When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  How many of America’s 150,000 or so Jews smuggled in violation of trade regulations during the Civil War is impossible to know. Some unquestionably did, whereas “Jews as a class” unquestionably did not. Cincinnati’s Mount Carmel Lodge of the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith communicated a private warning on this subject:

  Information has been received here, doubtless authentic, proving the fact of certain of our co-religionists being engaged in an illegal traffic and other acts of disloyalty with those who are in rebellion against the Government.…We fraternally call your attention to this subject, urging your vigilance to suppress all acts of disloyalty, especially among those who style themselves members of the B’nai B’rith.26

  A few Jews, in the post–Civil War years, produced elaborate accounts of their smuggling adventures. Heyman Herzberg, in Atlanta, joined “a couple of men who had already made money as blockade-runners and were preparing to go north once more.” He blundered, was arrested, and his goods were taken from him. While he did eventually make it to Philadelphia for a reunion with his family, he arrived a good deal poorer than he had left. Undaunted, he prepared to smuggle goods in the other direction, heeding advice from his brothers, who told him that “they ran the blockade by way of Memphis and got through without trouble.” Once again, he miscalculated, but he did manage to smuggle some goods through the lines to the South. He did not reveal how much money he made selling them, but his account serves as a further reminder that smuggling was a risky business, fraught with dangers.27

  Aaron Hirsch of Batesville, Arkansas, proved much more successful. His tale of passing through military lines to trade cotton for gold and quinine in Memphis, in addition to its comfort with slavery, explains why generals like Grant and Sherman were so disgusted by the administration’s policy, and so angry at smugglers and those who abetted them:

  Memphis, Tennessee: hauling sugar and cotton from their hiding places for shipment north, 1862 (illustration credit ill.14)

  Medicine was very much needed, and having none, I took a few bales of cotton, secured permission to pass the Confederate lines, went by land some 120 miles with my negroes, sold the cotton in Memphis, receiving for same quinine and gold. Coming back into Arkansas, I had to pass the [Mississippi] River, which was a great risk because both gold and quinine was strictly forbidden to be brought into the Confederate lines. I then discovered that an old carpenter and wife, who formerly worked for me, were living in Memphis. I got his wife to make an old flannel undershirt for my negro and sewed all the gold I had in this shirt. It was two or three days before I obtained a pass to leave, and during this time my negro was walking around town with this money on his person. He was then as free a man as I, being in Memphis, but he was faithful to me and got through the lines all right.28

  The most appalling account of Jewish smuggling in and around Memphis was produced by an eyewitness, the ardent secessionist Abraham E. Frankland, whose family numbered among the earliest Jewish settlers in the state. Preserved in manuscript and published only in 1957, the Kronikals, written in pseudo-biblical language, paints a devastating portrait of the merchants who descended upon Memphis following its capture and confirms that “the most of them were of the descendants of Israel … Israelites of Cincinnati.” Memphis’s Rabbi Simon Tuska, so Frankland recalled, appealed to these Northern traders to leave:

  Why must you ever entail prejudices upon yourselves by bringing to bear the envy and contempt of the nations of the earth. Have ye not suffered sufficiently? Must ye also be driven out of this land by the Gentiles, who may become infuriated against thee?

  Yet instead of heeding the rabbi’s advice, the Jewish merchants, seeking “to grow fat and rich upon the necessities of those that had sojourned here,” set themselves up in commerce. Memphis Jews neither associated with them, “nor did they invite them to thier [sic] habitations, nor hold friendly intercourse with them,” Frankland admiringly wrote, for the Jewish merchants from the North took the oath in fealty to the Union and the local Jewish merchants refused. Before long, though, “foreigners” began to purchase cotton “with virgin gold.” “Speculators went from house to house … cotton!, cotton!, cotton!” Local Jewish businessmen, who needed the money, joined them in these speculations and “had the same conveyed in large arks to the great … City of New York.” Both “foreign” and “local” merchants thus engaged in risky and illicit activities, according to Frankland’s caustic recollections. “Were the historian to recite the many and various schemes perfected during the war by the merchant princes, they would seem herculaneon [sic],” he concluded. “But the writer is satisfied that the schemes of our So[u]thern princes were as nought compared with the stupendous and gigantic ones of the people of the North.”29c

