Cary Gratz Killed in Action: August 10, 1861

From the obituary in the New York Times, August 18, 1861:

"Capt. CARY GRATZ, who has been for about five years a citizen of St. Louis, is youngest son of BEN. GRATZ, of Lexington, Ky., one of the oldest and most honored citizens of that State, and intimately connected for a quarter of a century with the banking institutions of Kentucky. The family is a branch of the Philadelphia family of the same name. Capt. CARY GRATZ was first cousin of HON. F. P. BLAIR [member of the U.S. House of Representatives], and from the first outbreak of the war has been in the public service; and in his last battle he died with great gallantry. His father has hundreds of friends in this City and in Philadelphia who will be pained by his misfortune."

Cary Gratz died in the second battle of the Civil War, at Wilson's Creek, near Springfield, Missouri, on August 10, 1861. He had turned 32 the day before.

An earlier post, A Civil War Tragedy, focused on Cary and his stepbrother/cousin Jo Shelby who both fought in the battle but on opposite sides. This one and the next will deal with Cary's death and its repercussions in military and political circles as well as its aftermath for his family.

The official account of Cary's death reports that he was advancing at the head of his men (Company E), when they discovered the enemy led by an officer carrying a Union flag. Gratz drew his revolver, fired "and knocked [the Confederate officer] off his horse, but upon reaching the ground he immediately arose and rushed through his lines, at which instant Captain Gratz fired a second shot pitching him headlong out of sight. The enemy now opened fire, and Captain Gratz fell, pierced by five shots."

The first member of the family to learn of his death was probably Frank Blair, his cousin in St. Louis, who took the loss of Cary and other friends to heart. The Blair's had political clout: Frank, of course, was a Congressman, his father, Francis Preston Blair of Blair House, Washington, DC, was a founder of the Republican Party and an advisor to President Lincoln and his brother Montgomery was Postmaster General in Lincoln's Cabinet. They had used their influence to help their old friend John C. Fremont, a soldier, explorer and the first anti-slavery Republican candidate for president in 1856. He was appointed to head the Army of the West in the summer of 1861, and it was Fremont who denied reinforcements to the outnumbered Union troops at Wilson's Creek. The Blair's faith in the general was shaken and in the following weeks Fremont's rash decisions and poor organizational skills seemed to form, for many observers, a pattern of bad judgment. The Blairs lent their support to Fremont's other critics, and the general was relieved of his command in November 1861.

John Fremont -- and his formidable wife Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator, who had devoted her life to her husband's career -- were ambitious and used to controversy. The couple battled back against the Blair's, their former patrons. Rebecca Gratz wrote at the end of October 1861: "[T]he great mortification they [the Blair family] suffer, is having assisted to place [the Fremont's] in power to do so much mischief. It seems to me that our friends [the Blair's] are deficient in knowledge of human character -- like other sanguine people they act from feeling -- and misjudge those they love, who they think are as guileless as themselves...."

Fremont would be courtmartialed and later pardoned by Lincoln, but he never received another command during the Civil War. (See the comment for a correction to this last statement.) The long friendship between the Fremont's and the Blair's was over.

Concerned as Rebecca was with the Blairs' grief and their troubles with the Fremont's, her main concern was closer -- her brother Ben's reaction to the death of his son.

To be continued.

(The report of Cary Gratz's death is taken from The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Record..., U.S. War Department, 1881. Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Civil War Letters: May 22, 1861

On May 22, 1861, Rebecca wrote a thank you note to her nephew-in-law Solomon Cohen, of Savannah, an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. He had sent his condolences on the recent death of her friend and companion Julia Hoffman. Thinking of Julia's death, Rebecca begins by quoting scripture:

"'The righteous are removed from the evil to come' and thus I ponder on the destiny our unhappy country torn by evils of our own creating. How many we love may be sacrificed by the coming strife! My only comfort is that we shall love and pray for each other through all changes and chances of this life."

She was determined to preserve affectionate ties within the family, and she would succeed in this. However, her dark forbodings proved true: Cohen will lose his only son in the War; Rebecca, not only this great-nephew on the side of the South, but also a beloved nephew fighting for the Union.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

The Civil War Begins

As Confederate troops bombarded Fort Sumter, Rebecca was concerned with matters nearer at hand. Many years before, she had promised her dying friend Maria Fenno Hoffman to look after her children. Following the death of Maria's widower Josiah Ogden Hoffman in 1837, it was found that the family fortune was gone. The two sons were unmarried and working but did not have enough money to provide a home for their sister Julia. From that point on Julia spent her life as a guest in others' homes. Eventually she was able to summer with her brother George and his wife on their farm in central Pennsylvania, take extended visits with her cousins in Boston and Fishkill NY and have her winter home with Rebecca, where the Gratz's treated her as one of the family. In April of 1861, Julia, who had suffered from a digestive disorder for years, was seriously ill, and Rebecca had moved into the bedchamber closest to hers to better care for her.

