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The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai

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Melissa R. Klapper discusses the wartime experiences of a Jewish woman in the Confederate South

Image courtesy of interviewee. September 3, 2024

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This video is a transcript from an interview with Melissa R. Klapper about her work on the "Civil War diary" of Emma Morde, a Southern Jewish woman living during the Civil War. Melissa discusses her motivations for becoming involved with this project, which was initiated by her late mentor, Dianne Ashton. After Dianne's passing, Melissa felt compelled to complete the book in her honor.

Melissa details the significance of Emma Morde's diary, which offers insights into daily life during the Civil War from a woman's perspective, highlighting themes around race, gender, and the complexities of historical narratives. Emma, a slave-owning white woman, had complex views shaped by her societal position, and while she was dedicated to the Confederacy and slavery, she also played a pivotal role in her Jewish community.

Melissa conducted extensive research using Diane's personal library and existing scholarship about the Civil War, women, and slavery to understand the broader context of Emma's life. She emphasizes the importance of grappling with the complexities of historical figures and the societal norms of the time.

The interview concludes with Melissa expressing hopes that readers will recognize the messiness of history and the multifaceted nature of individuals within it. She suggests that future research should continue examining the roles of women and enslaved people in Southern households to gain better insights into the era, as well as consider the nuances of the Confederacy's demise.

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1. **Mentorship and Legacy**: The speaker discusses their long-time colleague and mentor, Diane Ashton, who made significant contributions to Jewish women's studies and feminist religious studies, particularly in her research on Jewish women during the Antebellum era. After Ashton's passing in January 2022, the speaker decided to complete her unfinished work on Emma Morde Key, emphasizing the importance of honoring Ashton’s legacy.

2. **Emma Morde Key's Background**: Emma Morde Key, a Southern Jewish woman living in the pre-Civil War South, is the focus of the unfinished book. Morde's diary captures her life and experiences during a tumultuous time, and her story provides insight into the complexities of her identity as both a Jew and a slave owner in a deeply divided society.

3. **Complex Historical Narratives**: The video highlights the complexities and contradictions of historical figures like Emma Morde. While she is portrayed as a devoted practitioner of Judaism, she was also a slave owner, reflecting the complicated nature of individual identities and moral choices within the convideo of historical events like the Civil War and slavery.

4. **Role of Women in Society**: The speaker notes the challenges faced by women like Emma and her sister-in-law in a patriarchal society, which limited their authority while also placing them in positions of power within their households. Despite their societal constraints, these women were responsible for managing their households and supervising enslaved people.

5. **Understanding the Past**: The speaker emphasizes the importance of exploring the messy and multifaceted nature of history, illustrating that people's beliefs and actions can be influenced by various factors. The work aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about the roles of women in history, slavery, and the experiences of Jews in America, encouraging readers to recognize the complexities of historical narratives.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video:

1. **On Dianne Ashton’s Influence:**
- "I had a longtime colleague and mentor named Dianne Ashton, a pioneer of Jewish women's studies and a feminist religious studies more generally."

2. **On Emma Morde and the Nature of Her Work:**
- "Emma Morde Key was an important southern Jewish woman in the South during the period leading up to the Civil War."

3. **On Finishing Dianne’s Project:**
- "I just couldn't bear the idea that the book would disappear into the ether after all the work she had put into it."

4. **On the Historical Convideo:**
- "Emma Morde was a slave owning white woman in the South."

5. **On the Misconception About Jewish Slave Ownership:**
- "It is a long ago debunked idea that there were more Jewish slave owners than other people, that that's a complete lie and antisemitic lie that has been completely debunked."

6. **On the Difficulty of Revising the Diary:**
- "It was difficult to do all that so quickly, but it was important that I be able to approach the work she had done."

7. **On Emma's Cultural Identity:**
- "Emma was dedicated to the Confederacy. She believed in the Confederacy. She saw the Yankees and the United States as the bad guys."

8. **On Emma’s Jewish Identity:**
- "Emma made a very conscious choice... to stay Jewish, and not only to stay Jewish, but to be a sort of a defender of Judaism."

9. **On the Complexity of Historical Figures:**
- "This is a way to think about how messy history is, about how complex history is."

10. **On the Contribution to Understanding Women's Roles:**
- "There’s still a lot of work to be done about women and slavery, actually."

11. **On Historical Perspective:**
- "When you read something like this, you can... add from today's perspective, the righteousness of their cause that helped the Union win."

These quotes reflect key themes of mentorship, historical complexity, identity, and the nuances of social dynamics during the Civil War era.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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I had a longtime colleague

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and mentor named Diane Ashton, a pioneer

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of Jewish women's studies

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and a feminist religious studies more generally.

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Um, she wrote important books about the history

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of Hanukkah in America

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and about Rebecca Gratz, who was one

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of the most important Jewish women

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of the Antebellum era in the United States.

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Um, somebody who founded the Sunday School movement of Ed,

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supplementary religious education for Jewish children.

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And Diane spent about 10 years, toward the end

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of her life working on this project about Emma Morde.

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Emma Morde key was,

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as you'll hear more about it in a moment, an important,

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southern Jewish woman, in the South

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during the period leading up to the Civil War.

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And then she lived for many years after that.

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And Diane had worked on this project

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for about 10 years, but she was ill.

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Um, she had a chronic illness that got worse,

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and she sadly passed away in January

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of 2022 without being able to finish the book.