  Non-Jewish accounts of Memphis confirm many of Frankland’s assertions. “The Israelites have come down upon the city like locusts,” a Chicago Times reporter wrote in July 1862. “Anything in the line of trade … may be obtained of these eager gentlemen at ruinous prices.” Another account recalled that “the long dining-hall of the principal hotel at Memphis, looked at meal-times like a Feast of the Passover.” A later account, from Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana (who himself secretly speculated in cotton), complained of a “mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton, raging in a vast population of Jews and Yankees.” Dana uncovered widespread corruption among soldiers eager to share in the profits that illicit trading by civilians yielded. “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.” Instead of blaming Jews alone, Dana portrayed a whole culture of corruption involving traders and soldiers, Jews and non-Jews alike. “The amount of plunder & bribery that is going on in and about the City of Memphis is beyond all calculation,” the city’s commanding general agreed. “Soldiers on picket are bribed, officers are bribed.…Honesty is the exception and peculation [embezzlement] the rule wherever the army is brought into contact with trade.”30

  Ulysses S. Grant had long been concerned about traders, speculators, and smugglers in his territory. Immigrant Jews, who looked, dressed, and sounded distinctive particularly caught his attention. They cared only about their own fortunes, he thought, while he worried about the fortunes of the Union as a whole. He also worried that traders who slipped over into the Confederacy would pass along classified military information that they had gleaned along the way, such as where troops were camped and where they were headed (traders who passed from the Confederacy to the North, he knew, did the same).31 Grant, given his aims, believed in employing economic warfare alongside military actions against the South; this greatly contributed to his success, especially at Vicksburg. To his mind, any trade with the South, legal or illegal, inevitably hindered the war effort. He did whatever he could to limit it.32

  As early as July 1862, Grant ordered the commander of the District of the Mississippi to “examine all baggage of all speculators coming South,” and to turn back those who were carrying gold (“specie”). “Jews,” he admonished, “should receive special attention.” In August, a soldiers’ newspaper quoted Grant as calling Jews “a nuisance.” It intimated that he had plans to “abate” that nuisance. Nothing happened for several months, but on November 9, as he prepared to move south in preparation for the decisive battle at Vicksburg, Grant tightened his regulations against Jews: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present,” he ordered. “The Isrealites [sic] especially should be kept out.” The very next day he strengthened that order: “No Jews are to be permitted to travel on the Rail Road southward from any point … they are such an intolerable nuisance that the Department must be purged for [sic] them.” Writing in early December to General Sherman, whose quartermaster had created problems by selling cotton “to a Jew by the name of Haas,” Grant explained that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”33
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  Nevertheless, when Colonel John Van Deusen Du Bois on December 8, 1862, angrily ordered “All Cotton-Speculators, Jews and other Vagrants having no honest means of support, except trading upon the miseries of their Country” to leave Holly Springs and gave them “twenty-four hours or they will be sent to duty in the trenches,” Grant insisted that the draconian order be rescinded. “Instructions from Washington,” he reminded Du Bois, “are to encourage getting Cotton out of the country.” Regardless of his private opinions and actions, Grant understood that he still had to publicly uphold official government policy, which permitted those loyal to the Union to trade in cotton.34

  Why then did Grant himself expel “Jews as a class” from the entire territory under his command just nine days later? Clearly, and notwithstanding subsequent claims to the contrary, the order fit into a pattern of orders that he had issued over many months. Grant identified a widespread practice—smuggling—with a visible group and blamed “Jews as a class” for what was in fact an inevitable by-product of wartime shortages exploited by Jews and non-Jews, civilians and military men alike. But if that was the cause, the occasion for the order remains somewhat mysterious, especially since Grant had so recently countermanded a more limited order expelling Jews. Three different explanations have been proposed.

