Today’s Weekly History Thread commemorates the blackest mark on Ulysses Grant’s ledger: General Order No. 11.
On December 17, 1862, Grant, frustrated by the exploitation of wartime cotton trade by civilian merchants, issued the following proclamation:
- The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department [of the Tennessee] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
- Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.
- No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
Many of Grant’s biographers have agonized trying to explain this order; perhaps Grant used “Jews” as a shorthand for traders in general? Perhaps it was an overreaction to revelations that his own father, Jesse Grant (who never hesitated to trade on his son’s name), was involved in unscrupulous cotton trading? It’s not like either of these are very good excuses to begin with. But no, Grant’s private correspondence of the time is littered with imprecations against the “Israelites” who he thought were swindling the Army.
In at least three communities occupied by Union troops – Paducah, Kentucky, and Holly Springs and Oxford, Mississippi – the order was carried out; the entire Jewish populations of these towns were expelled at bayonet point. Jewish groups across the Northern states instantly reacted with horror, petitioning President Lincoln who immediately rescinded the order. General Henry Halleck expressed sympathy with Grant’s concerns but noted that “in terms proscribing an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
Grant spent the rest of his life trying to atone for this action. While running for President, he insisted that “I do not sustain the order” and reached out to Jewish leaders like Rabbi Isaac Wise to apologize. He further did much as President to strengthen ties with the Jewish community, from attending the opening of a synagogue in Washington to appointing Jewish civil servants to denouncing pogroms against Jews in Russia (to which the political cartoon above refers, accusing him of hypocrisy). He handily won the Jewish vote in both of his elections and was largely forgiven his transgressions by Wise and others. Still, a modern reader finds it hard not to view General Order No. 11 as, at best, a massive lapse in judgment; at worst, one of America’s most regrettable expressions of the world’s oldest prejudice.