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THE GRANDEES: AMERICA'S SEPHARDIC ELITE |
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15. THE U.S. NAVY SURRENDERS AT LAST!
URIAH P. LEVY, in the meantime, had been continuing with his crusade to have Jews treated as the equals of Christians. He had gone on with his lecturing and scolding of fellow Jews who took insults lying down, who responded to slurs by turning the other cheek. He was a frequent writer of peppery letters to the editor, and was otherwise securing his reputation as a firebrand. He had also decided -- since he no longer had Navy duties to occupy him -- that it was time for him to make some money.
New York in the early nineteenth century had become a more important seaport than either Newport or Philadelphia. The completion of the Erie Canal, linking East to West," in 1825, secured New York's position as the maritime -- hence commercial, and hence money -- capital of the United States. In that year alone, five hundred new businesses were started in the city, and twelve banks and thirteen marine insurance companies opened their doors. The population topped 150,000, and -- an unheard-of thing in America -- one of the city newspapers announced that it would publish on Sundays. The Park Theatre declared that it would present grand opera, and number 7 Cherry Street became the first private house in America to be lit by gas.
Maiden Lane, four blocks north of Wall Street, had been the division between the commercial and residential sections of the city. South of Maiden Lane, the city was abustle with business; to the north lay houses with gardens, estates, and farms. Greenwich Village had been a separate village, approached by crossing a stone bridge at Canal Street, but, by 1825, the commercial part of the city had encroached so far north that it was pointed out that no more than "the width of one block" separated the city from the suburban Village, and the most daring of the speculators prophesied that Broadway would one day extend as far north as Tenth Street. Today, of course, it continues on through the length of Manhattan, through the Bronx, Yonkers, and into Tarrytown. Washington Square, at the northern edge of Greenwich Village, had been the city's potter's field until 1823, when its development into a park was begun and the tall red-brick mansions were built on its perimeter. This helped establish Fifth Avenue -- which sprouted from the northern side of the park -- as the fashionable residential address it was to become. When Washington Square Park was completed in 1827, it was felt that the city would never reasonably be expected to grow north of Fourteenth Street. Within a year or so, even a Fourteenth Street boundary seemed too constricting. It did not take especial real estate shrewdness to see that Manhatten island, shaped like an elongated footprint and growing upward from the toe, had no way to expand except to the north. It was in this northern real estate that Uriah Levy decided to invest his Navy savings. He bought, in 1828, three rooming houses, two on Duane Street and one on Greenwich Street.
It was quickly clear that his unofficial discharge from Navy duty had put him in the right place at the right time. Within a few months, he was able to sell one of his Duane Street houses for nearly twice what he had paid for it. He bought more real estate, sold it, and bought more, parlaying each deal into something bigger than the last. Such was the booming state of Manhattan real estate that, within just four years, Uriah Levy was a rich man. He began to cut a considerable figure in New York's fledgling society -- which had never been the "set thing" it had been in Philadelphia -- and was able to afford to turn his affairs over to a staff of assistants and to take off for Europe, where he acquired, among other things, a Savile Row tailor and "a broadcloth frock coat with velvet collar; white satin stock shaped with whalebone; pantaloons of wool and silk jersey; two linen suits; white pleated shirts with gold buttons; light colored fawn gloves, a walking stick with ivory knob," according to his tailor's bill.
Rich almost overnight, still a bachelor -- and, it began to seem, a confirmed one -- Uriah was now able to indulge himself in personal whims and fancies, and, after his rejection from the Navy, this must have given him a certain amount of personal satisfaction. One of his enthusiasms was Thomas Jefferson, whom he regarded as "one of the greatest men in history. . . . He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life." In the summer of 1833,he conceived the idea of personally commissioning a statue of Jefferson and presenting it to the United States government. It was a totally new concept. Individuals had never before given statues of American heroes to the public. Perhaps Uriah felt that by celebrating Jefferson -- the champion of tolerance -- in this public way he could get back at the United States Navy for its snubs. In any case, in Paris Uriah gave the assignment to Pierre Jean David d'Angers, considered one of the greatest sculptors of his day, who used a Sully portrait of Jefferson, which Uriah borrowed from General Lafayette, as a likeness. It took d'Angers nearly a year to complete the sculpture, a massive bronze which depicts Jefferson standing astride two books, a quill pen poised in his right hand and, in his left, a scroll on which the Declaration of Independence is inscribed in its entirety. Uriah arranged for the statue's shipment to Washington, and wrote a formal letter of presentation to Congress.
