St. Nicholas Visits the Mordecai House

Last December when I wrote "Did St. Nicholas Visit the Gratz House?" my answer was, "Possibly." I was suggesting that the poem now known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas" was a major source of the American-style holiday. Published in 1823 at a time when the majority of Americans did not recognize Christmas as a religious holiday, the poem re-invented it as a dazzling festival for children. And notice that in "A Visit from St. Nicholas," there is absolutely no mention of the Nativity or even any concern about which children have been "naughty or nice;" Christmas is all about toys and sweets for everyone.

With December 25 a business day in Philadelphia and most people treating it as such, and with a lack of Christmas paraphernalia -- the public Christmas trees, lights and creches -- some American Jews probably did not see it as a threat to their way of life and permitted their children the good time it offered.

In researching Alfred Mordecai, Rebecca's nephew-in-law, for a recent post, I found another reference to Christmas. Emily Bingham, in Mordecai: An Early American Family, describes a letter from Sara Mordecai, Alfred's wife, in December of 1855 in which she "recalled to her absent husband Christmases spent together in Washington, wrapping gifts and filling their children's stockings." It seems to be a happy memory which the two shared.

This is surprising. Alfred Mordecai, although he was brought up in an observant Jewish home, was an agnostic who would not permit his sons to be circumcised. He resisted his wife's attempts to bring him closer to her faith as firmly as he deplored his sister's conversion to Christianity. Sara Mordecai, a niece of Rebecca's, upheld the religion and traditions of her ancestors. She brought up her children as Jews and in 1867 when her son Alfred Jr. married a non-Jew, she refused to attend the wedding. You would think that at least one of these two would find grounds to object to Christmas yet it seems to be a moment they enjoyed together.

To have taken pleasure in a visit from St. Nick in the 1840's when their children were small, neither Alfred nor Sara could have thought of it as part and parcel of a religious observance. But as Protestant denominations warmed to the holiday, its Christian content would become inescapable, and American Jews in the latter part of the 19th century would do some reinvention of their own with Hanukkah.

The Doctrine of Discovery, Indian Removal and the Gratz Family

(I recently wrote a post, "The Indian Removal Act, Evangelicals & Rebecca Gratz," about Rebecca's opposition to the government's forced removal of Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi.)

It must have seemed quite a caper in 1773, in the waning days of British rule of the colonies. A group of investors, chafing under the British policy forbidding them to buy land from Native Americans west of the Alleghenies, had found a possible way around. Somehow one of their number, William Murray, had come into possession of a doctored document: the original permitted land purchases by individuals without the need of prior royal approval in India; with the removal of all references to moguls and any other words limiting it to the British possession in Asia and the retention of words like "Indians," the "revised" document might seem to an unwary official west of the mountains to give permission for private investors to purchase land from Native Americans.

The investors, mostly Pennsylvanians who included Rebecca's father Michael Gratz and her grandfather Joseph Simon, formed the Illinois Company and sent Murray west. He waved the document in front of the British commander of the region and closed a deal with Native Americans for a stupendous 43,000 square miles of land in Illinois. Now all that was needed was for the claim to be recognized by the government.

The British government instead recognized the fraud and ruled the transaction illegal. The Illinois Company then turned to the Royal Governor of Virginia, a colony which had land claims in Illinois. To encourage his interest, they created the Wabash Company and bought more lands in the region; its investors were mostly Marylanders -- and the Governor of Virginia.

Confirmation of the claims seemed imminent when in 1775 the American rebellion began in earnest and the Governor fled.

For the next 45 years the two companies would press their land claims with whatever government was in power, and all to no avail, sometimes for reasons of national interest, sometimes for reasons of partisan politics. (The colonist investors had morphed into big Federalists whom the Jeffersonian Republican Democrats saw no reason to please.)

Finally in 1817-1818, the heirs to the original investors decided on one last attempt to secure the land through the courts. Rebecca's brother Benjamin Gratz was sent West to lay the legal groundwork necessary to bring a case. Anticipation ran high among the investing families, as we see from Rebecca's letter to Ben in the West:

"The Illinois & Wabash claim, of which I have all my life heard so much, seemed like a romance. I never expected to see anything but maps & pamphlets of the subject, or that it would cost us your society, for so long a time. but since it has proceeded so far, I catch a little of the mania and frame wishes for its success at any rate hope you will not permit it to engage years of toil on an uncertain event & that after satisfying your curiosity with every thing worth visiting, you will bend your course homeward."

Her words with some minor changes could have come from Dickens' 1851 Bleak House, his novel about a lawsuit which went on for generations.

