When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  Four years later, Illinois senator Richard J. Oglesby, who had served under Grant in the Civil War, recommended Browne for a small remunerative government position on the basis of his “high scholarly and literary attainments” and his “disease of the eyes.” Browne met with Grant at that time, and later published what he claimed was an interview with the president in which, among other things, he quoted Grant as saying that “the Jew lives longer because he loves his life more,” takes fewer risks than non-Jews, and is therefore rarely injured in railroad accidents, that Jewish soldiers were nevertheless “wonderfully courageous,” and that he had “intimate friends among the Jews.” Grant approved a minor consulate appointment for Browne (“If there is a South American consulate Mr. Browne can have, I have no objection to his appointment”), but none proved sufficiently remunerative and no appointment was made. Still, Browne kept up ties with Grant, and, according to his great-granddaughter, visited with him occasionally after he left office.24

  On the Sabbath following Grant’s death, Browne announced to his small New York congregation that “the Jews have lost a great friend in the death of Gen. Grant.” He then proclaimed that it was time to “speak the whole truth” concerning General Orders No. 11. Grant, he disclosed, had made a confession to his Methodist minister, the Reverend Dr. John Philip Newman, in which he said the following: “I consider it now my duty to make known a secret that I have kept these twenty years and locate the responsibility upon the proper parties that have come to me from Washington direct. I protested against it, but had to promulgate it against my will. I shall make this statement in my book likewise.” Newman, Browne said, had so informed his own family, and apparently confided in his friend Browne as well. Having revealed the “secret” to his congregants, Browne went on to deliver a stirring eulogy suggesting that Grant was even greater than Moses: “Moses liberated 3,000,000 of people, his own brethren, from Egyptian bondage. Grant liberated 3,000,000 of people, a race not his own, from American bondage.” At the conclusion of his address, he instructed his entire congregation to rise and recite the mourner’s kaddish in Grant’s memory. “This is a prayer,” he declared with typical exaggeration, “never recited for a non-Jew before.” Thanks to wire services, the sensational story was reprinted around the country and Browne for a time became a celebrity.25

  In fact, Browne’s story does not bear close scrutiny. The rabbi himself, just a few years earlier, had quoted Grant in a personal interview as taking full responsibility for General Orders No. 11. Grant at that time explained that “there were army followers among us. It happened one day that a number of complaints reached me and in each case it was a Jew and I gave the order excusing the Jewish traders … it was no ill-feeling or want of good-feeling toward the Jews. If such complaints would have been lodged against a dozen men each of whom wore a white cravat, a black broadcloth suit, beaver or gold spectacles, I should probably have issued a similar order against men so dressed.” Moreover, contrary to Browne, Grant made no mention at all of General Orders No. 11 in his memoirs. His son Frederick, we have seen, explained in his father’s name that it “was a matter long past and best not referred to.” Finally, as Edward Rosewater—editor of the Omaha Bee and a telegraph officer in the White House when General Orders No. 11 was issued—wrote in a sharp rebuttal, “Only three men in Washington had authority to issue orders to Gen. Grant”: Abraham Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, and Henry Halleck. Rosewater testified that not one of the three had issued any such order, and labeled Browne an “impudent imposter.”26

  The Reverend Dr. John Philip Newman, in his own lengthy eulogy for Grant delivered at Mount McGregor on August 4, made a brief reference to General Orders No. 11 that seemed to echo what Browne had disclosed: “The order issued during the war, excluding certain Jewish traders from a given military district, did not originate with him,” he declared, “but came from higher authority, and was not against the religion of the Jews.” The Jewish Messenger properly criticized this as “perverting history,” since Grant’s order had excluded “Jews as a class,” not “some Jewish traders,” and “the order was his and not dictated by higher authority.” It lamented, though, that the whole subject had been raised. “Contemporaries that refer to the ‘Order No 11’ incident in Grant’s career—which none regretted more than he—are certainly ungracious,” it complained. As for Newman, it submitted that as Grant’s “eulogist and friend the reverend should have been silent on this subject.”27

