So they’re talking about removing the seventh U.S. president from the twenty-dollar-bill because he was a slaveowner. What about taking the face of the eighteenth president off the fifty because he was an anti-Semite?
In late 1862 Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commanded the Department of the Tennessee, a long territorial band stretching from Cairo and Paducah southward down the Mississippi, embracing west Tennessee and all of Mississippi to the Gulf.
On December 17 he issued the following order: GENERAL ORDERS HDQRS. 13TH A.C. DEPT. OF THE TENN.,
NO. 11 Holly Springs, December 17, 1862.
The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.
No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits.
By order of Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant: JNO. A. RAWLINS,
Assistant Adjutant-General.
I bet you haven’t seen that lately in the Official Records—but yep, there it is in volume 17, pt. 2, 424.
This remarkable order is the subject of Jonathan D. Sarna’s book, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (2012). Professor Sarna, who teaches at Brandeis, explains that perhaps only a hundred people were forced from their homes. Nonetheless some received cruel treatment. A young Jewish trader and his fiancée were verbally abused, had their pockets picked, and were robbed of their horse and buggy. Union Brig. Gen. James Tuttle, commanding at Cairo, told the couple, “You are Jews, and…neither a benefit to the Union or Confederacy.”
Across the country, Jews voiced their outrage. A Paducah businessman, forced to leave his home, wrote directly to President Lincoln. A Cincinnati rabbi appealed to Secretary Stanton. Not lost upon many was the irony of Grant’s timing. On January 6, 1863, the Memphis Daily Bulletin published Grant’s order next to the text of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Negroes would be freed, but Jews had to go.
Carrying out General Orders
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No. 11 proved to be tricky. Did it apply to Jewish soldiers among Grant’s troops? What about Jewish sutlers serving at army posts? Because of officers’ uncertainty over these questions, Sarna explains, enforcement of Grant’s expulsion order was haphazard and spotty. At least one Union general refused to execute Grant’s order—until he was forced to after four days.
The Paducah businessman, Cesar Kashel, who had written Lincoln, followed up by securing a presidential interview on January 3. Lincoln did not know of Grant‘s order. After Kashel asked for presidential protection of Jews, Lincoln told him that “this protection they shall have at once.” The very next day Lincoln had General Halleck direct Grant to revoke his order. Grant complied on January 6. The day after that, a group of Jewish leaders personally thanked Lincoln. The president assured them that he knew “of no distinction between Jew and Gentile.”
Though he had revoked his edict within a month of its issue, Grant was haunted by General Orders No. 11 throughout his life. As he prepared to launch his campaign for president in the summer of 1868, many Jews were reportedly planning to vote against him. After Grant disavowed the measure, the leader of B‘nai Brith declared he would support Grant after all; the New York Times published his letter. Then, during his presidency Grant appointed more Jews to office than any previous U.S. president. He apologized for the order both publicly and privately, Needless to say, he mentioned nothing about General Orders No. 11 in his Memoirs, which he completed just before his death in 1885.
Historian Mark Neely points out that “Grant’s personal anti-Semitism” was reflective of “the deep anti-Semitism of the officer class” in the U.S. Army. He adds, though, that “anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army was a trait shared with other armies in the Western world in the second half of the nineteenth century,” as if that were some form of exculpation.
Professor Sarna points out that while wartime tensions in the North “anathematized Jews,” there was no similar anathematization in the Confederate South. Indeed, he points out that Judah P. Benjamin served throughout the war in Jefferson Davis’ cabinet. Not until Theodore Roosevelt would a Jew be appointed to a U.S. presidential cabinet. Robert Rosen adds more. “The Northern states were not as hospitable as the South to the Jews prior to the Civil War….Southern Jewry [were] more secure in their place in Southern society than their coreligionists in the North.”
It may be worth noting that the first two Jewish United States senators represented states in the antebellum slaveholding South: David Yulee of Florida and Judah Benjamin of Louisiana. Election to Congress, though, did not immunize a member from anti-Semitic slurs. Robert Rosen relates that in the early 1840s John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, the former U.S. president, referred to Yulee, who was representing Florida as a territorial delegate, as the “squeaking Jew delegate from Florida.”
Jonathan Sarna states that “no fewer than five distinguished public figures, including three U.S. senators (one of whom, Andrew Johnson, later became president of the United States), are likewise known to have pilloried Benjamin specifically as a Jew.”
Decades ago, Burton Hendrick related one such incident (admittedly apocryphal). On the floor of the Senate, Benjamin was reviled by a “colleague” as “that Jew from Louisiana.”
The floor was stunned; the gallery hushed. All watched as the perpetually slightly smiling Benjamin rose and raised his hand
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for a point of personal privilege. “Yes,” he declared,
...it is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their ten commandments from the immediate hand of Deity, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors of the distinguished gentleman who is opposed to me were herding swine in the forests of Scandinavia.
Additional sources consulted •
Stephen Davis’ most recent article for America’s Civil War Magazine is “’Give Us Hood!’” (September 2019 issue). It tells of the time when Maj. Gen. John B. Hood was placed under arrest after Second Manassas for not giving over ambulances that his troops had captured. Two weeks later, at South Mountain, Md., General Lee pleaded with Hood to apologize so he could be released from arrest and sent in to lead his troops. Hood repeatedly refused. The officer who wrote about the incident after the war, Maj. Richard York, recalled that Lee was so desperate that he actually began crying, when Hood relented (Our Living and Our Dead, June 1875).
Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York, 1988) Burton J. Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost Cause: Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet (Boston, 1939) Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty and Civil Liberties (New York, 1991) Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia SC,