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She had a more or less full draft

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and a book proposal, but it wasn't done.

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She knew it wasn't done, and

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that it needed quite a lot of work.

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And as, someone who had been first a mentee of hers

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and then a colleague of hers,

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I just couldn't bear the idea

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that the book would disappear into the ether

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after all the work she had put into it.

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And so, with the blessing of her husband, I decided

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to finish the book and revise it

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and finish it, see it through

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to publication, in her name.

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Um, I would like to point out that the book is, you know,

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it's Diane Ashton with Melissa Clapper.

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So, you know, she gets the credit for it, as she should

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for initiating the project and doing so much work on it.

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So her motivation and mine works slightly different.

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Her motivation was to investigate, the Civil War diary

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of a woman that she already knew something about.

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And this diary is not completely unknown

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to Civil War historians, but it wasn't very well known.

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It had never been published.

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Only excerpts, small excerpts had never been transcribed

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and made aware available to the public.

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And Diane really wanted to do that.

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And so I wanted to finish her project,

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but I am also a historian of American Jewish women.

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And so the topic was not unfamiliar to me.

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The time period was,

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it's a little earlier than my usual research, moment,

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but it wasn't like I was walking into something I had no

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knowledge of whatsoever.

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Um, so my motivation was to, of course, contribute

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to the body of literature on American Jewish women

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and on women during the Civil War more generally,

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but also to honor my colleague

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and mentor by finishing a project

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that she sadly was unable to finish.

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I'm not a Civil War historian,

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and of course, there's an enormous scholarly literature on

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the Civil War and on slavery.

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Um, Emma Morkey was a slave owning white woman in the South.

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Um, it is a long ago debunked idea

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that there were more Jewish slave owners than other people,

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that that's a complete lie

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and antisemitic lie that has been completely debunked.

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But there were Jewish slave owners in the South,

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and Emma Morde, and most of the members

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of her family were among them.

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So it was new to me in some ways that all that, the,

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the, the in-depth literature on slavery

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and on gender domestic relations

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and slave households,

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which I think we'll come back to in a moment.

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Diane's husband graciously brought over here bags and bags

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and bags, bags of books that of course,

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I could have gotten from, a library, but that I had.

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So I had her personal library to draw on.

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I did a tremendous amount of reading.

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I didn't need to do that much more primary source research

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because the book is really very tightly focused on Emma

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Morde Key's diary itself.

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And Diane had already done some research around it

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with correspondence from other

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family members, that kind of thing.

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I didn't need to do that part of it,

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but I did need to read very deeply in the scholarly

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literature so that I could write

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and revise her manuscript with authority about,

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these very difficult topics.

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And they are difficult. I mean, it's about the dark days

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of the Civil War, the, you know, the shadow of slavery that,

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you know, it still exerts a sustain on US history.

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Um, it was, it was difficult to do all that so quickly,

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but it was important that I be able

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to approach the work she had done,

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by making myself familiar with this literature.

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I would also say that I think, it is a common problem

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for biographers that they sometimes get too attached

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to the people that they are writing about.

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And I believe that had happened just a little bit to Diane.

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I'm sure that if she had had the opportunity

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to revise her work,

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she would have addressed this a little bit.

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But it was a little, she certainly never hid the fact

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that Emma Morde Key was a slave owner

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and not a particularly benign one.

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Not that there is such a thing as that anyway,

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but it that there was a little bit

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of imbalance in the version that she had left, which again,

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I'm sure she would have addressed.

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And I it needed more work.

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Um, the, we needed to spend more time discussing, you know,

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what it meant to live in a slave owning society,

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how class status and racial privilege were

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underlined by owning slaves.

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And that was particularly true for the Jews

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who did own slaves who were trying to make sure

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that they were seen as white.

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Um, Jews were often seen as racially ambiguous

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during this time period.

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And so, it was a lot of work,

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but I was very, I was supported by Diane's husband.

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And of course, there is an enormous scholarly literature on

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the Civil War on slavery.

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Emma Morde lived in Richmond,

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and then actually for the duration of the diary, she moved

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to her sister-in-Law's farm just outside of Richmond,

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Virginia and Richmond.

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It, there's also a, a robust scholar literature on Richmond,

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which was the capital of the

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Confederacy during the Civil War.

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And Emma moved in pretty elite social circles.

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She knew a lot of the people

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who are running the Confederacy.

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And so for that alone, her story was interesting,

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and I needed to read up a little bit on that as well.

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Emma, kept a diary.

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I think the, the prompt for Emma Morkey

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to start keeping a diary was actually leaving Richmond in

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April, 1864.

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She and, two siblings,

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I should say Emma was 51 at the time,

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and her two half siblings who had been living

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with her in Richmond were in their seventies.

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So these are not very young people,

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and they decided it was just too dangerous

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to keep living in Richmond.

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They closed up their house. They

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were actually, their mother had just died.

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She was an older woman herself and Emma.

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They all, they, they scattered,

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the three siblings went different places.

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Um, Emma went to live with a sister-in-Law outside

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of Richmond at a farm about five miles away.

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She frequently walked back and forth.

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It wasn't that far,

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but it was out of the immediate line of fire,

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or so they thought, actually, as things turned out.

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And I believe that, that making this big decision

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and changing her life so radically

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and also losing, what she had, she was the person

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who ran that home, who ran that household in Richmond.

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And when she moved to her sister-in-Law's farm,

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she was a very loved and welcomed guest and relative,

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and she certainly contributed to the household,

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but it wasn't her house and it wasn't her home.

