By the autumn of 1862, the South’s last great cotton crop was in— picked and baled; worth tens of millions, billions in today’s money—and Deep South states such as Mississippi were literally wallowing in it. But because of the Union blockade, transportation to the regular European buyers was foreclosed, and as the war raged, shipping the cotton north had long been a practical impossibility.
That is, however, until U.S. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase agreed to issue special permits to certain Northern “cotton traders” to make their way through the lines and buy up as much of the Southern stock as possible. This was both to provide a supply to the New England textile mills, whose sources of raw cotton had dried up when fighting began, but more importantly, to remedy the desperate needs of the mills in England and France, in order to deter them from entering the war on the side of the Confederacy to break the Southern blockade.
These cotton traders, noticeably if not predominantly Jewish, would travel south to where the fighting was—including Grant’s department in Tennessee and Mississippi—and receive permits to go through Union lines, purchase cotton from the Southern plantation owners and ship it north by whatever means possible. The arrangement was eagerly accepted by most cotton growers, anxious to not have the bounty of their slaves’ labors rot on the wharfs or railheads, or be burned by the Confederates before it could be confiscated by the Yankee Army.
But soon various authorities within and without both military regimes began saying, “Now wait just a minute.”
First, the Confederate government in Richmond fretted the practice would undercut its hopes of bringing England and France into the war, once those countries saw they could get a supply of cotton despite the Union blockade. That, in part, resulted in General Orders No. 9 by the Rebel General Earl Van Dorn, outlawing the sale of cotton to Northerners, with hanging prescribed for violators.
This did not deter the Southern farmers, however, who continued their trade with renewed vigor, which prompted a different sort of objection from Grant’s deputy, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was in charge of occupying the great cotton-trading city of Memphis. While the U.S. Treasury had justified the commerce with the Southerners partially on the basis that European purchases of cotton bales would provide the Federal government with much-needed specie (gold), Sherman questioned the military logic.
“We cannot carry on a war and trade with a people at the same time,” he announced, arguing that the Southerners were using the money they received to purchase arms, ammunition, medicines and other necessities of war from the same foreign countries that were receiving the cotton, and thus actually prolonging the war in a vicious cycle of contraband.
“The commercial enterprise of the Jews,” Sherman wrote Secretary Chase, “soon discovered that ten cents would buy a pound of cotton behind our army; that four cents would take it to Boston, where they could receive thirty cents in gold. That translated to a 300 percent profit over what they paid the Southerners.”
Accordingly, Sherman had outlawed possession of all gold, silver and U.S. Treasury notes in his district, hoping that would halt the custom. It did not. “The bait was too tempting,” Sherman continued sourly, noting the traders then began bartering with the Southerners for “salt, bacon, percussion caps, etc., that were worth as much as the gold.”
Grant, who after the battles of Shiloh and Corinth had marched his Army of the Tennessee south of Memphis toward the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Miss., chimed in with a letter of his own to the treasury secretary, opining that the cotton traders’ “love of gain is greater than their love of country.” Many traders, without government licenses it seemed, had descended on the South, bribing Army officers, sneaking across front lines, smuggling cotton northward—or so it was charged.
With much more territory under his control than Sherman—including all of Kentucky and Tennessee—on November 9, 1862, Grant issued orders to all railroad conductors that no cotton traders would be permitted in the southern part of his department, adding that “the Israelites should especially be kept out.” Next day he issued another order: “No Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point…they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
Still the traders came, bribing as they went. A month later Grant issued an edict declaring, “cotton speculators, Jews, and other vagrants not having honest means of support, except trading upon the miseries of their Country…will leave in twenty-four hours or they will be sent to duty in the trenches.”
A week later, after peering all day through a misty rain at Confederate defenses across the Yalobusha River near Oxford, Miss., a frustrated Grant wrote to the assistant secretary of war, “the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by the Jews, and other unprincipled traders, [but] they come in with their carpet-sacks despite all that is done to prevent it.”
This Grant followed up immediately—the week before Christmas—with the soon-to-be controversial and afterward, infamous, “Order No. 11.” It decreed that “The Jews, as a class having violated 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.” To punctuate his determination in the matter, Grant ordered his post commanders “to see that all of this class of people [are] required to leave,” and that any who didn’t were imprisoned. As if that weren’t enough, there would be no appeals heard by any headquarters under his command, Grant said.
Like nearly all the rest of their fellow countrymen North and South, Grant and Sherman were, like their ancestors for many generations, usually indifferent, and often superior-acting, to those with other skin colors, religious beliefs, social or national backgrounds—even their gender. But the results of General Orders No. 11 were swift, devastating and sometimes pathetic. Jews in the Middle South were swept up in a Federal dragnet and hustled toward the Ohio River. In effect, the order banished not only Northern Jews who traded and speculated, but long-established non-trading and non-speculating Southern Jewish families from Memphis to Louisville, from Lexington to Paducah, and all points in between. Most embarrassingly, on its face the edict also included Jews in Grant’s own army.
