By Michael Goodwin
The New York Post
It’s far worse than I
thought. In addition to the many links between the family that owns The New
York Times and the Civil War Confederacy, new evidence shows that members of
the extended family were slaveholders.
Last Sunday, I recounted
that Bertha Levy Ochs, the mother of Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs, supported
the South and slavery. She was caught smuggling medicine to Confederates in a
baby carriage and her brother Oscar joined the rebel army.
I have since learned that, according to a family history, Oscar
Levy fought alongside two Mississippi cousins, meaning at least three members
of Bertha’s family fought for secession.
Adolph Ochs’ own “Southern sympathies” were reflected in the
content of the Chattanooga Times, the first newspaper he owned, and then The
New York Times. The latter published an editorial in 1900 saying the Democratic
Party, which Ochs supported, “may justly insist that the evils of negro
suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.”
Six years later, the
Times published a glowing profile of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on
the 100th anniversary of his birth, calling him “the great Southern leader.”
Ochs reportedly made contributions to rebel memorials, including
$1,000 to the enormous Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia that celebrates
Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He made the donation in 1924 so his
mother, who died 16 years earlier, could be on the founders’ roll, adding in a
letter that “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”
In the years before his death in 1931, Ochs’ brother George was
simultaneously an officer of The New York Times Company and a leader of the New
York Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
All that would be bad
enough given that the same family still owns the Times and allows it to become
a leader in the movement to demonize America’s founding and rewrite history to
put slavery at its core. As part of that revisionism, George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are suddenly beyond redemption, their great deeds
canceled by their flaws.
But shouldn’t such breathtaking self-righteousness include the
responsibility to lead by example? Shouldn’t the Times first clean out the
Confederates in its own closet?
That was the question last week. It is now more urgent because
of the new information.
A week ago, I was “aware
of no evidence or claims that any members of Bertha’s family owned slaves or
participated in the slave trade.”
That statement is no longer accurate. I have found compelling
evidence that the uncle Bertha Levy Ochs lived with for several years in
Natchez, Miss., before the Civil War owned at least five slaves.
He was her father’s
brother and his name was John Mayer because he dropped the surname Levy,
according to a family tree compiled by the Ochs-Sulzberger clan some 70 years
ago.
Mayer was a store owner and prominent leader of the small Jewish
community in Natchez and, during the war, organized a home-guard unit,
according to family letters and historians.
Neither the 1860 census nor its separate “slave schedule” lists
the names of Mayer’s slaves. They are identified as two males, ages 70 and 26,
and three females, ages 65, 45 and 23.
That makes it likely that Mayer had slaves when niece Bertha
lived with him for several years before she married Julius Ochs in 1853. Mayer
and his wife had 14 children and were affluent enough that it would have been
unusual if they didn’t own slaves, according to Robert Rosen, author of “The
Jewish Confederates.”
Bertha, who came from
Germany as a teenager, might have been horrified by the experience of
witnessing and being served by human chattel. Instead, she fully embraced the
barbaric practice and became devoted to the “peculiar institution.” She was a
charter member of a Daughters of the Confederacy chapter and requested that a
Confederate flag be draped across her coffin, which it was.
Separately, there is also compelling evidence that the brother
of a Revolutionary War-era ancestor of the Sulzberger branch of the family was
involved in the slave trade.
His name was Abraham
Mendes Seixas, and he was born in New York City in 1750. He was an officer in
the Continental Army during the war, then stayed in South Carolina, where
accounts describe him as a slave merchant and/or auctioneer.
“The Final Victims,” a 2004
book about the slave trade by James McMillin, reprints a poem published in a
Charleston newspaper in 1784 advertising an upcoming sale.
It reads in part:
“Abraham Seixas . . . He has for sale, Some Negroes, male
“Will suit full well grooms,
“He has likewise Some of their wives
“Can make clean, dirty rooms.
“For planting, too, He has a few
“To sell, all for cash, . . . or bring them to the lash.”
A few lines later, Seixas adds, “The young ones, true, if that
will do.”
The discovery of these
lurid histories gives me no pleasure. The Ochs-Sulzberger family is a great
American family that has served our nation in war and peace since its founding.
Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold standard of
journalism and the paper under his heirs often took great risks to defend the
First Amendment.
I will forever be grateful to the lessons I learned during my 16
years there. But it was a different paper then, one where standards of fairness
were enforced and reporters’ biases were left on the cutting-room floor.
Now the standards are on the cutting-room floor, with every
story dominated by reporters’ opinions. The result is a daily train wreck that
bears little resemblance to the traditions of what used to be a great
newspaper, trusted because it was impartial.
Even worse, the Times has moved beyond overt
partisanship to declare itself the decider of all things relating to race. Its 1619 Project insists that slavery was the key to the nation’s
founding, and that the war for independence was primarily about perpetuating
white supremacy.
This narrative is deeply
misguided, according to a long list of top historians. Yet the paper is not
deterred, and has ramped up its demonization of any who disagree with that or
its reckless support for the Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter agenda.
Handcuff the cops, tear down the statues, rewrite the textbooks,
make America the world’s bad guy — that’s what today’s Times is selling.
Anyone with such an activist agenda better be purer than
Caesar’s wife. The Times clearly fails that test and owes its staff,
stockholders and readers a full account of the slave holders and Confederates
in its past.
My hope is that after taking a dose of their own medicine, the
owner and editors will focus their efforts where they belong: on making The New
York Times a great newspaper again.
Link at maggiesfarm.