In its customary fashion, Congress did a certain amount of hemming and hawing over the unusual gift, and there was a good deal of debate over whether it should be accepted or not. What sort of "precedent" would be set by accepting a gift like this? Congress wondered. And from an expected quarter -- the Navy Department -- came disgruntled noises to the effect that it was "presumptuous" for a "mere lieutenant" to present a statue of a great President. Once more, Uriah was being called pushy and overassertive. But at last, when Representative Amos Lane of Indiana said bluntly that he saw no reason why the statue should be turned down simply ''because it had been presented by a lieutenant instead of a commander," the Congress seemed to recognize the silliness of its behavior, and the Jefferson statue was accepted by a substantial majority. It was placed in the Capitol Rotunda. Several years later, it was moved to the north front lawn of the White House, where it stood for thirty years. Then it was returned to the Capitol, where it presently stands, to the right of Washington's statue, the only statue in the Rotunda ever donated by a private citizen. [ i]
Uriah Levy may, in a way, have begun to identify himself with his hero at this point in his life. Like Jefferson, Uriah possessed a certain genius and had experienced command. But now the great moments of his life must have seemed past. Like Uriah, Jefferson had been rich, but, Uriah may have remembered, he died penniless and heavily in debt. Uriah's thoughts turned next to Monticello, the extraordinary manor house Jefferson had designed and built for himself on a mountaintop near Charlottesville, Virginia.
When Jefferson died, Monticello went to his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, along with 409 acres, all that remained of what had been a 10,000-acre estate. By 1828, she could no longer afford to run the great house, and she advertised it for sale at $71,000.But Monticello proved itself something of a white elephant. In design, it was revolutionary for its day, built like a temple and topped with a huge octagonal tower and dome. Guests had complained that for all the aesthetic pleasure the place provided, it was not really comfortable. Inside, it contained innovative oddities. There were no bedrooms in the conventional sense. Sleepers used platforms in curtained-off cubicles. In 1830, Mrs. Randolph's asking price had dropped to $11,000.A year later, she announced she would accept $7,000. At that price, Monticello was bought by a Charlottesvilleman named James Barclay, an eccentric who cared nothing about Thomas Jefferson's house; the house did not figure in his plans at all. Barclay had a grandiose scheme to plant the mountaintop with mulberry trees and grow silkworms, in order to comer the world's silk market. By the time Uriah Levy made what he described as a "pilgrimage" to Monticello in 1836, the silkworm program had been abandoned. The house, left empty, had been attacked by vandals and the weather. Uriah rode on horseback up a rutted roadway that had once been a gracious drive and found the house almost in a state of ruin. He bought the house and land for $2,700, from a grateful Barclay.
Because he did indeed get Monticello at a bargain price, and because he was regarded somewhat coolly by his new neighbors -- who resented him more for being a Yankee than a Jew -- rumors began, in Charlottesville, about Uriah's obtaining Monticello through some sort of chicanery, and these stories persisted and have been perpetuated in history texts. In one tale, Uriah, having learned that a wealthy Bostonian had decided to buy Monticello for a considerably higher figure, hurried to Charlottesville and put in his low bid before the Bostonian's bid arrived by mail. Another story, even more unlikely, is that Uriah -- who never drank -- engaged a prospective buyer (from Philadelphia) in "a drinking bout," and then bought Monticello while the Philadelphian was recovering from a hangover. None of these stories is remotely true, and the purchase was carried out in a perfectly straightforward and orderly manner. Uriah immediately began a long and costly program of renovation and restoration, paying particular attention to the cherry and walnut parquet Hoors, the room that Jefferson had used for his study, the area he had used as a sleeping room, and the place where President Madison had slept. He tried to recover, wherever he could, Monticello's original furnishings, most of which had been sold and scattered about the country, and he hired gardeners to restore the grounds in accordance with the elaborate plans drawn up by Jefferson. In 1837, Uriah bought goo adjoining acres to protect the property, and a few months later he added 1,542 acres more. In the middle of this happy -- if at times lonely -- activity, a surprising thing happened. Suddenly, in a commission signed by President Andrew Jackson, Uriah learned that he had been promoted -- after twenty years as a lieutenant -- to the rank of commander. All at once things were looking up again.
Though Uriah certainly didn't need the Navy pay, he immediately applied for sea duty and -- again -- was delighted and surprised to receive orders assigning him to proceed "with as little delay as possible" to Pensacola, Florida, where he was to report to the war sloop Vandalia as its commanding officer. When he arrived in Pensacola, however, and went aboard the Vandalia, he must have wondered whether his old enemies in the Navy Establishment weren't after him again and giving him this assignment as a cruel joke. The Vandalia was barely afloat. Her hull was rotting, her decks were collapsing, and her guns and metalwork were thick with rust. Her rats had not yet left her, though, and were in evidence everywhere. The Vandalia's crew was, if anything, in even sorrier shape. It seemed to be composed of the ragtag and bobtail of the Navydrunkards, thieves, and misfits of every variety. The incorrigibles of every command seemed to have filtered, at last, down to the Vandalia. When Uriah came aboard, only one junior officer bothered to salute him. A number of the crew were missing and, after a tour of Pensacola taverns had rounded up most of them -- protesting that they saw no reason why they should not be permitted to drink during duty hours -- many were in such an alcoholic state that they had to be lashed into hammocks on the deck. But Uriah was unfazed. With his customary self-assurance, he wrote to his mother that: "1 am certainly one of the most capable of putting the corvette in seaworthy condition." On September 7, 1838, he set about refurbishing his ship. By February the following year she was ready to sail.
