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And thank you, electratig, for Hanson's quote. That's what I was trying to say, but lacked the skill.
An ordinary man accomplishing extraordinary things. I'd bet that if the WBTS had not lifted him from his situation, he'd still be in it. Or, perhaps, at best, a lieutenant in a remote western post.
Your interesting post sent me back to the Civil War Times Illustrated article on General Order No.11 which first alerted me to this incident. Re-reading it reminded me of some things I had forgotten, such as the fact that Grant attended a Know-Nothing lodge after his rejection for the post of county engineer in St. Louis in favour of a German immigrant.
But what chiefly interested me was the pattern of events that led up to the issue of Order No. 11 on 17th December 1862. What is clear is that the order was not the result of a sudden rush of blood to the head, and the reference to Jews was neither accidental nor the result of an isolated verbal clumsiness.
On 26th July 1862 Grant telegraphed from Corinth, Miss., to a subordinate at Columbus, Ky.:
"Examine the baggage of all speculators coming South, and, when they have specie, turn them back. If medicine and other contraband articles, arrest them and confiscate the contraband articles. Jews should receive special attention."
On 9th November he telegraphed Major General Hurlburt at Memphis:
"Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Isrealites [sic] especially should be kept out."
On 10th November he instructed his superintendent of military railroads:
"Give orders to all the conductors...on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the Rail Road 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 for them[.]"
It is possible that Grant only intended these instructions to apply to "peddlars". If so, his failure to draft a competent communication on four separate occasions suggests definite intellectual and imaginative deficiencies. And certainly at least one Jewish officer, Captain Philip Trounstine of the 5th Ohio Cavalry, resigned in protest.
It has been suggested that the real explanation for "that obnoxious order" was the arrival in Mississippi of Grant's father, Jesse, who was bent on buying cotton for a Jewish firm in Cincinnati. And in 1868 Grant himself stated that Order No. 11 "never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned and without reflection."
But the three earlier orders seem to undermine that explanation.
[The article in question, entitled "That Obnoxious Order", was written by John Simon and appeared in the October 1984 issue of C.W.T.I.]
Bill
Last edited by bill_torrens; 04-08-2005 at 05:37 AM.
I would certainly agree with you, Ole'. I don't believe Grant's reference to 'Jews' was meant to disparage an ethnic group; he merely voiced the opinions of many of the WASP men at the time. There were similar unkind comments from others regarding Catholics and blacks. (Sherman) These comments were nothing but the general feelings of citizens.
Same statements made in this time period would be a whole 'nother ballgame.
Are we to take it, then, that disparaging comments by Confederates about blacks would be regarded as "nothing but the general feelings of citizens"? Are we to take it that pro-Union participants on these boards regard all such expressions of prejudice voiced by planters or crackers in a similarly indulgent way?
Regarding that "Obnoxious Order," Bruce Catton in his book, "Grant Moves South" explains it thusly:
(Regarding Grant's father, Jesse) "....More recently Jesse had taken great pride in the new fame which his son had won, and had made so much noise about it that Grant felt called on to rebuke him, in a letter which, for Grant, was amazingly cold and sharp. Now, with the cotton problem lying heavily on his stooped shoulders, Grant was to find Jesse making book with the very traders who were Grant's worst trial -- coming in, sly and insinuating, to help the men whose patriotism, as Grant believed, was to be measured by dollars and cents.
The whole business is a little less than crystal clear, but what happened apparently went like this: Jesse Grant, in Cincinnati, formed some sort of partnership with three brothers, Henry, Harmon and Simon Mack, merchants who traded as Mack and Brothers. Under this deal, Jesse and the Macks would go South to buy cotton in the military department controlled by Jesse's son, the General; the Macks would furnish the capital, Jesse would furnish the son -- who was in a position to say whether any trader in West Tennessee or northern Mississippi could buy and ship cotton at all -- and the profits would be split. And so, early in December, while Grant was trying to get his army down to the Tallahatchie, and while Sherman was hurriedly getting his own expedition on transports at Memphis with Porter's gunboats puffing in the stream, Jesse and the Macks came down to northern Mississippi to see General Grant.
At first, Grant was cordial enough -- glad, as any son might be, to meet businessmen who were good friends of his father. Then the truth of the matter dawned on him. What Jesse and the Macks wanted was permits to buy and ship cotton, and Grant's own authority was being put up for sale. By the next train, under orders, the Cincinnati merchants went back North, lacking permits. The Chicago newspaperman, Sylvanus Cadwallader, wrote that Grant was bitter, indignant and mortified; and on December 17, at Holly Springs, Grant put his fury into an order which would leave a queer enduring stain on his own name. This order, published for the guidance of the whole department, read as follows:
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 within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
Post commanders will see 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 for trade permits.
Concerning all of which there is much to be said.
