Soldiers in camp visiting the sutler’s store (illustration credit ill.8)
Finally, and most significantly, there is evidence that at least one commander refused to carry out Grant’s order, believing it to be illegal. Isaac Mayer Wise, relying on information from Jews in the field, reported that General Jeremiah Cutler Sullivan “refused to execute Grant’s order,” on the grounds that “he thought he was an officer of the army and not of a church.” Sullivan had himself worked as a lawyer and came from a family eminent in the law. His father was a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court and his brother, Algernon Sydney Sullivan, later cofounded the white-shoe New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. This may have made the general especially sensitive to human rights abuses and those legal “niceties” too often overlooked (even in our day) on the field of battle. At the time of Grant’s order, General Sullivan commanded the District of Jackson, Tennessee, and was busy repelling Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s marauders. So his instinctive refusal to carry out Grant’s order is instructive. While additional evidence concerning those who refused to carry out Grant’s order is lacking, Wise reports that Sullivan’s principled resistance to the order was eventually broken: “He was forced after 4 days to enforce it.”27
Abraham Lincoln, about 1863 (illustration credit ill.9)
Cesar Kaskel, making his way as fast as he could to Washington, probably knew nothing about any of this. Arriving in the nation’s capital just as the Sabbath was concluding on January 3—travel on the Jewish day of rest would have been sanctioned even by the most scrupulous authorities, given the nature of his mission—he called at once upon Cincinnati congressman John Addison Gurley. Gurley was a Republican, and though defeated in his 1862 bid for reelection, he had Jewish friends and supporters in Cincinnati and enjoyed ready access to the White House. The ousted congressman, with Kaskel in tow, sought an immediate audience with the president, and according to the likely embellished account published many years later, Lincoln “sent word that he was ‘always glad to see his friends,’ and shortly made his appearance.” The president turned out to have no knowledge whatsoever of the order, for it had not reached Washington. According to an oft-quoted report, he resorted to biblical imagery in his interview with Kaskel, a reminder of how many nineteenth-century Americans linked Jews to ancient Israel, and America to the Promised Land:
LINCOLN: And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?
KASKEL: Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.
LINCOLN: And this protection they shall have at once.28
Even if (as seems likely) no such conversation actually took place, Lincoln did instantly command the general in chief of the army, Henry Halleck, to countermand General Orders No. 11. He reassured Kaskel that he had nothing further to worry about and could return home. Halleck, for his part, still had trouble believing in the authenticity of the original order, though Kaskel had shown him a copy. Consequently, in writing to Grant, he chose his words carefully. “If such an order has been issued,” his telegram of January 4 read, “it will be immediately revoked.” Two days later, several urgent telegrams went out from Grant’s headquarters in obedience to that demand: “By direction of the General in Chief of the Army at Washington,” they read, “the General Order from these Head Quarters expelling Jews from this Department is hereby revoked.”29
Kaskel, by then, was safely home in Paducah, having reached there before the revocation became known. When the post commander de-manded to know by whose orders he had returned, Kaskel, even years later, recalled his vigorous and definitive reply: “By order of the President of the United States.”30 Thanks to Lincoln, his faith in the country had been restored.
Unofficially, Halleck’s assistant adjutant general, John C. Kelton, explained to Grant the president’s central problem with General Orders No. 11: “It excluded a whole class, instead of certain obnoxious individuals.” Sixteen days later, Halleck followed this up with an official explanation, likely prepared for public consumption:
It may be proper to give you some explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your department. The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order; but, as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.31
News of the revocation soon spread. Newspapers across the country carried the story. Adolphus Solomons personally confirmed the news in a jubilant telegram to the Board of Delegates (“Feeling happy to have it in my power to attest the promptitude of our Government in countermanding the ill-liberal and un-lawful ‘order’ of Genl. Grant”). Delegations of Jews from Cincinnati and Louisville, on their way to Washington to lobby against General Orders No. 11, also heard the news, probably from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which carried it in its issue of January 6. Rather than turning around in Philadelphia and going home, though, they decided to continue onward and thank the president personally for what he had done.32
Owing once again to Congressman James A. Gurley’s influential ties to the White House, the Cincinnati and Louisville delegations quickly got in to see Lincoln—so quickly, indeed, that the delegates, including rabbis, lawyers, and one of Grant’s victims, Abraham Goldsmith of Paducah, had no time to change out of their traveling clothes. Isaac Mayer Wise, who participated in the meeting, wrote a widely circulated account of what transpired. Though he had not previously been one of the president’s acolytes, he was now deeply impressed. Lincoln, he reported, “knows of no distinction between Jew and Gentile.” In addition, he “feels no prejudice against any nationality,” and “by no means will allow that a citizen in any wise be wronged on account of his place of birth or religious confession.” “To condemn a class,” he quoted Lincoln as declaring, thereby turning Grant’s order practically on its head, “is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”33
* * *
a This is the “official text” of the order, issued at Grant’s field headquarters in Holly Springs and preserved in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 424. Another text, issued from Grant’s department headquarters at Oxford, Mississippi, is designated “General Orders No. 12” and carries slightly different wording. A third text, with other minor differences in wording, was published in the New York Herald, January 5, 1863. A fourth text, with still other variants, is found in a handwritten copy of a U.S. military telegraph sent to Brigadier General Mason Brayman and preserved in the Chicago History Museum (see illustration opposite). The discrepancy in numbering was caused by the discovery that a completely unrelated “General Orders No. 11” was issued by the Department of the Tennessee at La Grange, Tennessee, on November 26. While the text issued at Oxford therefore corrected the numbering and slightly improved the language of the order, “General Orders No. 11” remained the name by which the order was known. For the corrected text issued at Oxford, see The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 7, p. 50. Note that the official text properly uses the plural form (“General Orders”), since generals inevitably issued many orders. Unofficially, though, the singular form, “General Order No. 11,” was common.
