Commodore Uriah P. Levy.
Levy had many difficulties in the Navy, partly due to his promotion from the line, which is never popular among officers who receive their training at the Naval Academy, and partly, as he himself and many others thought, on account of his faith and descent. He fought a duel, in which he killed his opponent, was court-martialed six times, and finally dropped from the list as captain, to which rank he had been promoted. He defended his conduct before a court of inquiry in 1855, which restored him to the navy as captain. Subsequently he rose to the rank of commodore.
Levy was the descendant of an old Philadelphia family, always acknowledged his Jewish allegiance, and was one of the charter members of the Washington Hebrew Congregation. He purchased Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, whom he greatly admired, and it is still owned by the family, the present owner being Congressman Jefferson M. Levy, a nephew of the commodore. A statue of Jefferson, presented to the government by Uriah P. Levy, is still standing in the Statuary Hall of the Capitol in Washington. Levy is buried in the portion of Cypress Hills Cemetery in New York which belongs to Congregation Shearit Israel (of which another nephew, Louis Napoleon Levy, a brother of the Congressman, is president), and on his imposing tombstone is recorded that “he was the father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the United States Navy.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE FORMATIVE PERIOD AFTER THE CIVIL WAR.
Ebb and flow of immigration between 1850 and 1880—Decrease and practical stoppage of Jewish immigration from Germany—The breathing spell between two periods of immigration, and the preparation for the vast influx which was to follow—The period of great charitable institutions—Organization and consolidation—The Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations—The Independent Order B’nai B’rith—Other large fraternal organizations and their usefulness—Important local institutions in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.
The number of immigrants arriving in the United States increased in the middle of the last century, and reached its highest point of that period in 1854, when the new arrivals numbered 427,833. It then began to diminish, and fell to about 150,000 in 1860, and to less than 90,000 in each of the two first years of the Civil War, 1861 and 1862. In the following year it began to rise again, and in the two last years of the war, when the final outcome was already easily foreseen in the Old World, it was considerably above the three years preceding the beginning of the conflict. In 1865 there came 247,453; in 1867 (when the present system of figuring by the fiscal year, ending June 30, was adopted) they numbered 298,967, and only a little less in 1868. In 1869 it rose to 352,569; in 1870 to 387,203. After a slight relapse in 1871 to 321,350, it rose in 1872 to 404,806 and in 1873 to 459,803, when the current receded again on account of the slackening of all business activity which followed the panic of that year. It sank to as low as 138,469 in 1878, rose again to 177,826 in 1879, and to 457,257 in 1880, when the country had fully recovered from the effects of the panic, as well as from the ravages of the great struggle.
But while Germans formed a large part of those who arrived in the two or three decades after the war, the number of Jews who left that country was now very small, and sank to almost nothing about 1880. What was described by a Jewish traveler[41] as the second German-Jewish migration to America, which began about 1836, and to which “Bavaria contributed the largest quota of (Jewish) immigrants, because of her peculiarly harsh (anti-Jewish) marriage laws and commercial restrictions,” practically ended in the decade of the Civil War, when the Jews were emancipated in most of the German states. The progress made by these immigrants in less than one generation can be best illustrated by quoting two passages from the same article by Mr. Kohler: “The early German settlers commonly arrived here without means, frequently without any education other than of the most rudimentary character.” Subsequently ([p. 102]) he quotes a German-American politician, who wrote in 1869: “The German Jews in America gain in influence daily, being rich, intelligent and educated, or at least seeking education. They read better books than the rest of the Germans....”