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And I believe this is what prompted Emma Morkey

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to start keeping her diary, which she did from April of 1864

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until about May of 1865, just after the war ended.

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There are periods that she did not write in the diary,

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around the time that Richmond burned, actually,

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there's a sort of a gap, and it's also kind of interesting.

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Emma kept this diary from 1864 to 1865,

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but in 1886, she recopied it.

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She had her original diary.

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She had kept it, and she,

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at some point must have opened it up and realized that bugs

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and insects and who knows what had gotten to it.

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And she recopied her own diary in her own

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hand into a new book.

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And so what we actually have,

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what exists is at the University

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of North Carolina's Southern Historical Collection,

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is the 1886 diary, the copy, the copy

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that she herself made, and she annotated it.

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Sometimes she would put in more information about

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what happened to somebody that she mentioned.

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Um, once or twice, she put in a sort of funny addendum

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to a story that she had told in the diary.

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She was a very literate, educated woman.

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The diary reflects that.

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It's beautifully written, of course, it's,

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she was copying it, so it wasn't written in the,

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it wasn't literally written in the heat of the moment.

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And she covers all kinds of topics, everything from

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what they were eating to, what the fear that they had,

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that soldiers would come by and attack them or raid them

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or potentially rape them.

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She had a teenage niece that was living in this household,

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the problems that they had, as she put it

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with the quote unquote servants.

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She never uses the word slave.

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She always says servants, but these are enslaved people.

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She's talking about. Um, she

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and her sister-in-law went to hospitals

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and paid visits to wounded veterans.

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So, and, and also the way

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that news spread from one household

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to another at a time when rumor was rife.

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But communication was slow. And so the diary really talks.

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It's about the daily life of a more

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or less regular person during the Civil War.

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And of a woman in particular, there were,

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she had three nephews, who were sometimes home,

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but most of them spent most

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of the time off fighting for the Confederacy.

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So it was very much a household

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of women and as slave people.

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And so there's a lot to be learned about

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what life was like for ordinary people.

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And something else that you see

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very clearly throughout the diary is

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that Emma was dedicated to the Confederacy.

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She believed in the Confederacy.

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She saw the Yankees

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and the United States as the bad guys, very much so.

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She cheered every time the Confederacy won.

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She very much resented the attack on slavery

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and what she saw as the best possible way

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of life for all races.

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She was a, died in the wool Confederate nationalist.

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And that comes through very clearly in the diary.

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Emma was Jewish, but her sister-in-law, with whom she went

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to live, was not actually a number of Emma's,

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siblings had actually converted

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to Christianity in the period in the decades

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before the Civil War started.

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And, and, and many of the siblings

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that did not themselves converted married non-Jewish,

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married Christian, partners

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or spouses, including her brother Augustus.

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And that although he had already passed away,

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it was his widow, her sister-in-law, Rosina

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that Emma went to live with.

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Uh, and Rosina was not Jewish.

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So Emma was the only Jewish person in this Christian

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household, and that mattered.

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She made a very conscious choice, repeatedly made a choice

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to stay Jewish, and not only to stay Jewish,

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but to be a sort of a defender of Judaism.

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She founded a Jewish Sunday school in Richmond.

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She was a pillar of the Jewish synagogue.

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There were two synagogues in Richmond,

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but she was a pillar of the one

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that her family had gone to historically.

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Um, she celebrated all the holidays and wa during that year

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or so that she lived on her sister-in-Law's farm.

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Every time there was a Jewish holiday,

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she would actually go back to Richmond to stay

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with her Jewish cousins there and attend synagogue

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and celebrate the holiday.

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And each week on the Sabbath, on Shabbat,

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she didn't entirely refrain from work,

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but she would retreat to her room on Friday night

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or Saturday morning, sometimes both read from the Hebrew

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Bible, say the prayer service

10:32.835 --> 10:34.125
that was appropriate to the day.

10:34.145 --> 10:36.245
So she certainly maintained her Jewishness,

10:36.465 --> 10:37.685
but it was in isolation.

10:38.425 --> 10:39.565
And that was different from her

10:39.565 --> 10:41.085
because in Richmond, she had been a pillar.

10:41.145 --> 10:42.645
She and her family had been pillars

10:42.645 --> 10:44.485
of the Jewish community in Richmond.

10:44.545 --> 10:46.725
And that was another sort of wrenching thing.

10:47.225 --> 10:50.525
One of Diane Ashton's major arguments about the diary was

10:50.525 --> 10:53.645
that Emma used the diary as a sort of repository

10:53.705 --> 10:56.325
for her Jewishness in a Christian household.

10:56.455 --> 10:59.045
There was no hostility, no one was trying to convert her,

10:59.145 --> 11:01.005
but it was the only place that she felt she could

11:01.005 --> 11:02.085
express her Jewishness.

11:02.085 --> 11:03.685
That was one of the major insights

11:03.685 --> 11:05.885
that Diane Ashton had into this diary.

11:06.545 --> 11:11.355
Um, I, it's her Jewishness did not really have

11:11.415 --> 11:12.435
an impact as far

11:12.435 --> 11:15.155
as anyone can tell on the relationship she had

11:15.155 --> 11:16.515
with the enslaved people in her house.

