Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

82 // JASON H. SILVERMAN
this large mass of defenseless victims who were compelled to absorb all of the
prejudices which might otherwise have been expressed more frequently in anti-
Jewish sentiment." 22
With such social and economic vested interests in slavery, it would be as unrealistic
to expect antebellum southern Jews to eschew slavery as it would be to
expect any southern white in the Old South to turn his back on the peculiar institution.
Hence, when war came in 1861, the Jews of the Old South were as loyal
to the Confederate cause as any other white southerner. Typical of this loyalty was
the Shreveport, Louisiana, Jewish community, which resolved that "although we
might be called Southern rebels; still, as law-abiding citizens, we solemnly pledge
to stand by, protect, and honor the.. .Southern Confederacy with our lives, liberty,
and all that is dear to us."
Whether newly arrived immigrant (and at least two-thirds of the southern
Jews were) or native-born southerner, for the Jews, loyalty to the Confederacy was
a matter of "personal gratitude and cultural affinity." Indeed, "nowhere else in the
United States had Jews been offered the opportunity to participate so fully as
equals in society As a consequence, Jews had acclimated themselves to Southern
values, had become imbued with Southern traditions, and therefore had become
committed to the struggles and fortunes of the Confederacy." Devotion to their
homeland, then, meant fighting for the perpetuation of slavery and the Old
South. "Now, we of the South," wrote Solomon Cohen of Savannah in 1861, "seeing
that public opinion, {and}.. .the North are against all that we hold valuable,
[and] seeing that.. .our enemies have triumphed and that the government is about
to pass into the hands of those who hate us and our institutions, feel that prudence
and self-defense demand that we should protect ourselves, even while there is ruption
of every tie that binds us to the union that we have loved so well." Had he
been alive, John C. Calhoun could not have expressed the southern white sentiment
any more eloquently.
And most southern Jews readily answered the call to fight for slavery, states'
rights, and the Confederacy. University of Virginia student Gratz Cohen, who was
to fall mortally wounded in battle, perhaps best expressed the mood of most
southern Jews in one of the stanzas of a poem that he wrote imploring his fellow
students to enlist:
Go, for your soldier brothers need you by their side;
Go, fight as we have fought and die as we have died;
If need there be, a thousand deaths were better than disgrace;
Better that every man should die than live a conquered race. 23
On virtually every level of participation southern Jews served the Confederacy.
Transforming their businesses into producers of war materials or enlisting in the
Confederate army as entire families, elected or appointed as noncommissioned or
commissioned officers, serving in the Confederate cabinet or state office, Jewish