This image of the Jew carried over into the Union army, where, especially in the wake of Grant’s order, some Jews found themselves persecuted and taunted. One of the highest-ranking Jews serving under Grant, Philip Trounstine, a captain in the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, resigned from the army on account of the abuse that he was suffering. “Not alone my feelings, but the sense of Religious duty I owe to the religion of my Forefathers, were both deeply hurt and wounded in consequence of the late order of General Grant,” he wrote his commanding officer, fully two months after that order had been revoked. “I can no longer bear the taunts and malice, of those to whom my religious opinions are known, brought on by the effect that, that order has instilled into their minds.”10
The extent to which “Jews”—a tiny minority of about one half of one percent of the American population at that time—came to represent malevolent forces harming the war effort as a whole is evident from the more than one hundred references to Jews found in the subsequently published “Official Records” of the Union and Confederate armies, issued by the Government Printing Office. In the months prior to Grant’s order, one finds Brigadier General Leonard F. Ross using “Jew owners” as a synonym for “cotton speculators.” Major General William Tecumseh Sherman warned officials in Washington (with a copy to General Grant) that as a result of cotton trading in areas recaptured from the Confederacy, “the country will swarm with dishonest Jews who will smuggle powder, pistols, percussion-caps, &c.” Major General William S. Rosecrans (himself often misidentified as a Jew) reported hearing that “large amounts of goods, shipped by express from Louisville by Jews … have been sent South.” And Major General Benjamin F. Butler (who helped his brother make a fortune in the illicit cotton trade) entreated Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to prevent “the Jews from gathering up all the gold in the country to exchange it with the Confederates for cotton.”11 While some Jews, as we shall see, certainly did engage in smuggling and speculating, these were actually common wartime practices profitably engaged in by Jews and non-Jews alike (including politicians and military men). The problem, which Jewish leaders like Isaac Leeser well understood, was that in the eyes of far too many people, these common practices had become perniciously identified with Jews alone.
General William Tecumseh Sherman (illustration credit ill.13)
This, however, was not the only cause for alarm in Jewish circles in the wake of Grant’s order. The very term “Jews as a class” took Jews aback. Generally, the word “class” simply referred to individuals possessing common attributes, and used in that sense it was unobjectionable. When George Washington, in 1790, wrote to the Jews of Newport that he would always remember the cordial welcome he had received there “from all classes of citizens,” nobody even noticed. When, a decade after the Civil War, North Carolina congressman Alfred Moore Waddell praised Jews “as a class” for being “orderly, industrious and intelligent members of society,” nobody seems to have worried about that either. Indeed, references to a wide range of groups “as a class” abounded throughout the Civil War era. The “Official Records” of the war contain references to “negroes as a class,” “Germans as a class,” “Irish as a class,” and “merchants as a class.”12
Nevertheless, when Ulysses S. Grant accused “Jews as a class” of violating trade regulations and military orders, and ordered them expelled, that went beyond normative generalizations and group stereotypes. By indicting and punishing all Jews for the sins of just a few, Grant seemed to be hearkening back to an older, corporate view of the Jew common in the Middle Ages and lasting in many places well into modern times. “Jews as a class” meant that Jews were not treated as individuals, responsible for their own actions. Instead, Grant’s order treated them as part of a Jewish collectivity, akin to the Jewish “nation” that the Dutch West India Company permitted to settle in New Amsterdam back in 1654, or to the Jews in the days of Jesus portrayed in Christian sermons and Sunday-school texts.