By this time Rebecca's large household had shrunk to only one nephew, Horace Moses, and she had come to rely greatly on Julia's companionship. As she would later remark, at eighty she had taken for granted that Julia, nearly 30 years younger, would survive her. Anxiously caring for her friend, it was not until April 17, 1861, that Rebecca sat down to write her niece Miriam Cohen in Savannah "in anticipation" of future difficulties in communicating.

Miriam had married a Southerner and had lived in South Carolina and Georgia for nearly a quarter of a century, and it was obvious, from early in her marriage, that she had become an enthusiast, like her husband, for slavery and states' rights. From about 1840 on, Rebecca no longer brought up in her letters to Miriam anything on which they might disagree. And so Rebecca starts this April 1861 letter with family matters, but on the second page, she cannot stop herself from voicing her anguish:

"The horrors of civil war, separation from dear friends and multitudes of unknown troubles seem to hover over us in frightful array. It strikes me that there is no glory in such warfare -- whichever side succeeds, his brother fails. I have not yet learned to narrow my patriotism to a single section of my country. May God assist us to bring a right understanding about, without bloodshed in this unholy struggle."

Rebecca was a Unionist, but here she writes only of her anti-war feelings. So rational herself, she was at a loss to understand that anyone could prefer violence to some compromise which would keep the peace and the Union intact.

Particularly interesting is her statement about limiting her patriotism. Some historians have suggested that Americans were much more attached to their states than to the nation, and this may be true in some regions. (Early on in their correspondence, Rebecca commented that Miriam had become quite a Georgian.) Yet in about seventy years worth of letters Rebecca never refers to herself as a Pennsylvanian nor does she glory in her region's superiority or in the inferiority of other parts of the country. She always sees herself as an American.

Perhaps this was a legacy of being among the first generation to grow up as citizens of the United States. Rebecca and her contemporaries were very aware of the fact that they were part of a political and social experiment which Europeans were watching with interest and in some cases with the hope that the new nation would fail. When the government removed Native Americans from the East, although she opposed it, Rebecca felt a responsibility because she was an American. That identification was much more central to her than any political or regional connection. Sadly, by the time of the Civil War, Rebecca had few contemporaries left to watch with her as the nation stood on the brink of self-destruction and to speak out for their old ideals.

All unknowing of her own prescience, Rebecca also writes in her letter that whichever side wins, "his brother" loses. In less than four months this terrible fate would fall upon her own family at the Battle of Wilson's Creek. But before that tragedy, she had to face another grief: Julia Hoffman died on April 28, 1861.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Papers, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Alfred Mordecai's Civil Wars

[As promised in a previous post, "Rebecca Gratz and the Civil War," here is the first of the profiles of Gratz relatives' war experiences.]

Alfred Mordecai, (1804-1887) was a North Carolinian. His father ran a girls' boarding school in Warrenton, NC, which was considered one of the best in the South. Alfred, the only boy who attended the Mordecai School, received special tutoring and was admitted to West Point (no doubt quite a change) when he was fifteen. He graduated first in his class of 1823, and after two years as an assistant professor at the Academy and a stint building forts in Virginia, he became the assistant to Gen. Alexander Macomb in the War Office's Engineering Department in Washington.

In 1835 he was appointed to head the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. Mordecai had met Sara Hays, Rebecca Gratz's niece, a few times during his Washington days and renewed the acquaintance. His father, a scholar of religion as well as a schoolmaster, had recently visited Philadelphia where he had met Rebecca; the Gratz's were ready to welcome his son. In June 1836 Alfred and Sara were married.

The marriage was not without its tensions. Mordecai, though not a slaveholder, upheld the institution and states' rights; his wife held northern (although not Abolitionist) views on slavery and the importance of the Union. While she was an observant Jew and tried to interest her husband in religion, he remained a firm agnostic despite his upbringing in an observant family. Still, in 1855 when his brother was about to marry, Alfred said he hoped the couple would be as happy as he and Sara were.

After his marriage Mordecai continued to rise in the army as an expert in ordnance, receiving assignments in recognition of his knowledge -- an inspection tour of European munitions factories and a trip to the Crimea to observe the war there. He and his family lived in Washington during most of this period, moving to Watervliet NY when Mordecai was posted to the Arsenal there in 1857.

