When General Grant Expelled the Jews (Jewish Encounters Series) - Softcover

Sarna, Jonathan D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805212337 ISBN 13: 9780805212334

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

On December 17, 1862, just weeks before Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, General Grant issued what remains the most notorious anti-Jewish order by a government official in American history. His attempt to eliminate black marketeers by targeting for expulsion all Jews "as a class" from portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi unleashed a firestorm of controversy that made newspaper headlines and terrified and enraged the approximately 150,000 Jews then living in the United States, who feared the importation of European anti-Semitism onto American soil.

Although the order was quickly rescinded by a horrified Abraham Lincoln, the scandal came back to haunt Grant when he ran for president in 1868. Never before had Jews become an issue in a presidential contest and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their "American" and "Jewish" interests. Award-winning historian Jonathan D. Sarna gives us the first complete account of this little-known episode—including Grant's subsequent apology, his groundbreaking appointment of Jews to prominent positions in his administration, and his unprecedented visit to the land of Israel. Sarna sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic presidents, on the Jews of his day, and on the ongoing debate between ethnic loyalty and national loyalty that continues to roil American political and social discourse.

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JONATHAN D. SARNA is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. He has written, edited, or coedited more than twenty books, including American Judaism: A History and Lincoln and the Jews. 

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1

General Orders No. 11
 
Cesar Kaskel’s faith in America was wavering. Born in the town of Rawitsch, then part of Prussia, he, like tens of thousands of other young Jews in the 1850s, had left home and endured a long, perilous voyage across the Atlantic in hopes of establishing himself in business in the United States. Opportunities in Prussia were circumscribed for Jews, owing to domestic unrest, a failing economy, and severe legal limitations on where they could live and what kinds of occupations they could pursue. America, Kaskel had heard, was different. Dispatches in the German-Jewish press and letters received from earlier immigrants reported that in America opportunity was unlimited and freedom guaranteed to people of all faiths—Jews included. That guarantee, Kaskel now feared, had been voided.
 
Moving to Paducah, Kentucky, in 1858, Kaskel imagined he had found just the opportunity he had been looking for. The newly incorporated city, located on the Ohio River below the mouth of the Tennessee River and fifty miles up from the Mississippi, was booming. Its population grew exponentially, reaching almost five thousand residents by the Civil War. A timely investment by city fathers in the stock of the New Orleans and Ohio Railway brought Paducah excellent rail connections and a growing volume of trade. Kaskel and his business partner, merchant Solomon Greenbaum, looked to participate in this prodigious growth. They set themselves up in business.
 
Two years later, in 1860, a Kentucky native son, Abraham Lincoln, was elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Fewer than 1 percent of Kentucky voters supported him. Fearing that the new president and his party threatened slavery and the distinctive character of life in the South, seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded to form the Confederate States of America. When the Confederacy bombarded the coastal fortification of Fort Sumter at the entrance to Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, forcing it to surrender, war broke out. Once President Lincoln called for troops to quell the rebellion, four more states, including Virginia, joined the Confederacy, while four states on the border between the North and the South, including Kentucky, did not.
 
The Civil War disrupted economic life in Paducah and changed Kaskel’s life for the worse. The North began restricting Southern trade with Paducah as early as June 12, 1861, seeking to place economic pressure on the Confederacy. On September 6, Ulysses S. Grant and his troops captured and occupied the city, further restricting its trade with the South. The state of Kentucky declared itself neutral in the war, but Grant believed that the majority of Paducah’s citizens “would have much preferred the presence of the other army.”  Be that as it may, at least some of the city’s thirty-odd Jews publicly supported the Union’s cause. Cesar Kaskel was one of them; he served as vice president of the Paducah Union League Club. His younger brother, Julius, operated as a recruiter for the Union army.
 
The disruption of free trade in Paducah created bountiful opportunities for speculators and smugglers, who always find ways to profit from wartime shortages and imbalances between supply and demand. While merchants like Kaskel burnished their pro-Union credentials in hopes of obtaining precious trade permits, officials entrusted with governing trade in and out of the city found backhanded ways to line their own pockets; so did many soldiers. In short order, public corruption rose, mutual trust declined, and recriminations abounded. As is so often the case in such circumstances, suspicion fell particularly upon the Jews, long stereotyped in Christian culture as being financially unscrupulous. Jews became the focus for much of the hatred and mistrust that the war unleashed within the city. Even though few in number in Paducah, they played an outsized role in business and trade, and as immigrants they were easily marked by their European accents and foreign ways. Unionists and Confederates alike doubted their loyalties—partly because they doubted the loyalty of all Jews and partly because Jews nationwide were known to be on both sides of the struggle. Many therefore assumed, even in the absence of supporting evidence, that “secessionists and Jews” were engaged in “rascally conduct” in Paducah and that widespread smuggling was carried out “as usual chiefly by Jews.” 
 
Tense as conditions were in Paducah, nothing had prepared Cesar Kaskel for the events of December 28, 1862, and his agitated response to them was understandable. Pursuing his business, in his words, as a “peaceable, law abiding citizen,”  he was suddenly summoned, on a Sunday, to report “immediately” to Paducah’s provost marshal, Captain L. J. Waddell. There he was handed the following order banishing him from the city:
 
OFFICE OF PROVOST MARSHAL
Paducah, Ky., December 28, 1862
 
C. J. Kaskel—Sir: In pursuance of General Order No 11, issued from General Grant’s headquarters, you are hereby ordered to leave the city of Paducah, Kentucky, within twenty-four hours after receiving this order.
 
By order,
L. J. WADDELL,
Captain and Provost Marshal
 
Kaskel was not the only person ordered to leave. As he heatedly informed the newspapers, anyone “born of Jewish parents” was likewise expelled: “nearly thirty other gentlemen, mostly married, all respectable men, and old residents of Paducah, two of whom have served their country . . . and all loyal to the Government.” Women and children were expelled too, and in the confusion—so it was recalled years later—one baby was almost forgotten, and two dying women had to be left behind in the care of neighbors. Historian John E. L. Robertson preserves a (dubious) local tradition that citizens of Paducah hid some Jews to prevent their being sent away. “One soldier,” he reports, “is said to have knocked on the door of a Jew and demanded, ‘What are you?’ The resident of the house answered truthfully, ‘Tailor.’ To which the none-too-bright soldier replied, ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Taylor, but I’m looking for Jews.’ ” 
 
Cesar Kaskel quickly came to understand that Captain Waddell, in expelling him from his home, was simply following orders. The decision to evict Jews from the vast war zone under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant—known as the “Department of the Tennessee,” but actually stretching from northern Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River—appeared in a document entitled “General Orders No. 11” issued under Grant’s own signature eleven days earlier, on December 17. Waddell handed Kaskel a copy of Grant’s scarcely-to-be-believed order, and he wisely preserved it. Subsequently described as “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history,”  it read as follows:
 
GENERAL ORDERS No. 11, Hdqrs. 13th A.C. Dept. of the Tenn.,
Holly Springs, December 17, 1862.
 
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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805212337
• ISBN 13: 9780805212334
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Schocken; https://agu.com/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
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