The Dark Side of Lincoln and his Generals: 

 The Fight to Make Men Free

In November 1862, General Grant was convinced that the black market of cotton was organized by Jews. Grant ordered that "no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point." Nor were they to be granted trade licenses.

Now all wars have "contraband", black market", "illegal traders". This will include all people and there were just a handful of Jews that were "illegal traders". The majority of Jews were not. The terms "Jew", "profiteer", "speculator", "trader", were employed interchangeably.

Union General Henry W. Hallack linked "traitors and Jew peddlers" as one. General Grant shared Hallack's mentality, describing "the Israelites" as "an intolerable nuisance".

Gen. Grant's order in November 1862 was carried out immediately and with enthusiasm by the Army of the Tennessee. In Holley Springs, Mississippi, Jewish traders had to walk 40 miles to evacuate the area. In Paducah, Kentucky, the Union military gave 30 Jewish families, all long term residents, with 2 of Jewish inhabitants being Union Army Veterans, 24 hours to leave.

The exodus of the Jews was not happening fast enough for Gen. Grant. He wanted more and he showed exactly the type of man he was, the man Lincoln wanted for his Commander of the Armies of the United States.

In December of 1862, General Grant initiated an official order of anti-Semitism. It was one of the worst in 19^th century America. One could argue this was a test to be used on the Indians in the future. We know that tactics used in the burning of Missouri and of Atlanta was later employed on the Indians.

General Grant issued his "General Order Number 11". This order expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. The order said:

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 ('Department of the Tennessee,' an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi) 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 on 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.

A few months earlier, on 11 August 1862, General William Tecumseh Sherman had warned in a letter to the Adjutant General of the Union Army that "the country will swarm with dishonest Jews" if continued trade in cotton is encouraged. (Sherman, in a letter written in 1858, had described Jews as "…without pity, soul, heart, or bowels of compassion…").

And Grant also issued orders on 9 and 10 November 1862 banning southward travel in general, stating that "the Israelites especially should be kept out… no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance, that the department must be purged of them".

As a result of Grant's expulsion order, Jewish families were forced out of their homes in Paducah, Kentucky, Holly Springs and Oxford Mississippi, and a few were sent to prison. When some Jewish victims protested to President Lincoln, the Attorney General Edward Bates advised the President that he was indifferent to such objections, "myself feeling no particular interest in the subject."

Nevertheless, on 4 January, 1863, Lincoln had Grant's odious order rescinded, but by then, some Jewish families in the area had been expelled, humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and others stripped of their possessions. As Bertram W. Korn writes in his classic work, "American Jewry and the Civil War" (1951):

They still tell stories of the expulsion in Paducah, Ky.: of the hurried departure by riverboat up the Ohio to Cincinnati; of a baby almost left behind in the haste and confusion and tossed bodily into the boat; of two dying women permitted to remain behind in neighbors' care. Thirty men and their families were expelled from Paducah, and according to affidavits by some of "the most respectable Union citizens of the city," the deportees "had at no time been engaged in trade within the active lines of General Grant…" Two had already served brief enlistments in the Union army.

On 21 January, Union General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck wrote to Grant to explain the rescission of the order, stating that "The President has no objection to your 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."

Captain Philip Trounstine of the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, being unable in good conscience to round up and expel his fellow Jews, resigned his army commission, saying he could "no longer bear the Taunts and malice of his fellow officers… brought on by … that order."

The officials responsible for the United States government's most vicious anti-Jewish actions ever were never dismissed, admonished or, apparently, even officially criticized for the religious persecution they inflicted on innocent citizens.

What caused Grant to take these draconian steps against the Jews?  Military historian Mel Young points out in his book "Where They Lie,"  that Grant's own family were slave owners and  involved in cotton so he perhaps considered Jewish traders as competition.

Bertram Korn asserts that many "suspected that the expulsion of the Jews had been foisted upon Grant and Sherman by influential cotton buyers and their [Union Army] officer-partners, to pave the way for higher profits for themselves."

As Korn observes:

But only Jews, and not all traders were banished; cotton traders as a group were never expelled. The question therefore….was… "who stood to profit most from the departure of Jews?"…And the answer, "The other traders and speculators, civilian and military," was in itself the only possible explanation of The Order….The Jews were the natural scapegoat…because they had already been the scapegoat for almost two millennia.

Other instances of this widespread Yankee bigotry are described in detail by Korn and by Robert Rosen, in his work "The Jewish Confederates", as well as by other historians of the era. They recount how Jews in Union-occupied areas, such as New Orleans and Memphis, were singled out by Union forces for vicious abuse and vilification.

In New Orleans, the ruling general, Benjamin "Beast" Butler, harshly vilified Jews, and was quoted by a Jewish newspaper as saying that he could:

 "suck the blood of every Jew, and …will detain every Jew as long as he can."

An Associated Press reporter from the North wrote that:

 "The Jews in New Orleans and all the South ought to be exterminated. ..They run the blockade, and are always to be found at the bottom of every new villainy."

Of Memphis, whose Mississippi River port was a center of illegal cotton trading, "The Chicago Tribune" reported in July, 1862:

 "The Israelites have come down upon the city like locusts…Every boat brings in a load of the hooked-nose fraternity."

Rosen writes at length about the blatant and widespread anti-Semitism throughout the North, with even The New York Times castigating the anti-war Democratic Party for having a chairman who was:

 "the agent of foreign jew bankers."

New Englanders were especially hateful, and one leading abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, called Jews:

 "lecherous," and said that their intellects were "sadly pinched in those narrow foreheads" and that they "did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover."

Yes, there was enough backlash from residents for Lincoln to make a decision to order General Grant to revoke the "Order". Only after an uproar, however, and not because the order per se offended President Lincoln.

From the forthcoming novel:  The Chosen Few: Renaissance  by Professor Marshall Onellion, Professor of Physics and R. David Ramati