In 1823, the Illinois and Wabash Companies' case, Johnson v. M'Intosh, came before the Supreme Court. The Gratz's and the other second- and third-generation investors lost, but Native Americans lost much more. John Marshall, the Chief Justice, made a mistake. As part of his ruling, he invoked the "Doctrine of Discovery," which went back to the earliest explorations of America. The doctrine awarded sovereignty to the (white European) discoverers; the discovered lost legal title to their lands.

Marshall, who was trying to protect lands given by the government to Revolutionary War veterans, realized too late that using the Doctrine of Discovery in this case could lead to the wholesale removal of Native Americans. He tried to alter what he had done in a later opinion, but the times were against him. Cotton was the greatest wealth-producer in the country, Southerners wanted more land to grow it and the only way open to that land, as they saw it, was to get rid of the Native Americans who held it. Jacksonian Democrats supported them, and as the Supreme Court took on Jackson appointees, Marshall lost control. The new Justices liked his "Doctrine of Discovery" ruling and used it as precedent. Marshall was all too aware of what he had done and regretted his error. Fortunately, he did not live to see the courts of Canada and Australia use his Johnson v. M'Intosh opinion to disallow their own indigenous peoples' land rights.

Rebecca Gratz probably had no knowledge that her family was implicated in any way in the removal of Native Americans. In a quote reproduced in the earlier post on this subject, she shoulders her share of the blame for the catastrophe, but I think she did that as an American citizen, not as an interested party in a law suit.

(To me a blog post is not a journal article or a book chapter; it can serve to introduce readers to a topic and lead them to more detailed information elsewhere. I have pared down this story to its essentials. If you want to read a full account, including Marshall's reasons for invoking the discovery doctrine, I suggest Lindsay G. Robertson's Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands, on Google Books. Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson, also on Google Books.)

Women's Sabbath

It is Hanukkah again and I still have found no mention of the holiday in the Gratz correspondence. So this may be a good time to talk about the Sabbath which I have been thinking about since a young woman who was researching Rebecca Gratz approached me for information: her professor, she said, questioned whether Jewish women in America, circa 1800, attended synagogue each week. I replied that they did, but the clearest evidence I found was from 1825 when Rebecca, reporting on the dedication of her synagogue's new building, writes that she attended on Friday evenings and Saturdays. After that, there are quite a few mentions of visits made after services (See "Rebecca Gratz's First Bar Mitzvah Party?"as an example.) But there are no straightforward statements about synagogue attendance from her youth, that is, circa 1800. Although evidence may be gleaned from the letters, it is usually in passing remarks: the Sabbath traditions were so much part of the fabric of family life there was never a need to discuss them.

One point at which there is a little more about Sabbath synagogue attendance is when Rachel was away from home. The youngest Gratz sister seems to have been a bit of a slacker in her youth in the area of religious observance. For instance, when 17-year-old Rachel went to New York in 1800 to visit their non-Jewish friends, the Fenno's, her older sister Sarah wrote to her: "Have you been to synagogue -- you know my Rachel your attention on that score will be pleasing to our inestimable Parents." And also during this stay, in a letter to Rebecca, Maria Fenno offered reassurance to the Gratz family that "Rachel has gone to synagogue." I think it is a fair conclusion that her parents expected her to attend as usual although they were worried that she would not.

The strongest evidence for the Gratz women's customary attendance at services on the Sabbath is a poignant remark of Rebecca's. Following her mother's death in September 1808, she first went to synagogue in November for the naming of Rachel's baby daughter. All her grief returned, as raw as ever, when she saw "the vacant seat which our Parent used to occupy there." She knew where her mother had always sat in the women's section because Rebecca had attended services with her on a regular basis.

The correspondence doesn't tell us about how the family spent their Sabbath, but it makes clear that one observance was strictly followed: many, many letters end with a mention that it is nearly the Sabbath and so the writer must lay down her pen, writing being forbidden after sundown on Friday. Usually in the rush to finish, there is little else said, but in one of her letters to Maria Fenno in 1802, 21-year-old Rebecca says she must stop writing because "our dear old day shall not be forsaken." The artless affection for the Sabbath in her choice of words tells us that the "dear old day" was a time she cherished each week.

(The letters concerning Rachel's trip to New York are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. The 1808 letter is in the Gratz Collection, American Jewish Historical Society and the one from 1802 is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Library of Congress. The 1825 letter is reproduced in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson.)

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.)

My History with American History

Last week, the publicity attending the Rosenbach Museum & Library's acquisition of a gorgeous Thomas Sully portrait of Rebecca Gratz brought a number of people to this blog for the first time. One of them commented: "I found [your site] incredibly interesting, and I can't figure out why, because normally that period of American History is of limited interest to me."