  The fact that so many people during the period of Grant’s death and funeral were far from “silent on the subject” underscores the importance of General Orders No. 11 for understanding Grant’s career from 1862 onward. When General Grant expelled the Jews from his war zone, he raised questions about himself and about America’s relationship to the Jews that shaped the remainder of his life. As president and even in his postpresidential years those questions repeatedly bobbed to the surface. They colored all of his dealings with Jews, tainting his wartime record but also shaping his remarkable postwar record of support for Jews that lasted into the 1880s. Whenever he interacted with Jews, and especially when Jews suffered persecution, one senses that embarrassing memories of General Orders No. 11 flooded into his mind. Like other personal failings in his life, the mistake proved difficult for him to live down; he spent the rest of his life making amends for it.

  Jews knew how much Grant regretted issuing his order. He had apologized for it publically and numbers of Jews had heard him lament it privately as well. Some of his non-Jewish friends also heard him regret what he had done. John M. Thayer, who knew Grant from the war onward and was appointed by him governor of the Wyoming Territory, recalled at the time of Grant’s death that “Grant sincerely regretted having ever issued the order, and in conversation with him said it was a great mistake … it was a source of great regret to him that he had been instrumental in inflicting a wrong upon [the Jews].” Grant’s wife, Julia, we have seen, likewise characterized the order against “Jews as a class” as “obnoxious.” She knew that her husband felt guilty about ever having issued it.28

  The funeral of President Ulysses S. Grant (illustration credit ill.34)

  Those who planned Grant’s funeral in New York, however, preferred Rabbi Browne’s version of events absolving the general of all blame for the order. Notwithstanding burgeoning social antisemitism in America and the embrace of anti-Jewish hatred by some cultural and political leaders in Europe, they understood that America’s greatest heroes were untainted by charges of religious prejudice. They wanted Grant purged of that taint as well. Perhaps for that reason, and likely at the instigation of John Newman, Browne was invited to serve as one of the fourteen honorary pallbearers at Grant’s state funeral on August 8 in New York as representative of the entire Jewish community. The city’s better-known rabbis, Reform and Orthodox alike, were all passed over (much to their annoyance), even as their counterparts among the city’s foremost Protestant and Catholic clergy stood conspicuously among the honorees.29

  August 8 was a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and that posed a problem for Browne. The honorary pallbearers were scheduled to ride the seven-and-a-half-mile route of the funeral from City Hall to the vault in Riverside Park where Grant was to be buried. Riding on the Sabbath meant flouting Jewish law, which bars traveling in a carriage on the day of rest. Browne, as a Reform rabbi, had not always honored the Sabbath so punctiliously, but he considered it improper to publicly violate it as a representative of the Jewish community as a whole. Besides, he occupied the right wing of the Reform movement, being more traditional than Isaac Mayer Wise. His German immigrant congregation was likewise quite traditional—years later, indeed, it transformed itself into the Park Avenue Synagogue and joined the Conservative movement. So in a well-publicized bid to honor the Jewish Sabbath (and in a backhanded slap at Radical Reform rabbis who sought to shift the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday), Browne announced that “his religion forbade him to ride on the Sabbath … and it would be necessary for him to forgo
attendance unless he were allowed to walk.” The harried planners, who needed to worry about logistics for tens of thousands of people expected at the funeral, turned a deaf ear to this plea, but Browne went over their heads. “Since I cannot honor your sainted father and my religion both,” he telegraphed Frederick Grant, he would “have to forego the honor.” The Grant family promptly interceded—when it came to Jews it had every reason to be especially sensitive—and the decision was reversed. The Daily Graphic on August 8 carried the story just as Browne would have wanted it: “Rabbi Browne is ‘footing it’ to Riverside in honor of the Jewish Sabbath, and every time he sets foot upon the pavement he tramples upon the hearts of his opponents who tried to transfer the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday.”30c