During the Civil War, to be sure, collective punishments were common; they were by no means confined to Jews alone. In Memphis, in 1862, General Sherman ordered that each time unarmed boats in the harbor were fired upon, “ten families must be expelled from Memphis.” Their names were determined by lot, and they were given three days to move at least twenty-five miles from the city. A far more shocking example took place on August 25, 1863, when Brigadier General Thomas Ewing responded to a horrific Confederate massacre in Lawrence, Kansas, led by guerrilla leader William Clarke Quantrill, by expelling from their homes (most of which were subsequently looted and burned) “all persons” living in four rural Missouri counties. In so doing, he punished as many as twenty thousand people, including women and children, just because some of them had fed and sheltered the massacre’s perpetrators. As fate would have it, that, too, was a “General Orders No. 11”—issued, of course, by Ewing—and Lincoln, in that terrible case, did not revoke it.13
The military in the Civil War (and long afterward) trained its officers to take quick and decisive measures based upon military considerations alone. Grant, in 1875, explained this to a visiting young rabbi looking to retrospectively understand his order expelling the Jews, but it was true of the Civil War as a whole: “Nice distinctions were disregarded. We had no time to handle things with kid gloves.”14 That remains an unfortunate characteristic of warfare. In World War II, Japanese Americans experienced even harsher forms of collective treatment, including banishment and internment, justified on the basis of individual malefactions and military necessity. Then, too, an entire group was deemed responsible for the misdeeds of individual members, and the misdeeds of individual members caused an entire group to suffer.
For Jews, meanwhile, Grant’s order that they be “required to leave” the territory under his command, and that “any one returning … be arrested and held in confinement,” inevitably called to mind memories, seared into the Jewish collective conscience, of expulsions from other lands where Jews had likewise considered themselves “at home”—until “required to leave.” There was the great expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, and the expulsions from France in 1306 and 1394. Most of the major cities of Central Europe expelled the Jews during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—at least temporarily. The most cataclysmic of all expulsions to its time—involving, some claim, well over one hundred thousand refugees—was the traumatic expulsion of Jews from Spain, in 1492, followed shortly thereafter by their expulsion from Portugal and from Naples. The Jews of Recife, in Brazil, were expelled in 1654 and the Jews of Prague in 1744. Thereafter, expulsions and threats of expulsion continued to hang over Jews’ heads in many of the lands where they lived—threats that would be mercilessly carried out in the century following Grant’s order, when more Jews were expelled from their homes in Europe and Arab lands than in all of previously recorded history put together. General Orders No. 11 echoed this doleful tradition. Its language sounded eerily familiar to Jews whose ancestors had been “required to leave” their homes many, many times before. But Jews never expected this to happen to them in America, dubbed by Francis Scott Key in 1814 “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”15
Even less did they expect to be threatened with extermination, but that, too, happened in the wake of Grant’s order, albeit from a journalist who allowed his prejudices to peek through his writing. On February 16, 1863, the Associated Press, described by its historian as “an authoritative source for news throughout the military conflict,” reported the capture of three Jews found smuggling letters and medicines to New Orleans. The capture of wartime smugglers hardly made for sensational copy, so the reporter added some chilling thoughts of his own. “The Jews in New Orleans and all the South ought to be exterminated,” he wrote. “They run the blockade, and are always found to be at the bottom of every new villainy.” How many newspapers published this AP dispatch is unknown. Some actually editorialized against it. But its impact, coming on the heels of Grant’s order, seems to have elicited a powerful e
motional response from nervous Jews. “Must a class of citizens be condemned, decried, persecuted, exterminated because some of them smuggle?” a visibly agitated Isaac Mayer Wise wondered aloud. “Must we all suffer, we, our wives and our children, must we all be dishonored and disgraced, because three Jews were caught on a fishing smack loaded with contraband goods? With an aching heart and eyes filled with tears, the pen trembling between our fingers, we sit down to appeal to the World at large, to the holiness of humanity and the precepts of religion; in behalf of a defenceless minority, we appeal to all good men—for mercy’s sake stop these outrages on thousands of innocent, industrious, loyal and honest persons; for our country’s sake stop this disgracing condemnation of all on account of the few.”16
Much as Jews agonized over antisemitism, expulsion, and even the muttered threat of extermination, the rhetoric of Isaac Leeser and Isaac Mayer Wise suggests that an uglier fear concerning the place of Jews in American society underlay some of their thinking as well. They worried, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, that the status of Blacks would appreciably rise and the status of Jews correspondingly fall. Most slaves, after all, were Christian. If America no longer split along racial lines, might it cleave along religious lines, rendering Blacks insiders and Jews outsiders? Historians, understandably, have played down this fear, not wishing to besmirch the reputations of some of American Jewry’s most illustrious leaders whose words, in retrospect, are painful to read.17 But for a minority group with a long history of persecution, theirs was a natural fear. Experience had taught Jews to be eternally vigilant. Nor was the prejudice that Jewish leaders displayed in writing about Blacks at all uncommon in their day. In this respect, as in so much of their behavior surrounding the great issues of the Civil War, Jews simply resembled their white neighbors.
