The Jews in America Trilogy (101 page)

The Panic of 1837 had left the real estate market severely depressed, and Uriah, whose fortune had not been affected
by the Panic, took this opportunity to invest heavily in more Manhattan properties. Soon he owned at least twenty buildings. Three of his rooming houses earned him an income of nearly $3,500 a month, at a time when the average American working man earned $600 a year. Still, he continued half hopefully to think of the sea, and another command. And so it can be imagined with what kind of shock he received, nearly two years after leaving the
Vandalia,
a tersely worded notice from Washington ordering him to appear before a court-martial for “forgery, cowardice, and cruel and scandalous conduct.” His sixth.

His accuser, it seemed, was his former fellow officer Lieutenant Hooe, who, in the months since Uriah had left the
Vandalia,
had been conducting a private vendetta to bring Uriah to his knees. The specific details of the charges were almost quaint. “Forgery” referred to the fact that a report submitted by Uriah had omitted two words, through a clerical error. “Cowardice,” the charges stated, meant that Uriah Levy had once allowed a man “to wring his nose severely without making any resistance.” The “cruel and scandalous conduct” referred to the punishment of John Thompson, and, for good measure, Uriah was also accused of having “failed to set an example of decency and propriety in his own personal conduct,” which was a long way of saying that he had had the temerity to paint his ship's guns blue. On the surface, the charges appeared to be by far the most serious Uriah had ever faced. Examined closely, on the other hand, they seemed ridiculous—and Uriah may have made a tactical error at the outset of his trial by telling the court that he considered them so.

Seldom in American history have a sailor's buttocks received so much and such intensive scrutiny from men in the highest ranks of government, including the man with the highest rank of all, the President. The prosecution accused the
Vandalia
's master of having ordered a
full-scale tarring and feathering. The defense insisted that a dab of tar “no larger than a silver dollar” had been applied to each member in question. The youth, the prosecution claimed, had been permanently traumatized from the humiliating treatment he had received before the eyes of his mates. Nonsense, replied the defense; the incident had been treated as a good joke and the morale of his ship had improved considerably as a result of it. Page after page of testimony went into the court transcript over the condition of the posterior of a young man who—because he was off on the high seas somewhere—could not be called to testify. As the case dragged on, Uriah became increasingly confident that he would be exonerated. It was a blow of stunning proportions when he heard the court pronounce him guilty, and then heard the sentence—that he was to be dismissed from the United States Navy. It was his second dismissal. He returned to New York in a state of shock.

President John Tyler had been a lawyer before assuming the Presidency, and he looked over courts-martial, when they were sent to him for the customary review, with particular care. It must have seemed to him quite clear that something other than his mode of punishment was “wrong” with Captain Levy where the Navy higher-ups were concerned. Though he did not touch on this in his opinion—anti-Semitism was still such an elusive, vague, ill-defined quantity in the United States—Tyler did say that he considered the punishment excessive, and asked the court to reconsider its sentence.

In its reconsideration, the court became very excited and wrote a shrilly worded reply to Tyler, saying: “We cannot imagine any punishment more degrading and more calculated to produce such feelings than that which was inflicted [on Seaman Thompson]. It involved not only the indecent exposure of the person of the boy at the gangway of the
ship, but the ignominy which are attached to only the most disgraceful of offenses. In this view the punishment was not only unusual but unlawful and exceedingly cruel.” Even flogging would have been more merciful. Please, the court begged the President, let Uriah's sentence stand, for the sake of “Navy tradition” if for nothing else.

The President's reply was firm. “A small quantity of tar,” he wrote, “was placed on the back”—“back” was a suitably Presidential euphemism—“of the boy and a half dozen parrot's feathers put on it was substituted in place of twelve stripes of the cat. And for this Capt. Levy is sentenced to be dismissed from the Service.… He meant to affix temporarily to the boy a badge of disgrace, in order to correct a bad habit, and to teach him and others that the habit of mimicry is that of the parrot whose feathers he wore. The badge was worn only for a few minutes. No harm was done to the person, no blood made to flow, as from the application of the cat. And no cruelty was exercised, unless the reasoning of the court be that this badge of disgrace was more cruel than corporal punishment.… I therefore mitigate the sentence of Capt. Levy from dismissal from the Service to suspension without pay for the period of 12 months.” Once again, Uriah had been saved by having the right man in the White House.

