The Jews in America Trilogy (102 page)

As Butler had warned Uriah, the prosecution opened with an attempt to introduce Uriah's six courts-martial into the record. Butler quickly objected, saying that these courts-martial had been held concerning certain specific actions in the past which were not relevant to the hearing, since those acts were not being questioned. He was overruled. Butler then moved that, if the courts-martial were entered as evidence, the fairness and merit of each decision should be taken up, and evidence heard—a process that would have taken months. Once more he was overruled.

When the findings of all the courts-martial had been read into the record—which took several days—the Navy then
unleashed its major attack against Uriah. One after another the prosecution brought forth a long string of officers to testify as to Uriah Levy's incompetence, his unreliability, and his general undesirability. One officer said that Uriah was “generally disliked.” Another testified that “His reputation is low.” Commodore Matthew Perry commented that there was “nothing particularly remarkable about him except that he was rather impulsive and eccentric in his manners, fond of speaking of himself and his professional requirements.” Commodore Silas Stringham said: “He is very vain, and his manner of interfering when two or three persons were talking together was disagreeable.” The charges were vague and ill-defined, and since so much time had passed since Uriah's last command the witnesses had a good deal of trouble with dates, one officer insisting he had worked with Uriah for four years, though the two had known each other only during his service on the
Vandalia,
a period of two years. One officer, who admitted he did not know Uriah at all, said that he felt instinctively that Uriah was a poor sort. “I feel he is unfit for the proper performance of the duties of a Captain,” he said.

Now it was the defense's turn. Benjamin Butler had lined up no less than thirteen officers on active duty in the Navy to testify in Uriah's behalf, plus six ex-Navy officers. Three others sent in written depositions. These witnesses were led by Uriah's old friend Senior Commodore Charles Stewart, chief of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, who testified that “When Captain Levy served under me, he performed his professional duties to my perfect satisfaction. I thought he was competent in 1818 and I think he is competent now. I'd be glad to have him on my ship under my command.” The others were similarly laudatory, and witness after witness made the point that at the heart of all Uriah's troubles lay anti-Semitism.

When the nineteen witnesses had testified, and the
depositions had been read, the court clearly expected the defense to rest its case. But Mr. Butler had saved a special surprise for the end. What happened next was a spectacle on an epic scale such as those devised, a century later, by Cecil B. De Mille. The courtroom doors opened, and in filed a stream of character witnesses composed of some of the most distinguished men in America, from every field and profession, all prepared to testify to the probity and uprightness and courage of Uriah Levy. They included bank presidents, merchants, doctors, commissioners, the editor of the
New York Globe
and the governor of New Jersey. Uriah's distant cousin, Henry Hendricks, was there, and Senator Dix and Congressman Aaron Vanderpoel and Nathan Ely, president of the Peter Cooper Fire Insurance Company, and James H. Blake, the former mayor of Washington. Jews and Christians, heads of companies and famous lawyers, one after another they mounted the witness stand to speak out for Uriah Levy. In all, fifty-three more witnesses gave testimony, bringing the grand total of defense witnesses to seventy-five. It was an overwhelming performance that might have begun to seem comic if it had not been for the distinction and the obvious sincerity of the men involved. And it was of course a grandstand play, for as each new day in court began, with new witnesses called, the American press and public attention became increasingly riveted on what was going on in a tiny Washington courtroom before a relatively unnewsworthy Navy court of inquiry. Americans who had never heard of Uriah Levy, or of such a thing as anti-Semitism, now were aroused, and sides were taken. For weeks, as the trial marched on, it seemed as though the newspapers could write, and Americans could talk, of nothing else.

Seventy-five witnesses were a difficult act to follow, but of course one voice remained to be heard to close the show: Uriah's. He had reached his finest hour. On December 19,
1857, at ten in the morning—the trial had now gone on for more than a month—Uriah rose to his feet and began: “My parents were Israelites, and I was nurtured in the faith of my ancestors.…” Three days later, on December 22, he concluded with the words: “What is my case today, if you yield to this injustice, may tomorrow be that of the Roman Catholic or the Unitarian, the Episcopalian or the Methodist, the Presbyterian or the Baptist. There is but one safeguard, and this is to be found in an honest, wholehearted, inflexible support of the wise, the just, the impartial guarantee of the Constitution. I have the fullest confidence that you will faithfully adhere to this guarantee, and, therefore, with like confidence, I leave my destiny in your hands.” The members of the board looked stunned and glassy-eyed. Uriah sat down to what a reporter called “a spontaneous outburst of heartfelt applause.”

