Jewish Montanans: Leopold Marks

life and death dates unknown

Montana Territory was a complex cultural landscape populated by diverse peoples with diverse stories. But perhaps among the more surprising of these stories are those of Montana Territory Jews who had fought for the South during the Civil War. According to Jonathan Sarna, the Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History, of one million Confederate soldiers, only 2,000 were Jewish. In The Jewish Confederates, Robert N. Rosen acknowledges that “[contemporary] Jewish Americans are understandably ill at ease [with the fact there were Jewish Confederates].” He also theorizes that Southern Jews joined the Confederate Army in part because they wanted to fight as equals side-by-side with their White gentile neighbors. 

One of these Confederate veterans was Leopold Marks who emigrated as a 21-year-old from Saxony to Cincinnati then on to rural Pike County, Mississippi, where he was a merchant, a husband, and father to two young sons. His wife’s sister, Adele, and her husband, merchant Henry Jacobs, lived nearby. 

Although the historical record does not indicate that Leopold was a slaveholder, fourteen months after the Civil War began Leopold enlisted as a private in Captain A.O. Cox’s Company, 2^nd Regiment Mississippi State Troops, which subsequently was known as Company B of the  2^nd (Quinn’s) Regiment Mississippi State Troops. (This regiment was not mustered into the CSA but were beholden to Confederate officers’ orders.) Regimental records note that Leopold went AWOL between December 1862 and February 1863, possibly prompted by the birth of daughter Alice during this period at the Marks’ home in unincorporated Holmesville, MS. 

Following the war, the Marks family briefly relocated to Illinois where a third son was born. On the Fourth of July 1869 they arrived in Montana Territory’s third largest city, Diamond City, in Confederate Gulch, likely joining Adele and Henry Jacobs. Named in 1864 for the CSA sympathizers and ex-Confederate soldiers who lived there, Confederate Gulch yielded approximately $19-$30 million in gold late 1860s gold valuations. 

Like many Jews relocating to mining camps, Leopold worked as a merchant. The decline of Confederate Gulch’s fortunes by 1870 or so didn’t seem to have impacted the family’s resolve to continue living there as Marks was appointed Diamond City’s postmaster, elected as a Democrat to the Meagher County Board of Commissioners in 1873 and, in 1876, voted in as treasurer of the Masonic Lodge in Diamond City. 

By the 1880 US Census, Leopold and family had moved to Helena. There he continued his deep associations with the Masons and Odd Fellows and served as the president of Temple Emanu-El and the Hebrew Benevolent Association. He also continued to value camaraderie with fellow CSA veterans long after the war had ended. In January 1902, he joined with twelve other Helenans to organize a Confederate veterans’ organization which, two months later, was formalized as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp of the United Confederate Veterans. 

The newspaper article detailing its formation included an invitation to its first campfire to Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) members to be held on Confederate Memorial Day that May: “Here the men who wore the blue & the men [who] wore the gray will meet & exchange reminiscences of the days long ago, with a handclasp that shows how deeply buried are the differences that existed then.” 

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