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T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 625–636 A Letter from Lincoln’s Jewish Telegrapher KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN that my great-great-grandfather, Edward Rosewater , was the telegrapher whom Abraham Lincoln assigned to transmit the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.1 I remember my grandmother taking my brothers and me, when I was twelve, into our Uncle Ed’s recently vacated bedroom in her Cleveland house. There, she read to us from the letter, framed in black on the wall, her grandfather’s description to his future bride of how President Abraham Lincoln, wearing white satin slippers, laughed loudly in the telegraph office on a Sunday morning in September 1862. This letter, inked on three sheets of yellowing War Department stationery in a slant, flourished hand, repreI am extremely grateful to Mary Hellerstein, Edward R. Feil, Jonathan Hellerstein , David Hellerstein, David Colman, Nancy Katz Colman, and Ann Rosewater for their help in obtaining family documents and other materials I’ve used in this essay. I especially thank Ann Greene for her sage advice on researching Civil War history and Dafnah Strauss for her generosity and her inspiring scholarship on Edward Rosewater. I dedicate this article to the memory of Rosewater ’s grandson, the late Edward Rosewater of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (December 25, 1908–January 5, 2004). 1. Albert A. Woldman, ‘‘Clevelander Announces Emancipation Proclamation to World: Young Telegrapher on Duty in Washington Transmits Lincoln’s Famous Document in 1863,’’ Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 12, 1939, All Feature Section, 1. Clipping in the Colman-Schwarzenberg family album, from private collection of David Colman; also, microfilm in the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. ‘‘The Man Who Knew Lincoln,’’ writ. Virginia Mazur, dir. Stuart Buchanan, The Eternal Light, National Broadcasting Company under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, WTAM, Cleveland, January 1, 1956, from private collection of Edward Rosewater Feil. This radio program was based on the then ‘‘newly discovered diaries of Edward Rosewater,’’ in the Rosewater Collection at the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio. This collection consists of the papers of Rosewater’s son Victor Rosewater which were donated to the Archives by his son, Edward. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 626 JQR 94:4 (2004) sented the essence of my grandmother’s childhood, along with the beaded Indian tobacco pouch given to her by Buffalo Bill, upon whose knee she perched when he visited her grandparents’ home in Omaha, Nebraska. From the moment her mother died, when she was a two-week-old infant, my grandmother lived in the home of her maternal grandparents, Leah Colman Rosewater (1843–1914) and Edward Rosewater (1841–1906).2 From my grandmother’s stories, I knew that Rosewater was a prominent citizen of Omaha, as the founding editor of the influential daily Omaha Bee (1871–1906) and a politician in the state’s Republican Party, who ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1901.3 More than once, my grandmother showed me the diary she kept when, at thirteen, she toured Europe with her cousin Anna and their grandmother, accompanying Rosewater, while he served as one of two delegates representing the United States at the 1906 International Postal Congress in Rome.4 The letter from Edward Rosewater to Leah Colman is a keyhole through which to consider one young Jewish man at a crucial moment in American history, as the only known Jewish telegrapher in the Civil War.5 Furthermore, this letter illuminates the texture of the everyday life lived by immigrant Jews who had in a matter of years transformed themselves into middle-class Americans.6 At 3:00 A.M. on September 18, 1862, while ‘‘on duty for the night’’ in the War Department telegraph office, Edward Rosewater began to compose a letter to seventeen-year-old Leah Colman, in Cleveland, Ohio. Rosewater, twenty-one years old, had very recently arrived at this post in Washington, D. C. Having joined the United States Military Telegraph Corps in April, 1862...

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