Isaac Mayer Wise, a fierce critic of abolitionists and their sometimes virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric, saw evidence of the declining status of Jews vis-à-vis Blacks in the way Congress debated Grant’s order. The abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, he knew, had once described the Jewish leader Mordecai Noah as “that lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross between two thieves.” Abolitionist Edmund Quincy of Boston likewise harbored fierce anti-Jewish sentiments. Now Wise wondered aloud whether Congressman Elihu Washburne, the Radical Republican who engineered the failure of the House of Representatives’ censure resolution against Grant, likewise supported Blacks at Jews’ expense. “If the Hebrew citizens of the United States were ‘gentlemen of color,’ ” he sardonically suggested, “Mr. Washburne would certainly have made a brilliant effort to vindicate their rights and expose a general who committed a gross outrage on them. But being only white men, it would not pay.”18 Wise may have pretended here that Jews were simply a species of “white men,” but he knew full well that Jews and non-Jews alike considered them to be a “class” apart. Many, indeed, considered Jews to be members of a distinctive “Jewish race.”19
The Jewish Record, edited by Abraham S. Cohen of New York, in an open letter to Congress, echoed Wise’s sentiments. “Supposing any general of the United States had issued an order expelling from his command all ‘Negroes,’ ” the newspaper asked. “Would not ‘sympathy for our oppressed brethren, without distinction of color,’ have moved you to censure him?”20
These comments, at one level, pointed to the hypocrisy of those (like Washburne) who supported emancipation for Blacks while expressing contempt for Jews. Their sarcastic tone, though, indicates how much more was also at stake. Isaac Leeser’s much longer discussion (written anonymously for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which refused to publish it, and printed instead in his own Occident) leaves little doubt that, at least to his mind, nothing less than the future status of the American Jew was on the line. He made this clear in the very title he gave to his piece—“Are Israelites Slaves?”—which, in the shadow of the Emancipation Proclamation, suggested that the ball and chain of victimization was being passed from one group to another. He then wondered aloud whether Jews fighting in the Civil War were sacrificing their lives “in a contest designed by those in authority to give freedom to the negro, only to bring expulsion from the Union territory to the descendants of the Hebrew race?” Finally, in perhaps the most outrageous and prejudiced paragraph that he ever wrote, Leeser proceeded to contrast the rising status of Black Americans with the forlorn condition of the country’s Jews:
Is there to be freedom for the colored races, who have never furnished a genius of towering intellect to the world, while we who have produced for Israel and all mankind the greatest of mortals, Moses the son of Amram, and for the Christians the founder of their faith … are even now to be ill-used and stigmatized for adhering to our faith? Why are tears shed for the sufferings of the African in his bondage, by which his moral condition has been immensely improved, in spite of all that may be alleged to the contrary, whereas for the Hebrews every one has words of contempt or acts of violence?21
Eastern Jews without familial ties to the South would not likely have written as Leeser did. Still, the fact that three different Jewish newspapers, including the two most important ones in the country (those of Leeser and Wise), contrasted the improving treatment of Blacks with the deteriorating treatment of Jews points to the grimness of Jewish fears. In the wake of Grant’s order, the Emancipation Proclamation, and heightened antisemitic rhetoric nationwide, Jews worried that their starkest nightmares might actually come to pass.
