When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  The stakes were high. The Democratic Party had been gaining power in local and state elections during the last year of Andrew Johnson’s presidency. Even Grant’s hometown of Galena, Illinois, had elected a Democratic mayor. So a close national election was forecast. A Jewish community of 150,000 to 200,000, many of them women, minors, or otherwise ineligible to vote as recent immigrants, might not appear to have been of great political significance. But Americans have regularly exaggerated the size and political power of the Jewish community—even back in 1868. Besides, in tight elections, as the nation periodically rediscovers, every vote counts.21

  Party differences appeared particularly consequential in 1868, for in the balance hung the fate of four million freedmen, underprivileged former slaves who had benefited politically, socially, and economically from the Reconstruction-era policies that Republicans championed. The opposition Democrats, firmly aligned with the white race, promised sharp policy changes “to rescue the country from the anarchy of Radicalism.” Their goal was to disenfranchise and disempower “the ruling horde of illiterate and brutal negro suffragans.” “The Negro,” one Democratic Party banner read, “May Become a Republican, a Slave, or a Tyrant!; but Never a Democrat.”22

  Against this background, liberal-minded Jews who disagreed with the pseudonymous pamphleteer of General Grant and the Jews and supported the Republican Party got busy. Lewis N. Dembitz, a noted Louisville attorney and scholar who courageously opposed slavery and was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln (as well as the uncle and idol of future Supreme Court justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis) sent a letter of inquiry concerning General Orders No. 11 to Grant’s headquarters. He received a long, courteous reply, clearly intended for distribution, from John A. Rawlins, who had cosigned the order as Grant’s assistant adjutant general back in 1862 and now served as one of his prime advisers and spokesmen. Rawlins candidly recalled the violations “by persons principally of the Jewish race” that led up to the order. He explained why Grant decided “whether wisely or unwisely” to issue the order. Finally, with an eye toward the coming election, he told Dembitz what he and other Jewish Republicans desperately wanted to hear: allegations that the order “was issued on account of the religion of the Jews cannot be seriously entertained by any one who knows the General’s steadfast adherence to the principles of American liberty and religious toleration.”23

  Simon Wolf likewise got busy. Notwithstanding his earlier suggestion that Grant’s order merited “lasting execration,” he now shifted from dreams of revenge to endeavors at rehabilitation. His long-standing devotion to the Republican Party and its policies, the favorable personal impression that Grant made upon him, and, likely as not, his own political ambitions led Wolf to try to clear the air on Grant’s behalf. Even before the general’s official nomination, Wolf addressed him on the subject of his order, subtly suggesting how it might be explained away. Grant, as usual, did not reply; he considered stony silence the best remedy for awkward problems. But Adam Badeau, his former military secretary who now handled his political correspondence, replied on Grant’s behalf. Echoing the very language that Wolf had proposed, he wrote:

  General Grant … instructs me to say that the order was, as you suppose, “directed simply against evil designing persons whose religion was in no way material to the issue.” When it was made, the guilty parties happened to be Israelites, exclusively; and it was intended to reach the guilty parties, not to wound the feelings of any others. It would have been made just as stringent against any other class of individuals, religious, political or commercial.24

  Satisfied by this response, Wolf transformed himself into a tireless campaigner on Grant’s behalf, “making speeches in different parts of the country, notably the crucial states of Ohio and Indiana.” He became the first Washington Jewish leader to declare Grant rehabilitated, persuading himself, against all evidence, that Grant’s order “never harmed anyone” and that Grant “had absolutely nothing to do with the said order.” In time, he became a friend and loyal acolyte of the general’s—so much so that he named his son, born in 1869, Adolph Grant Wolf.25

