American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume 64, Numbers 1 & 2

underexplored themes, the small and relatively inconsequential role of Jews in
uniform continues to receive outsized attention. 2
This article argues that those who carped during the war about Jewish
military contracting were correct—for all the wrong reasons—to focus their
attention on the conspicuous role of Jewish suppliers. For although at least
eight thousand served in blue and grey, the most significant impact of Jews on
the war and the war on Jews came not on the battlefield but in outfitting the
Union Army. Much less heroic than frontline gallantry and more problematic
given the opportunities for profit, this role has been little remembered. Even
if the war affected Jews in other ways, its most durable impact came in the
commercial realm. By this measure, the consequences of the war for American
Jews were monumental.
The drumbeat of war pushed Jewish firms into the front ranks of clothing
manufacturing in the United States. Jewish dry-goods merchants, clothing
dealers, wholesalers, and clothiers—some of whom had only relinquished the
aching peddlers’ pack a handful of years before—found themselves fortuitously
positioned. They were in the right industry with the right skills at the right
moment, a phalanx of foot-soldiers mustered into service by the Union’s war
economy. The Civil War, disastrous for so many, transformed their fortunes. The
opportunities presented to sew uniforms for the Union Army propelled some
Jewish entrepreneurs from small operators at the margins of the ready-made garment
business into manufacturers on a substantial scale. This was a development
of enormous consequence. The war supplied a boost that ensured that many of
these same contractors were able, a little over a decade after the war ended, to
employ hundreds of thousands of eastern European Jewish immigrants who
began to flock to the United States. Indeed, without this impetus, the economic
history of American Jews may have been very different.
This prospect looked unlikely in the latter months of 1860. In New York,
clothiers and dry-goods merchants watched the escalating political crisis with
trepidation. Much of the city’s merchant class prayed for a Democratic victory,
fearing that the election of Lincoln would be the death knell of the Union.
Barring an unexpected turn of events, New York City appeared all but certain
to be one of the largest losers if the South were to secede, robbing the metropolis
of its largest market. At best, merchants would encounter new tariffs imposed
by an independent South and greater competition from Southern ports. At
worst, they would be separated from their customers by war. Clothiers who
had struggled to resurrect their fortunes after the panic of 1857 now faced
the prospect of slow strangulation. Businesses that depended on the Southern
market shed workers. Although the worst pre-war predictions of New York’s
Cassandras quickly came to pass—trade between New York and the South all
but ceased and Southern merchants suspended remittances—war provided an
unexpected windfall. 3
84 • American Jewish Archives Journal