Cooler heads understood perfectly well that smuggling and speculation formed the central basis for General Orders No. 11. The order specifically indicted Jews for “violating every regulation of trade,” and complaints about Jews who traded “upon the miseries of the country” were legion.22 Grant, determined to put down the South’s rebellion and focused upon capturing Vicksburg, looked upon all smugglers as traitors. They gave aid and comfort to the enemy and prolonged the war. He favored a total embargo on trade with the South, complete with blockades and sieges.
Given the enormous pressures he was under to defeat the Southern rebels, he understandably lashed out at those who sought to undermine this strategy. He expelled the Jews to inhibit smuggling.
The fact that some Jews took advantage of wartime opportunities for smuggling is hardly surprising. All wars open up opportunities that enterprising individuals exploit. In the Civil War, the North (along with much of Europe) depended upon Southern cotton for clothes. “King Cotton,” like Middle Eastern oil in our day, was a basic commodity; the textile industry on several continents relied upon it. As a result, when the supply of cotton declined, its price on the world market rose dramatically. Anyone with access to cotton could reap huge profits. Meanwhile, in the South, deepening shortages of goods once imported from the North, including medicine (especially quinine), bacon, salt, clothing, and shoes, drove prices of those necessities skyward. Bans on trading with the enemy, and the North’s blockade of Southern ports, meant that these products had to be brought into the South illegally, at many times their original cost.
Such conditions—high demand, short supply—paved the way, as they always do, for canny traders and smugglers to profiteer; Rhett Butler, the fictional blockade-runner in Gone With the Wind, reflected that reality. At one point in the war, a bale (four hundred pounds) of cotton purchased in the South for $100 sold up north for $500, while four hundred pounds of bacon purchased in the North for $88 sold down south for $2,400 Confederate. An enterprising merchant who smuggled goods in both directions (and didn’t get caught) could turn a $100 investment into a payoff of $2,000 or more. The risks involved were considerable, but the venturesome—Jews and non-Jews alike—found the temptation impossible to resist.23
Speculative opportunities multiplied once Union troops moved into the Mississippi Valley in 1862, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. President Lincoln insisted that trade should follow the flag, believing that improved economic circumstances in recaptured areas would promote loyalty to the Union. He a
lso hoped to increase the supply of cotton available for export, so as to promote foreign exchange and dissuade foreign countries needing cotton from moving to the Confederacy’s aid. In line with this policy, traders who swore oaths of allegiance to the United States received official government permits and even encouragement to trade local cotton for cash and dearly needed supplies. Predictably, these permits became much sought after; they offered a ticket to wealth. Equally predictably, Confederate loyalists soon found ways of exploiting the new trade policy to evade the Union blockade. They illicitly sold Southern cotton for gold, and then used the gold to obtain food, weapons, and supplies needed to stave off the Confederacy’s defeat. Generals like Grant and Sherman were furious. Grant proposed that the government “buy all the Cotton at a fixed rate” and ship it north, thereby obviating the need for traders (“they are a curse to the Army”) once and for all. Sherman agreed: “We cannot,” he exclaimed, “carry on war and trade with a people at the same time.” But traders—non-Jews and Jews, politicians and soldiers—took full advantage of the new trade regulations, which yielded handsome profits.24
Immigrant Jews were no strangers to smuggling and illicit transactions of these sorts. As peddlers and traders, numbers of them possessed the skills, the connections, the temperament, and the nerves that such activities required. Some probably knew Jews who engaged in cross-border smuggling in Europe. For generations, the economic restrictions and confiscatory taxes that weighed heavily upon Jews in Central and Eastern Europe encouraged illicit means of gain. In 1820, the organized Jewish community of Vilna placed a ban on smuggling from neighboring Austrian and Prussian provinces into Russia—a sure sign that the practice was common. In Warsaw, well over 80 percent of all those caught smuggling goods between 1842 and 1849 were Jews (perhaps because officials turned a blind eye toward non-Jewish smugglers). Smuggling, in some of these cases, was a form of rebellion against rules deemed unjust. The fact that smuggling also proved extraordinarily lucrative only added to its appeal.25
When General Grant Expelled the Jews Page 4