When General Grant Expelled the Jews Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan D. Sarna

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A portion of this work was previously published in Reform Judaism (March 2012).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sarna, Jonathan D.

  When General Grant expelled the Jews/Jonathan D. Sarna.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN: 978-0-8052-4303-1

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Jews. 2. Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822–1885—Political and social views. 3. Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822–1885—Military leadership. 4. Jews—Southern States—History—19th century. 5. United States—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. I. Title.

  E468.9.S26 2012 973.708924—dc23 2011028572

  www.schocken.com

  Cover image: General Ulysses S. Grant, between 1860 and 1870, glass negative. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery

  Map by Mapping Specialists

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Jewish Encounters

  Other Books in This Series

  Forthcoming

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. General Orders No. 11

  2. “Jews as a Class”

  3. The Election of 1868

  4. “To Prove Impartiality Towards Israelites”

  5. “This Age of Enlightenment”

  6. “Then and Now”

  Chronology

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  The subject of this book once placed my academic career in jeopardy. In 1982, as a young faculty member at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, I was invited to deliver a talk before the institution’s board of overseers. This was an important “rite of passage” for a new faculty member, and I was determined to prove myself. Since my lecture more or less coincided with the 120th anniversary of Ulysses S. Grant’s General Orders No. 11 expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone, I decided to take that infamous 1862 order as my subject. “No single act or word, let alone edict of another president or federal official, in all of American history, compares with the Grant order for rank generalization, harshness, or physical consequences,” a standard reference source taught.1 Using fresh material concerning the order that had become available in volume 16 of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, I prepared my remarks.

  On the appointed day, my talk seemed to be going well until I broached the subject of smuggling. I stated that although Ulysses S. Grant had singled Jews out as smugglers, we now knew that smuggling was rampant throughout Grant’s territory; it was by no means a Jewish monopoly. “In fact,” I enthusiastically continued, “Grant’s own father, Jesse Grant, was engaged in a clandestine scheme to move Southern cotton northward. His partners were Jewish clothing manufacturers named Harman, Henry, and Simon Mack.”

  A few chairs in the room shifted uneasily at that point, and my mentor, the pioneering American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, buried his face in his hands. That, I knew, spelled trouble. Clearly, I had just said something terribly wrong. Not knowing what the problem was, and fearing for the security of my job, I hobbled to the end of my lecture and invited questions.

  An old man in the front row promptly raised his hand and rose to his feet. “My name is Mack,” he memorably began. I later learned that his full name was Edgar Johnson Mack Jr.; he was known to his friends as Buddy. Looking me straight in the eye, he announced: “That was my great-grandfather you were talking about.…And,” he continued after a long and dramatic pause, “it’s all true.”2

  The room relaxed. Dr. Marcus looked up. And everybody smiled. My academic career was safe.

  Since that memorable day, I have looked for an opportunity to expand upon the history of Ulysses S. Grant and the Jews. Although several academic articles and an important chapter in Bertram W. Korn’s American Jewry and the Civil War discuss aspects of General Orders No. 11, its history, aftermath, and implications remain all-too-little known, even among students of the Civil War and biographers of Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War sesquicentennial (which, naturally, also marks the 150th anniversary of Grant’s order) seems an appropriate moment to set the record straight.

  Americans today are surprised to learn that Ulysses S. Grant once expelled “Jews as a class” from his war zone. It seems incredible that Jews could be grouped together as part of a single “class” and ordered from their homes. So it is instructive to remember that, for all of America’s much-vaunted distinctiveness, there was a brief moment, amid the horrors of the Civil War, when Old World prejudices displayed themselves. Some Jews at the time wondered whether their new homeland was coming to resemble antisemitic Europe at its worst.

  In the end, only a few Jews were seriously affected by General Orders No. 11. A fortunate communications breakdown and Abraham Lincoln’s prompt decision to revoke the order greatly limited its impact. When Lincoln declared that he did not “like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners,” Jews felt reassured. In short order, attention returned to the battlefield, where, within a year, Grant’s victory at Vicksburg elevated him to a national hero.

  Like any trauma, however, General Orders No. 11 turned out to have lingering effects. In the short term, it brought to the surface deep-seated fears that, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jews might replace Blacks as the nation’s most despised minority. Some Jewish leaders explicitly feared that freedom for slaves would spell trouble for Jews.

  Later on, in 1868, when Grant ran for president, the memory of General Orders No. 11 sparked passionate debates between Jews who extolled Grant as a national hero and those who reviled him as a latter-day Haman, an enemy of the Jews. The issue thrust Jews, for the first time in American history, into the center of the political maelstrom. The excruciating question that Jewish Republicans faced—should they vote for a party they considered bad for the country just to avoid voting for a man who had been bad to the Jews?—prefigured a central conundrum of Jewish politics. Never before had a Jewish issue played so prominent a role in any presidential campaign.