“It was,” commented a Washington newspaper, “one of the most glorious, if not brilliant, pleas ever made in the history of the United States Navy: a plea that ‘right should be done!' This became the crowning triumph in Uriah Levy's career: it was a half-century of experience speaking, experience as a seaman, but most important of all, experience as an American Jew.”

The court's verdict was unanimous: “Levy is morally, mentally, physically and professionally fit for the Naval Service and … ought to be restored to the active list of the Navy.”

Now that the secret was out, that anti-Semitism afflicted America, too, as it had done for centuries in reactionary Europe, and lay there for all to see—live, quivering, and unpleasant, a fact that had to be dealt with in the armed services as in civilian life—the immediate reaction was one of extreme embarrassment. Now the Navy set about, very late in the game, to atone for the way it had treated Uriah. After years of ignoring his requests to be assigned sea duty,
he was, barely four months after the court of inquiry had reached its verdict, respectfully asked by the Secretary of the Navy if he would care to take command of the sloop
Macedonian,
being outfitted in Boston, and sail it to join the Mediterranean Fleet. Uriah replied gracefully that he would be honored, and then—perhaps in a spirit of wicked humor—added an outrageous request. He would like to take his wife along. She was, he explained, “an orphan, and not a native of this country, without any protection during my absence.”

It was an unheard-of request. Never before in American naval history—nor since, for that matter—had a captain been permitted to carry his wife aboard. But the Secretary of the Navy, in his new mood of trying to placate Uriah Levy, replied promptly that this would certainly be possible.

Virginia Lopez Levy often seemed in need of some sort of “protection.” A curious woman, with an enormous interest in herself, she wrote extensive memoirs in later years, in which she speculated at length about the secret of her immense charm and attractiveness to men. She once asked one of her many men friends, a poet named Nathaniel Parker Willis, whether he could put his finger on what made her so desirable. “I said,” she wrote, “‘I think you know me well enough to realize that I am not a vain woman—but it would be idle and ungrateful for me to pretend that I was unaware of the kindness and attention showered on me. Will you tell me the truth, to what do you attribute this popularity I am fortunate to enjoy?'”

The poet replied—according to Virginia—as follows:

You have indeed set me a hard task. You ask a mere man, an admirer and a poet, to be absolutely truthful to a young and interesting woman, but as your wish is my command, I will do my best. The beauty of a vain woman may command the adoration of men, but it rarely inspires their love. Your power is potent because
you use it so little. The infinite variety of your charm is as elusive as yourself and therefore difficult to define, but the brilliant bubbling effervescence of your youth is like a sparkling glass of champagne that you give us enough of to exhilarate without intoxicating. Do you wonder that we quaff it to the last drop?

A sculptor in Florence once asked her to pose for him and—again, according to Virginia—“He wanted me to sit for his
Allegro.
I asked how she was depicted. He said ‘buxom, blithe and debonair.' I positively refused to pose for anyone described in this manner, as I was short and plump and possessed of
la beauté de diable.”

She appears to have been an inveterate flirt, and there was a curious episode at Monticello, one day when Uriah was out of town, in which Virginia became involved with a number of spirited college boys who, for some reason, happened to be passing through. She girlishly ordered them off the property, but they refused to go. And after a romping chase over stone walls, through gardens, and in and out of arbors and bowers and gazebos, Virginia wrote that “We all parted friends.”

Virginia accepted full credit for the fact that her husband's request to bring her along was granted. “The popularity I was fortunate enough to enjoy with the men in power,” she wrote, “won for me the unusual distinction of being allowed to accompany my husband. This privilege, which has never been granted since, was passed by both houses and granted without protest.”