11:16.515 --> 11:18.315
Though po being a woman did,

11:18.335 --> 11:20.795
in some ways it was sometimes difficult in the South

11:20.815 --> 11:22.395
for women to exert authority,

11:22.395 --> 11:23.915
because the assumption was

11:23.915 --> 11:26.555
that middle class women at least were protected

11:26.615 --> 11:27.635
by the men in their lives.

11:27.635 --> 11:29.315
This was part of the gender arrangement.

11:29.815 --> 11:32.835
And of course, I'm speaking in extremely broad strokes.

11:32.835 --> 11:34.915
Not everybody agreed with this or acted in this way,

11:34.975 --> 11:37.915
but sort of the agreement was that at least for,

11:38.465 --> 11:41.755
genteel slave owning white women, they would sort

11:41.755 --> 11:44.635
of give up some of their power in order to be protected,

11:44.775 --> 11:47.035
but they would still have a lot of privilege relative

11:47.055 --> 11:48.115
to enslaved people.

11:48.815 --> 11:51.355
And again, as I've said, Emma subscribed

11:51.355 --> 11:52.555
to the system completely.

11:53.225 --> 11:54.925
And so it was difficult for both her

11:54.945 --> 11:56.005
and for her sister-in-Law

11:56.025 --> 11:58.365
to be the authority figures in this household.

11:58.365 --> 12:00.045
But they had no choice. And the truth is

12:00.045 --> 12:02.125
that Emma's brother had passed away

12:02.135 --> 12:03.365
quite a long time before.

12:03.465 --> 12:04.925
And so the sister-in-law was used

12:04.925 --> 12:06.565
to being the person who ran the household.

12:07.025 --> 12:08.525
And she did have adult sons,

12:08.525 --> 12:09.605
but as I said, they were away

12:09.605 --> 12:11.205
for almost all of the war fighting.

12:11.475 --> 12:14.045
They only came back for a few weeks here and there.

12:14.665 --> 12:18.005
And so they were the, the adult women in the house in charge

12:18.145 --> 12:19.525
of running the operation,

12:19.525 --> 12:20.925
making sure that everyone could eat.

12:20.925 --> 12:23.405
There was enough to eat, making sure the farm ran smoothly.

12:23.505 --> 12:24.805
But of course, making sure

12:24.805 --> 12:27.245
that all those things happened essentially meant supervising

12:27.245 --> 12:28.845
the enslaved people who were doing the work.

12:29.755 --> 12:31.405
Emma and her sister-in-Law did work.

12:31.405 --> 12:33.085
They did things themselves. They made rugs,

12:33.085 --> 12:34.765
they made clothes, they made furniture.

12:34.765 --> 12:36.525
It's not like they were actually not sitting around

12:36.525 --> 12:38.325
and doing nothing while directing the

12:38.485 --> 12:39.525
enslaved people in their homes.

12:39.945 --> 12:41.485
Um, but they didn't do the field work.

12:41.485 --> 12:43.445
They were not out actually doing the harvesting,

12:43.445 --> 12:45.445
and they didn't do a lot of the care of the animals

12:45.445 --> 12:48.885
that was necessary in order to keep a farm running.

12:49.425 --> 12:52.485
So they had different sets of things that they did.

12:52.585 --> 12:55.685
And that set of differentiation was very common in the

12:55.885 --> 12:57.165
antebellum South White people.

12:57.305 --> 12:58.925
And enslaved people did different things.

12:59.105 --> 13:00.405
Men and women did different things.

13:00.465 --> 13:02.125
Adults and children did different things.

13:02.145 --> 13:05.365
And so it's not surprising to see that on display even

13:06.025 --> 13:07.965
during the exigencies of lore.

13:08.345 --> 13:11.245
Um, but she, she was, you know, there's no other word

13:11.245 --> 13:13.685
for it, Emma, like most of the white people

13:13.685 --> 13:14.925
around her was racist.

13:15.365 --> 13:16.685
I mean, she believed it was her job

13:16.705 --> 13:18.365
to take care of enslaved people.

13:18.365 --> 13:21.005
That that was her role to help sort of,

13:21.125 --> 13:22.365
I wanna put this in quotation marks,

13:22.365 --> 13:25.605
people minded individuals who needed her guidance,

13:25.945 --> 13:28.285
but that didn't make her above threatening

13:28.285 --> 13:30.605
to sell people when it suited her, suited her fancy.

13:30.745 --> 13:32.165
She had sold enslaved people

13:32.165 --> 13:35.585
before the war when keeping them, didn't suit her,

13:35.605 --> 13:38.385
or she had trouble governing them, as she might've said.

13:38.765 --> 13:40.665
Um, and so she's not physically violent,

13:40.845 --> 13:43.185
but the threat of sale is of course, a different,

13:43.185 --> 13:44.425
another kind of violence.

13:45.245 --> 13:47.025
And when the war ended, she

13:47.025 --> 13:49.425
and her sister-in-Law had a lot of trouble adjusting,

13:49.425 --> 13:51.465
making the immediate adjustment they had to make

13:51.525 --> 13:54.145
to not owning, so to speak, these people anymore

13:54.165 --> 13:56.025
who had minds of their own plans of their own

13:56.025 --> 13:57.025
and left pretty quickly.

13:57.385 --> 13:58.945
I think one of the things that, I hope

13:58.945 --> 14:00.185
that readers will take from the book,

14:00.185 --> 14:02.865
and I know that Diane did too, is to, this is a way

14:02.865 --> 14:05.105
to think about how messy history is, about

14:05.105 --> 14:06.345
how complex history is.

