Copy of MARCH 30, 1921 - Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington

Coming Home: Part Two: The Boy from Richmond

Moses Ezekiel, Wartime Picture

Richmond in the 1840s and 1850s was loud and alive and complicated, a city that knew it was important and carried that knowledge the way a man carries a secret. There was money here. There was ambition. There was also something darker moving beneath it all, something no one talked about directly but everyone understood.

Moses noticed things. That was the first thing people remembered about him.

He noticed the way light fell across a face. The way a hand moved when someone was thinking. He drew on whatever was available. Scraps of paper. The margins of books. The backs of letters. His father Jacob noticed and said nothing, watching to see what the boy would do with it. His mother Catherine noticed and understood. The de Castro blood ran in him. The blood of people who had survived by paying attention, by seeing the world clearly and remembering what they saw.

He was not a large boy. He would never be a large man. In later years a classmate would describe him with affectionate irreverence as looking like a tin soldier broken in the middle and mended with sealing wax, with a head as large as a brownie's and legs that were very short. Moses apparently found this description as funny as anyone. He had that quality, the ability to laugh at himself without losing his footing.

Jacob and Catherine Ezekiel loved their children. All fourteen of them. But love and means are two different things, and the Ezekiel household had more of the first than the second. The house on Old Market Street was full of noise and faith and the particular intensity of a family that knew exactly who it was. It was also full of financial strain that no amount of faith could entirely quiet.

It was a world away at his grandparent's home. This was where Moses spent his formative years. Jacob Louis Abraham de Castro and Hannah Pepper de Castro lived in a different Richmond than the one Moses had been born into. Their household did not strain. It settled. The table was always set. The shelves were always stocked. The smell of a well-ordered house, beeswax and woodsmoke and something always simmering in the kitchen, was the smell of Moses's boyhood.

Jacob de Castro was a merchant of standing. His store was the kind of place where Richmond came to do business, where a man's word was his bond and the ledgers were kept with the precision of people who understood that commerce and integrity were the same thing. Moses was behind that counter by the time he was twelve. Bookkeeper. Observer. A boy with ink-stained fingers and eyes that never stopped moving.

He watched everything. The way a customer's face changed when he heard a price he didn't like. The way his grandfather's hands moved across the counter when he was closing a deal. The way the light came through the front window in the late afternoon and turned the dust motes into something worth painting.

He drew it all when no one was looking.

Four enslaved women moved through the world of Moses Ezekiel's childhood at his grandparent's home. They were the ones who woke the household before dawn and quieted it after dark. They fed him and tended him and shaped him in ways that no ledger recorded and no letter captured. Two of them he called Mammy. He knew their faces the way a child knows the faces of the people who are simply always there, before he had the language to understand what their presence cost them.

He never forgot them.

Moses had been named for his paternal grandfather, Moses A. Ezekiel. The name was not given lightly. In a family that understood the weight of history, a name was a thing you carried. A charge. A standard to meet.

He was still figuring out what meeting it would require when the war came and settled the question for him.

In September 1862, at the age of seventeen, Moses Jacob Ezekiel enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

He was the first Jewish cadet in the history of the institution.

VMI in 1862 was not a comfortable place for a boy who was different. The hazing was brutal and accepted as tradition. On his first night, an upperclassman came to his room to administer the customary physical abuse that every new cadet was expected to endure in silence.

Moses refused.

He stood his ground and told the upperclassman he would not submit to it. It was the kind of moment that could have broken a boy or defined him. For Moses it defined him. Word spread through the barracks. The boy from Richmond had refused. Some admired it. Some resented it. All of them remembered it.

He had to secure special permission from the Board of Governors to visit his family for Passover. He observed the Sabbath as best he could in an institution that did not observe it. He maintained his identity in a place that was designed to replace individual identity with collective identity. He managed to do both. He became a VMI man and remained Moses Ezekiel at the same time.

And somewhere in those barracks, between the drilling and the studying and the particular misery of a military education in wartime, the artist was still present. He sketched his classmates. He drew portraits of the officers. He made studies of the buildings, the mountains, the light on the Maury River in the early morning.

The war was closing in.

By the spring of 1864 the Confederate forces were stretched thin across Virginia. Ulysses Grant had crossed the Rapidan and was driving south. The Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy, was under threat. General John C. Breckinridge needed every man he could find.

On May 11, 1864, the order came to VMI.

The Corps of Cadets was to march north to join Breckinridge in the defense of the Valley. Two hundred forty-seven boys, the youngest fourteen years old, assembled on the parade ground. They were not soldiers in any conventional sense. They were students. They carried their textbooks in their haversacks alongside their ammunition. Some of them had never been in battle.

Moses Ezekiel was nineteen years old.

They marched eighty miles in four days through the mountains of western Virginia, through rain and mud and the particular uncertainty of men who do not yet know what they are walking toward. On the evening of May 14 they camped outside the small town of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley.

General Breckinridge rode among his troops that evening. When he came to the VMI cadets he reportedly turned to his staff and said something that no one who heard it ever forgot.

Put the boys in.

And then, almost to himself: God forgive me for the order...

To be continued.

 -By Mindy Esposito / March 25, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is an independent historian, writer, and Confederate heritage advocate based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has spent more than two decades in primary source research on nineteenth and twentieth century American history.

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COMING HOME: A Six-Part Series

Bibliography Part Two

Primary Sources

• 1860 United States Federal Census. De Castro household, Richmond, Virginia. Moses Ezekiel listed as resident.

• Moses J. Ezekiel Papers, Manuscript 0010. Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Virginia.

• Ezekiel, Moses Jacob. Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian. Edited by Joseph Gutmann and Stanley F. Chyet. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

Secondary Sources

• Nash, Peter Adam. Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor of the Gilded Age. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.

• Gibson, Keith. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917)." Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020.

• Jewish Virtual Library. "Moses Ezekiel."

• Grokipedia. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel."

• Sephardic Horizons. "Discovering Moses Ezekiel." Vol. 7, Issue 1-2.

• Institute of Southern Jewish Life. "Virginia Richmond Encyclopedia.".

COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY | The Boy from Richmond