And President Tyler, a just and kindly man, further mitigated Uriah's twelve-month suspension a few months later by promoting him from commander to captain.

But the twelve months passed, and Uriah's official status continued to be “unassigned.” Apparently the Navy did not want his services, despite his new rank. Uriah, growing still richer, busied himself in real estate, bustling back and forth between his house in New York and Monticello, and whenever he had a moment, he dashed off a polite note to the Navy Department, asking for an assignment. His requests were always “noted.” The Navy would let him
know if anything came up. Uriah also, in this period, took up another form of writing—letters to editors of newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, on the United States Navy's “antiquated,” “barbarous,” and “medieval” use of flogging as punishment. Uriah Levy loved to indulge in bombast, and these letters show him at his grandiloquent best. “America shall not be scourged!” he cried. Soon he was taking to the lecture platform with his crusade, and his vivid descriptions of men being lashed held audiences in shocked fascination.

He was, of course, alternately beseeching the Navy for assignments and attacking one of the Navy's most sacred institutions in the press and on the dais. His editorial letters, which were presently being published in pamphlet form, were drawing reactions from the Congress. Speeches, quoting Uriah, were being delivered on the floor of the House, and both pro- and anti-flogging factions were developing. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire took up Uriah's cause with particular enthusiasm, and soon he had become Congress' chief opponent of the lash. The Navy, becoming even more deeply entrenched in its position, announced that “it would be utterly impracticable to have an efficient Navy without this form of punishment.” Meanwhile, Uriah's replies from the Navy brass grew chillier and chillier in tone. The months stretched into years, the years to a decade. In September, 1850, Senator Hale succeeded in attaching an anti-flogging rider to the Naval Appropriations Bill. Two years later, further laws were passed, and Uriah was being called “the father of the abolition of flogging,” though he shares this honor with Senator Hale. It was now twelve years since he had left the
Vandalia.
Now, when he wrote to the Navy, his letters were sometimes not even acknowledged. He was growing old, but he had not in any way tired of the fight.

In the autumn of 1853, Uriah Levy did a thing that
startled his friends and neighbors. He married a young woman named Virginia Lopez. Uriah was sixty-one. She was eighteen. She wasn't just young. She was his niece, the daughter of his sister Fanny, who had married a West Indian banker named Abraham Lopez—a cousin, in turn, of the Lopezes of Newport, the Gomezes, and a number of other Levys. Uriah and his new wife were related, it was once figured out by the family, at least fourteen different ways. Later in the nineteenth century laws were passed—and have since been abolished—banning such consanguineous marriages, but in 1853 it was all quite legal. And Uriah pointed out that he was really marrying Virginia to “protect” her. Her father, who had at one point been quite rich in Jamaica, had made some unwise loans and investments, and had died leaving his wife and daughter almost penniless. It is part of Jewish tradition for the closest unmarried male relative to marry and care for a widowed or orphaned female member of the family. Nonetheless, eyebrows were raised.

In 1855, Congress approved an “Act to Promote the Efficiency of the Navy.” Among other provisions, the act set up a board of officers to examine Navy personnel “who, in the judgment of the board, shall be incapable of performing promptly and efficiently all their duty both ashore and afloat.” Uriah had no reason to suppose that the act was aimed specifically at him and a few other jostlers of the official Navy applecart—but it was. Within a few months of the passage of the act, Uriah was notified that he was among those adjudged incapable of further service, and that he was therefore “stricken from the rolls” of the United States Navy. The implications of this terse note were even more insulting. The act specified that officers who had achieved their incapacity because of ill health or old age should merely be placed on the reserve list. Those “stricken from the rolls” were those who were “themselves to blame
for their incompetency.” The final, most cutting touch of all was that the letter was addressed “Mr. Uriah P. Levy, Late Captain, U.S. Navy.”