As the Vandalia moved out of the harbor into the Gulf of Mexico, there was a certain amount of comment on shore as a decorative detail of Uriah was noticed. He had whimsically ordered the Vandalia's guns painted a bright blue. It was his way of giving the ship his personal stamp. It was also very un-Navy. It was, again, his insistence on being his own man, stating his own terms.
The Vandalia's mission was to call on various Mexican ports along the Gulf Coast and to offer support -- moral or, if needed, physical -- to American consuls who were the butts of waves of anti-American feeling during a period of revolutionary upheaval. In one port after another, the appearance of the now snappy Vandalia with her sparkling bright blue guns was enough to quell Mexican tempers and reassure United States consulates. And Uriah, in full-dress uniform, clearly relished being rowed ashore to be escorted to consular dinner parties, where he inevitably was first to raise a toast "To the flag!"
On board his ship, too, he was held in a curious kind of awe. The first day out he announced that he was making a few innovations in regard to disciplinary measures. There would, for example, be no floggings carried out on his ship while he was in command of it. To his junior officers, this was an astounding announcement. How could discipline possibly be carried out, they wanted to know, without the threat of the cat, particularly with a crew that contained the dregs of the naval service? One officer, Lieutenant Hooe, asked Uriah whether he had lost his reason. Flogging was a Navy tradition. To promise that there would be no flogging was an open invitation to mutiny. But Uriah was firm.
On the third night out, one of the most regular offenders in the crew, who had smuggled whiskey aboard, fell over the railing in a drunken stupor and was lost, which left the Vandalia in slightly better shape. But the men who remained were better behaved only in a matter of degree. Drunkenness and petty thievery were diseases endemic to the Navy, and Uriah devised unique punishments for these offenses. A man found guilty of stealing would have hung from his neck a wooden sign painted with the word THIEF. A sailor found drunk on duty would wear a sign, cut in the shape of a bottle, marked A DRUNKARD'S PUNISHMENT. Lieutenant Hooe pronounced these measures not only futile but ridiculous. But after a few weeks at sea, an odd fact had to be admitted: they seemed to be working.
[b][size=120]Uriah's theory was that to make a man look absurd in the eyes of his companions had a much more lasting effect on his behavior than to torture him physically.[/b][/size] And he was an early endorser of the notion that a punishment ought to fit the crime. Sometimes this required him to exercise an unusual amount of imagination. One day, for example, a young sailor named John Thompson was brought to Uriah and accused of mocking -- by imitating his voice -- an officer. Uriah considered the charge, and then, to a mystified crew member, ordered that a few handfuls of seagulls' feathers be collected. When the feathers arrived, Uriah ordered Thompson to drop his trousers. A small dab of tar was applied to each buttock, and the feathers were then affixed to the tar. The young man was told to stand on deck in this condition for five minutes, to the great amusement of the crew. "If you are going to act like a parrot, you should look like one," Uriah said.
When he returned to Pensacola, Uriah fully expected to be sent out on another assignment with the Vandalia. But, without warning, he was ordered relieved of his command and to "await orders." Another long period in professional limbo began. He wrote to Washington asking for assignments, but the Navy remained mute. At last, discouraged, he returned to Monticello and the real estate business.
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's 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.
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 1 am fortunate to enjoy?'"
The poet replied -- according to Virginia -- as follows:
[quote]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?[/quote]
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 beaute 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 Beet 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.
Needless to say, Virginia was not happy with this state of affairs, nor were members of Uriah's family, who had looked forward to splitting up the vast and valuable acreage at Monticello, and who might have been willing to spend less on a monument to the deceased. After Uriah died, his will was contested and his estate went into litigation for several years. Finally the will was broken, and Monticello went to one of Uriah's nephews -- appropriately named Jefferson Levy -- who, with his family, maintained the big place until 1923, when a Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased it from him for half a million dollars, a respectable gain on the $2,700 Uriah Levy had paid for it. Virginia Levy remarried rather soon after her husband's death, thus disqualifying herself from much more than the share of the estate she already had received. She survived Uriah by an astonishing sixty-three years, and died in 1925. So it was that the widow of an officer of the War of 1812 lived well into the flapper era. She did not, however, live to see the launching of the destroyer U.S.S. Levy during World War II. At the height of the war, the Levy was described by the New York Herald Tribune as one of "the swift and deadly sub-killers." It was an appropriate monument to Uriah -- more appropriate than the life-size statue, which never came to be.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
i. A copy of the Jefferson statue stands in the council chamber of City Hall in New York City.
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