Her “infinite variety” made her quite a handful for her aging husband. He tried to keep pace with her youthful energy, and dyed his graying hair and moustache jet black. But he also found her an expensive commodity, and whenever they quarreled it was over the extravagant amounts she spent on clothes and trimmings. And she was very nearly too much for the
Macedonian,
where the presence of a solitary female among an all-male crew was, not surprisingly, disruptive. In his diary, a junior officer wrote: “She
seemed determined to show off her dresses for every time she came on deck she had a different one.” On another occasion, this same officer was disturbed to enter the captain's cabin on an errand and to find “the tables and chairs covered with ladies' apparel, hoops and skirts, bonnets and shoes, etc. etc.”

Virginia, on the other hand, found life on shipboard most agreeable, and seemed, at times, to be going out of her way to be kind to the younger officers—particularly at times when the captain was on duty on the bridge and she was alone with time to kill in her cabin. And she enjoyed the stops at Mediterranean ports, where she mingled, as she put it, among “the exalted circles of European society.” Everywhere, she wrote, she was admired. From her memoirs: “My sojourn in Italy was as enjoyable as my stay in Egypt. Particularly so in Naples, where I occupied an apartment for some time. Captain Levy was compelled to leave, but everyone was very kind to me, including our Ambassador & his wife, Mrs. Chandler.… Spent Yom Kippur with Baron and Baroness Rothschild, who had a synagogue in their home. I have always admired the Rothschild family, and in whatever country I met them was impressed with their nobility of character. They understood perfectly
noblesse oblige.”
She dashed off to Paris, where “I went to a fashionable modiste … and told her I wanted a white tulle gown, as simple as she could make it, and told her I must have it in time for the ball. She was horrified. Madame must have brocade and point lace, but I insisted on the tulle, and she reluctantly agreed to make it. The night of the ball when these old duchesses adjusted their lorgnettes to look me over and pronounce me
charmante,
I thought I had made a wise selection. But neither the gown nor I had anything to recommend us but our freshness. I have never seen such a collection of jewels and ugly women in my life!”

Her favorite ball that season was the “wonderful
costume ball given by the Emperor Napoleon III and where the Empress Eugenie was masked … the splendor of its costumes, the scintillation of its lights, the rhythm and intoxication of its music, I think, went a little to my head and I felt that in order to enter into the spirit of the evening I must indulge in a violent flirtation.… I learned later that my partner was Prince Metternich.…”

Virginia must have been a trial to Uriah, but there were other compensations. In February, 1860, Uriah Levy learned that he had been placed in command of the entire Mediterranean Fleet, and had been elevated to the rank of commodore, which was then the Navy's highest rank. The fleet celebrated this event by presenting him with a thirteen-gun salute. And so Uriah Levy, scorned and beleaguered most of his life in the service, had all the luck at last.

It was all he wanted. The board of inquiry trial had taken its toll on him. He had begun to complain of “stomach distress,” and there were other signs that he was getting old. In 1861, he and Virginia came home to the big house in Saint Mark's Place in New York. In April of that year Fort Sumter surrendered, and suddenly the Navy officer corps was split along North-South lines. War seemed inevitable, and many officers returned to the South to count themselves with the Confederacy. Uriah, though he owned property south of the Mason-Dixon Line, announced his allegiance to the Union, and even talked excitedly of Navy service in the Civil War. But early in the spring of 1862, he came down with a severe cold. It developed into pneumonia. On March 22 of that year he died in his sleep, with Virginia at his side.

Uriah's last will and testament managed to say a good deal about his zeal as a patriot, as well as the size of his ego. One of his bequests was for the erection of a statue of himself, “of the size of life at least” and “to cost at least
six thousand dollars,” above his grave, on which he wished inscribed: “Uriah P. Levy, Captain of the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practise of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.” He then directed that Monticello—the house and acreage—be left “to the people of the United States,” but he attached an odd proviso. He asked that the estate be turned into “an Agricultural School for the purpose of educating as practical farmers children of the warrant office of the United States Navy whose Fathers are dead.” Was this Uriah's idea of a joke, or a serious gesture aimed at turning swords into plowshares? Why should the children of dead warrant officers be taught farming? Perhaps Uriah, who considered himself a gentleman farmer as well as a Navy officer, felt that the two occupations complemented each other. In any case, his will left the condition unexplained. There were a number of charitable bequests, and gifts to relatives. Virginia was directed to receive the minimum that the law allowed.