“The Civil War was responsible for creating many of the core elements of modern American antisemitism.”

By Adam D. Mendelsohn

AUGUST BONDI already had a distinguished record as a revolutionary when he mustered into the Fifth Kansas Cavalry in the Union Army in December 1861.

Swept up as a 14-year-old in the liberal uprisings in Europe, he had carried a flintlock musket as the youngest member of the Academic Legion in Vienna in March 1848. He then volunteered for a regiment mustering to join the democratic rebellion in Hungary. His parents immediately persuaded their son to leave with them for St. Louis. He was one of several thousand political exiles—“Forty-Eighters”—who made their way to the United States once these liberal revolutions foundered.

If Bondi’s parents hoped that precipitate relocation would quiet their son’s revolutionary ardour, they were quickly disappointed. For Bondi soon became “tired of the humdrum life of a clerk” and “thirsted” for adventure.

“Any struggle, any hard work,” he recalled, “would be welcome.”

Settling in Kansas in 1855, Bondi was drawn into the political conflict that roiled the territory. By 1856 he was riding with John Brown, one of a handful of Jewish Forty-Eighters to fight alongside the radical Free Soiler.

Given Bondi’s idealism, appetite for adventure and willingness to commit to causes body and soul, it was little surprise that he was again drawn to the thunder of the guns in 1861. Bondi’s mother promised to take care of his wife and child—we have no record of what her daughter-in-law thought of this arrangement—and, according to his version, she came round to his revolutionary frame of mind.

“[A]s a Jehudi [Jew],” he recalled his mother admonishing him, “I had the duty to perform, to defend the institutions which gave equal rights to all belief.”

From what we know of him, George Kuhne could not have been more different from August Bondi. The Hungarian-born volunteer slipped away from the Army of the Potomac soon after enlisting as a substitute in the summer of 1863. Passing himself off as a peddler, he was quickly caught along with two other deserters. Abraham Lincoln closed his ears to their appeal for clemency. General George Meade, wanting to make an example of these suspected bounty jumpers—those who made a lucrative sport of serially volunteering to claim generous enlistment bounties and then absconding—issued a special order read to every company in the Army of the Potomac describing Kuhne and his confederates as members of “that class who . . . have embraced enlistment with a view to desertion for the purpose of gain.” Kuhne, if we are to accept Meade’s claim, acted out of a single motive: he was in it (again and again) for the money.

Bondi and Kuhne embodied archetypes often imagined for immigrant enlistees during the war: Kuhne, mercenary in motive and mentality; Bondi, the idealist whose aspirations, frustrated in Europe, achieved fulfilment in the American republic.

What is curious, however, about Kuhne’s case is that his Jewishness—mentioned in the extensive coverage of the episode in the press—passed almost entirely without comment. Here was opportunity to pillory Jews as the people of the pocketbook: motivated by money to enlist but absconding before they saw a day of service.

The fact that Kuhne escaped this canard was certainly not because of any sensitivity toward Jews and other minorities. Far from it. Antebellum America was awash with prejudice, and most Americans shared an ease and fluency when speaking and thinking of the characteristics of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Although their views were often rooted in a lack of familiarity, many Americans instead thought that they understood the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and African Americans all too well. There was, moreover, ample wartime precedent for accusing immigrants—particularly Irish and German recruits—of being mercenary in their motives when it came to enlistment and bounties.

Jews fared no better than other minorities. Indeed, the Civil War was responsible for creating many of the core elements of modern American antisemitism.

Already in the first year of the conflict, Jews felt the sting of prejudice as the “shoddy” scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear, even as soldiers shivered in the field for want of decent clothing and had large sums docked from their pay for the inferior garments they were required to purchase. Several Northern newspapers hostile to the Republican Party led the charge. Army suppliers were lambasted in cartoons and satirical verse as “shoddy contractors” and “shoddy vampires.”

Contractors whose profits and ostentation were deemed dishonest and immoral were derided as a crass and ill-mannered “shoddy aristocracy.” Although Jews were not exclusively blamed for “shoddy manufacturing,” the term not infrequently took on antisemitic coloration. At a moment when contractors were impugned as immoral, it was easy to imagine that Jews placed profit over patriotism. Wartime scandal accentuated existing fears of the corrupting influence of the market on the nation’s morals that were easily projected onto Jews.

Wartime stereotypes drew on older associations of Jews with commerce and the garment trade, and particularly with the motif of the duplicitous Jewish used-clothing dealer, a stock figure whose silver-tongued salesmanship concealed second-rate wares. A variety of cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as the archetypal cunning contractor, not only refusing to enlist but indeed actively undermining the war effort in order to turn a quick buck. In the first year of the war several Northern newspapers used the terms “Jew” and “contractor” interchangeably.

Ironically, it was precisely this stereotype that saved Jews from the accusation—directed at other immigrant and ethnic groups—that they made up a disproportionate share of bounty jumpers. Instead, they were more easily imagined to have shirked entirely. Why scrabble for bounties and enlistment bonuses, so the logic went, when ill-gotten gains were so much larger by profiteering on the home-front or as cotton smugglers and blockade runners?

Of course, it was of no consolation to George Kuhne that he was not maligned as a Jewish bounty-jumper. The military authorities delayed execution of sentence until Aug. 29, 1863 so that an ecumenical assemblage—a rabbi, priest, and two Protestant ministers—could console the deserters.

Kuhne, manacled and distressed, had been confined to a tent under guard for two weeks. At 3 p.m. on that day, Kuhne stepped outside. Below were three divisions of the Fifth Corps, at least 15,000 men standing in “oppressive silence,” arrayed in dense columns that formed three sides of a square. At their centre were five freshly dug graves.

The spectacle that followed was seared into the memories of many who witnessed it. Though few sympathized with bounty jumpers, executions were still relatively rare in August 1863, and this one had been marshalled to serve an exemplary purpose. Two artists from popular magazines sketched as the macabre processional escorted the prisoners to their graves. The only sound, “slow, measured, sorrowful,” was “The Dead March” from Handel’s Saul played by the army headquarters band.

Arriving at the graves, the prisoners were seated on their coffins. The firing party halted and stood at “parade rest.” A “much agitated” Kuhne, an eyewitness wrote, now “stood up and recited after the Rabbi a portion of Thilim, Yigdal, and Shimas [psalms and other prayers]. At the close, the minister, much affected, kissed the accused, who convulsively clung to him.” Now:

“the ministers of the gospel stood aside and the poor fellows were left alone on the brink of Eternity. They hadn’t long to wait. ‘Attention guard,’ in clear ringing tones called Capt. Orne, ‘shoulder arms.’ ‘Forward march,’ and the solid steady tramp of the detail sounded appalling on the ear. When within six paces, ‘Halt,’ ordered the Captain. ‘Ready.’ ‘Aim.’ ‘Fire,’ and 60 pieces flashed full in the breasts of the deserters, and military justice was satisfied. Four of the men fell back heavily on their coffins and rolled off to the ground, their heads striking the coffin lid making a sounding thud, while the bullets, passing through the bodies, were seen skipping and bounding over the open fields.”

So ended the life of George Kuhne, one of only 147 Union soldiers shot for desertion during the war, and the only Jew known to be among this sorry number.

And what of August Bondi? He died in 1907, proud to his last of having been a Forty-Eighter, of having fought in Bleeding Kansas, and of having served in the Civil War, and of being a Jew.

Adam D. Mendelsohn is the author of Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army.