Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

“I, a peaceable, law abiding citizen, pursuing my legitimate business at Paducah, Kentucky, where I have been a resident for nearly four years, have been driven from my home, my business, and all that is dear to me, at the short notice of twenty-four hours; not for any crime committed, but simply because I was born of Jewish parents,” said a young merchant named Cesar Kaskel to reporters in late December 1862. The accompanying headline disclosed why Kaskel was so abruptly ordered out. It read: “Expulsion of Jews from General Grant’s Department.”

The order, known as General Orders No. 11, expelled Jews from the territory under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s command — which stretched from Northern Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. It was issued on Dec. 17, 1862, and came directly from Grant’s headquarters in Holly Springs, Miss. It read:

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. By order of Maj. Gen. U.S. Grant JNO. A. RAWLINS, Assistant Adjutant-General

For months, Grant had been worried about cotton speculators and smugglers in the area under his command. His department seethed with blockade runners who traded “upon the miseries of the country.” Canny traders could turn $100 into $2,000 by smuggling Southern cotton to Northern ports and quinine, bacon and finished goods in the other direction. If he could just put a stop to the smuggling, Grant thought, he could put real economic pressure on the South and the terrible war would end sooner.

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Such trade was, of course, illegal, and some of the smugglers that Grant’s men caught were Jews. America’s Jewish population had ballooned from about 15,000 in 1840 to some 150,000 in 1860, mostly immigrants from Central Europe. Large numbers of those immigrants became peddlers and merchants, marked by their European accents and foreign ways. Some of them, during the war, peddled contraband.

Lots of non-Jews, including many soldiers, likewise pursued fast money by trading in illicit goods. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana (who himself secretly speculated in cotton) reported in early 1863 that “every colonel, captain of quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.” In Memphis, the leading city in Grant’s territory, “the amount of plunder & bribery” was “beyond all calculation,” according to Dana. “Honesty is the exception and peculation” — that is, embezzlement — “the rule.”

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Grant and of many other Americans, all smugglers and speculators and traders were Jews, whether they were actually Jewish or not — just as Southerners dubbed all Northerners “Yankees,” whether or not they hailed from New England. Grant wanted as few of them as possible in the area under his command.

In July 1862, Grant ordered the commander of the District of the Mississippi to “examine all baggage of all speculators coming South,” and to turn back those who were carrying gold. “Jews,” he admonished, “should receive special attention.” In August, a soldier newspaper quoted Grant as calling Jews “a nuisance” that he had plans to “abate.” On Nov. 9, as he prepared to move South in preparation for the decisive battle at Vicksburg, Grant tightened his regulations against Jews: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present,” he ordered. “The Isrealites especially should be kept out.” The very next day he strengthened that order: “no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the Rail Road southward from any point. . . they are such an intolerable nuisance that the Department must be purged” of them. Writing in early December to Gen. William T. Sherman, whose quartermaster had created problems by selling cotton “to a Jew by the name of Haas,” Grant explained that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”

But until Dec. 17, Grant had not gone so far as to expel Jews from his department. Indeed, when Col. John Van Deusen Du Bois on Dec. 8 angrily ordered “all Cotton-Speculators, Jews and other Vagrants having no honest means of support, except trading upon the miseries of their Country” to leave Holly Springs, and gave them “twenty-four hours or they will be sent to duty in the trenches,” Grant insisted that the Draconian order be rescinded. “Instructions from Washington,” he reminded Du Bois, “are to encourage getting Cotton out of the country.” Notwithstanding his private opinions and actions, Grant understood that he still had publicly to uphold official government policy, which permitted those loyal to the Union to trade in cotton.

All that changed on Dec. 17. Grant, according to multiple sources, received a visit that day from his 68-year-old father, Jesse R. Grant, accompanied by members the prominent Mack family of Cincinnati, significant Jewish clothing manufacturers. Harman, Henry and Simon Mack, as part of an ingenious scheme, had formed a secret partnership with the elder Grant. In return for 25 percent of their profits, he agreed to accompany them to his son’s Mississippi headquarters, act as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton” and help them secure the means to transport that cotton to New York.

According to the journalist Sylvanus Cadwallader, a witness, General Grant waxed indignant at his father’s crass attempt to profit from his son’s military status, and raged at the Jewish traders who “entrapped his old father into such an unworthy undertaking.” He refused to provide the permit, sent the Macks homeward “on the first train for the north” and, in high dudgeon, immediately issued the order expelling “Jews as a class” from his territory.

Fortunately for the thousands of Jews who lived in the territory under his command, Grant was soon distracted. Less than 72 hours after his order was issued, his forces at Holly Springs were raided by 3,500 Confederate troops. Simultaneous raids to the north inflicted significant damage to Grant’s lines and tore up 50 miles of railroad and telegraph lines. Communications to and from Grant’s headquarters were disrupted for weeks. As a result, news of Grant’s order spread slowly, sparing many Jews who might otherwise have been banished.