Uriah was outraged. Sixteen years had passed since he had left the
Vandalia,
and he was now sixty-three, with a young and beautiful wife, a fortune, and two splendid houses—at Saint Mark's Place in New York, and Monticello. His chances of reversing the board's decision looked almost hopeless, and would involve virtually another act of Congress. But Uriah, ever the warrior, girded himself for the grandest and mightiest battle of his career.

He rode to New York and hired Benjamin Butler as his attorney. Butler was one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country. He had been Martin Van Buren's law partner and, when Van Buren became President, had been named secretary of war. He had also served as attorney general under Andrew Jackson. Together, the two men sat down to prepare a petition to Congress which declared that the Navy's action was “outrageous, unauthorized, illegal, and without precedent,” and that Uriah had been “unjustly dealt with, and was entitled to reinstatement in the Navy and compensated for the illegal and cruel treatment he had received.”

In many ways the naval review board that had dismissed Uriah was reminiscent of the Inquisitional courts of Spain centuries earlier, which had sent Uriah's ancestors from the country. The board had conducted its proceedings in total secrecy. No witnesses had been heard, no evidence had been presented. The accused had not been permitted to say anything in his own defense, nor had he had anyone to represent him. Butler reminded the Congress of this in his petition.

He pointed out that the board had vastly overstepped the authority given it. It had been authorized to conduct “a careful examination into the efficiency” of officers, and
to submit “the names and rank of all officers who, in their judgment, shall be incapable of performing promptly and efficiently all their duty … and when they believe that such inefficiency has arisen from any cause implying sufficient blame on the part of any officer to justify it, they are to recommend that he be stricken from the rolls.” This meant, Butler argued, that unless an officer could be proved “incapable of performing” duties, the Navy board had no business reaching a judgment about him. And how had Uriah's capabilities been tested? Not at all. Despite repeated attempts to return to service, where he might have been tested, he had been repeatedly turned down. The petition was also boldly critical of President Pierce for approving the board's action, and said: “In so far as the President may have been led to a general acceptance of the report … by the unsound and fallacious arguments of his cabinet adviser, he has been misguided.” The objections to Uriah Levy on the Navy's part, Butler's petition stated flatly, were three: he had not risen through the ranks in the traditional way; he was outspokenly opposed to the tradition of corporal punishment; and he was a Jew. It was the first time in American history that anti-Semitism had been publicly identified as a force in American life and government. The Butler-drafted petition for Levy ran to more than nine thousand words.

Congress was no less slow-footed in 1855 than it is today, and not until a year after the petition was formally submitted did Congress pass a bill which provided that officers, such as Uriah, who had been cashiered could have their cases presented before a board of inquiry. It was an initial victory for Uriah, and now began the long and tedious process of scheduling the hearing—for the following fall—and of gathering evidence and witnesses to a career which, after all, had been cut off seventeen years before. Uriah was sixty-four now, and must have wondered
at moments whether it was worth it. But the fire was still in him, and he was determined to end his life proudly, as a Jew and as a United States naval officer. He was driven by a kind of stubborn patriotism, an unwavering faith in the guarantees and freedoms stated in the Constitution, and he seems to have felt that his fight was not for his vindication but that America and all Americans somehow needed to be exonerated, acquitted, declared guiltless of what had happened within its armed services.

He, and his attorney, Mr. Butler, also had a high sense of showmanship, and were determined, in the process of seeking justice and redress, to give Washington, the press, and the public a performance they would not soon forget. When the Levy party arrived in Washington for the hearing in November, 1857, it installed itself in a series of suites in Gadsby'a Hotel, and when ready to depart for the Navy building, the party chose a route that took them down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, where Uriah could dramatically point out his monumental statue of Thomas Jefferson as it stood, snow-covered, on the White House lawn. The party—including Uriah, Butler, his aides, and Mrs. Levy—entered the hearing room processionally, and took their seats.