14:06.655 --> 14:09.865
Emma from the Jewish perspective is sort of a hero, right?

14:09.925 --> 14:12.185
She stays Jewish, she defends the religion.

14:12.565 --> 14:16.185
She, you know, is, is very a stalwart believer in Judaism

14:16.205 --> 14:19.505
and its ethics and values, and yet she's a slave owner.

14:20.205 --> 14:23.585
And when you, when you sort of get a window into the mind

14:23.585 --> 14:25.385
of someone like this through a diary

14:25.575 --> 14:27.825
that was certainly meant to be a private document,

14:28.285 --> 14:30.305
you really begin to see how messy people are.

14:30.365 --> 14:31.825
We sort of give people the grace

14:31.845 --> 14:33.545
to be complicated in our own lives

14:33.605 --> 14:35.665
and sometimes flatten historical figures.

14:35.965 --> 14:38.985
And so I really hope that when readers read the diary,

14:39.115 --> 14:40.665
which is about, makes up about half

14:40.665 --> 14:42.225
of the page count more than that actually

14:42.245 --> 14:44.985
of the book itself, they'll get a chance not only

14:44.985 --> 14:47.545
to learn in granular detail about what life was like

14:47.605 --> 14:50.745
for people during the war, but also to see how messy

14:50.745 --> 14:53.765
History is and how people have many dimensions to them.

14:53.865 --> 14:56.245
And that's true now, but it was true in the past as well.

14:56.745 --> 14:58.685
So that's one thing that I think is really important.

14:59.025 --> 15:01.845
And another is from the Jewish perspective as a reminder

15:01.955 --> 15:04.565
that Jews have lived in America for hundreds

15:04.565 --> 15:06.725
and hundreds of years, been fully integrated

15:06.945 --> 15:10.725
and had, you know, the same kinds of attitudes

15:10.825 --> 15:15.035
and the same kinds of, you know, just perspectives

15:15.455 --> 15:18.395
as other people around them while also remaining

15:18.395 --> 15:19.835
distinctive religiously.

15:20.335 --> 15:23.475
And again, this is just an illustration of how that is true.

15:23.575 --> 15:26.155
And so, although it's a piece, it's only a small piece

15:26.175 --> 15:27.595
of American Jewish history,

15:27.655 --> 15:28.755
and the vast majority

15:28.775 --> 15:31.355
of American Jews did not live in the Antebellum South.

15:31.775 --> 15:34.755
And those who did, like most whites in the South,

15:34.765 --> 15:35.995
never owned slaves.

15:36.205 --> 15:39.075
Still, this shows us, you know, the relationships

15:39.075 --> 15:42.155
that could exist and the way that so-called minorities,

15:42.155 --> 15:43.715
and they were, of course, a tiny minority.

15:43.825 --> 15:47.395
Were still part of a larger American story that cannot

15:47.535 --> 15:48.915
and should not be told without them.

15:48.975 --> 15:51.875
And so these are the things that we hope will come out

15:51.875 --> 15:55.475
of readers encountering both the introduction that Diane

15:55.535 --> 15:57.355
and I provide, but also the diary itself.

15:57.355 --> 16:00.155
There's still a lot of work to be done about women

16:00.375 --> 16:01.595
and slavery, actually.

16:01.655 --> 16:03.115
So again, I should say specify,

16:03.115 --> 16:05.795
this is not my primary research field myself,

16:06.335 --> 16:08.955
but, in doing the research I needed to do

16:08.975 --> 16:11.075
to work on this project, I really think, I mean,

16:11.075 --> 16:13.715
there's some wonderful, wonderful historians, of course,

16:13.855 --> 16:15.395
who are working on this from the perspective

16:15.495 --> 16:18.315
of both enslaved people, which is critically important,

16:18.735 --> 16:22.675
and also white women, both populations,

16:22.915 --> 16:25.515
although in very different ways that lacked a certain kind

16:25.515 --> 16:28.555
of power in, you know, within the system

16:28.705 --> 16:31.915
that pervaded at least the constructs

16:31.915 --> 16:32.955
of the antebellum south.

16:33.195 --> 16:35.315
Although again, most white people never owned slaves

16:35.315 --> 16:37.035
or had a chance to, a chance to,

16:37.815 --> 16:39.475
but, so I, I think there's just a lot,

16:39.595 --> 16:41.755
I think there's more research that needs to be done about

16:41.755 --> 16:44.035
what life looked like on the daily level

16:44.575 --> 16:46.795
for people in these kinds of households.

16:47.095 --> 16:49.515
And this is just one example. There are many more.

16:49.615 --> 16:51.235
And so I think that that's really important.

16:51.575 --> 16:53.915
And I, the other thing that I think, this kind

16:53.915 --> 16:56.595
of book contributes to is a very deep,

16:56.705 --> 17:00.235
long ongoing debate about sort of why the Confederacy lost.

17:00.895 --> 17:03.675
And there are debates now in broad strokes about whether it

17:03.675 --> 17:06.155
was because they were just defeated by the military might

17:06.335 --> 17:09.195
of the union, or could it be that there was

17:09.195 --> 17:13.035
so much dissension from within the south, including

17:13.365 --> 17:16.035
among women who were not willing to give up their privilege

17:16.035 --> 17:18.275
to have to be the ones in charge during the war.

17:18.655 --> 17:19.915
And maybe that's why they lost.

17:19.935 --> 17:21.555
So of course, it's not a zero sum game.

