Mordecai, Captain Alfred. Letter Signed written to Captain Edward Harding.

(AMERICAN-JUDAICA).

18th October

Washington, DC

1839

Written from the Ordnance Office of the War Department, concerns the discharge of a laborer, one George Davis.

Alfred Mordecai (1804-87), was the son of Jacob Mordecai, a pioneer in women’s education in America, and a Jewish Bible scholar. Raised in Warrenton, North Carolina, where he was educated as the only boy at his father’s boarding school, Alfred enrolled in the United Sates Military Academy at West Point when he was 15 years old. He subsequently graduated first in his 1823 West Point class at the age of 19. His education and military career was very successful, first being appointed assistant to the Army Chief of Engineers, and then assistant to the Secretary of War and to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington, DC. Mordecai served in the Mexican War of 1846-48 and the following decade led the military commission to Europe to report on weaponry used in the Crimea War which resulted in a most detailed, authoritative report. Indeed Mordecai became the Army's leading authority in developing all new weapons, ammunition and ordnance equipment for the Army. When the Civil War broke out, Mordecai, a Southerner, declined an offer to join the Confederacy, yet he also did not wish to be part of the fight against it, as his siblings and their families resided in the South and supported the Confederacy. As a solution he sought a commission in California, but it was denied. As a result Mordecai resigned from the army, and lived out the remainder of his years in Philadelphia.