5 - M. J. Michelbacher, ‘A Sermon Delivered on the Day of Prayer’, 27 March 1863, Richmond, Virginia

Summary

FOLLOWING Seixas's sermon during the War of 1812, I have found no ex - ample of American Jewish pulpit discourse in wartime until the Civil War. What we do find is a passage in Isaac Leeser's eulogy for President William Henry Harrison, delivered on 9 April 1841, the fifth day of Passover, reviewing his role as a military leader in the Indian Wars: ‘And when the newly-awakened demon of war again roused the savages to strife and slaughter, [Harrison] led the armies of his country to the onset, and overthrew the dangerous foe.’ In this context, Leeser evokes the savagery of the Native Americans in melodramatic passages that exceed even the description by Seixas of the massacre near Buffalo. The danger that Harrison faced was not from ‘the warlike sons of ancient Britain’, nor from ‘the children of gallant France’, nor from ‘foul treason’; rather, ‘it was the war-yell of the fierce, untamable sons of the forest, who slaughtered without mercy the armed man and the defenceless woman; who spared not, in their murderous lust, the aged sire and the timid maiden, and who were strangers to mercy, and unmoved by the innocent smiles of helpless infancy’. Some measure of understanding and even a touch of empathy for the plight of the Native Americans can be detected in the following passage, as well as an acknowledgement of the deceit and greed of those who dispossessed them, but on the whole it portrays the enemy as sharing very little in common humanity with the preacher or his audience. America was won

by the prowess of the civilized Caucasian race from the indigenous inhabitants of the land, more savage than the beasts of their forests, and as uncultivated as the soil on which they trod … Extermination and an utter obliterating almost have been the fate of many tribes of the once powerful owners of this land, for whom we cannot avoid having pity, though they have often been stained with the blood of many innocent victims; knowing, as we do, that their untutored mind was not rarely goaded on to madness by the bad faith and rapacity of their more lettered, but frequently dishonest neighbours, who came at times, first, to seek a refuge and shelter in the to them unhospitable forest, and then aimed ere long to dispossess their kind red friends of the graves of their forefathers.