  Rabbi E. B. M. (“Alphabet”) Browne, wearing his medals (illustration credit ill.35)

  Original tomb of General Grant, Riverside Park, New York City, 1885 (illustration credit ill.36)

  Having represented Jews at the funeral, Browne continued to honor Grant every year thereafter by journeying to “the tomb on Riverside Drive to place a wreath there.” At the thirty-fifth memorial service, in 1920, he declared proudly: “Grant, we are here again.” By then, he had styled himself “the oldest Minister in the American pulpit” and had lived long enough to become the last of Grant’s pallbearers to annually appear at the tomb.31

  The vault where Browne placed his wreath in 1920 was not the one in which Grant had originally been buried. Indeed, it required twelve years of planning, politicking, and fund-raising before Grant’s remains were transferred into what is today known as Grant’s Tomb. Opened on April 27, 1897, which would have been the general’s seventy-fifth birthday, the tomb, according to scholars, was “rooted in the most substantial tradition of funerary memorials.” Its prototype was said to be the mausoleum of the Roman emperor Hadrian, the Mausoleum Hadriani now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo (in Rome). From a Jewish perspective, that design could hardly have been less appropriate. Hadrian, after all, had been the Roman emperor who brutally put down the Jewish revolt against Rome (132–135 CE) led by Bar Kokhba. He murdered Jews by the thousands including eminent rabbis, restricted the study of the Torah and the practice of Judaism, and erected a gentile city (Aelia Capitolina) on the site of the destroyed city of Jerusalem. His name, in Jewish tradition, is followed by the imprecation “may his bones rot.”32

  Architect John Hemenway Duncan had no reason to know that, and Jews of the day, if they did know it, were silent. As a result, when Grant’s Tomb was dedicated, Jews joined with fellow New Yorkers—about a million of them, it was estimated—to participate in and watch the grand celebration. Pittsburgh’s Jewish newspaper listed by name ten local Jews from that city who journeyed to New York for the occasion. A huge “Grant parade,” involving some fifty thousand marchers, included “pupils of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, with their famous band,” seventy-five “Alliance Cadets” representing the city’s Hebrew Institute, and “many lads of Jewish parentage” from the public schools. This time, probably to the relief of the planners, General Orders No. 11 went unmentioned during the festivities. Instead, Rabbi Joseph Silverman of New York’s Temple Emanu-El, the city’s flagship Reform congregation, delivered a stirring sermon in advance of the event, taking as his text the “inscription over the door of the beautiful mausoleum,” Grant’s famous epigram “Let us have peace.” He defended Grant against those who misunderstood him, labeled him “the Prince of Peace,” and praised the new edifice as a “monument to his valor and greatness.” Simon Wolf, in a piece printed in several Jewish newspapers, likewise offered a eulogistic tribute. “His tomb will stand on the banks of the Hudson,” he concluded, “but his memory and achievements will live in the hearts of all men who love liberty and admire nobility of character for all time to come.”33

  Grant’s Tomb, Riverside Drive, New York City, 1897 (illustration credit ill.37)

  Wolf, like so many other eulogists, proved much too optimistic. Though Grant was as popular as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the late nineteenth century, in the twentieth century his reputation fell under withering assault. Historians, many of them Southerners critical of his benevolent policy toward African Americans, criticized both the way he waged war and the way he forged peace. They blamed him for the Civil War’s high death rate, for the failures of Reconstruction, for the corruption of his underlings, and for his personal failings. They derided him as a butcher and a drunkard. They ranked him close to the bottom among all American presidents: twenty-eighth out of twenty-nine presidents in 1948 (only Warren G. Harding ranked lower), and thirty-eighth out of forty-one in 1996.34

  Jews joined in this outpouring of criticism. A standard work of American Jewish history by Rufus Learsi (Israel Goldberg), published in 1954, devoted three closely printed pages to Grant’s General Orders No. 11 and barely a mention to the rest of his interactions with Jews. “Although Grant gave assurances that he regretted the Order,” Learsi admonished, “those attempts at exculpation … were not convincing: the devil’s tail of politics bulged out of them only too plainly.” Two scholarly volumes on American antisemitism, published in 1994, reinforced the sense that the nation’s eighteenth president was a hater of Jews. The Encyclopaedia Judaica confirms that in Jewish memory “Grant’s name has been linked irrevocably with anti-Jewish prejudice.”35

  It is, of course, understandable why Jewish history should vilify a leader who blamed “Jews as a class” for the sins of smugglers and traders, and then expelled “Jews as a class” from the entire territory under his command. Yet Ulysses S. Grant deserved better. Having apologized for his anti-Jewish order in 1868, he became highly sensitive, even hypersensitive, to Jewish concerns. He came to appreciate the diversity of Jews, displaying particular appreciation for those who pulled themselves up, as he himself had done, from poverty to respectability. He appointed more Jews to public office than any of his predecessors. He sought to bring Jews (as well as Blacks) into the mainstream of American political life. He acted to promote human rights for Jews around the world.

  Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” the Jewish comedian Groucho Marx used to ask down-and-out contestants on his popular 1950s quiz show, You Bet Your Life. The question, while always good for a laugh (in fact, Ulysses and Julia Grant were “entombed” and not “buried” there at all), concealed a deep truth. By the 1950s, Ulysses S. Grant had become a mystery and a caricature to many of his countrymen. His tomb was neglected, the memory of his achievements obscured.

  Careful reexamination of the record by historians, in recent years, has revised the image of the man “buried” in Grant’s Tomb. New biographies set forth many of his political achievements, especially in the area of race. A 2008 poll of top international and political commentators lifted him, for the first time ever, into the second quartile of American presidents, ranking him as number 18.36

  Grant’s record with respect to Jews now likewise requires revision. During his administration, Jews moved from outsider to insider status in the United States, and from weakness to strength. Having abruptly expelled Jews in 1862, Grant as president significantly empowered them. He insisted, over the objections of those who propounded narrower visions of America, that the country could embrace people of different races, religions, and creeds. He endeavored, as president, to further human rights at home and abroad.

  Reconstruction is an ongoing and never-ending process in America. Over time, albeit in fits and starts, with forward steps and backward ones, freedom and human rights have advanced. Innumerable mistakes have been made along the way, from which Jews, African Americans, and other minority groups have suffered grievously. Fortunately, many of these mistakes have, over the course of time, been corrected.

  So it was with General Orders No. 11. Its unexpected aftermath—the transformation of Ulysses S. Grant from enemy to friend, from Haman to Mordecai, from a general who expelled “Jews as a class” to a president who embraced Jews as individuals—reminds us that even great figures in his
tory can learn from their mistakes.

  In America, hatred can be overcome.

  * * *

  a Grant, according to Hamilton Fish, “gave to all who asked of him, giving from five to ten times the amounts that the applicants could have reasonably or probably expected.” Hamilton Fish, interview, The Independent, July 30, 1885, as quoted in Smith, Grant, 607.

  b Another sign of late-nineteenth-century Jews’ strong attachment to Grant is the tradition that he was moved by Aaron Z. Friedman’s Tub Taam; or, Vindication of the Israelitish Way of Killing Animals (1876) “to eat only ritually slaughtered meat in the latter part of his life.” There is no evidence either in Grant’s published papers or in his wife’s memoir that he insisted upon eating only kosher meat, or had even read Friedman’s book, but one biographer does report that “throughout life the only meat he would eat was beef cooked to a cinder, for the sight of blood destroyed his appetite.” Since kosher meat is drained and salted to remove all traces of blood, Grant’s aversion to the sight of blood may be the source of this tradition. Joakim Isaacs, “Candidate Grant and the Jews,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 409n25; J. F. C. Fuller, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 64.