When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  Two of Grant’s Jewish appointments stood out, attracting special notice. The first was Wolf’s longtime friend Edward S. Salomon, whom Grant appointed governor of the Washington Territory. He became the first self-identifying American Jew to sit in a governor’s chair (David Emanuel, governor of Georgia in 1801, never identified himself as a Jew). A native of Schleswig, Salomon seemed to embody the American Dream. He immigrated to Chicago as a seventeen-year-old, studied law, and won election as an alderman at the remarkably young age of twenty-four. During the Civil War, he distinguished himself in battle several times, including at Gettysburg, and won an honorary (“breveted”) promotion for “distinguished gallantry and meritorious services” to the rank of brigadier general (one of only a handful of Jews in the Union army to achieve that rank). He then served as clerk of Cook County. At the time of his appointment, on January 10, 1870, Salomon, then thirty-two, knew absolutely nothing about the Washington Territory—not even its whereabouts—but the position paid a respectable $3,000 a year (more than $50,000 in today’s money), as well as expenses, and was a shrewd “two-for-one” patronage appointment; it pleased both Germans and Jews. Even Grant’s longtime opponents cheered it. “The appointment,” Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise gushed, “shows that President Grant has revoked General Grant’s notorious order No. 11.” Like so many subsequent (and more prominent) appointments through the years that propelled Jews through glass ceilings—the first Jewish Supreme Court justice (1916), the first Jewish secretary of state (1973), the first Jewish candidate for the vice presidency on a major party ticket (2000), and so forth—the honor redounded to the benefit of all Jews. They basked in Salomon’s reflected glory and hoped that his achievement would make it easier for them to fulfill their highest aspirations as well.16

  Edward Salomon, governor of the Washington Territory, 1870 (illustration credit ill.24)

  As governor, Salomon promoted immigration, education, and equal representation in government. He also preached in 1871 at the tiny Yom Kippur service held for the seven Jewish families of Olympia, Washington. While his words on that day, set aside for Jews to atone for their sins, have not been preserved, his thoughts may easily be guessed at. Just two months earlier he had been caught, red-handed, using public funds for private gain.17

  On July 23, a Treasury agent named R. H. Leipold had conducted a surprise audit of the state’s Treasury. He found some $30,500 missing (equivalent to about $600,000 today), much of it ($28,000) easily accounted for through promissory notes discovered in the governor’s private safe documenting loans to his brother-in-law and assorted political friends for land speculations. Such practices were all too common in post–Civil War America, a period one scholar has labeled “the era of good stealings.” Many leading figures in the Washington Territory “borrowed” public funds to make short-term private loans and investments. Salomon, however, compounded his crime by desperately attempting to bribe Treasury agent Leipold. When that failed, he obtained short-term loans from bankers in Portland and made full restitution, but was apparently less than contrite. He explained to the bankers, according to one source, that with the money restored, “the agent would go away,” previous practices could resume, and all would be well.18

  The agent did not go away. Instead, he dispatched a detailed account of Salomon’s misdeeds to the secretary of the Treasury. Meanwhile, an outraged Union veteran who somehow learned of these events sent a protest directly to Grant. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Salomon, in January 1872, sent in his resignation to take effect three months later. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish was outraged: “Do you intend to allow him to remain in office until that time?” he inquired of Grant. “He ought to be removed at once.” But Grant, ever loyal to those who served under him and mindful, perhaps, that he himself had not been removed after he expelled Jews from his war zone, permitted the young Jewish governor to save face.19

  Years later, Simon Wolf, who certainly knew better, described Salomon (quoting a local Republican newspaper) as being “honest, fearless and capable.” Jewish history books since then have generally echoed this assessment, recalling the first American Jewish territorial governor as an American Jewish “pioneer” and “patriot.” Not one of the three major Jewish encyclopedias explains why he resigned his office when he did. By contrast, students of the Grant administration have remembered the Salomon episode as a signal of the president’s “curious attitude toward corruption in office.” By not coming down hard on appointees who misused their positions for private gain, they contend, Grant conveyed the all-too-beguiling message that crime paid. Salomon’s religion arguably worked to his advantage here. Grant may have feared the implications of a public scandal involving a highly placed Jew. He was working hard to win the Jewish community over, and knew from experience how quickly the jackals of prejudice could be set to howling. By allowing Salomon to resign quietly, he made it easier to nominate other Jews to positions of public trust.20

  The same year that he nominated Salomon, Grant put forth the name of a second Jew for a responsible position that no Jew had ever held before. He appointed Dr. Herman Bendell, age twenty-seven, to be superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory. Born in Albany, Bendell received his doctorate of medicine at the age of nineteen and served as a surgeon in the Civil War, rising to become head of the depot field hospital of the Army of the Potomac. Returning to Albany after the war, he established a medical practice and, like Wolf and Salomon, played an active role in the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith. While he had absolutely no experience with “Indian affairs,” that was not what made his appointment noteworthy; the same was true of other aspirants to the office. The distinctive feature, particularly fascinating in terms of Grant’s Christian-based Indian policy, was the fact that Bendell was a Jew.21