As the Civil War approached, Major Mordecai faced an almost unbearable choice. He was a southerner by birth and would have lived there if his career had permitted it. He was also the pride of his large extended family -- a symbol of Jewish patriotism and success. Now they expected him to become one of their military heroes in the struggle against the North. But Mordecai had competing loyalties which his Southern relatives discounted. First, there was the United States Army to which he had devoted his life. Then there was his son, Alfred, Jr., at West Point as the War began, who, without any divided allegiances, would be fighting for the Union. Finally, there were Sara and his daughters, Northerners who would be forced to live in the Confederacy if he went with the South.

Both the Governor of North Carolina and Jefferson Davis, an old friend, offered Mordecai commissions as the War began. He turned them down and requested to be transferred to somewhere far away from the War -- in the West, perhaps. His request was denied, and he resigned from the United States Army; the family arrived in Philadelphia at the end of May 1861.

Mordecai's principled stand had immediate financial repercussions: he had no other income than his salary; in September 1861 his daughters opened a school on Delancey Place in Philadelphia by which they hoped to support their family. Rebecca Gratz reported at the time that Major Mordecai was "very broken-spirited" despite "the girls' noble efforts to cheer their parents."

A year later, another friend Elizabeth Blair Lee, visiting from Washington, looked in on the family and found the Major "a premature old, old man....he hangs about doing nothing not even reading and [his daughters] are working in their school for bread...." Rebecca, an ardent Unionist, was also critical: the major's "associates," she found, were those "among the disaffected [Southern sympathizers]...so I fear whatever sentiments he might have entertained in the beginning -- they are now so far implicated on the wrong side that he will find it difficult to recede -- poor Sara is victimized being the only loyal member of the household -- the subject nearest all our hearts is never discussed in their household."

The atmosphere in the Mordecai home may have been an emotional war zone, but somehow the family pulled through. Mordecai found a job teaching mathematics, then worked for a company owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. At the end of the war, he was employed by the Imperial Mexican Railroad, which allowed him to get away from the scene of his humiliation. Mordecai liked Mexico and the many ex-Confederates who worked with him. Together they dreamed of setting up a slave state, and Alfred considered bringing his family to live there. These plans collapsed with the defeat of Maximillian, and Mordecai returned to Philadelphia and to the job he had left.

In post-war Philadelphia, Unionists and those who had been pro-South (a minority which included members of eminent local families) somehow patched up their differences. Alfred Mordecai, criticized by both sides for his decision to stay out of combat, was accepted. In 1877, when the Gratz family was concerned that the press had erroneously characterized Rebecca's relationship with Washington Irving as a romance, it was Mordecai who was delegated to write the first article about Rebecca by a family member.

In 1886, Alfred and Sara Mordecai celebrated their golden anniversary, a milestone rarely achieved in the nineteenth century. The family sent out hundreds of invitations, but only one member of Alfred Mordecai's southern family attended. His relatives had always believed that it was Sara who had prevented him from taking his place among the military leaders of the Confederacy.

(I have gleaned the information about Mordecai's life from Emily Bingham's Mordecai: An Early American Family. The quotes from Rebecca are in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson, accessible on Google Books. Elizabeth Blair Lee's quote is from Wartime Washington: the Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas, also accessible on Google Books. Alfred Mordecai's article appeared in Philadelphia's Jewish Record.)

Yom Kippur, 1861

On August 10, 1861, Cary Gratz, the son of Rebecca's brother Ben, was killed at the Battle of Wilson's Creek on the side of the Union. His stepbrother and cousin, Jo Shelby, the son of Ben's second wife Ann, fought for the Confederacy in the same battle. Rebecca had known both young men since boyhood. This is an extract from a letter of Rebecca's to Ann, who was not Jewish, dated September 13:

"How I wish by sharing I could lessen My poor brother's grief!

I sympathize with you, too My dear Ann, in the anxiety which is so harassing by the uncertain accounts the papers bring of the contending Armies -- we may pray for Jo's personal safety -- tho' we cannot for the success of his arms -- Faith in Him, who in justice & in Mercy rules over the destiny of all, must give us patience! Tomorrow will be a holy day with us -- Sabbath & day of Atonement, when memorials of the dead mingle with petitions for the living -- and we endeavour to purify ourselves by devotion, confession & repentance -- you will all be remembered by me, in the house of prayer --"

(For the full letter, see Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Rebecca Gratz & the Civil War

Thinking of her relatives and friends fighting on both sides in "this unhappy war," Rebecca wrote in 1862 that "there is scarcely a field on which some we are interested for may not bleed." She was exaggerating, but the statement reflects the depth of her anxiety.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, five of her nephews had brought home brides from the South, and three nieces had married Southerners. (Not all these individuals lived to the 1860's, but bonds of friendship had been forged with these southern families.) When the Civil War came, it was where Rebecca's relatives lived, rather than where they were from, which determined their allegiance. Gratz wives from the South, who had lived in Philadelphia for decades, supported the Unionist cause with their husbands and sons. The niece who had married a Georgian shared the Confederate enthusiasm of the men in her immediate family. In Kentucky, a border state, Rebecca's brother Benjamin was a Unionist as were three of his sons; one other son and his stepson were with the South (see my post for September 29, 2009, for the tragic results). In another border state, Missouri, a nephew, who had emigrated there in the 1840's, and his sons were Confederates. And one niece was married to a Southerner who would choose neither North nor South.