2
“Jews as a Class”
Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky was shocked by the expulsion of his Jewish constituents from Paducah. A lawyer, former state governor, and staunch Democrat, he had remained in the Senate despite pressure to join the Confederacy; he would not abandon the Constitution. While he vigorously opposed the Civil War and defended slavery on constitutional grounds, he also became one of the Senate’s foremost defenders of civil liberties in wartime—for citizens, not for Black slaves. Early in the war, he delivered a celebrated address condemning the suspension of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln. “If you allow the Executive or any other offic
er to suspend this great writ,” he declared, “who is it who is secure in his person or his liberty?” Later, he condemned the arrests without trial that became all too commonplace in the Civil War. According to him, some five thousand of his Kentucky constituents had been so imprisoned, in violation of “the plainest provision of the Constitution.” He even rose to defend himself in 1862, when his Republican opponent from Kentucky sought to have him expelled from his seat in the Senate on grounds of disloyalty; he survived by a vote of 28 to 11. Insisting upon his duty to speak truth to power, and deaf to the argument that rights might need to be suspended in the short term so that the Union might survive for the long term, Powell declared it his obligation as a senator “to arraign the President and all others in authority who violate the Constitution of my country.”1a
Lazarus W. Powell (illustration credit ill.10)
So it was that Powell mounted the Senate’s rostrum on January 5, 1863, to propose a resolution condemning Ulysses S. Grant’s General Orders No. 11 as “illegal, tyrannical, cruel and unjust.”2 Two days later, a parallel resolution was introduced into the House of Representatives by Ohio congressman George H. Pendleton, a Peace Democrat of Virginia background, who likewise stressed “strict adherence” to the Constitution. The order having been revoked by the president, however, the critical question of civil liberties in wartime that both men sought to highlight rapidly dissolved into party politics: Democrats attacked Grant; Republicans defended him. Grant’s longtime friend and chief congressional promoter, the Radical Republican Elihu B. Washburne of Galena, Illinois, moved to table the House resolution. He condemned it for censuring “one of our best generals without a hearing.” Privately, in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, he described Grant’s order as “the wisest order yet made by a military command, and … necessary.” He begged him not to rescind the order, for “there are two sides to this question.” Lincoln, of course, had already acted, but thanks in good part to Washburne’s vigorous defense of Grant, the House resolution went nowhere.3
In the Senate, though, Lazarus Powell proved resolute. In a major speech on the Senate floor on January 9, he pushed forward his resolution as necessary, “particularly at this time, when the constitutional rights of the citizens are being stricken down and trodden under foot throughout the entire country by the executive and military power.” Declaring that there was “no excuse for General Grant … issuing the order,” he reiterated that only those “who violated the law” should have been expelled, not “Jews as a class.” He called upon his fellow senators to “administer to those in command of our armies the sternest rebuke for such flagrant outrages … to teach these military gentlemen that they are not thus to encroach on the civil and religious rights of the citizen, whether he be Jew or Gentile.”4
Powell did not ultimately prevail. The Senate tabled his resolution by a vote of 30 to 7. But even the opposition offered no defense of Grant’s order. “General Grant issued an order that I take it no man in the Senate approves,” declared Massachusetts Republican Henry Wilson (who, ironically, later served as Grant’s vice president). “The order excluding a whole class of men is utterly indefensible.” Still, the order had been revoked and Jewish rights “promptly vindicated.” So instead of rebuking one of the Union’s best and most able generals, he, along with the majority of other senators, voted to “let the matter drop.”5
The national press did not let the matter drop quite so quickly. Editorials continued to appear for at least another nine days. Generally speaking, the Republican newspapers supported Grant, whereas the Democratic ones opposed him. In cities with significant Jewish populations, like Cincinnati and New York, even newspapers sympathetic to Grant editorialized against his order. Elsewhere, a few newspapers sought to fuel the controversy. One groundlessly alleged that Jews were “arming themselves to resist further interference with their rights.” Another scurrilously characterized Jews as “notorious” for “illegitimate … modes of making money” and “scavengers … of commerce.” Yet the dominant message of editorial writers, even those sympathetic to Grant, was that Jews should be treated as individuals and not collectively as a “class.” “No offense can be committed by individuals, which will justify the singling out of a whole class,” the habitually Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer thundered; “there are black sheep in every flock.” The pro-Republican Cincinnati Commercial, meanwhile, called upon Grant to “word his orders so as not to do injustice and injury to ‘a class.’ ” The New York Times, not yet a Jewish-owned paper, devoted three long paragraphs to this same theme, reminding its readers, “All swindlers are not Jews. All Jews are not swindlers.” Years later this same formulation (substituting other words for “swindlers”) would be used to defend Jews against those who stereotyped them as “radicals,” “Communists,” and “financial crooks.” The newspaper concluded, as so many others had, that “men cannot be condemned and punished as a class, without gross violence to our free institutions.”6
