-Yankee Jew outside!” The boy’s mother came out and invited Levy to return that evening for a Passover meal.
Milwaukee recently had a forum about maintaining civility within our community (see page one). In that spirit, I propose that Chronicle readers recall this Civil War anecdote when you attend your seders this Passover. Chag Pesach same’ach.
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