From the Archive: A Letter from Rebecca Gratz During the Civil War

The Matriarch of the Gratz Family

Rebecca Gratz is primarily known for her remarkable philanthropic work and legacy, having founded several charitable organizations in Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia Orphan Society, the Jewish Foster Home, and the Hebrew Sunday School. However, the central role that her kin network played in her life is frequently overlooked. Rebecca’s world stretched far beyond Philadelphia, encompassing relatives across the North, the contested border states, the South, and even Canada—connections that expanded her influence over the decades.

In an era when the role of matriarch typically fell on older married women and mothers, Rebecca, though unmarried, held that role within her extended family, serving as its primary connector and moral figurehead. As the seventh of twelve children and with three of her sisters married between 1793 and 1806, Rebecca shouldered caring for her ailing father alongside her mother. When her mother died in 1808, she also helped raise her younger brothers, and in 1823, after her sister Rachel’s death, she became the primary maternal figure for her sister’s seven surviving children. Through her constant correspondence with relatives outside Philadelphia, she offered thoughtful guidance on domestic, familial, and educational matters, kept them informed on family news, and urged them to visit and write to one another. 

Over 800 of Rebecca’s letters, now collected on the Grayzel Digital Platform, reveal that her family fully recognized and embraced her as this figurehead. Sitting at the nexus of her family, she wielded a level of authority rare for an unmarried, childless woman in the nineteenth century. 

Historian Dianne Ashton notes that the Civil War led many Jewish and non-Jewish women to assume responsibility for preserving family ties across a divided nation. Rebecca, however, had been filling that role successfully for more than fifty years. Raised in the post-Revolutionary era, she devoted her life to the ideals of “Republican Motherhood,” instilling moral and patriotic ideals in the next generation, and, in her case, infusing those values with her Jewish faith. In her old age, however, she watched with distress as those foundations seemed to unravel under the strain of war and shifting political loyalties. Rebecca could only watch as the national conflict shook the very core of those closest to her heart—her family. 

At War with Each Other

On September 12, 1861, in the early days of the Civil War, the 80-year-old Rebecca Gratz wrote from Philadelphia to her Christian sister-in-law, Anna Maria (Boswell Shelby) Gratz, in Lexington, Kentucky. Anna was the second wife of Rebecca’s beloved youngest brother, Benjamin, a wealthy businessman. 

Rebecca’s letter and her anguish over the Civil War, particularly the possible enmity between Cary and Jo, the son and step-son of her brother, Benjamin—two young men she had helped raise, reflects not only her personal grief, but also the broader struggle of women—both Jewish and non-Jewish—to preserve familial unity in the midst of significant, national upheaval.

“I have long thought of you My Dear Ann and sympathized in the anxiety, which I know must be silently preying on your peace of mind,” Rebecca began. She was referring to Anna's son from her first marriage, Joseph “Jo” Shelby, who had been identified in the press as a member of the "Southern army." Although Benjamin was a prominent slaveholder and Kentucky was a divided border state, the Gratz family in Lexington primarily identified as Unionists, sharing the political views of their northern relatives. 

Knowing their shared beliefs, Rebecca expressed to Anna her sorrow over the “solemn changes” in their “once happy country.” She lamented the impact of the political divisions on the country’s population, writing, “one can hardly realize they are at home in the U.S. of America—we are at war with each other!!”  

For the Gratz family, being “at war with each other” was deeply personal. Just a month earlier, Benjamin’s son Cary, a Union army captain, was killed in battle. His death devastated the family, especially Benjamin, who had been more attached to Cary than his other three sons from his first marriage to Maria Gist. Adding to their grief, Anna feared that her own son, Jo, had fought “in the fearful battle, so fatal” to his stepbrother on the opposite side as a Confederate rebel. 

As young men, Jo and Cary had been close. They attended the same boarding school in Pennsylvania, and while away from home, they often spent holidays and school breaks with Rebecca and her other brothers in Philadelphia. Those experiences strengthened the family’s interregional and intergenerational ties.

Although Rebecca condemned Jo’s role in the Confederate army, she sympathized with Anna's plight and that of so many other mothers whose sons were now fighting against them. She mourned that their “arms are perhaps now raised against the hearts at which they have fed—and the bosoms of those, who have cherished them! [This] I cannot but lament as among the horrors of war.”   

Learn More 

To explore Rebecca’s full letter and other correspondence with family and friends from 1799 to 1869, visit Gratz College’s newly launched Grayzel Digital Platform, home to the Rebecca Gratz Correspondence. The site, which is fully searchable and features the original letters and their transcriptions, is the largest and most accessible repository dedicated to Rebecca Gratz. It aggregates letters from the collections of the University of North Carolina, the American Philosophical Society, Transylvania University, the Rosenbach Museum, and the American Jewish Historical Society in one searchable collection. 

For further reading on Rebecca and other Jewish women during the Civil War, see Dianne Ashton’s essay Shifting Veils: Religion, Politics, and Womanhood in the Civil War Writings of American Jewish Women in the 2010 Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn. 

 For more on Rebecca’s life and her devotion to Judaism and philanthropy, see Ashton’s 1997 Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America and the bibliography on the Grayzel Digital Platform.