Lincoln Appoints Jewish Officer, E.M. Joel, to Serve on General Blair’s Staff

Background

The Blairs have to an unusual degree the spirit of clan. Their family is a closed corporation. Frank is their hope and pride. They have a way of going with a rush for anything they undertake; especially have Montgomery and the Old Gentleman.

President Lincoln, speaking to John Hay and others, December 9, 1863

With friends like the Blairs of Missouri, Lincoln hardly needed enemies. The father, Francis Preston Blair, a newspaper editor, appointed himself Lincoln’s advisor; son Frank served fiercely in the War as a general, and congressman, and a general again; and son Montgomery was Postmaster General, until Lincoln let him go. All were irascible, intense, combative, and time-consuming. Here Lincoln tends to General Frank Blair, who had resigned his commission just long enough to make a blistering speech in Congress against Republican radicals and Salmon Chase’s presidential ambitions and now, reinstated as a general, is complaining about his staffing needs. 

When Gen. Frank Blair went from here, and ever since, there was and has been so much opposition to him, that I have been restrained from asking, as he frequent has asked me, to have his Staff filled up. He claims to have been substantially without a Staff through this whole years campaign. He now asks as follows…

One of the men Blair wants back with him is “E.M. Joel now A.Q. M. to be Corps Q.M. with rank of Lt. Col.” Ephraim M. Joel began was a non-commissioned officer and, with Lincoln’s approval here, rose to be a Lieutenant Colonel. Born in Scotland, Joel was that very rare thing: a Jewish staff officer. 

During the Battle of Vicksburg, Joel of St. Louis seized Confederate cannons. An excellent Quartermaster, he rose as high in the ranks as Lieutenant Colonel, and survived the war, a decorated officer. Mustered out, he returned to Saint Louis, Missouri, where he worked as a district assessor. When he died there in 1884, at the age of 54, he was recalled as a “man of almost universal acquaintance, shrewd and kindly” – and one whose loyalty to Frank Blair, in service and out, never diminished.

As for Lincoln, he liked and respected the Blairs well enough, be they ever so quarrelsome and malignant. Indeed, one way or another, in concert or no, the Blair clan played an important, if contentious, part of Lincoln’s presidency.