  In a different way, the Seligman brothers, merchants and bankers, also got busy. Jesse and Henry Seligman, immigrants from Bavaria, had first met Grant back in 1848 when he entered their dry goods store in Watertown, New York, to buy “a bit of finery for his bride of a few months.” The brothers were about the same age as Grant, and they all became fast friends. This friendship eventually expanded to embrace the eleven brothers and sisters of the Seligman clan, led by elder brother Joseph. During the Civil War, the Seligmans strongly supported the Union cause and the Republican Party. They helped to outfit New York’s Seventh Regiment, marketed U.S. government war bonds in Europe, and received lucrative military contracts for uniforms and accessories. They were unaffected by General Orders No. 11, and their response to it is unknown. But in 1868, they contributed generously to Grant’s campaign. Henry Seligman, then in Germany, predicted that Grant would “walk over and beat the [Democratic] party and its standard bearers” and that “all intelligent portions of our race” would keep religion out of the contest. Brothers Joseph, James, and Jesse, according to a history of the House of Seligman, “threw themselves wholeheartedly into the campaign to elect their friend.” Abraham Seligman, from his base in San Francisco, likewise aided Grant. How much the family collectively contributed to the campaign’s coffers cannot be known, but it was enough to secure banker Joseph Seligman a spot directly behind Grant at the inauguration.26

  The majority of American Jews, however, were not nearly so easily won over. Nor did the Seligmans exert much influence over the Jewish community as a whole. As a result, even the staid New York Times, which generally supported Grant and opposed ethnic appeals, warned in June of a possible “wholesale defection” on the part of Jews. That, it feared, “would endanger the election of Grant and Colfax in Illinois, and render the election of the Democratic ticket in Indiana certain beyond a doubt.”27

  “What can be done?” Joseph Medill, the Republican editor of the Chicago Tribune, asked Grant’s longtime friend and supporter Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, likely in response to articles in the Times and elsewhere. “The Jews of Cincinnati and St. Louis are numerous enough to defeat our ticket in both cities, and they are strong enough to hurt us in Chicago also, as they include many of our most active Republicans.” Unless Grant put the issue to rest with a strong public statement, he warned, “we shall lose large numbers of Jew [sic] votes … besides converting them into very active bitter opponents.”28

  Grant later admitted to having received “hundreds of letters” from Jews inquiring about his order. Refusing to budge from his principles (“I thought it would be better to adhere to the rule of silence as to all letters”), he answered none of them. As a result, just as Medill had feared, the Democrats bustled about “making a handle” of Grant’s expulsion order “in all parts of the country.”29

  Spurring them on from his place behind the scenes may have been the longtime chair of the National Democratic Committee, financier August Belmont. Born and educated as a Jew in Germany, Belmont made a substantial fortune as a banker in New York, aided by his close ties to the Rothschilds. He married (in a church) the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry. Though he raised his children as Episcopalians and maintained no formal connections to the Jewish community, his enemies still frequently reminded him that he was a “foreign born Jew.” He therefore understood as well as any politician of his day that the “Jewish issue” could be a potent weapon in the Democrats’ campaign arsenal.30

  The Democratic Speaker’s Hand-book, prepared by the party for its loyal supporters, trumpeted that weapon. It devoted three double-column small-print pages to “General Grant on our Hebrew Fellow Citizens,” recounting the episode to the bulk of Democrats who knew nothing about it. The section concluded with lines that the handbook likely expected party speakers on every stump to echo: “Violating trade, indeed! Why, that order was
violated everywhere.…No; the Jews were persecuted because they were Jews, and nothing else.” The handbook also reprinted an anti-Grant statement signed by two hundred Jews in St. Louis opposing the election of “such a man.” Obliquely admitting that most American Jews were unaffected by the order, the St. Louis Jews nevertheless predicted that there would be “as few Israelitic (!) votes cast for General Grant next November as he had occasion to make arrests under his famous order.” The handbook even reprinted the court proceedings in Jesse Grant’s long-forgotten court case against the Mack brothers. It wondered darkly (and baselessly) whether it was “in view of this arrangement” between the Mack brothers and Grant’s father, “and in order that it might be as profitable as possible, that General Grant issued his inhuman order of December 17, 1862, requiring all Jews to be expelled from his department?”31