17:21.615 --> 17:23.155
All of those factors are relevant,

17:23.155 --> 17:25.835
but when you read something like this, you can, this,

17:25.905 --> 17:30.155
this book could be used as evidence for actually a sort

17:30.155 --> 17:31.915
of unified confederate nationalism,

17:31.915 --> 17:33.915
that it was only the military might of the union,

17:34.175 --> 17:36.835
or possibly we might add from today's perspective,

17:37.015 --> 17:40.835
the righteousness of their cause that helped the union win.

17:41.015 --> 17:44.515
Um, so that's not, there's never gonna be an answer to that,

17:44.695 --> 17:46.675
but I think that this book can, is, is a,

17:47.035 --> 17:50.435
a small piece in a puzzle that is just always unfolding.

17:50.435 --> 17:52.875
There's always more and more pieces to put together about

17:52.875 --> 17:53.915
what daily life was like

17:54.655 --> 17:57.755
and how people's daily lives contributed

17:57.775 --> 17:58.835
to this larger picture

17:58.975 --> 18:00.915
of things like why the Confederacy lost.

00:00 - I had a longtime colleague and mentor named Diane Ashton, a pioneer of Jewish women's studies and a feminist religious studies more generally. she wrote important books about the history of Hanukkah in America

00:12 - and about Rebecca Gratz, who was one of the most important Jewish women of the Antebellum era in the United States. somebody who founded the Sunday School movement of Ed, supplementary religious education for Jewish children. And Diane spent about 10 years, toward the end of her life working on this project about Emma Morde. Emma Morde key was, as you'll hear more about it in a moment, an important, southern Jewish woman, in the South

00:38 - during the period leading up to the Civil War. And then she lived for many years after that. And Diane had worked on this project for about 10 years, but she was ill. she had a chronic illness that got worse, and she sadly passed away in January of 2022 without being able to finish the book. She had a more or less full draft and a book proposal, but it wasn't done. She knew it wasn't done, and

00:59 - that it needed quite a lot of work. And as, someone who had been first a mentee of hers and then a colleague of hers, I just couldn't bear the idea that the book would disappear into the ether after all the work she had put into it. And so, with the blessing of her husband, I decided to finish the book and revise it and finish it, see it through to publication, in her name.

01:19 - I would like to point out that the book is, you know, it's Diane Ashton with Melissa Clapper. So, you know, she gets the credit for it, as she should for initiating the project and doing so much work on it. So her motivation and mine works slightly different. Her motivation was to investigate, the Civil War diary of a woman that she already knew something about. And this diary is not completely unknown to Civil War historians, but it wasn't very well known. It had never been published.

01:46 - Only excerpts, small excerpts had never been transcribed and made aware available to the public. And Diane really wanted to do that. And so I wanted to finish her project, but I am also a historian of American Jewish women. And so the topic was not unfamiliar to me. The time period was, it's a little earlier than my usual research, moment, but it wasn't like I was walking into something I had no knowledge of whatsoever.

02:11 - so my motivation was to, of course, contribute to the body of literature on American Jewish women and on women during the Civil War more generally, but also to honor my colleague and mentor by finishing a project that she sadly was unable to finish. I'm not a Civil War historian, and of course, there's an enormous scholarly literature on the Civil War and on slavery. Emma Morkey was a slave owning white woman in the South.

02:36 - it is a long ago debunked idea that there were more Jewish slave owners than other people, that that's a complete lie and antisemitic lie that has been completely debunked. But there were Jewish slave owners in the South, and Emma Morde, and most of the members of her family were among them. So it was new to me in some ways that all that, the, the, the in-depth literature on slavery and on gender domestic relations

03:01 - and slave households, which I think we'll come back to in a moment. Diane's husband graciously brought over here bags and bags and bags, bags of books that of course, I could have gotten from, a library, but that I had. So I had her personal library to draw on. I did a tremendous amount of reading. I didn't need to do that much more primary source research because the book is really very tightly focused on Emma Morde Key's diary itself.

03:25 - And Diane had already done some research around it with correspondence from other family members, that kind of thing. I didn't need to do that part of it, but I did need to read very deeply in the scholarly literature so that I could write and revise her manuscript with authority about, these very difficult topics. And they are difficult. I mean, it's about the dark days of the Civil War, the, you know, the shadow of slavery that,

03:48 - you know, it still exerts a sustain on US history. it was, it was difficult to do all that so quickly, but it was important that I be able to approach the work she had done, by making myself familiar with this literature. I would also say that I think, it is a common problem for biographers that they sometimes get too attached to the people that they are writing about. And I believe that had happened just a little bit to Diane. I'm sure that if she had had the opportunity

04:15 - to revise her work, she would have addressed this a little bit. But it was a little, she certainly never hid the fact that Emma Morde Key was a slave owner and not a particularly benign one. Not that there is such a thing as that anyway, but it that there was a little bit of imbalance in the version that she had left, which again, I'm sure she would have addressed. And I it needed more work.

