DECEMBER 17, 1862:
General
Ulysses S. Grant U.S.A. issues General Order Number 11:
“1. 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.
2. 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.
3. No passes will be given these people to
visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade
permits.”
Grant issued this odious order because he believed that “Jew
traders” or “Jew pedlars” were conducting illicit cotton trade with the South
in the States of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. While this was true to an
extent, not all illicit cotton traders were Jewish, nor were all Jews were
involved in the illicit trade; yet, Grant’s order applied to “The Jews, as a
class.”
This was not the first reference that Grant had made to
“Israelites” and their supposedly grasping ways. Grant clearly suffered from
that form of Judeopathy that stereotyped all Jews as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice:
“The
Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at
any woodyard on the river and make their way through the country. If not
permitted to buy cotton themselves, they will act as agents for someone else…”
In general terms, Grant had long been concerned about
“trading with the enemy”; this was a particular problem in the Border States,
where members of families and even partners in business, often had divided
political loyalties but maintained good personal relationships---who
constituted the “enemy” in such cases?
Throughout
the war there had been a thriving sub
rosa trade in cotton moving North and manufactured goods moving South. Grant
wanted to impede it, and issued a number of orders severely restricting trade
and prescribing penalties for rulebreakers, but General Order Number 11 applied
to all Jews, regardless of
occupation, age or sex.
To be fair, Grant may not have intended such a
wide-ranging effect---he excused various Jewish business owners and their
families freely from the order when asked, and the order was implemented
unevenly throughout the region---in part, because the notoriously racist Nathan
Bedford Forrest (who after the war founded the Ku Klux Klan) raided the telegraph
lines near Grant’s Headquarters that day and cut the lines, disrupting
communications for some time. Nevertheless, within the allotted 24 hours, Jews
were driven from Holly Springs, Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi and Paducah,
Kentucky.
When word of these expulsions reached the North, there was
condemnation of Grant’s actions as “medieval”.
A delegation of Paducah’s Jews
traveled to Washington to see President Lincoln, who they met with on January
3rd. “And so,” Lincoln is said to
have commented when General Order Number 11 was placed before him, “the children of Israel were driven from the
happy land of Canaan?”
“Yes,” the spokesman replied, warming to Lincoln’s Biblical
allusion, “and that is why we have come
unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”
“And this protection,” Lincoln declared “they
shall have at once.” With that, Lincoln went immediately to the Telegraph
Room of the White House and issued an order countermanding General Order Number
11. After going through channels, General Halleck to General Grant (and over
Halleck’s objections to the President), General Order Number 11 was revoked on
January 17, 1863.
Lincoln later said he was surprised that Grant had
issued such a command and said, "To
condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad."
Lincoln himself stated specifically that he drew no distinction between Jew and
Gentile, and that he would allow no American to be wronged because of his
religious affiliation.
In the meantime, however, some affected Jewish families had
no choice but to relocate to the North or to Mexico or the Caribbean, tragically
leaving their homes and goods behind.
The question has been asked: Was Abraham Lincoln of Jewish
ancestry? It is possible, though the evidence is thin. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise,
founder of Reform Judaism, started his eulogy for Lincoln with the words, "Brethren, the lamented Abraham Lincoln
believed himself to be bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh. He supposed himself to be a descendant of
Hebrew parentage. He said so in my
presence."
Even if this is dismissed as “a pleasantry” between friends,
the Lincoln family may well indeed have had connections to the ancient Jewish
community in Lincoln, England. When the Jews were expelled from England in
1290, many of Lincoln’s Jews became Conversos and maintained some Jewish
customs in secret. Perhaps these people included Lincoln’s remoter ancestors.
President Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born of that
mysterious hill people, the Melungeons, who are believed by some to have been
descended from Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.
Lincoln himself belonged to no Church, and his Biblical
references were almost always Old Testament-based. He had many Jewish friends
and was clearly at ease among The People of The Book.
Whatever the facts of his ancestry,
Lincoln’s fundamental humanity is again highlighted by the episode of General
Order Number 11.
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