  Democratic newspapers soon embellished the story of Grant and the Jews with far-fetched tales that purported to “explain” the general’s hostility toward Jews “as a class” based upon earlier incidents from his life, when individual Jews supposedly took advantage of his business naïveté. According to one widely repeated account, a Jew named Rosenthal, who was in the pork trade in Bellevue, Iowa, discovered that Grant, then trying his hand at that business, “knew no difference between the price of light and heavy hogs.” Using a clever ruse, Rosenthal sold Grant all of his light hogs for the dearer price of heavy ones, and “it was not half an hour before every body nearly was splitting with laughter” at the Jew’s craftiness. The transaction, according to the storyteller, greatly embittered Grant against “the old tribes of Israel,” and “this is undoubtedly the whole cause of the expulsion of Jews from his camp.” The tale echoed popular anecdotes concerning Grant’s string of embarrassing business failures prior to the Civil War, toyed with well-known taboos concerning Jews and pork, and portrayed Jewish merchants as clever but utterly unscrupulous. For all that it reveals about cultural stereotypes, however, the story was soon shown to be the work of a “notorious rebel sympathizer,” and the Rosenthal in question, who had been living in Bellevue at the time, indignantly insisted that it was “a lie from beginning to end.”32

  Another fabulous tale, published under the headline “Why Grant Issued His Order Against the Jews,” was no less false, though even more revealing:

  A prominent Jew cotton dealer of Cincinnati made a bargain with Grant for the getting out of five hundred bales of cotton from the Black River country assisted by the Second Wisconsin Cavalry. The Jew offered, as was the custom, one-fourth of the profits. Grant wanted more, and at last the Jew offered an eighth, which Grant accepted. The cotton was got out and shipped to Memphis and sold. The Jew, faithful to his promise, met Grant with the proceeds of the sale, and gave the General one-eighth of the profits and departed. Grant’s Adjutant General, surprised at the smallness of the profits, spoke to the General about it, who was so exasperated on learning that one-eighth was less than one-fourth, that he within that hour issued the order expelling all Jews from the lines, and to this day has never forgiven the entire race for his own stupidity.33

  While on the surface this tale, too, showed a shrewd, somewhat unscrupulous Jew taking advantage of an ignorant and naïve Grant, the story in this case employed authentic details from the historical episode involving Grant’s father and the Mack brothers. The fact that the story confused Ulysses S. Grant with Jesse, and invented the “stupidity” that it attributed to the younger Grant, is less significant than that contemporary folklore in 1868 already linked the order expelling the Jews to the interactions between Grant and a “Jew cotton dealer of Cincinnati.”

  The Democratic newspapers that gave space to these and other stories concerning Grant and the Jews sought to cast doubt on Grant’s fitness to be president. To the same end, a Wisconsin newspaper ridiculed Grant in verse:

                 Who drove the Hebrews from his Camp,

                 Into the Alligator swamp

                 Where everything was dark and damp? Ulysses

                 Who wrothy at those faithless Jews

                 Who kept “pa’s” share of Cotton dues,

                 All further permits did refuse? Ulysses34

  Other Democratic newspapers, like the provocatively named Corinth Caucasian, argued that only a loyal Democrat would frustrate the forces of Radical Reconstruction and preserve the prerogatives of the white race. They hoped that readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, would be dissuaded from voting for a candidate who could expel “Jews as a class,” and vote, if only by default, for his opponent. That opponent was finally chosen early in July 1868. His name was Horatio Seymour, and he was a well-known New York politician.35

  Nominated unanimously and very much against his will after twenty-one exhausting ballots failed to find an acceptable alternative, Seymour became the Democrats’ compromise candidate to oppose Grant. The handsome former New York governor had publicly supported the Union war effort but opposed many of Abraham Lincoln’s policies, including the emancipation of the slaves. In 1862, the platform he had run upon, when he won the state’s governorship, denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder.” Now Democrats called upon him “to drive from power the Radical cabal at Washington” and to declare the Reconstruction Acts “usurpations and unconstitutional, revolutionary and void.”36

