General Order No. 11 (1862) - Background

Background

During the war, the extensive cotton trade continued between the North and South. Northern textile mills in New York and New England were dependent on Southern cotton, while Southern plantation owners depended on the trade with the North for their economic survival. The US Government permitted limited trade, licensed by the Treasury and the US Army. Corruption flourished as unlicensed traders bribed Army officers to allow them to buy Southern cotton without a permit. Jewish traders were among those involved in the cotton trade; some merchants had been active in the cotton business for generations in the South; others were more recent immigrants to the North.

As part of his command, Major General Ulysses S. Grant was responsible for issuing trade licenses in the Department of Tennessee, an administrative district of the Union Army that comprised the portions of Kentucky and Tennessee west of the Tennessee River, and Union-controlled areas of northern Mississippi. He was deeply engaged in prosecuting the campaign to capture the heavily defended Confederate-held city of Vicksburg, Mississippi and was committed to succeed. During this period, he tried several approaches to Vicksburg.

Grant resented having to deal with the distraction of the cotton trade. He perceived it as having endemic corruption, as the lucrative trade resulted in a system where "every colonel, captain or quartermaster ... in a secret partnership with some operator in cotton." He issued a number of directives aimed at black marketeers.

On November 9, 1862, Grant sent an order to Major-General Stephen A. Hurlbut: "Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out." The following day he instructed General Webster: "Give orders to all the conductors on the road that 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." In a letter to General William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant wrote that his policy was occasioned "in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by Jews."

Grant tightened restrictions to try to reduce the illegal trade. On December 8, 1862, he issued General Order No. 2, mandating that "cotton-speculators, Jews and other Vagrants having not honest means of support, except trading upon the miseries of their Country ... will leave in twenty-four hours or they will be sent to duty in the trenches." Nine days later, on December 17, 1862, he issued General Order No. 11 to strengthen his earlier prohibition.

General James H. Wilson later suggested that the order was related to Grant's difficulties with his own father, Jesse Grant. He recounted,

"He was close and greedy. He came down into Tennessee with a Jew trader that he wanted his son to help, and with whom he was going to share the profits. Grant refused to issue a permit and sent the Jew flying, prohibiting Jews from entering the line."

Wilson felt that Grant could not deal with the "lot of relatives who were always trying to use him" and perhaps attacked those he saw as their counterpart — opportunistic traders who were Jewish. Bertram Korn in his 1951 history suggested that the order was part of a pattern by Grant. "This was not the first discriminatory order had signed he was firmly convinced of the Jews' guilt and was eager to use any means of ridding himself of them."