The first thing to say is that the brothers Mack, unfortunately, were Jewish. The second is that the Army officers of that time and place, infuriated by the activities of the traders who were infesting western Tennessee and northern Mississippi, had long since concluded that most traders were Jews (which was not at all the case) and were using the word "Jew" much as superheated Southerners at the same time were using the word "Yankee" -- as a catch-all epithet which epitomized everything that was mean, grasping and without conscience. The third is that there did exist then, in the United States, latent for years, but now suddenly blooming under forced draft, a violent Ku Klux spirit, hang-over perhaps from the recent Know-Nothing era, a spirit which could rise to what now seem incredible heights of misunderstanding and hatred for all people who were not Northern Americans of English descent. All of these, taken together, were reflected in Grant's famous General Orders Number 11.
On November 9, Grant had told General Hurlbut, at Jackson, to let no civilians go south of Jackson, adding the injunction: "The Israelites especially should be kept out." The next day he told General Webster, in charge of his railroad supply line: "Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad south 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." And on the day he issued General Orders Number 11 he wrote to C.P. Woolcott, Assistant Secretary of War, a detailed explanation of his action:
I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into post commanders, the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officers at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come south, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood-yard 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, who will be at a military post with a Treasury agent to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold. There is but one way that I know of to reach this case; that is, for Government to buy all the cotton at a fixed rate and sent it to Cairo, St. Louis or some other point to be sold. Then all traders (they are a curse to the army) might be expelled.
Grant's emotions are clear enough, and his idea about the best way to handle the cotton traffic was excellent, but his language was confused. He wanted to get the traffic under decent control so that he could get on with the war, and like many other officers at that time and place he was using the words "Jews" and "cotton traders" interchangeably. In the same way, Dana had been warning Stanton about the get-rich-quick mania that had infected "a vast population of Jews and Yankees," and Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, complaining about the bargain-hunting that was going on, was denouncing unprincipled sharpers, Yankees, bloodhounds of commerce, and Jews all in one sentence, making all of the words mean the same thing. Grant himself, later on, seemed honestly puzzled by the furore his order had raised. Talking with a rabbi after the war, he tried to explain what he had done: "You know, during war times these nice distinctions were disregarded. We had no time to handle things with kid gloves. But it was no ill-feeling or a want of good-feeling towards the Jews. If such complaints" --that is, complaints about extortionate practices in the cotton trade -- "would have been lodged against a dozen men each of whom wore a write cravat, a black broadcloth suit, beaver, or gold spectacles, I should probably have issued a similar order against men so dressed."
There were some odd aspects to the whole business. A week before Grant issued his order, the Commanding Officer at Holly Springs, Colonel John V. Dubois, announced that "all cotton speculators, Jews and other vagrants having no honest means of support except trading on the miseries of their country" must leave town within twenty-four hours or be conscripted into the Army; Grant revoked this order and Dubois was transferred to other duty -- an unfortunate shift, perhaps, since he was replaced by the Colonel Murphy who would surrender so meekly when Van Dorn demanded it. There was also persistent gossip to the effect that Grant himself did not devise General Orders Number 11. Old Jesse told Congressman Washburne that the order was issued on instructions from Washington; several newspaper stories said the same thing; and one witness asserted that one of Grant's subordinates prepared and issued the order without Grant's knowledge. But however all of this may have been, the order did come out -- to stand as a melancholy example of the kind of prejudice which was taken for granted in the 1860's."
Catton's sources and notes:
1. "The deal between Jesse Grant and the Mack brothers is set forth in detail in a lawsuit which Jesse filed against the brothers in Cincinnati courts early in 1863 -- a bit of litigation which the judge non-suited, and which is described in the New York Tribune, September 19, 1872. See also Nelson Cross, The Modern Ulysses, LL.D.:His Political Record,p. 76; and William B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant, Politician,pp. 30-31. There is an extensive discussion of the rather singular relationship between Grant and his father in Captain Sam Grant."
2. Grant's General Orders No. 11, dated December 17, 1862, in O.R., Vol. XVII, Part Two, pp. 330, 337, 421-422.
3. Dana, Recollections,p. 18; Hovey to Brig. Gen. Fred F. Steele, December 5, 1862, in O.R., Vol. XVII, Part One, p. 532. Sherman's correspondence, and that of other Army officers for this period, bristles with references to the activities of "Jewish traders."
4. Chicago Tribunefor April 9, 1885, an interview with Rabbi Browne, who quoted his own diary entry for an interview with Grant on Aug. 27, 1875.
5. The details as to Colonel Dubois are in the Chicago Tribunefor December 18, 1862, in a dispatch from Oxford, Mississippi. See also J.R. Grant's letter to Washburne dated Jan. 20, 1863, in the Washburne Papers; undated clipping from the Cincinnati Commercial, apparently for early January, 1863, in the Lloyd Lewis Papers; New York World, August 18, 1863; Otto Eisenschiml, "Anti-Semitism in Lincoln's Times,"in the Chicago Forum, Vol. I, No I, p. 11.
