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201 7 Divided Loyalties in 1861 The Decision of Major Alfred Mordecai Stanley L. Falk When Confederate batteries opened fire on beleaguered Fort Sumter on the morning of April 12, 1861, Major Alfred Mordecai, a senior officer in the Ordnance Department, United States Army, was testing artillery carriages at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He immediately hurried back to his post as commanding officer of Watervliet Arsenal, a major ordnance installation located just outside of Troy, New York.1 Like thousands of other Americans, he found himself faced with the problem of divided loyalties. Major Mordecai was a distinguished army scientist who had made great contributions in weapons development and ballistics during a military career that spanned more than four decades. Born in North Carolina in 1804, he had entered the United States Military Academy in 1819. After graduating at the top of his class, he had held a number of important positions and commands, had been sent by the War Department on several consequential missions, and, above all, had been an active and outstanding participant in the development of American military technology. In April, 1861, he was at the height of his long and distinguished career when the booming guns in Charleston harbor pushed him one step closer toward the inevitable and agonizing decision that would end his service in the United States Army. A sensitive, perceptive, gentle man, he was horror -stricken by the knowledge of what lay before him and his country. Along with many of his fellow Army officers, Mordecai was forced by the advent of the Civil War to make a most difficult choice. Southern Reprinted with permission from Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 48 (1959): 147–169, copyright © 1959 by the American Jewish Historical Society. 202 Stanley L. Falk born and oriented, he was sympathetic to the Southern position. The other members of his father’s large family were scattered throughout Virginia , North Carolina, and Alabama, and Mordecai was closely bound to them by strong ties of loyalty and affection. On the Northern side, Mordecai had served the United States faithfully for more than forty years, and he loved and firmly believed in the Union. His wife, Sara, moreover, and their children were all Northern by birth and belief. And finally, he was, above all, a conscientious, sincere, and highly honorable man. Torn by divided allegiances, he postponed his choice as long as he could. But in the spring of 1861, when further delay was no longer possible, he made the only decision that logic and conscience allowed.2 Mordecai’s views on the major questions dividing the nation can best be described as moderate or, in his own words, “conservative opinions.” Above all, he desired the preservation of the Union and saw “no hope for the country if divided.”3 Such a division, he believed, would split the nation “into incoherent fragments, to become the inveterate foes of each other, and the scorn and contempt of the rest of the world.” He had “no patience to think of the spectacle” that America would present under these circumstances, and “no disposition to join in the miserable strife” that would result.4 He viewed with growing annoyance, disgust, and apprehension the activities of extremists on both sides. In 1850, when he was still confident that a peaceful and satisfactory solution could be found to the problems dividing North and South, he suggested, as his own “favorite plan” for ending tensions, the hanging of “a dozen or twenty politicians—without being very particular in the choice of them either.”5 But as the heat of the intersectional dispute intensified, his jocular tone changed to one of growing dread. He condemned abolitionism, that “wide spread sentiment at the North, . . . grown to a fearful extent within a few years”6 and at the same time denounced the “madness and folly” of Southern radicals.7 The extremists were leading the country to civil war, a prospect “dreadful to contemplate,”8 which must be averted by all means possible. “How much easier and better it would be to sit down in peace,” he exclaimed, “than to purchase it with the horrors of revolution and civil war!”9 Mordecai saw the quarrel between North and South as basically “a struggle about the institution of slavery,” and here, while he completely opposed the North “for attempting to interfere,” he had “no sympathy ” for the Southern “feeling, or doctrine rather, as lately inculcated.”10 From boyhood, he had looked upon slavery in the...

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