While newspapers soon moved on to other subjects, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, General Orders No. 11 continued to pose deeply troubling questions to America’s Jews. Many of those targeted by Grant’s order, after all, were immigrants like Cesar Kaskel. They had left home and crossed the ocean in the cherished belief that America was different, for it treated Jews as individuals and placed no special restrictions upon them. Now they had cause to wonder: Was it really so different? Did America’s guarantee of “liberty and justice for all” exclude “Jews as a class”? America’s greatest hero, George Washington, had promised Jews that the “Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” How, then, to explain Grant’s order? True, Abraham Lincoln had promptly seen it revoked, but why had Grant escaped all punishment? And why had Congress “let the matter drop” rather than censuring him?
Isaac Leeser (illustration credit ill.11)
“We are still in bondage,” Isaac Leeser explained simply. The foremost advocate of Orthodox Judaism in America, and editor of America’s oldest Jewish publication, The Occident, Leeser, who lived in Philadelphia and maintained close ties to relatives in the Confederate capital of Richmond, published a rambling ten-thousand-word essay (“a greater length than ever we permitted ourself since our first appearance”) in response to Grant’s expulsion order. Entitled “On Persecution,” it made clear to American Jews that they were still in exile, subjected, like all other Diaspora Jews, to the “decrees of those in power, who are not restrained by any feeling of humanity and justice from inflicting injury on us.” America, Leeser lamented, had lost regard for the “rights of all” in the decade prior to Grant’s order. “Should the deterioration proceed in the same ratio for the next fifty years,” he despaired, “despotism, military and civil, may naturally succeed to overthrow a rotten State which has ceased to be free except in name.”7
Leeser viewed Grant’s order as evidence of “deep-seated prejudice,” a “latent sentiment inimical to Judaism” spreading throughout the country. He was not wrong. The tensions and frustrations of war, which frequently found their outlet in persecutions of Catholics and African Americans during the Civil War years, likewise anathematized Jews. One student of the subject, historian Bertram W. Korn, has concluded that anti-Jewish prejudice was actually “far greater in articulation, repetition, frequency, and in action too, than had ever before been directed against Jews in America.” These prejudices were heightened by the prominence of several Jews, notably President Jefferson Davis’s right-hand man and cabinet secretary, Judah P. Benjamin, in the ranks of the Confederacy. The Boston Transcript, for one, took early notice of the fact that Benjamin and other Jews were contributing to the Confederate cause. Generalizing from the few to the many, it denounced the entire “stiffnecked generation” of the “Children of Israel” for taking the “lead in attempting to destroy a Constitution which has been to them an Ark of refuge and safety.” 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. One of them, Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, memorably described him as an “Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Other Jews, too, were almost always identified as such when their names appeared in the public press. Like Black Americans, their distinctiveness defined them.8
Judah P. Benjamin (illustration credit ill.12)
Fault for many of the other evils inevitably associated with war—smuggling, speculating, price gouging, swindling, and producing “shoddy” merchandise for the military—was similarly laid upon the doorstep of “the Jews.” Indeed, “Jews” came to personify the foulest ills of wartime capitalism. They bore disproportionate blame for badly produced uniforms, poorly firing weapons, inedible foodstuffs, and other substandard merchandise that corrupt contractors supplied to the war effort and sutlers marketed to the troops. In the eyes of many Americans (including some in the military), all traders, smugglers, sutlers, and wartime profiteers were “sharp-nosed” Jews, whether they were actually Jewish or not.b The implication, echoing a perennial antisemitic canard, was that Jews preferred to benefit from war rather than fight in it. An open letter to a German Jew, published in the widely read Harper’s Weekly, made these charges explicit: “You have no native, no political, no religious sympathy with this country,” it declared. “You are here solely to make money, and your only wish is to make money as fast as possible.”9
When General Grant Expelled the Jews Page 3