  Still later, during the eight years of Grant’s presidency, memories of General Orders No. 11 surfaced repeatedly. Eager to prove that he was above prejudice, Grant appointed more Jews to public office than had any of his predecessors and, in the name of human rights, he extended unprecedented support to persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania. Time and again, partly as a result of his enlarged vision of what it meant to be an American and partly in order to live down General Orders No. 11, Grant consciously worked to assist Jews and secure them equality.

  Nevertheless, the memory of what his wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order” continued to haunt Grant up to his death in 1885. Especially when he was in the company of Jews, the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. He apologized for the order publicly and repented of it privately. He consciously excluded any mention of it from his acclaimed Memoirs. He gloried in the fact that, on his deathbed, Jews numbered among those who visited with him and prayed for his recovery.


  The story of General Orders No. 11 and its lingering impact fills in a missing and revealing “Jewish” chapter in the biography of Ulysses S. Grant. But it also does much more than that, for the order and its aftermath also shed new light on one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. During these years—America’s “Second Founding,” as one historian terms it—the definition of what America is and the determination of who “we the people” should include convulsed the country.3 Most of the debate naturally centered on the status of African Americans but, more than generally recognized, there was likewise substantial debate concerning the Jews. Though they formed far less than 1 percent of the population at that time, Jews were the most significant non-Christian immigrant group in the nation and their numbers had been increasing rapidly—from about 15,000 in 1840 to some 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War. General Orders No. 11 implied that these Jews formed a separate “class” of Americans, distinct from their neighbors, and subject, especially when suspicions of smuggling fell upon them, to collective forms of punishment, including expulsion. The National Reform Association, which was particularly active during the 1870s, went further, seeking to “declare the nation’s allegiance to Jesus Christ and its acceptance of the moral laws of the Christian religion, and so indicate that this is a Christian nation.”4 A “religious” amendment, proposed repeatedly during the Grant years, looked to write Christianity directly into the Constitution itself.

  Against this background, Ulysses S. Grant’s surprising embrace of Jews during his presidency takes on new significance. Through his appointments and policies, Grant rejected calls for a “Christian nation” and embraced Jews as insiders in America, part of “we the people.” During his administration, Jews achieved heightened status on the national scene. Judaism won recognition (at least from him) as a faith coequal to Protestantism and Catholicism. Anti-Jewish prejudice declined, and Jews looked forward optimistically to a liberal epoch characterized by sensitivity to human rights and interreligious cooperation. In the president’s mind, a direct parallel existed between the treatment of Blacks under Reconstruction and the treatment of Jews. He sought to create new opportunities for members of both minority groups.

  Reconstruction proved to be an “unfinished revolution” for African Americans, and so it was (albeit not nearly to the same extent) for Jews.5 In 1877, the very year that Grant left the White House, his friend, banker Joseph Seligman, was excluded from the Grand Union Hotel as an “Israelite.” Four years later, the great Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise complained that “we poor optimists are sadly disappointed and made false prophets.” 6 By 1897, Professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia University felt that “gradually, but surely, we are being forced back into a physical and moral ghetto … our social lines run as far apart from those of our neighbors as they did in the worst days of our European degradation.” 7 Across the United States, antisemitic restrictions and quotas led to a substantial decline in Jews’ social status. The “golden age” of the Grant years had, by then, become a distant memory.

  Readers today who grew up hearing squalid tales of Ulysses S. Grant’s drunkenness, incompetence, and antisemitism will be surprised to learn that Jews had once viewed him more positively. Jews who lived during Grant’s own lifetime, however, would have been unsurprised. They had watched Grant rehabilitate himself with the Jewish community and were familiar with his many Jewish friends and admirers. As a result, they participated wholeheartedly in the national mourning that followed his death in 1885, and later in the dedication of his tomb. They did so, in spite of General Orders No. 11, for they recognized, as Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise noted at the time, that Grant had “often repented” of his order and “that the wise also fail.”8

  In recent years, a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Ulysses S. Grant has taken place. “Though much of the public and even some historians haven’t yet heard the news,” historian Sean Wilentz observed in the New York Times, “the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves—not only as the military savior of the Union but also as one of the great presidents of his era, and possibly one of the greatest in all American history.”9 Tellingly, a letter to the editor dissented, recalling Grant’s anti-Jewish actions during the Civil War.10 This book, in a sense, is the answer to that letter writer. It places General Orders No. 11 within the larger context of Grant’s career.

