Israel Matzav

Jews expelled from three US states

148 years ago today, on December 17, 1862, Jews were ordered expelled from the States of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky by Union commander Ulysses S. Grant. The reason for the expulsion was alleged black market dealing in cotton by some Jews (I know the JPost wrote November 17, but go here).

The order was issued on the backdrop of cotton trading between the US North and secessionist South during the war. The North was reliant on cotton from the South, and handed regulatory control over the trade to the army. As a general, Grant was given the authority to regulate that trade and hand out licenses to cotton merchants inside his military theater of operations. It was his anti-Semitic belief that Jews controlled trade, specifically the black market trade of cotton, which led to General Order No. 11.

In late 1862, as Grant was preparing to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi, his command was flooded by requests by middlemen and merchants for licenses to trade cotton. The general was vexed by the volume of requests and carried an old world prejudice that led him to believe the “Israelites,” whom he described as an “intolerable nuisance,” were responsible for black market cotton. In November of that year, Grant banned Jews from traveling on the railroad and forbid granting them cotton-trading permits.

However, as Jews were not actually responsible for most unlicensed trading, the black market continued to thrive. Following an incident where Grant’s own father requested licenses for a group of merchants from the northern city of Cincinnati, some of whom were in fact Jews, the Union army general issued General Order No. 11 and gave the Jews in his administrative district 24 hours to leave the three-state area.

General Order No. 11 had devastating consequences for the Jewish population in a way that was uncharacteristic of the United States. In one Jewish community in a Mississippi town called Holly Springs, thirty families who were not at all involved in the cotton trade were forced to abandon their belongings and walk 40 miles (64 kilometers) out of the state. Adding insult to injury, some of the town’s Jewish residents were Union army veterans.

Jewish communities all over the country were shocked and enraged. The still-young country had witnessed very little institutionalized anti-Semitism in the United States up until that point. Congregations in Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis staged protests against the order. Community leaders in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago sent urgent telegrams to US president Lincoln.

The order still in effect, one Jewish delegation arrived in Washington D.C. on January 3, 1863, two days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Armed with documentation disproving a connection between Jews and the black market for cotton, the support of several congressmen and the moral high ground, the delegation easily convinced Lincoln to rescind the order.

I wonder whether any Muslims were expelled during the Civil War. Or is it 'Islamophobia' just for raising the point?

Labels: American Jews

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:14 PM