His words took me back to a moment in my childhood when sitting at my desk in the 5th-grade, I gazed in dismay at the next section in our history book, "The Coming of the Iron Horse." I had liked American history to that point: the age of exploration, the colonies and the Revolutionary War, even the Constitution and the first years of the republic. There were stories, descriptions of the colonists' struggles and heroic Founding Fathers. But technology was not my cup of tea, and the account of America's antebellum period was full of it. The political events were even worse, as each came freighted with a name which included at least one long latinate word not in my vocabulary: the Missouri Compromise, the Tariff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis. And all these things were described in a bright bland "Pageant of America" style.

I took American History again in the 8th and 11th grades, but to no better effect. I liked history

and continued to read it for pleasure -- English, French, Russian, medieval, classical -- but never American.

Passing quickly over college, graduate school, career and family -- by the 1990's I had found my interests in history to be focussed on women and everyday life and was ready to try a work of American history with these themes. A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, swept me (and practically everyone else who read it) into the world of rural Maine at the beginning of the 19th century. Ulrich had teased out (through painstaking research) a picture of the lives of the women in the area through the brief entries in the local midwife's records.

My old scholarly leanings reawakened, I decided for fun to research Rebecca Gratz, a figure I had first encountered at the Rosenbach. As a docent I knew her story and the legends which surrounded her. I wished to determine the truth of these assertions, and this goal was feasible because Rebecca, her family and friends had left more than 2000 documents which might hold the answers. I've learned a great deal about Rebecca, but reading her letters also opened up her world to me: antebellum America with its moral ambiguities, religious ferment, new technologies and political stalemates seemed not so different from the United States of the 21st century, and with Rebecca at the center, it was possible to grasp how these issues affected individual lives. Researching Rebecca's life and times has been rewarding for me, and I hope I am sharing some of that experience with those who read the blog.

I will return to Rebecca after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I wish you a happy holiday.

(Steven Riddle's complete comments about the blog, quoted in part in the first paragraph above,

can be read on his site, "A Momentary Taste of Being.")

The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz

A little more than a year ago, I was wishing that I could see a color reproduction of Sully's first portrait of Rebecca. The painting was in private hands and had not been exhibited since the 1920's. Starting on November 9, 2010, you can view the original portrait at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which just acquired it (along with a portrait of Rebecca's brother Joseph, by George Peter Alexander Healy) from a Gratz family descendant.

Rereading what I wrote last year about the painting (based on a black-and-white reproduction), I feel that I got it right as far as I went. Now, having seen the portrait, which has an impact much beyond that of the small color reproduction above, I am prepared to go further.

In 1820, Rebecca Gratz at thirty-nine was an "old maid." We know exactly what people thought of unmarried middle-aged women from a poem Rebecca's lost love, Samuel Ewing, wrote in his youth (long before Rebecca would end up as one). In it, he describes a withered, embittered woman, filled with envy, who still practices in front of a mirror accepting the proposal which will never come. Single women were failed women who could not get a man, their empty lives filled with longing.

It was almost impossible for an unmarried woman to escape the stereotype of this slightly ridiculous and pitiful figure, but something close to miraculous happened to Rebecca at this juncture in her life: at the end of 1819 Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe was published and within a few years the story was circulating that Rebecca Gratz was the inspiration for the character of the beautiful Jewish girl Rebecca who was a universal favorite among readers.

In 1830, when Rebecca's family wanted to have her portrait painted, it almost surely was because they wished to preserve an image of the woman thought to be the original for Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Rebecca Gratz agreed to have the painting done, but it is clear she is not sitting as the inspiration for her fictional namesake. If she were, there would have been a reference to the novel -- a volume of Ivanhoe in her hand, perhaps a misty castle or a Gothic window in the background to recall the medieval setting of the novel or some "oriental" style of clothing to connote the eastern origins of her people. (At this time, anywhere east of Italy was considered "oriental.")

No, Rebecca appears as a beautiful woman, filled with vitality and dressed in the height of fashion (an anti-old-maid). Although she never chased after her identification with Rebecca in Ivanhoe, she was probably grateful for it because it caused people to remember and circulate her story. True, she was unmarried, but not because she was a failure who could not get a man: as a young woman, she had turned down the proposal of the man she loved because he was Christian. Her renunciation was seen by both her Jewish and Christian contemporaries as an act of integrity and an admirable example of filial piety. Rebecca Gratz was not simply the raw clay from whom Scott shaped his idealized heroine, she was a heroine herself, and what we see in the portrait is a woman who has overcome suffering, found fulfillment and is very much the hero of her own life.