  Multiple sources have always maintained that Grant acted in response to instructions from Washington. Supposedly, he received a telegram from officials there warning that Jews were buying up gold “to take to the South to invest in cotton.” The purported telegram gave him clear instructions: “Issue an order expelling from your lines all Jews who can not give satisfactory evidence of their honesty of intentions.” An informant with the ominous nom de guerre of “Gentile” reported in the Cincinnati Commercial that he was sitting with Grant when this telegram arrived. Grant’s father, Jesse R. Grant, insisted that his son’s order “was issued on express instructions from Washington.” Even Isaac Mayer Wise, no supporter of Grant, found the report credible: “It appears a fact that Gen. Grant received instruction from Washington to drive the Jewish traders out of his line … it must have come from the Treasury Department.” Diligent searches, however, have failed to turn up any such telegram, even though government records from the Civil War are extraordinarily complete. As we shall see, Edward Rosewater, the Jewish editor of the Omaha Bee and a telegraph officer in the White House when General Orders No. 11 was issued, testified years later that “only three men in Washington had authority to issue orders to Gen. Grant,” and none of them ordered him to expel the Jews. Moreover, even the purported telegram that Grant received made no mention of expelling “Jews as a class.” Had Grant simply expelled those Jews who could not give “satisfactory evidence of their honesty of intentions,” the response to his order would likely have been altogether different.35

  A second explanation suggests that military personnel wanted Jews out of the way so that they themselves could monopolize the cotton trade. Jewish traders unquestionably competed with soldiers to purchase Southern cotton, and often outbid them. Indeed, no sooner were the Jews expelled than the purchase price of cotton fell from forty cents a pound to twenty-five cents a pound—a boon to speculators who already enjoyed outsize profits on sales of the staple in the North. Cincinnati newspapers cleverly transformed this effect of the expulsion into its cause (“the Jews must leave, because they interfere with a branch of military business”), but the claim does not bear close scrutiny. Grant himself never traded in cotton, and on the very day that he expelled the Jews he called for the government “to buy all the Cotton at a fixed rate” and send it north for sale, a plan that would have ended military and civilian trade in the commodity altogether. Corrupt soldiers may indeed have wanted Jews out of the way, but there is no evidence that Grant was acting on their behalf.36

  Jesse R. Grant (illustration credit ill.15)

  The third and most likely reason for the timing of Grant’s order concerns a visit in mid-December from his sixty-eight-year-old father, accompanied by members of the prominent Mack family of Cincinnati, significant Jewish clothing manufacturers. Harman, Henry, and Simon Mack, as part of an ingenious scheme, had formed a secret partnership with the ever-entrepreneurial and somewhat shady elder Grant. In return for 25 percent of their profits, he agreed to accompany them to his son’s Mississippi headquarters, act as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton,” and help them secure the means to transport the cotton to New York. The Macks surely did not know how troubled the relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and his father was: Ulysses, like many a child who sets off on his own path, craved his father’s approval but winced at many of the old man’s shortcomings. In this case, according to journalist Sylvanus Cadwallader, an eyewitness, the younger Grant waxed indignant at his father’s crass attempt to profit from his military status, and raged at the Jewish traders who “entrapped his old father into such an unworthy undertaking.” He refused to provide the permit, sent the Macks homeward “on the first train for the north,” and in high dudgeon immediately issued the order expelling “Jews as a class” from his territory. Jesse R. Grant’s involvement in this scheme provides “a psychological explanation” for General Orders No. 11, according to John Simon, the scholarly editor of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. In a classic act of displacement, the general “expelled the Jews rather than his father.”37

  Julia Dent Grant (illustration credit ill.16)