Grant’s subordinates, some overly enthusiastic, went to work uprooting entire Union-loyal Jewish families from their homes, often in the dead of night, and shunted them onto steamboats up the Mississippi, or to Cincinnati and other towns across the Ohio. Horror stories abounded, including that of a baby, tossed bodily into a boat, without its parents, bound for the Ohio side of the river. Other Jews were imprisoned in stockades.
Jewish reaction was immediate, furious and effective—but not at first. On December 29, a delegation of Jewish leaders from Paducah composed a telegram to President Lincoln, expressing outrage at Grant’s action: “The undersigned, good and loyal citizens of the United States and residents of this town for many years, engaged in legitimate business as merchants, feel greatly insulted by this inhuman order, the carrying out of which would be the grossest violation of the Constitution and our rights as citizens under it, and would place us…as outlaws before the whole world.”
Their communication apparently reached Washington, but whether it reached Lincoln has been a matter of speculation through the years. Finally, one member of the delegation, Cesar J. Kaskel, took it upon himself to go to Washington and seek an audience with the president.
When the press published details of Grant’s edict, reactions ran the gamut from support to fury. A movement led by congressional Democrats reflexively opposed to the Lincoln administration condemned the order as a violation of the Constitution, but before their bill reached the floor, Mr. Kaskel had reached Washington.
He went to the White House and was received by Lincoln, who reportedly denied knowing anything about the matter. Kaskel produced a copy of General Orders No. 11 and, after Lincoln read it, the following colloquy is said to have ensued:
“And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Lincoln asked, to which Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham, asking protection.”
“This protection they shall have at once,” the president responded, and he sent Kaskel away with a note instructing Grant’s superior, General Henry W. Halleck, to rescind Order No. 11. “A paper purporting to be General Orders, No. 11, issued by you December 17, has been presented here. By its terms it expells [sic] all Jews from your department,” Halleck telegraphed Grant on January 4, 1863. “If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.” Grant rescinded the order on January 7.
Halleck later wired Grant, “It may be proper to give you an explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your department. The President has no objection to you expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
Democrats in both houses of Congress, meanwhile, introduced resolutions to censure Grant. Neither was successful.
Order No. 11 reflected no credit on anyone associated with it, and today it mainly serves to tarnish Grant and the whole command of the Civil War Army of the Tennessee with the ugly stain of racism. But before that sinks in too far, it may be useful to remember that by the mid-19th century—and in particular the Civil War era— the notion of “racism” was a concept that barely had begun to evolve, and was practically unknown in America outside of a few New England drawing rooms and Congregationalist meeting halls.
By our standards today, Grant, Sherman, even Lincoln—three of the people most associated with black emancipation—would be denounced as atrocious racists; they regularly used the “N” word, and casually described blacks as well as Jews in demeaning ways. Lincoln, in fact, was for shipping freed blacks to Panama or similar places, and once told Frederick Douglass to his face that neither he nor his race would ever gain equality with the white man. At the time, nearly the entire Western world shared these values. Deeply held prejudices—against blacks and Jews among others—were almost universal, and had been for many hundreds of years.
The order is instructive today as an example of the evils of such prejudices; even in a time of civil war it was a constitutional outrage to single out an entire class of people for punishment. But the temptation to condemn Grant, Sherman or any of the others of their day as being immoral racist bigots, as we now understand those terms, is misplaced. It is a historical fallacy to unequivocally assign present-day ethics, values and morals to people who were born nearly 200 years ago—akin to blaming a giraffe for falling through ice he’s never seen before.
Grant eventually paid a price for Order No. 11 when he ran as the Republican candidate for president in the election of 1868. Jews did not forget having been singled out. Many in the Democratic Party coalesced around the issue, urging their brethren to spurn Grant, but he won anyway, mainly owing to the continued disenfranchisement of voters in several Southern states and control of others by freedmen under martial law.
Grant countered the accusations of anti-Semitism by shamefully blaming his staff officers for drawing up the order without his permission, and without his ever seeing it, and the former staff officers shamefully abetted this fiction.
Lincoln was said to have softened his racial prejudices after acknowledging the contribution of free blacks to the Union armies’ victories, but his untimely death leaves us without any clear historical understanding of the change.
Sherman seems to have remained himself, unchanged.
Racial and religious prejudices in America before, during and after the Civil War continued more or less unabated until the 1920s when a few souls began to question the notions of white Protestant superiority. But it wasn’t until after the civil rights movements of the 1960s that the majority of Americans became sensitized to the wrongness of unequal treatment based on nothing more than “otherness.”
Grant’s Order No. 11 certainly wasn’t the first U.S. military dictate to embrace a prejudicial concept, and by looking at this episode honestly and clearly, we undertake the main task of historical writing—to tell the Truth as well as we can. And if we do, we may be able to go beyond some of the disputes and contentions that have lingered from the distant past into our present moment in history.
Novelist and historian Winston Groom is the author of Forrest Gump and several other novels and Civil War histories. His current release is Shiloh 1862 (National Geographic Society, March 2012).
Originally published in the November 2012 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