04:36 - the, we needed to spend more time discussing, you know, what it meant to live in a slave owning society, how class status and racial privilege were underlined by owning slaves. And that was particularly true for the Jews who did own slaves who were trying to make sure that they were seen as white. Jews were often seen as racially ambiguous during this time period. And so, it was a lot of work,

05:00 - but I was very, I was supported by Diane's husband. And of course, there is an enormous scholarly literature on the Civil War on slavery. Emma Morde lived in Richmond, and then actually for the duration of the diary, she moved to her sister-in-Law's farm just outside of Richmond, Virginia and Richmond. It, there's also a, a robust scholar literature on Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

05:23 - And Emma moved in pretty elite social circles. She knew a lot of the people who are running the Confederacy. And so for that alone, her story was interesting, and I needed to read up a little bit on that as well. Emma, kept a diary. I think the, the prompt for Emma Morkey to start keeping a diary was actually leaving Richmond in April, 1864. She and, two siblings,

05:44 - I should say Emma was 51 at the time, and her two half siblings who had been living with her in Richmond were in their seventies. So these are not very young people, and they decided it was just too dangerous to keep living in Richmond. They closed up their house. They were actually, their mother had just died. She was an older woman herself and Emma. They all, they, they scattered,

06:01 - the three siblings went different places. Emma went to live with a sister-in-Law outside of Richmond at a farm about five miles away. She frequently walked back and forth. It wasn't that far, but it was out of the immediate line of fire, or so they thought, actually, as things turned out. And I believe that, that making this big decision and changing her life so radically and also losing, what she had, she was the person

06:24 - who ran that home, who ran that household in Richmond. And when she moved to her sister-in-Law's farm, she was a very loved and welcomed guest and relative, and she certainly contributed to the household, but it wasn't her house and it wasn't her home. And I believe this is what prompted Emma Morkey to start keeping her diary, which she did from April of 1864 until about May of 1865, just after the war ended. There are periods that she did not write in the diary, around the time that Richmond burned, actually,

06:53 - there's a sort of a gap, and it's also kind of interesting. Emma kept this diary from 1864 to 1865, but in 1886, she recopied it. She had her original diary. She had kept it, and she, at some point must have opened it up and realized that bugs and insects and who knows what had gotten to it. And she recopied her own diary in her own hand into a new book. And so what we actually have,

07:16 - what exists is at the University of North Carolina's Southern Historical Collection, is the 1886 diary, the copy, the copy that she herself made, and she annotated it. Sometimes she would put in more information about what happened to somebody that she mentioned. once or twice, she put in a sort of funny addendum to a story that she had told in the diary. She was a very literate, educated woman. The diary reflects that.

07:39 - It's beautifully written, of course, it's, she was copying it, so it wasn't written in the, it wasn't literally written in the heat of the moment. And she covers all kinds of topics, everything from what they were eating to, what the fear that they had, that soldiers would come by and attack them or raid them or potentially rape them. She had a teenage niece that was living in this household, the problems that they had, as she put it with the quote unquote servants.

08:04 - She never uses the word slave. She always says servants, but these are enslaved people. She's talking about. she and her sister-in-law went to hospitals and paid visits to wounded veterans. So, and, and also the way that news spread from one household to another at a time when rumor was rife. But communication was slow. And so the diary really talks. It's about the daily life of a more

08:27 - or less regular person during the Civil War. And of a woman in particular, there were, she had three nephews, who were sometimes home, but most of them spent most of the time off fighting for the Confederacy. So it was very much a household of women and as slave people. And so there's a lot to be learned about what life was like for ordinary people. And something else that you see

08:48 - very clearly throughout the diary is that Emma was dedicated to the Confederacy. She believed in the Confederacy. She saw the Yankees and the United States as the bad guys, very much so. She cheered every time the Confederacy won. She very much resented the attack on slavery and what she saw as the best possible way of life for all races. She was a, died in the wool Confederate nationalist.

09:10 - And that comes through very clearly in the diary. Emma was Jewish, but her sister-in-law, with whom she went to live, was not actually a number of Emma's, siblings had actually converted to Christianity in the period in the decades before the Civil War started. And, and, and many of the siblings that did not themselves converted married non-Jewish, married Christian, partners or spouses, including her brother Augustus.

09:34 - And that although he had already passed away, it was his widow, her sister-in-law, Rosina that Emma went to live with. and Rosina was not Jewish. So Emma was the only Jewish person in this Christian household, and that mattered. She made a very conscious choice, repeatedly made a choice to stay Jewish, and not only to stay Jewish, but to be a sort of a defender of Judaism. She founded a Jewish Sunday school in Richmond.

09:57 - She was a pillar of the Jewish synagogue. There were two synagogues in Richmond, but she was a pillar of the one that her family had gone to historically. she celebrated all the holidays and wa during that year or so that she lived on her sister-in-Law's farm. Every time there was a Jewish holiday, she would actually go back to Richmond to stay with her Jewish cousins there and attend synagogue and celebrate the holiday.

10:19 - And each week on the Sabbath, on Shabbat, she didn't entirely refrain from work, but she would retreat to her room on Friday night or Saturday morning, sometimes both read from the Hebrew Bible, say the prayer service that was appropriate to the day. So she certainly maintained her Jewishness, but it was in isolation. And that was different from her because in Richmond, she had been a pillar.