From "Recollections of the Civil War" by Charles A. Dana:
"It was in January, 1863, that Chadwick and I went to Memphis, where we stayed at the Gayoso House, at that time a swell hotel of the town and the headquarters of several officers.
It was not long after I began to study the trade in cotton before I saw it was a bad business and ought to be stopped. I at once wrote Mr. Stanton the following letter, which embodied my observations and gave my opinion as to what should be done:
Memphis, January 21, 1863
DEAR SIR: You will remember our conversations on the subject of excluding cotton speculators from the regions occupied by our armies in the South. I now write to urge the matter upon your attention as a measure of military necessity.
The mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton, raging in a vast population of Jews and Yankees scattered throughout this whole country, and in this town almost exceeding the numbers of the regular residents, has to an alarming extent corrupted and demoralized the army. Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay. I had no conception of the extent of this evil until I came and saw for myself.
Besides, the resources of the rebels are inordinately increased from this source. Plenty of cotton is brought in from beyond our lines, especially by the agency of Jewish traders, who pay for it ostenibly in Treasury notes, but really in gold.
What I would propose is that no private purchaser of cotton shall be allowed in any part of the occupied region.
Let quartermasters buy the article at a fixed price, say twenty or twenty-five cents per pound, and forward it by army transportation to proper centers, say Helena, Memphis, or Cincinnati, to be sold at public auction on Government account. Let the sales take place on regular fixed days, so that all parties desirous of buying can be sure when to be present.
But little capital will be required for such an operation. The sales being frequent and for cash, will constantly replace the amount employed for other purposes. I should say that two hundred thousand dollars would be sufficient to conduct the movement.
I have no doubt that this two hundred thousand dollars so employed would be more than equal to thirty thousand men added to the national armies.
My pecuniary interest is in the continuance of the present state of things, for while it lasts there are occasional opportunities of profit to be made by a daring operator; but I should be false to my duty did I, on that account, fail to implore you to put an end to an evil so enormous, so insidious, and so full of peril for the country.
My first impulse was to hurry to Washington to represent these things to you in person; but my engagements here with other persons will not allow me to return East so speedily. I beg you, however, to act without delay, if possible. An excellent man to put at the head of the business would be General Strong. I make this suggestion without any idea whether the employment would be agreeable to him.
Yours faithfully, Charles A. Dana
Mr. Stanton
P.S. -- Since writing the above I have seen General Grant, who fully agrees with all my statements and suggestions, except for the inputing corruption to every officer, which of course I did not intend to be taken literally.
I have also just attended a public sale by the quartermaster here of five hundred bales of cotton confiscated by General Grant at Oxford and Holly Springs. It belonged to Jacob Thompson and other notorious rebels. This cotton brought to-day over a million and a half dollars, cash. This sum alone would be five times enough to set on foot the system I recommended, without, drawing on the Treasury at all. In fact, there can be no question that by adopting this system the quartermaster's department in this valley would become self-supporting, while the army would become honest again, and the slaveholders would no longer find that the rebellion had quadrupled the price of their great staple, but only doubled it."
Note: Looking through my library, this is all I find that relates to the issue of Grant and his "Obnoxious Order." There is doubtless much more in other publications. My conclusion is simple. "Political Correctness" was not yet identified during the Civil War era. It apparently took another century for Americans to realize that some labels, and attitudes are hurtful and unacceptable. While I personally believe that General Grant did recognize the difference between "traders" and "Jews," I think he truly believed that a majority of the persons indulging in the "get-rich-quick" schemes as a benefit of a land in turmoil, happened to be Jewish. I doubt that the rumors that Order #11 was devised by a subordinate had any substance, for Grant later took the credit (blame) for it later.
The attitude that Jews are especially aggressive in business persists today, although it is considered (and IS) part of lingering racism in this country, and goes hand in hand with other notions related to one's ethnicity and/or ancestral roots that simply refuse to die out and give way to common sense.
I have to admit that the first time I heard of Grant and his apparent anti-semitic order, I was stunned. Having always considered USG one of the best of the best, (a moral, honest, fair-minded, clear-thinking person) I wanted very much to find it was all a lie. Obviously, it wasn't.
I can accept Catton's explanation that traders were lumped into one category and referred to as "Jews," up to a certain point, as well as the story about Grant's father attempting to take advantage of his son's new-found fame and power, but I still would have expected more and better of General Grant.
It is not a comfortable thing to find out one's idol has, if not feet of clay, at least toes that were eroding. Still, he was a man of his times and overall, I continue to believe he was possessed of many admirable qualities.
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