"Their Children Rise and Call them Blessed:" One Sumter Family's Story of Love and the Civil War

At first glance, Perry and Rosalie Moses appear to be an ordinary Reconstruction era couple. Perry sports a thick yet well kept beard, pocket watch, and gentleman’s bowtie. Rosalie wears a long hand-made dress, a family brooch, and keeps her hair modestly tied back. Their story, however, is anything but ordinary. Perry and Rosalie, both from Jewish families, met as a result of the Civil War. At only sixteen years old, Perry received an honorable discharge from the Citadel Military College so that he could enlist in the Confederate Army. He served at The First Battle of Bull Run, The Siege of Vicksburg, and The Battle of Fort Blakeley in Mobile, Alabama. It was because of his stationing in Mobile that he would meet Rosalie, and it was a direct result of the ensuing bloody battle that he would become engaged to her.

Rosalie’s father Jack Levy, a prominent doctor from New Orleans, had taken refuge in Mobile with his family to escape the siege on their home city. As an old friend of Perry’s father, Andrew, Dr. Levy took it upon himself to look after Perry to the best of his ability when he discovered the boy was stationed in Mobile. The Levys often hosted Perry for dinner, where he would meet and become close with their daughter, Rosalie. During the Battle of Fort Blakeley, Confederate forces were defeated and Perry was wounded. He was taken to a field hospital where he was visited by Dr. Levy, who asked him to come his home, where he could receive better care. Perry agreed on the condition that he be allowed to marry Rosalie, a condition to which she readily agreed.

The two were married the very next day, remarkably the same day that General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Because news of the war’s end traveled so slowly, and fighting was still going on, the wedding ceremony had barely finished when an old servant hurried into the room exclaiming “Run Cap’n run; the Yankees are after you!” Perry was then forced to flee and it would be another three long months before he would see his new bride again. After being reunited, the couple lived in many different places as their fortunes fluctuated. First in Sumter, South Carolina, then in Lafayette, Louisiana, where five of their seven children were born. They then relocated to Beltbuckle, Tennessee, where their last two children were born. In all these places, Perry had affectionately named their homesteads ‘Rosedale’, after his beloved wife. After crop failure doomed their homesteading effort in Tennessee, the family returned once more to Sumter where Perry started a saw mill, a lumber business, and eventually a successful cotton oil mill.

Perry and Rosalie were married more than fifty years until Perry’s death in 1916. They were well-liked and respected members of both their large family and of the Sumter community. The couple were buried in Temple Sinai Jewish Cemetery and their gravestones were inscribed thusly: “Their children rise and call them blessed”. The epitaph is truly fitting as a tribute to the lives of two extraordinary people.

The main sources for this post were “The Story Of A Good Life” by Dorothy Phelps-Bultman, a descendant of the Moses’s, and “It Takes A Heap O’Living” By Ruth J. Edens. These photos and many more of the family can be seen at the Sumter County Museum.