10:41 - She and her family had been pillars of the Jewish community in Richmond. And that was another sort of wrenching thing. One of Diane Ashton's major arguments about the diary was that Emma used the diary as a sort of repository for her Jewishness in a Christian household. There was no hostility, no one was trying to convert her, but it was the only place that she felt she could express her Jewishness. That was one of the major insights

11:03 - that Diane Ashton had into this diary. I, it's her Jewishness did not really have an impact as far as anyone can tell on the relationship she had with the enslaved people in her house. Though po being a woman did, in some ways it was sometimes difficult in the South for women to exert authority, because the assumption was that middle class women at least were protected

11:26 - by the men in their lives. This was part of the gender arrangement. And of course, I'm speaking in extremely broad strokes. Not everybody agreed with this or acted in this way, but sort of the agreement was that at least for, genteel slave owning white women, they would sort of give up some of their power in order to be protected, but they would still have a lot of privilege relative to enslaved people. And again, as I've said, Emma subscribed

11:51 - to the system completely. And so it was difficult for both her and for her sister-in-Law to be the authority figures in this household. But they had no choice. And the truth is that Emma's brother had passed away quite a long time before. And so the sister-in-law was used to being the person who ran the household. And she did have adult sons,

12:08 - but as I said, they were away for almost all of the war fighting. They only came back for a few weeks here and there. And so they were the, the adult women in the house in charge of running the operation, making sure that everyone could eat. There was enough to eat, making sure the farm ran smoothly. But of course, making sure that all those things happened essentially meant supervising the enslaved people who were doing the work.

12:29 - Emma and her sister-in-Law did work. They did things themselves. They made rugs, they made clothes, they made furniture. It's not like they were actually not sitting around and doing nothing while directing the enslaved people in their homes. but they didn't do the field work. They were not out actually doing the harvesting, and they didn't do a lot of the care of the animals that was necessary in order to keep a farm running.

12:49 - So they had different sets of things that they did. And that set of differentiation was very common in the antebellum South White people. And enslaved people did different things. Men and women did different things. Adults and children did different things. And so it's not surprising to see that on display even during the exigencies of lore. but she, she was, you know, there's no other word for it, Emma, like most of the white people

13:13 - around her was racist. I mean, she believed it was her job to take care of enslaved people. That that was her role to help sort of, I wanna put this in quotation marks, people minded individuals who needed her guidance, but that didn't make her above threatening to sell people when it suited her, suited her fancy. She had sold enslaved people before the war when keeping them, didn't suit her,

13:35 - or she had trouble governing them, as she might've said. and so she's not physically violent, but the threat of sale is of course, a different, another kind of violence. And when the war ended, she and her sister-in-Law had a lot of trouble adjusting, making the immediate adjustment they had to make to not owning, so to speak, these people anymore who had minds of their own plans of their own and left pretty quickly.

13:57 - I think one of the things that, I hope that readers will take from the book, and I know that Diane did too, is to, this is a way to think about how messy history is, about how complex history is. Emma from the Jewish perspective is sort of a hero, right? She stays Jewish, she defends the religion. She, you know, is, is very a stalwart believer in Judaism and its ethics and values, and yet she's a slave owner. And when you, when you sort of get a window into the mind

14:23 - of someone like this through a diary that was certainly meant to be a private document, you really begin to see how messy people are. We sort of give people the grace to be complicated in our own lives and sometimes flatten historical figures. And so I really hope that when readers read the diary, which is about, makes up about half of the page count more than that actually of the book itself, they'll get a chance not only

14:44 - to learn in granular detail about what life was like for people during the war, but also to see how messy History is and how people have many dimensions to them. And that's true now, but it was true in the past as well. So that's one thing that I think is really important. And another is from the Jewish perspective as a reminder that Jews have lived in America for hundreds and hundreds of years, been fully integrated and had, you know, the same kinds of attitudes and the same kinds of, you know, just perspectives

15:15 - as other people around them while also remaining distinctive religiously. And again, this is just an illustration of how that is true. And so, although it's a piece, it's only a small piece of American Jewish history, and the vast majority of American Jews did not live in the Antebellum South. And those who did, like most whites in the South, never owned slaves. Still, this shows us, you know, the relationships

15:39 - that could exist and the way that so-called minorities, and they were, of course, a tiny minority. Were still part of a larger American story that cannot and should not be told without them. And so these are the things that we hope will come out of readers encountering both the introduction that Diane and I provide, but also the diary itself. There's still a lot of work to be done about women and slavery, actually. So again, I should say specify,

16:03 - this is not my primary research field myself, but, in doing the research I needed to do to work on this project, I really think, I mean, there's some wonderful, wonderful historians, of course, who are working on this from the perspective of both enslaved people, which is critically important, and also white women, both populations, although in very different ways that lacked a certain kind of power in, you know, within the system that pervaded at least the constructs

16:31 - of the antebellum south. Although again, most white people never owned slaves or had a chance to, a chance to, but, so I, I think there's just a lot, I think there's more research that needs to be done about what life looked like on the daily level for people in these kinds of households. And this is just one example. There are many more. And so I think that that's really important. And I, the other thing that I think, this kind

16:53 - of book contributes to is a very deep, long ongoing debate about sort of why the Confederacy lost. And there are debates now in broad strokes about whether it was because they were just defeated by the military might of the union, or could it be that there was so much dissension from within the south, including among women who were not willing to give up their privilege to have to be the ones in charge during the war. And maybe that's why they lost. So of course, it's not a zero sum game.

17:21 - All of those factors are relevant, but when you read something like this, you can, this, this book could be used as evidence for actually a sort of unified confederate nationalism, that it was only the military might of the union, or possibly we might add from today's perspective, the righteousness of their cause that helped the union win. so that's not, there's never gonna be an answer to that, but I think that this book can, is, is a, a small piece in a puzzle that is just always unfolding.

17:50 - There's always more and more pieces to put together about what daily life was like and how people's daily lives contributed to this larger picture of things like why the Confederacy lost.

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