Everybody's Affair
Antisemitism in America and General Grant's Civil War Order No. 11
In late December 1862, a Jewish immigrant named Cesar Kaskel was forced from his home in Paducah, Kentucky by Union Army officials. Leaving the town where he had lived and worked for four years behind, Kaskel boarded a steamship named the Charley Bowen, bound north for Cincinnati on the Ohio River. From Cincinnati, Kaskel planned to journey to Washington, D.C. to take the matter of his expulsion directly to President Lincoln.
Kaskel was a merchant and the vice president of the Paducah Union League Club; his brother was a recruiter for the Union Army. But that loyalty hadn’t stopped the Army from serving the Kaskels, along with thirty other Jewish families in Paducah, with a notice informing them that they had 24 hours to leave, “in pursuance of General Order No. 11, issued from General Grant’s headquarters.”1 The full order, issued by General Grant on December 17, 1862, from Oxford, Miss., read as follows:
The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department within twenty-four (24) hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commander.
They will see that all this class of people are furnished with 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 permits from these headquarters.
No pass will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits.
General Grant’s order sprang from months of trouble with speculating and smuggling in the cotton trade that had plagued the Union Army in the part of the South that Grant occupied. In the wake of the war, the price of cotton had “skyrocketed,” and men “of dubious character” were eager to cash in on the potential profits, both legally and illegally. Grant believed that these traders were also carrying military intelligence and gold behind Confederate lines, and he was weary of “crowds of speculators and vagrants” who “besieged” his headquarters looking for permits for their work. Although most of the traders participating in unscrupulous commercial activity were not Jewish, in Grant’s mind and the minds of other Union leaders, “speculator” and “Jew” became interchangeable. Jewish people in this part of the country stood out; they were mostly immigrants, carrying foreign accents and names, and they became a target for Grant’s wrath—and the mistrust and anger of both Union and Confederate sympathizers, eager for a scapegoat.2
The order was enforced sporadically within the territory under Grant’s control, which covered northern Mississippi, western Kentucky, and western Tennessee, in part because Confederate attacks frequently disrupted communication between Union officers in the winter of 1862-63. Questions for Grant about the nature of the order went unanswered, and some officers decided to ignore it, either because its directive was unclear or because they felt it was illegal. But not all of them did: In Holly Springs, Miss., a group of Jews were evicted from the city and denied the use of the railway, forced to walk 40 miles to Memphis, Tenn. Another Jewish couple reported that “they were detained, forbidden to change out of wet clothes, robbed of their horses and buggy, verbally abused, and also had one of their trunks burned and their pockets picked.”3 A Jewish man named Lazerus Silberman was arrested and jailed for attempting to telegraph Grant’s headquarters to confirm the legitimacy of the order.4
In Paducah, unlike in other places, Grant’s order was interpreted to include all Jews living in the town, no matter whether they were involved in the cotton trade or not. The number evicted from their homes included women and children as well as two men who had served in the Union Army. Only two elderly women, seriously ill and bedridden, were allowed to stay behind. Paducah was a politically divided town where trade had declined since the war, and the increased competition had led to resentment toward the Jews from people on both sides of the conflict. The outcome in Paducah was “not a coincidence but rather the tragic culmination of longstanding attitudes,” writes Stephen Ash in his account of the order and its aftermath, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant's General Orders No. 11.”
Kaskel, along with his brother and the Wolff brothers, also merchants from Paducah, sent a telegram to Lincoln, saying that they were “greatly insulted and outraged by this inhuman order” which was the “grossest violation of the Constitution,” and demanding the order be rescinded immediately.5 Kaskel also wrote an account of his ordeal and sent it to newspapers in the region in order to publicize what had happened in Paducah. In Cincinnati, Isaac Wise, the editor of the popular American Israelite, began protesting the order in his paper, and later prepared to journey to D.C. himself. “Are we playthings in the hands of presumptuous men, to abuse and maltreat us at pleasure? Are we frogs and mice to be trampled under anybody’s feet, or are we men who stand by their rights?” Wise asked his readers, imploring them to make their objections to the order known. “Israelites, citizens of the United States, you have been outraged, your rights as men and citizens trampled into the dust, your honor disgraced, as a class you have officially been degraded!” he wrote. “It is your duty…to bring this matter clearly before the president of the United States and demand redress.”6
Just days after Order No. 11 was enforced in Paducah, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in Union-occupied, former Confederate states, and Wise asked, pointedly, how Grant’s order could stand “in an enlightened age” and “in the heart of God’s only spot of freedom and in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The New York Times agreed with Wise, lamenting what the paper called “a momentary revival of the spirit of the medieval ages.”7
On January 16, 1863, an update about Grant’s order—and the delegations that had traveled to Washington to protest it—appeared in the American Israelite. On learning about the order when Kaskel reached the White House, Lincoln had rescinded it (though at first, he did not think it was real). Wise’s Cincinnati delegation arrived after Kaskel’s group, but they still met with Lincoln to talk about the order. “I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned for a few sinners,” he told Wise.8 For political reasons related to the war, Lincoln did not “express his humanitarian sentiments” in public, nor did he publicly criticize Grant for the order, and “outside of Jewish circles” the order “was not long discussed.”9
In the 21st century, antisemitism is on the rise in America. The Anti-Defamation League’s most recent report on incidents of antisemitism in the United States showed a 12 percent increase over the previous year, recording more than 2,100 acts of “assault, vandalism, and harassment,” the highest number since 1979, when the ADL began collecting reports. The terrifying hostage situation that unfolded at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas on January 15, 2022, is another such incident; the FBI is treating it as “as a terrorist act and hate crime.”
In one of his 1863 articles denouncing the order, Wise appealed beyond his core audience and toward Americans who weren’t Jewish, too, making the case that discrimination against anyone is a threat to everyone. “If the Jew as a nationality may be treated with impunity, where are the guarantees that other nationalities…will not be treated in the same manner tomorrow?…It is not only the business of the Jew to look to these matters,” he wrote. “It is everybody’s affair.”
When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan D. Sarna
“Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant's General Orders No. 11,” The Historian, by Stephen A. Ash, August 1982
When General Grant Expelled the Jews
“Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant's General Orders No. 11”
When General Grant Expelled the Jews
American Israelite, January 2, 1863
“Gen. Grant and the Jews,” The New York Times, January 18, 1863
American Israelite, January 16, 1863
“Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant's General Orders No. 11”