A few years after the portrait was painted, Rebecca wrote about her niece Sarah Moses, whom she was raising (and who would eventually inherit the painting). Touched by the girl's optimism about the life awaiting her, Rebecca believed that "I...with the memory of many sorrows and disappointments may still encourage her thus far, that if she misses the favorite path to happiness [marriage] she may find another leading to content." Rebecca's life had proved to be anything but bleak and lonely and could be a positive model for other single women.

I have a lively awareness that Rebecca associates marriage with happiness and the alternative of good works with contentment, not quite the same thing. It indicates something of what it cost her to give up Samuel Ewing and suggests a reason why she did not identify with Rebecca in Ivanhoe: the fictional character suffers with surprising serenity through Ivanhoe's marriage to Rowena; Rebecca knew what it felt like to have that kind of experience -- serenity came only after a long struggle.

The newly acquired portraits of Rebecca and Joseph join a number of Gratz family portraits at the Rosenbach, including those of her father Michael Gratz, her brother Benjamin and another portrait of Rebecca, all by Thomas Sully; portraits of her sister and brother-in -law Rachel Gratz and Solomon Moses, by Gilbert Stuart; her sister-in-law Maria Cecil Gist, by Matthew Jouett; a copy of the Sully portrait of her father, by Jane Sully Darley; and a copy of a Stuart portrait of her mother, also by Jane Sully Darley. Most, but not all, are on view. If you have questions about the paintings or about museum hours and admission, use the link above to contact the Rosenbach.

(A letter from a friend asking Rebecca if she is in fact the original of the character in Ivanhoe is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. Ewing's poem "An Old Maid" is from The Philadelphia Souvenir, edited by John Elihu Hall (1826) and is accessible on Google Books. The letter in which Rebecca writes about her niece Sarah is from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson, and also on Google Books.)

Girls At Franklin College

In "Rebecca Gratz: NOT the First Female College Student," I reported that although Richea Gratz, Rebecca's older sister, attended Franklin College in 1788, she went to a section of the college which was a high school, not an institution of higher learning. Although we cannot confer the honor of the first American Jewish female college student on either Richea or Rebecca, the story has revealed a moment in early American history when girls were allowed to follow, along side boys, an academic curriculum.

After the Revolution, Americans (that is, white men) found themselves no longer subjects of a king but citizens of a republic which required more political participation of them. Education for good citizenship became a cause for many of the founding fathers. In Pennsylvania, Benjamin Rush was particularly interested; he founded Dickinson College, in Carlisle, PA, for the youth of the western part of the state and Franklin College, in Lancaster, to help inculcate republican values in the large German-speaking population in the area and to encourage their participation in the great American experiment.

Rush also gave thought to the best kind of education for American women, and in 1787 told an audience at the first female academic high school in Philadelphia:

"The equal share that every citizen has in liberty, and the possible share he may have in the government of our country, make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government....In particular it is incumbent upon us to make ornamental accomplishments yield to principles and knowledge in the education of our women....let the ladies of a country be educated properly and they will...form its manner and character."

Rush's ideas of "republican mothers" and female "makers of manners" gave women a role to play in building the new nation and seem to have fostered the notion of a more serious education for women, at least among some of the upper-class families in and around Philadelphia. Less than a year after Rush spoke, girls' names pop up on the roll of the new Franklin College, and we can speculate that his words played a part in this development, both because he had influence with the College and because, as a Founding Father, he had influence with the well-to-do families of the area who at other times were socially very conservative when it came to their daughters.

The new college was no doubt eager to fill as many places as it could in its first years, but many similar institutions had faced the same situation and didn't solve it by admitting girls. I think Franklin's doors were open to young women at this moment because of the double influence of Rush and Americans' consciousness that their republican experiment might require new attitudes about and expectations for women.

Richea Gratz, Margaret Coleman, Elizabeth Grubb and others lost to history attended school along with young men. It would be interesting to know which courses were open to them. Even Benjamin Rush, who championed their education in history, arithmetic, geography and composition, did not suggest they should take courses in Classics and higher mathematics which their male classmates were studying.

The Franklin College records for this period are incomplete, but the school soon returned to single-sex education. We have to assume that male applications were given preference over female ones, and girls were soon squeezed out. But in generation after generation, there were always some American women attempting to broaden and deepen the education of their sex. In the 1830's Sara Moses, Rebecca's niece, who was studying at the socially prestigious but by no means progressive French Academy in Philadelphia, learned conversational French and music, just as 18th-century girls did. But Sara also studied "French composition and criticism and Chemistry." Accomplishments were slowly giving way to knowledge.