  In his inaugural address, Grant had signaled that he favored a sympathetic new policy toward “the original occupants of this land—the Indians.” “I will favor any course toward them,” he declared, “which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.”22 At a time when many in the West, including his good friend William Tecumseh Sherman, promoted policies that tended toward the extermination of the “original occupants,” Grant, with his broader Reconstruction-era vision of what it meant to be an American, appointed as commissioner of Indian affairs a full-blooded Seneca Indian, Ely S. Parker—formerly his military secretary and a well-educated Christian.b Grant ordered that Indians be treated as much as possible not on a tribal basis but as individuals responsible for their own actions. Ironically, this echoed Lincoln’s response to General Orders No. 11. To condemn a class on account of a few sinners, Grant now understood, meant wronging the good with the bad.23

  Ely S. Parker (illustration credit ill.25)

  Parker, who sometimes styled himself “the Wolf” based on his Indian clan name, soon became for Native Americans what Simon Wolf was for Jewish Americans. Both men represented their communities in government, both mediated between their communities and the larger American public, and both served as role models, living proof that even the most “savage” or despised of minority groups could be upraised and transformed.24

  Together, Grant and Parker developed a policy aimed at Americanizing and Christianizing Native Americans. Where patronage and graft had characterized earlier pacification efforts, the new plan called for missionary agents from different Protestant denominations to be assigned to each tribe to oversee their needs and bring to them the blessings of Western civilization. Grant considered it “highly desirable” that “the aborigines … become self-sustaining, self-relying, Christianized, and civilized.” He looked to missionary agents and to the new Board of Indian Commissioners to accomplish these goals. The wealthy, philanthropic, and all-Protestant members of the new board—at least one of whom, Felix Brunot, strongly supported the “religious” amendment to the Constitution—hardly needed much encouragement. “The religion of our blessed Saviour,” they proclaimed, “is believed to be the mos
t effective agent for the civilization of any people.”25

  Today, Jews and civil libertarians would hasten to challenge a policy like this as an obvious violation of Article VI of the Constitution (“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”) and, even more so, of the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion. In Grant’s day, however, court cases based on religious liberty were few and far between. Seeking to forestall criticism, the government initially apportioned missionary appointments among eight different Protestant denominations, thereby ensuring that no single one was “established.” Non-Protestants, however, remained firmly excluded from this “Christianization” campaign. Catholics protested, and over time their missionaries came to play an increasing role in Indian affairs, anti-Catholic prejudices notwithstanding. Jews, however, did not have any missionaries. Indeed, leading modern Jewish thinkers, like the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, insisted that Judaism was distinct from Christianity in not being a missionizing religion at all. Since Jews likewise did not subscribe to “the religion of our blessed Saviour,” they seemed destined to be shut out of the government’s new Indian policy for, according to its calculus, religion trumped race. The goal of “Christianization” would thus deny even people who shared the original religion of the “blessed Saviour” but were not themselves Christians any role in supervising Indian affairs.26

  Simon Wolf nevertheless recalled that he “saw no reason … why the Jewish faith should not also have a representative,” and took personal credit for bringing the issue to Grant’s attention. Other sources suggest that Grant acted in response to a more collective Jewish protest. Whatever the case, Grant once again proved sympathetic toward Jewish concerns for equality and ensured that Jews were included in his “Christianization” initiative after all. The appointment of Bendell simultaneously placated the Jewish community, since it placed one of their own in a position of authority over Native Americans, and freed the new appointee, whose job was to oversee “officers and persons employed by the government,” from becoming directly involved with day-to-day missionizing efforts. “Let our Christian friends give themselves no uneasiness,” the Jewish Times wrote approvingly soon after the appointment was announced. “The Jewish superintendent will not disturb the Christian missions much, nor will he attempt to make capital for the Jewish religion.…We suppose the President made the appointment to signify his sense of equity by recognizing the Jewish church, and according it the same privileges as to other denominations.”27

  The opposition of New York’s Senator Roscoe Conkling (known in his day as “the great American quarreler”) threatened to derail Bendell’s nomination. Grant generally cleared appointments of New Yorkers with the powerful senator prior to making them, and Conkling was miffed that he had not been consulted about this one. The Catholic Pilot likewise sought to kill the nomination, warning that Bendell might “undo the work of the … missionaries” and calling upon “the Christian people, and the Catholics in particular” to protest against “an Israelite superintendent.” But the Senate, on January 12, 1871, brushed aside these objections and confirmed Bendell anyway. As soon as four Albany Jews put up the required $50,000 surety bond, the doctor took off for the West. He would later be remembered as the first Jewish settler of Phoenix, Arizona.28

  Herman Bendell (illustration credit ill.26)

