Toward the end of the Civil War, some thirty Jewish veterans were buried in the Cemetery for Hebrew Confederate Soldiers in Richmond, Virginia. They were not locals but rather hailed from Mississippi, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana, and their bodies were brought to Richmond after Confederate military cemeteries refused to inter them alongside their fellow soldiers. Why would military cemeteries make such strict distinctions among the glorious dead? And, perhaps more to the point, why would Jews fight for a cause that disdained their sacrifice? In the postwar period, the politics of Jewish courage and wartime sympathies would form a kind of genre of its own—one that sought to defend American Jews from a new libel by enshrining their service. These monuments were not limited to the former capitals of the Confederacy; even today, some can still be found in the most unlikely places.
In 1901 the magazine Confederate Veteran reported that the newly formed Cincinnati chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy had put up, as part of its first initiative, a monument to a veteran named Felix Moses. Monuments and memorials to the glorious Confederate dead were constantly going up in the early twentieth century, part of a concerted effort to enshrine the Lost Cause and protect it from alleged Northern revisionism. On May 5, the article continued, “a plain but appropriate stone was placed over his resting place in the Jewish cemetery. Professor John Uri Lloyd…who has every year decorated and cared for the grave of Felix Moses, gathered as many as possible of Moses’ old friends and veterans to attend the commemoration services.” It was an interfaith affair, according to a local newspaper: “The chapel was crowded to its utmost with all classes and creeds, making in itself an excellent testimonial to the reunited North and South.” The Daughters had draped the chapel in Walnut Hills with Confederate flags.
The inscription on the black granite stone read:
Felix Moses, a Confederate soldier and a true friend. 1827–1886.