Rebecca was an ardent Unionist and was grieved by these divisions. Nevertheless, family came first, and in the years preceding the War she stuck to personal matters when writing to those whose political opinions differed from her own. The envelopes among the Gratz papers printed with "Flag of Truce" attest to her continuing efforts during the War to keep lines of communication open and ties of affection strong with her relatives in Georgia. These letters contain only family news, this time because "Flag of Truce" mail was read by censors on both sides.

Although Rebecca wished to support the Union by participating in some useful activity, her age (she was eighty at the beginning of the War) forbade any active involvement, especially in nursing at which she had excelled all her life. She reported to her niece Anna Gratz in Kentucky that she had been talking to some "Flora [sic] Nightingales," and had felt her "energies so roused that I sighed for the power of other days [that I might] help the sufferers collected in so many hospitals around and about our city."

She had to be content with offering a haven to her "honorary" niece Elizabeth Blair Lee and her little boy who arrived from Washington DC whenever the capital was threatened. Preston and Eliza Blair's daughter (see my post dated October 13, 2009), Lizzie was married to Philip Lee, a naval officer and a Unionist from the Lee family of Virginia. During one of her stays in Philadelphia, Lizzie taught Rebecca a skill useful to the war effort; she wrote to her husband: "Everyone is knitting for the soldiers. T'is the fashion -- I am a great teacher of the art. Aunt Becky even is a pupil -- she is so good, kind to your boy and your devoted Lizzie."

And so, for the most part, Rebecca's contributions would be on a very personal level, kindnesses to friends and relatives coming to Philadelphia, a regular correspondence with those far away, compassionate letters to her brother Ben and her niece Miriam Cohen when they lost sons in the War. However, Rebecca was a very well-connected woman, and she found that she could sit at home and pull strings -- to get a job for a nephew -- and, when needed, a message to President Lincoln. These two actions will each get a blog post of its own.

I also plan to write posts about the Civil War experiences of various Gratz relatives, North and South.

(Rebecca's letters quoted here are in the Henrietta Clay Collection at Transylvania University. The "flag of truce" envelopes are among the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. Elizabeth Blair Lee's is from a volume of her letters, Wartime Washington, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas, and accessible through Google Books.)

A Civil War Tragedy

Benjamin Gratz (1792-1884), Rebecca's youngest brother, settled in 1819 in his bride's hometown, Lexington, Kentucky. He and his wife Maria (nee Gist) had six sons, four of whom lived to adulthood. After Maria's death he married her niece Anna Boswell Shelby, a widow with a son around the same age as Ben's youngest.

The stepbrother-cousins came to Pennsylvania for prep school, and their Aunt Becky welcomed them to her house on Chestnut Street for those academic vacations too short to make a trip home feasible. During these years she wrote glowingly to Kentucky about her nephews.

The boys seem to have gotten along well but as they came to manhood in the 1840's and 1850's, they were divided by the issues of slavery and secession. Benjamin Gratz, though a slaveholder, was a strong Unionist; his sons Bernard, Hyman and Cary stood with him. However, another son Howard and Jo Shelby, Ben's stepson, who had gone into business together in Missouri, were with the South.

The family rift was played out tragically on August 10, 1861, at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri: Capt. Cary Gratz on the Union side, Jo Shelby across the lines from him. Cary was killed, devastating his father. Rebecca wrote that she wished that by sharing Ben's grief she could somehow lessen it. But in her many letters to Kentucky, seeking to console Ben, she also was solicitous of the continuing anxieties of her sister-in-law, Jo's mother, telling her, "I hope [Jo] will escape unhurt from this desperate conflict."

Cary's body was brought home and interred, the first Civil War soldier to be buried in Lexington Cemetery. Jo Shelby rose to the rank of general in the Confederate army, and is today considered one of the South's most brilliant cavalry officers. At the beginning of the War, he had left his wife and children in Missouri. When as southern sympathizers they were expelled from their land in 1863, Benjamin Gratz escorted them to Lexington, Kentucky, where they lived for the rest of the war. Jo Shelby and his wife named their first son born after the end of the conflict Benjamin Gratz Shelby.

(Much of the information in this post is drawn from The Letters of Rebecca Gratz, which is available on the internet. The letter quoted is from the Henrietta Clay Collection, Transylvania University, Lexington, KY.)