  Ulysses S. Grant himself never made public mention of his father’s corrupt scheme with the Macks. Nor, in 1863, did he provide any other justification for General Orders No. 11. He accepted Lincoln’s revocation of the order in silence and offered no defense of his actions before Congress. In his long and justly celebrated Personal Memoirs, written just prior to his death, he also made no mention of General Orders No. 11. “That was a matter long past and best not referred to,” his son Frederick quoted him as saying when he pointed out the omission to him. Just as the memoirs passed over in silence other embarrassing episodes from the war, most notably the general’s bouts of drunkenness, so, too, did they ignore his order expelling “Jews as a class.”38

  Julia Dent Grant, the memoir writer’s high-spirited wife, proved far less circumspect. In her own memoirs, written following her husband’s death and published only in 1975, she went out of her way to mention Grant’s order “expelling the Jews from his lines,” characterizing it as nothing less than “obnoxious.” The general, she recalled, felt that the severe reprimand he received for the order was deserved, for “he had no right to make an order against any special sect.”39

  Had Ulysses S. Grant expressed such sentiments himself back in 1863, the subsequent course of his relationship with the Jewish community might have been altogether different. As it was, he found himself compared, in some Jewish circles, to historic enemies of the Jewish people, a long and ignoble list. The most common comparison was to the wicked Haman, vizier of Persia and villain of the biblical book of Esther, whose order to exterminate the Jews of his day was overturned by Persia’s King Ahasuerus—with disastrous consequences for Haman and his family. The Hebrew journal Hamagid, published in the Prussian town of Lyck, in recounting the Grant episode for Hebrew-speaking Jews across Europe, used the very language of the book of Esther to underscore these parallels between the biblical story and the contemporary one. It also anticipated that Jews would one day have their revenge on the general: “The day will come,” it predicted, “when he will pay in judgment for all of the damage that he wrought upon the Children of Israel by his ignorant and wicked order, and his deeds will recoil upon his own head.”40

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  a U. S. Grant’s view was different. “The right to resist or suppress rebellion is as inherent as the right of self defense, and as natural as the right of an individual to preserve his life when in jeopardy,” he wrote in his Memoirs. “The Constitution was therefore in abeyance for the time being, so far as it in any way affected the progress and termination of the war.” M
emoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 749.

  b Civil War historian James M. McPherson observes that “harassed Union officers had come to use the word ‘Jew’ the same way many southerners used ‘Yankee’—as a shorthand way of describing anyone they considered shrewd, acquisitive, aggressive, and possibly dishonest.” Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 622n61.

  c These schemes sometimes made it difficult to distinguish between honest and dishonest forms of trade. On January 25, 1864, for example, the schooner Thomas F. Dawson, on its way from Richmond to Baltimore, was captured by a Union armed transport. It was found to contain tobacco, jewelry, gold, silver, bonds, and banknotes in the possession of five Jews named Philip Epstein, M. David, Henry Steen, Julius Louis, and Herman Sommers, who were discovered hidden in the hold of the vessel. The five Jews were jailed and the government seized their effects as contraband and sold them for $16,703 (more than $226,000 in today’s money). Subsequently, however, the Jews appealed to the secretary of war, insisting that they had only been “availing themselves of the advantages of the … amnesty proclamation” issued by President Lincoln. They argued that since they were fleeing “rebel tyranny,” they should have been allowed to proceed freely. The men sought compensation for the money and property seized from them and demanded “substantial justice” for wrongful imprisonment and ill treatment. General Benjamin F. Butler, who distrusted Jews, scornfully dismissed their claims, but some in Congress proved more sympathetic. The House of Representatives collected documents in the case, filling some fifty closely printed pages. Ultimately, the secretary of war endorsed Butler’s findings. The documents in the case, as a result, were “laid on the table and ordered to be printed.” House of Representatives, Letter from the Secretary of War in Answer to a Resolution of the House of the 5th Instant Transmitting All the Papers and Testimony Relating to the Claim of Philip Epstein and Others, 39th Congress, 1st Session, Ex Doc. No. 9 (1865).