  Seymour was a respected and well-liked conservative aristocrat known to favor limited government. His running mate, Francis P. Blair of Missouri, was more hotheaded. Although he had fought valiantly for the Union in the Civil War, he later fought equally determinedly against Reconstruction and any form of equality for the freed slaves. He promised, if elected, “to prevent the people of our race … from being driven out of the country or trodden under foot by an inferior and semi-barbarous race.”37

  The original caption to this 1868 Thomas Nast cartoon read: “We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress as usurpations, and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.”—Democratic Platform (illustration credit ill.19)

  With all the candidates finally in place, the 1868 election became something of a national referendum on Reconstruction and Black suffrage. Thomas Nast, in a cartoon entitled “This Is a White Man’s Government,” captured the centrality of these themes by depicting the stalwarts of the Democratic coalition—Democratic chair August Belmont, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and an anonymous Irish immigrant workingman—all stomping on a Black veteran of the Union army reaching out for the ballot box.38 Complex economic issues at stake in the election, such as the value of debased greenbacks and whether government bonds would be repaid in gold, divided members of both parties and were in any case too abstruse for most voters to understand. By contrast, emotional issues concerning formerly rebellious states and recently freed slaves engaged every voter’s attention. These issues upped the ante for Jews who choked at the thought of voting for Ulysses S. Grant but strongly supported Republican policies on Reconstruction. 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? The closer the election drew, the more heated rhetoric within the Jewish community became.

  Simon Wolf, in a widely reprinted letter, insisted that Jews should always vote their principles. However ill-worded Grant’s order might have been, that was no reason, he exclaimed, “why American citizens should be betrayed from their allegiance to principles, and turn to a party that advocated the reverse of what is right and true.”39 Henry Greenebaum, a banker and liberal Jewish leader from Chicago who had raised a Union regiment during the Civil War and was a proud proponent of social justice, completely agreed. He criticized Grant for prejudice (“if the nomination of a presidential candi
date had been left to [R]epublican Jews there would have been a different choice”) but nevertheless insisted that his faith led him “to regard all men as brothers,” an indication that his definition of inclusiveness stretched far beyond that of the Democrats. To vote against the Republican Party, he warned, meant “impeding the progress of history.”40

  By contrast, Moses Ezekiel of Richmond, a Confederate veteran and budding sculptor (he would later produce a parade of Confederate war monuments) insisted that Jewish religious principles, as he understood them, required him to vote against Grant. “The Jew who does not with all his heart, soul and means, oppose the election of this second Pharaoh,” he wrote, echoing one of Judaism’s watchwords, “deserves to be publicly branded as a renegade to his faith.” A writer in New York’s Hebrew Leader summoned another biblical metaphor in encouraging Jews to oppose Grant. Recalling the story of the ancient Amalekites, cursed by God for attacking Israel when it was vulnerable, he invoked the first words of the biblical injunction against Amalek from the book of Deuteronomy (25:17): “Remember what Amalek did unto you.”41

  Similar insistence upon religious duty—directed negatively against Grant, rather than positively in support of Horatio Seymour and the principles of his party—underlay unprecedented public gatherings by Jews in Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. The gathering in Memphis, described as “large and enthusiastic,” resolved that Grant was “a man unfit for the high position to which he aspires, and incapable of administering the laws to all classes with impartiality and without prejudice.” Attendees pledged themselves as “Israelites who have respect for our honor and religion, pride for our race and love for our country to use every honorable means in our power to defeat the election of … U. S. Grant.” One enthusiastic speaker, doubtless seeking to avenge Grant’s occupation of Memphis during the Civil War, went further, thrilling the crowd with the suggestion that “if there was any high place to which the Jews would, perhaps, assist in elevating a man who had so foully abused them it would be to a place corresponding with that upon which Haman ended his career”—meaning, the gallows.42 Atlanta’s Jewish merchants boldly agreed. They erected a transparency on Whitehall Street that proclaimed: “The Jews will defeat Grant as they defeated Haman. The Jews will elevate Grant to office as they elevated Haman.”43