Jews of the Civil War

The history of Jews in the Civil War isn’t nearly so secret as this essay suggests, but it’s still a good discussion of a part of the Civil War that doesn’t get so much public attention. This essay focuses on the United States over the treasonous Slave Power, who had the Civil War’s most famous Jewish person, the traitor Judah Benjamin, featured above.

Born on Christmas Day in Schlesswig-Holstein, Edward Selig Salomon came to the United States in 1855 when he was 17, and was among the first Jews, if not the first, to practice law in Chicago. When the war began, Salomon was an alderman in Chicago’s Sixth Ward and the youngest member of the city council. With the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor that ignited the war, Salomon enlisted on May 6, 1861, in Colonel Hecker’s first regiment, the 24th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Distrust between the rival German and German-speaking Hungarian militias comprising the regiment immediately manifest among the officers of the 24th Illinois, leading to the resignation of Col. Hecker and his loyal faction, including then-Major Salomon. Hecker and Salomon were reunited at the Concordia Club as the Jewish company was recruited and funded.

Col. Hecker was wounded in the regiment’s first action at the battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May, 1863, while Lt. Colonel Salomon recovered from illness in time to rejoin the new Hecker Regiment shortly thereafter, and as General Robert E. Lee moved his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac toward Pennsylvania. Neither General Lee nor the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George Meade, had planned to fight a battle at Gettysburg, as Salomon would later write, “but events shaped themselves, and Gettysburg, which, up to the 1st of July, 1863, had been an obscure little hamlet in Pennsylvania, old fashioned and sedate, in a beautiful and peaceful valley, became a place of great historic importance, the place where the great forces of a great but divided people were to decide forever the question, whether or not a government of the people for the people and by the people should endure…” (Salomon, p. 6). After confused and frantic street fighting to cover the retreat through the city of Gettysburg on the first day of the battle, and as the regiment under his command reached the higher ground of Cemetery Hill, Salomon had his first of two horses shot out from under him at Gettysburg. The rest of Lee’s and Meade’s armies would arrive at Gettysburg by the following afternoon, Thursday, July 2.

During an artillery duel on the second day of the battle, Salomon had his second horse shot out from under him by a ricocheting round of solid shot. Meanwhile, Confederate sharpshooters had taken positions in several nearby houses, “from where they picked off our cannoniers and officers at a rapid rate,” Salomon wrote. General Oliver O. Howard ordered the colonel to call up volunteers to clear the houses of the sharpshooters. Salomon selected about forty men from among those who volunteered, and requested that Captain Joseph B. Greenhut lead the mission.

Joseph B. Greenhut was born in Austria and brought to Chicago by his parents in 1852 when he was nine years old. Greenhut was among the first to volunteer for service, rising quickly to the rank of sergeant. But early in the war his arm was wounded badly enough during the capture of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, that he was mustered out of the army. Greenhut reenlisted upon his recovery and was appointed captain of Company K in the Hecker Regiment, as the Concordia Guards were being recruited in Chicago.

I don’t have too much to add, but figured this would be of significant interest to readers.