Seen in their entirety for the first time, Emma Mordecai’s US Civil War writings paint a seemingly contradictory picture of an anti-emancipation woman who was herself a minority
Like this year, Passover in 1864 took place in April. In the penultimate year of the American Civil War, a Jewish Confederate citizen named Emma Mordecai spent the holiday with her cousins in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It’s one of the opening memories in the diary she started in the spring of 1864 and continued into the following year.
“By all I was most kindly greeted,” she wrote in her diary, “and I was gratified at the unvarying regret expressed at our family having left Richmond, and at the kind invitations I received from various friends to pass days or nights with them whenever I could.”
The 51-year-old Mordecai had previously lived in Richmond but left the capital to seek refuge from the advancing Union army at her sister-in-law’s nearby farmhouse. Still, Mordecai was committed to returning to the war-torn city’s Jewish community for the holidays, including that Passover.
It was a colder-than-usual spring, making it vital to light fires at the farmhouse and for much of her Passover stay in Richmond. There were other concerns: Her nephew George, after some time away from the Confederate army, had rejoined its ranks with his two brothers.
Mordecai’s wartime diary in its entirety is now available to the general public in print for the first time, thanks to the poignant efforts of two scholars, Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, both of Rowan University in New Jersey.