  Bendell, once ensconced in his new job, sent regular reports back to Washington on the conditions of Indians in the Arizona Territory. He deplored the lack of proper sanitation on the reservation of the Mohave Indians. He noted large numbers of syphilis cases, the product of fraternization between soldiers and Mohave women. He found medical care unsatisfactory and called for the establishment of “a proper hospital upon the reserve.” He fought corruption among Indian suppliers, courageously going head-to-head with Arizona’s leading Jewish merchants, the Goldwaters, in his insistence on following government regulations. He even, as a Jew, promoted “the introduction of missionaries among these wild children of the mountain.” Christian missionaries, he advised the commissioner of Indian affairs, would “bring the most cruel savage on our continent … face to face with the highest element in our condition of civilization.”29

  The missionaries, however, did not return the compliment. John H. Stout, an agent to the Pima Indians selected and backed by the Dutch Reformed Church, confidentially warned Vincent Colyer, first secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners, that Bendell was an “Israelite” who could not be trusted to advance the cause of Christianity. He encouraged his church to advocate the appointment of one of its own as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory, and to insist that the next superintendent “should be of our way of thinking.” Eager to promote peace, General Oliver O. Howard, founder and president of Howard University and a leading advocate for the downtrodden, lauded Bendell following a fact-finding mission to Arizona, but nevertheless suggested that he be replaced by a “Dutch Reformed Churchman.” A Washington, D.C., meeting of the Board of Indian Commissioners likewise praised Bendell for his work while condemning him for his faith. “Dr. Herman Bendell, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Arizona, is a most excellent official, a man of splendid judgment, strict integrity, who has managed the affairs to entire satisfaction,” Simon Wolf heard the commissioners conclude, “but unfortunately he is not a Christian.” Whether this would have been enough to dismiss Bendell cannot be known, for in March 1873 he announced his resignation. He was getting married and sought to be closer to home. J. A. Tonner of the Dutch Reformed Church was immediately selected to succeed him. Thereafter, into the twentieth century, Jews were unofficially excluded from most aspects of Indian affairs. Policy makers denied religious “outsiders,” like the Jews, any role in transforming Native Americans into “insiders.”30

  Grant, whose loyalty to those who served under him was legendary, compensated Bendell by appointing him consul to Helsingør (Elsinore), Denmark—a more suitable appointment for the newly married physician.31 The president may have sought to signal, in this way, that those who carried out his policies toward the Indians would not be permitted to extend their prejudices into diplomatic appointments. Whatever the case, the appointment of Bendell, like the appointments of Salomon and Wolf and the attempted appointments of Seligman and Solomons, left no doubt as to Grant’s overall attitude toward Jews. Far from excluding them, he now went out of his way to include them. During his administration, Jews won growing acceptance within American political life.

  * * *

  a Probably the youngest Jew who owed his career to a Grant appointment was sixteen-year-old Albert A. Michelson. Upon the recommendation of Nevada congressman Thomas Fitch and Vice Admiral David D. Porter, Grant, on June 28, 1869, appointed him to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Only ten appointments-at-large were allotted to the president, and Michelson was his eleventh appointment. But the strong recommendations that Michelson received, coupled with Congressman Fitch’s observation that “these people [the Jews] are a powerful element in our politics, the boy who is uncommonly bright and studious is a pet among them, and I do most steadfastly believe that his appointment at your hands, would do more to fasten these people to the Republican cause, than anything else that could be done,” brushed such obstacles aside. Michelson, in 1907, won America’s first Nobel Prize in Physics. Dorothy Michelson Livingston, The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 22–27.

  b When Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in 1865, Grant had introduced him to Parker. Noticing his dark features, Lee at first mistook him for a Black man and reportedly “flushed with indignation.” Recognizing his mistake, he extended his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker, according to the account, took Lee’s hand and replied, “We are all Americans.” William H. Armstrong, Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief (Syracuse,
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 108–10.

  5

  “This Age of Enlightenment”

  For all of the domestic Jewish appointments that Grant made, his real test, Jews knew, would come in the international arena. How would the president respond if foreign governments persecuted and expelled the Jews? Less than nine months after his inauguration, such a test arrived in the form of a Russian replay of General Orders No. 11. Leading newspapers, including the New York Times, reported that two thousand Jews were being “removed from the Bessarabian frontier” to the Russian interior. They were charged, among other things, with smuggling.1

  Prior to the Civil War, President James Buchanan had declared that the United States had “neither the right nor the duty … to express a moral censorship over the conduct of other independent governments.” He therefore refused in 1858 to join the worldwide campaign on behalf of Edgardo Mortara, the young Italian Jewish boy who had been secretly baptized, torn from his home, and, in accordance with local law, handed over to the Catholic Church for upbringing. Realizing that American slave children were similarly being torn from their homes and handed over to new masters, and aware that under the tit-for-tat rules of international diplomacy other nations might choose to interfere in America’s debate over slavery, Buchanan fell back upon a time-honored principle of international law: no country has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.2