  In the end, General Orders No. 11 greatly strengthened America’s Jewish community. The successful campaign to overturn the order made Jews more self-confident. The tempestuous 1868 election taught them much about politics, and about the power—real and perceived—of a well-organized minority group. The fact that Ulysses S. Grant selected, for the first time, a Jewish adviser, appointed a series of Jews to public office, and attended the dedication of a synagogue further enhanced Jews’ self-confidence. So did America’s successful interventions on behalf of persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania.

  It is always easy to exaggerate the political impact of a religious or ethnic minority, and Jews would have many occasions in the post-Grant years to learn the limits of their ability to win political appointments and effect public policy. Nevertheless, General Orders No. 11 marked a turning point in American Jewish history. Paradoxically, Ulysses S. Grant’s order expelling the Jews set the stage for their empowerment.

  1

  General Orders No. 11

  Cesar Kaskel’s faith in America was wavering. Born in the town of Rawitsch, then part of Prussia, he, like tens of thousands of other young Jews in the 1850s, had left home and endured a long, perilous voyage across the Atlantic in hopes of establishing himself in business in the United States. Opportunities in Prussia were circumscribed for Jews, owing to domestic unrest, a failing economy, and severe legal limitations on where they could live and what kinds of occupations they could pursue. America, Kaskel had heard, was different. Dispatches in the German-Jewish press and letters received from earlier immigrants reported that in America opportunity was unlimited and freedom guaranteed to people of all faiths—Jews included. That guarantee, Kaskel now feared, had been voided.

  Moving to Paducah, Kentucky, in 1858, Kaskel imagined he had found just the opportunity he had been looking for. The newly incorporated city, located on the Ohio River below the mouth of the Tennessee River and fifty miles up from the Mississippi, was booming. Its population grew exponentially, reaching almost five thousand residents by the Civil War. A timely investment by city fathers in the stock of the New Orleans and Ohio Railway brought Paducah excellent rail connections and a growing volume of trade. Kaskel and his business partner, merchant Solomon Greenbaum, looked to participate in this prodigious growth. They set themselves up in business.1

  Two years later, in 1860, a Kentucky native son, Abraham Lincoln, was elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Fewer than 1 per-cent of Kentucky voters supported him. Fearing that the new president and his party threatened slavery and the distinctive character of life in the South, seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded to form the Confederate States of America. When the Confederacy bombarded the coastal fortification of Fort Sumter at the entrance to Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, forcing it to surrender, war broke out. Once President Lincoln called for troops to quell the rebellion, four more states, including Virginia, joined the Confederacy, while four states on the border between the North and the South, including Kentucky, did not.

  Cesar Kaskel (illustration credit ill.1)

  The Civil War disrupted economic life in Paducah and changed Kaskel’s life for the worse. The North began restricting Southern trade with Paducah as early as June 12, 1861, seeking to place economic pressure on the Confederacy. On September 6, Ulysses S. Grant and his troops captured and occupied the city, further restricting its trade with the South. The state of Kentucky declared itself neutral in the war, but Grant believed that the majority of Padu
cah’s citizens “would have much preferred the presence of the other army.”2 Be that as it may, at least some of the city’s thirty-odd Jews publicly supported the Union’s cause. Cesar Kaskel was one of them; he served as vice president of the Paducah Union League Club. His younger brother, Julius, operated as a recruiter for the Union army.3

  The disruption of free trade in Paducah created bountiful opportunities for speculators and smugglers, who always find ways to profit from wartime shortages and imbalances between supply and demand. While merchants like Kaskel burnished their pro-Union credentials in hopes of obtaining precious trade permits, officials entrusted with governing trade in and out of the city found backhanded ways to line their own pockets; so did many soldiers. In short order, public corruption rose, mutual trust declined, and recriminations abounded. As is so often the case in such circumstances, suspicion fell particularly upon the Jews, long stereotyped in Christian culture as being financially unscrupulous. Jews became the focus for much of the hatred and mistrust that the war unleashed within the city. Even though few in number in Paducah, they played an outsized role in business and trade, and as immigrants they were easily marked by their European accents and foreign ways. Unionists and Confederates alike doubted their loyalties—partly because they doubted the loyalty of all Jews and partly because Jews nationwide were known to be on both sides of the struggle. Many therefore assumed, even in the absence of supporting evidence, that “secessionists and Jews” were engaged in “rascally conduct” in Paducah and that widespread smuggling was carried out “as usual chiefly by Jews.”4

  Occupation of Paducah by General Grant (illustration credit ill.2)

  Tense as conditions were in Paducah, nothing had prepared Cesar Kaskel for the events of December 28, 1862, and his agitated response to them was understandable. Pursuing his business, in his words, as a “peaceable, law abiding citizen,”5 he was suddenly summoned, on a Sunday, to report “immediately” to Paducah’s provost marshal, Captain L. J. Waddell. There he was handed the following order banishing him from the city: