When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  Introduction

  1. EJ (2nd ed.), 8:35. The identical quote appeared in the first edition.

  2. See now the family’s unpublished memoir, “General Orders No. 11: The Mack Brothers—Real Trouble Makers” in AJA. It reveals that Buddy Mack “only begrudgingly” acknowledged Grant’s episode with his great-grandfather.

  3. David Quigley, Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

  4. Constitution of the National Reform Association, http://candst.tripod.com/nra.htm.

  5. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002).

  6. American Israelite (May 20, 1881), 364.

  7. American Hebrew (December 10, 1897), 163.

  8. American Israelite (July 31, 1885).

  9. New York Times (March 13, 2010).

  10. New York Times (March 22, 2010).

  1. General Orders No. 11

  1. For biographical information on Kaskel, see Hamagid 7 (1863): 84; Isaac Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” PAJHS 17 (1909): 117–19; and Kaskel’s own statement to the press, December 30, 1862, a copy of which is in SC-4218, AJA. Jacob Kaskel is mentioned in J. Cohn, Geschichte der jüdischen Gemeinde Rawitsch (Berlin: L. Lam, 1915), 69. On Paducah, see Isaac W. Bernheim, History of the Settlement of Jews in Paducah and the Lower Ohio Valley (Paducah, Ky.: Temple Israel, 1912); Amy Hill Shevitz, Jewish Communities on the Ohio River: A History (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 98–101; John E. L. Robertson, “Paducah: Origins to Second Class,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 66 (1968): 108–36; John E. L. Robertson, Paducah: Frontier to the Atomic Age (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Books, 2002).

  2. Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Selected Letters, 1839–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 175.

  3. Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 118; Hamagid 7 (1863): 84; Joseph S. Kaskel to Bertram W. Korn (October 7, 1950), Bertram W. Korn Papers, box 6, file 5, AJA.

  4. Stephen V. Ash, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant’s General Orders No. 11,” The Historian 44 (August 1982): 505–23, esp. 514–17; S. L. Phelps to A. H. Foote (December 30, 1861) in Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1908), series I, vol. 22, p. 479.

  5. This and subsequent quotes are from Kaskel’s statement to the press (Decem-ber 30, 1862), SC-4218, AJA.

  6. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 123; Robertson, Paducah: Frontier to the Atomic Age, 44.

  7. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 122.

  8. Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years with Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 32–40, quote on 36; N. P. Chipman to Samuel R. Curtis (December 24, 1862) in OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 471; Grant to Commanding Officer Expedition Down Mississippi (December 23, 1862), in OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 463: “These raids have cut off communication, so that I have had nothing from the north for over a week.” For background on these raids, see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 578; David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 388–90.

  9. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants”: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews, The Tenenbaum Family Lecture Series in Judaic Studies (Atlanta: Emory University, 2005), 7.

  10. OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 506. The “official record” slightly diverges in wording and spelling from the original, reprinted in PUSG 7, p. 54. Robertson, Paducah: Frontier to the Atomic Age, 44, identifies Wolff as “David,” but Bernheim, History of the Settlement of Jews in Paducah, quoting the 1859 Paducah City Directory, provides the names of all three brothers, none of whom was known as David. In writing to Lincoln they identified themselves as “D. Wolff & Bros.”

  11. Isaac Mayer Wise claimed that Lincoln “informed General Halleck instantly” upon receipt of Kaskel’s telegram, but no external evidence supports this. See Israelite (January 16, 1863), 218.

  12. Memphis Daily Bulletin (January 6, 1863), as cited in Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 272n16.

  13. PUSG 7, p. 55. Grant’s “report” on January 15, 1863, consisted simply of copies “of General Orders from this Department.”

  14. A copy of Kaskel’s statement to the press (December 30, 1862) is found in SC-4218, AJA, photocopied from an unidentified clipping. It appeared in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (January 2, 1863), in the Memphis Daily Bulletin (January 6, 1863), and in the New York Jewish Record (January 9, 1863). Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 124, identifies the steamer as the “Charley Bowens” and Kaskel calls it the “Chaley Bowe,” but it was in all likelihood Captain Henry T. Dexter’s Charley Bowen; see Myron J. Smith Jr., The Timberclads in the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), 38, 65, 90.

  15. Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 118, has him arriving by steamer in Cairo, Illinois, on his way to Washington. The Israelite never mentions that Kaskel was in Cincinnati or that Isaac Mayer Wise met him, but it does mention the letters he collected from Lilienthal and Wolf. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 124, concludes from this that Kaskel paused in Cincinnati “only momentarily,” which is plausible but not certain.

  16. Israelite (June 14, 1861), 396; Sefton D. Temkin, “Isaac Mayer Wise and the Civil War,” AJA 15 (1963): 120–42; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 96–98.

  17. Israelite (January 2, 1863), 202.

  18. Isaac M. Wise to Edward [sic] Stanton (December 30, 1862), Isaac Mayer Wise Digital Archive, http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/wise/view.php?id=2630 (accessed October 15, 2009).

  19. Isaac M. Wise to Edward [sic] M. Stanton (January 4, 1863), Isaac Mayer Wise Digital Archive, http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/wise/view.php?id=2631 (accessed October 15, 2009).

  20. This undated clipping [January 6, 1863?], and a similar one attributed to the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune, is found in Jacob R. Marcus’s collection of “Civil War Documents,” now in AJA.

  21. Robert Shosteck, “The Jewish Community of Washington, D.C., During the Civil War,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 56 (1966–67): 334–35; Adolphus Solomons to Henry S. Hart (January 6, 1863), Board of Delegates of American Israelites Papers, AJHS. Myer Isaacs, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites: Final Report,” PAJHS 29 (1925): 106, declares that Adolphus Solomons “represented to the President and the Secretary of War the illegal, unjust and tyrannical character” of Grant’s order, and implies that this affected the course of events. Neither the board’s own papers at AJHS nor any other source warrants such a conclusion.

  22. United Order of Bne Brith Missouri Loge [sic] to His Excellency Abr. Lincoln (January 5, 1863), copy in Philip Lax Archive/Archives of B’nai B’rith, Washington, D.C., and in S-C 4218, AJA; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 126.

  23. Sarna, American Judaism, 112, 375; Ash, “Civil War Exodus,” 513.

  24. Israelite (January 2, 1863), 202; Jewish Record (N.Y.) (January 13, 1863), online at http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/g011.htm (accessed October 16, 2009).

  25. Spiegel was the highest-ranking Jewish officer under Grant’s command; see John Y. Simon, “That Obnoxious Order,” Civil War Times Illustrated 23, no. 6 (1984): 14, and A Jewish Colonel in the Civil War: Marcus M. Spiegel of the Ohio Volunteers, ed. Jean Powers Soman and Frank K. Byrne (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); on Trounstine see chapter 2, and Cadwallader, Three Years with Grant, 40.

  26. Telegrams concerning General Orders No. 11 and Jewish sutlers are listed in PUSG 7, p. 53. On sutlers, see “sutler,” Oxford English Dictionary, online at http://dictionary.oed.com.resources.library.brandeis.edu/cgi/entry/50243710, and David Michael Delo, Peddlers and Post Trade
rs: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992). Friedrich von Hayek noted other examples of less respected trades opened up to alien races; see Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 67.

  27. Israelite (January 23, 1863), 229; on Sullivan, see Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 487–88.

  28. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 125; Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 118.

  29. Israelite (January 16, 1863), 218; PUSG 7, pp. 53–54; a follow-up circular letter went out the next day (January 7) with essentially the same text; see OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 544.

  30. Markens, “Lincoln and the Jews,” 119.

  31. Kelton to Grant (January 5, 1863) in PUSG 7, p. 54; OR, series I, vol. 24 (part 1), 9.

  32. Philadelphia Inquirer (January 6, 1863), 2; [Baltimore] Sun (January 6, 1863); undated clippings in Jacob R. Marcus’s collection of “Civil War Documents,” now in AJA; Adolphus Solomons to Henry S. Hart (January 6, 1863), Board of Delegates of American Israelites Papers, AJHS; Israelite (January 16, 1863), 218.

  33. Israelite (January 16, 1863), 218; the article was reprinted as far away as San Francisco: San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (February 10, 1863).

  2. “Jews as a Class”

  1. Biographical Sketch of the Honorable Lazarus W. Powell (Frankfurt, Ky.: S.I.M Major Public Printer, 1868), quotes are from 61, 63, 73; E. Merton Coulter, “Powell, Lazarus Whitehead,” Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner’s 1935), 148–49; Mark E. Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  2. Journal of the Senate, 37th Congress, 3rd Session (January 5, 1863), 78; Congressional Globe, Senate, 37th Congress, 3rd Session (January 9, 1863), 245.

  3. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 3rd Session (January 7, 1863), part 1, p. 222; Journal of the House of Representatives, 37th Congress 3rd session (January 7, 1863), 151; E. B. Washburne to Abraham Lincoln (January 6, 1863), Robert Todd Lincoln Collection, reprinted in Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 273 (copy of the original in Jacob Rader Marcus Papers, Civil War box 1, AJA); Ari Hoogenboom, “Pendleton, George Hunt,” American National Biography Online (accessed Octo-ber 25, 2009). For the importance of Washburne’s support to Grant, see Julia Dent Grant, The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (New York: Putnam, 1975), 107.

  4. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 3rd Session (January 9, 1863), 245–46; Biographical Sketch of the Honorable Lazarus W. Powell, 73–76.

  5. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 3rd Session (January 9, 1863), 245–46.

  6. Cincinnati Commercial (January 6, 1863); Cincinnati Enquirer (January 3, 1863); Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 128–30; New York Times (January 18, 1863), 4.

  7. “On Persecution,” The Occident 20 (February–March 1863), online at http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/on_persecution.html#Related_Pages (accessed Oc-tober 27, 2009). Leeser’s understanding of “exile” follows the Talmudic teaching in TB Brachot 34b, Sanhedrin 99a.

  8. Ibid.; Eli Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1989), esp. 97; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, xx, 158–59; Neely, The Fate of Liberty, 107–9.

  9. Harper’s Weekly (August 1, 1863), as quoted in Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, xxi; Gary L. Bunker and John Appel, “ ‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82 (1994): 43–71; Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 190–203, 223–26; Ellis Rivkin, “A Decisive Pattern in American Jewish History,” in Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati: AJA, 1958), 38.

  10. Philip Trounstine to Major C. S. Hayes (March 3, 1863) online at http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/trnstine.htm. Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years with Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 40, reports that Trounstine “was the only cavalry officer in the service that was of Hebraic extraction. He enlisted early and served creditably to the end.”

  11. OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 172; series III, vol. 2, 350; series I, vol. 20 (part 2), 114; series I, vol. 15, 583. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 624, discusses Butler and the cotton trade. In a revealing correspondence with Myer Isaacs of the Board of Delegates, Butler showed how little he knew about Jews, identifying as “Jews” several Confederates who were not Jewish at all. “My experience with men of the Jewish faith or nation,” he confessed, “has been an unfortunate one.” The correspondence is reprinted in PAJHS 29 (1925): 119–30.

  12. Morris U. Schappes, A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950), 80; A. M. Waddell as quoted in Leonard Rogoff, Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 96. Waddell, a white supremacist, later played a central role in the 1898 Wilmington insurrection and riot. For “as a class” references, see OR, series I, vol. 47 (part 3), 461; OR, series I, vol. 22 (part 1), 814; OR, series III, vol. 3, 516; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, series I, vol. 25, 474.

  13. OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 240; OR, series I, vol. 22 (part 2), 473; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 785–86; Neely, The Fate of Freedom, 46–49; Charles R. Mink, “General Orders, No. 11: The Forced Evacuation of Civilians During the Civil War,” Military Affairs 34 (December 1980): 132–37.

  14. Stephen V. Ash, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant’s General Orders No. 11,” The Historian 44 (August 1982): 511; Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 279n70.

  15. H. H. Ben Sasson, “Expulsions,” EJ (2nd ed., 2007), 6:624–26; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” in Benjamin R. Gampel, Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3–22. As late as 1938, according to one poll, one-fifth of all Americans wanted to “drive Jews out of the United States.” Charles Stember, Jews in the Mind of America (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 121–23.

  16. Israelite 9 (February 20, 1863), 258; on the Associated Press, see Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1994), quote from p. 130.

  17. I have found but two references to this theme: a polemical footnote in Schappes, A Documentary History, 704n16; and a single paragraph in Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 132.

  18. Louis Ruchames, “The Abolitionists and the Jews: Some Further Thoughts,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram W. Korn (New York: Ktav, 1976), 508, 511; Israelite 9 (January 16, 1863), 218; reprinted in Schappes, A Documentary History, 475.

  19. Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006) masterfully explores this theme.

  20. [New York] Jewish Record (January 23, 1863); Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, 132.

  21. The Occident 20 (Feb.–March 1863): 498–99; see also his prejudiced comments on 493, 497. Also available online at http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/on_persecution.html.

  22. John V. D. Du Bois, “General Orders No. 2,” as quoted in PUSG 7, p. 9n1; for related complaints see p. 51n.

  23. David G. Surdam, “Traders or Traitors: Northern Cotton Trading During the Civil War,” Business and Economic History 28 (Winter 1999): 301–12, esp. 302; Stanley Lebergott, “Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling, 1861–1865,” Journal of Economic History 41 (December 1981): 867–88.

  24. Grant to Christopher P. Wolcott (December 17, 1862) in PUSG 7, pp. 56–57; OR, series I, vol. 17 (part 2), 141; OR, series I, vol. 25 (part 2), 80; McPherson, Battle Cry
of Freedom, 600–625; Joseph H. Parks, “A Confederate Trade Center Under Federal Occupation: Memphis, 1862 to 1865,” Journal of Southern History 7 (August 1941): 289–314.

  25. Salo Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 33, 85–86.

  26. This communication, likely from 1863, is reprinted in Moritz Ellinger, History of Washington Lodge No. 19 Independent Order B’nai B’rith (New York: n.p., 1904), 12.

  27. Heyman Herzberg, “Civil War Adventures of a Georgia Merchant,” in Jacob R. Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956), 3:116–32 (typescript of original in the AJA).

  28. Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 2:138–39. Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, founders of the eponymous banking firm, were likewise blockade-runners: “Mayer maneuvered whatever cotton he could through the blockade, and Emanuel sold it to an eager market in New York”; see Peter Chapman, The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844–2008 (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010), 28–29.

  29. A. E. Frankland, “Kronikals of the Times—Memphis, 1862,” AJA 9 (October 1957): 83–125; see also Judy G. Ringel, Children of Israel: The Story of Temple Israel, Memphis, Tennessee: 1854–2004 (Memphis: Temple Israel Books, 2004), 11–13.

  30. Chicago Times as quoted in Parks, “A Confederate Trade Center,” 293; Albert Richardson, A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1868), 276; Charles A. Dana to Edwin M. Stanton (January 21, 1863) in OR, series I, vol. 52 (part 1), 331; S. A. Hurlbut to John A. Rawlins (March 7, 1863) in OR, series I, vol. 24 (part 3), 92. On Dana as a cotton speculator, see McFeely, Grant, 123.

  31. See OR, series I, vol. 11 (part 3), 336, for intelligence provided by “an intelligent Jew boy, fourteen years of age, who is right from Richmond”; and OR, series I, vol. 30 (part 4), 4–8, for the remarkable report by twenty-year-old Jewish immigrant Louis Trager, “a freelance intelligence operative, purveying information to the Union Army, which he picked up on business trips and visits to the Confederacy”; cf. Milton M. Grossman, Hoopskirts and Huppas: A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Garfunkel-Trager Family in America (New York: AJHS, 1999), 17.