To be sure, some Jewish traders in the vicinity of Grant’s army were treated roughly. A “Mr. Silberman” from Chicago, temporarily in Holly Springs, was reportedly imprisoned for 12 hours for the “crime” of seeking to telegraph General Grant to find out if the expulsion order he received was genuine. An unnamed young Jewish trader and his fiancée, traveling through Grant’s department on their way east, described in The Jewish Record how they were detained, forbidden to change out of wet clothes, robbed of their horses and buggy and verbally abused, and also had one of their trunks burned and their pockets picked in the wake of the order. Their expulsion, if not their mistreatment, was explained by Brig. Gen. James Tuttle, commander of the Union garrison in Cairo, Ill., with the utmost simplicity: “you are Jews, and … neither a benefit to the Union or Confederacy.”

But it was only when Grant’s order reached Paducah, Ken., 11 days after it was issued, that a whole community of Jews found itself expelled. On Dec. 28, Paducah’s provost marshal, L.J. Waddell, sent Cesar Kaskel and every other Jew in the city an official notice ordering them to leave within 24 hours. 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. (The historian John E.L. Robertson of Paducah recounts, somewhat dubiously, that citizens of his city 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 not-too-bright soldier replied, ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Taylor, but I’m looking for Jews.’”)

As they prepared to leave their homes, Kaskel and several other Jews sent a telegram to President Abraham Lincoln describing their plight and pronouncing themselves “greatly insulted and outraged by this inhuman order, the carrying out of which would be the grossest violation of the Constitution, and our rights as good citizens under it.”

Lincoln, in all likelihood, never saw that telegram, as he was busy preparing to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The irony of his freeing the slaves while Grant was expelling the Jews was not lost on some contemporaries. The Memphis Daily Bulletin published the two documents one above the other. The juxtaposition of these events also shaped the responses of several Jewish leaders to Grant’s order. They feared that Jews would replace blacks as the nation’s stigmatized minority.

Fearing the worst, Kaskel wasted no time. “On my way to Washington, in order to get this most outrageous and inhuman order of Major General Grant countermanded,” he announced to reporters. He begged the journalists to whom he told his story “to lend the powerful aid of the press to the suffering cause of outraged humanity” and “to blot out as quick as possible this stain on our national honor.”

Arriving in the nation’s capital just as the Jewish Sabbath was concluding on Jan. 3, Kaskel called at once upon Cincinnati’s departing Republican congressman, John Addison Gurley, who enjoyed ready access to the White House. Together, they immediately went over to see President Lincoln.

Lincoln turned out to have no knowledge whatsoever of the order, for it had not reached Washington. According to an oft-quoted report, he resorted to biblical imagery in his interview with Kaskel, a reminder of how immersed he was in the Bible and how, like many 19th-century Americans, he linked Jews to Ancient Israel, and America to the Promised Land.

“And so,” Lincoln is said to have drawled, “the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?”

“Yes,” Kaskel responded, “and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”

“And this protection,” Lincoln declared, “they shall have at once.”

Even if no such conversation actually took place, Lincoln did instantly instruct the general-in-chief of the Army, Henry Halleck, to countermand General Orders No. 11. Halleck seems to have had his doubts as to whether the order Kaskel has showed him was genuine, so in writing to Grant, he chose his words carefully. “If such an order has been issued,” his telegram read, “it will be immediately revoked.” Two days later, several urgent telegrams went out from Grant’s headquarters in obedience to that demand: “By direction of the General in Chief of the Army at Washington,” they read, “the General Order from these Head Quarters expelling Jews from this Department is hereby revoked.”

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In a follow-up meeting with Jewish leaders, Lincoln reaffirmed that he knew “of no distinction between Jew and Gentile.” “To condemn a class,” he emphatically declared, “is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

The revocation of Grant’s order by no means ended the controversy. Democrats in Congress sought, unsuccessfully, to censure Grant. The New York Times called upon its readers to remember that “All swindlers are not Jews. All Jews are not swindlers.” Most of all, Jews discussed the matter among themselves, seeking to understand how, even in wartime, such an order could have been issued at all.

Grant himself never defended General Orders No. 11 and later omitted the episode from his “Personal Memoir.” According to his son, Frederick, who assisted his father with those memoirs, the omission was deliberate. “That was a matter long past and best not referred to,” he quoted his father as telling him. Julia, Grant’s wife, proved far less circumspect. In her memoirs, she characterized General Orders No. 11 as nothing less than “obnoxious.” The general, she recalled, felt that the severe reprimand he received for the order was deserved, for “he had no right to make an order against any special sect.”

Had Grant himself expressed such sentiments in the wake of the order’s revocation, his run for the presidency, in 1868, might not have proved so contentious. As it was, General Orders No. 11 became an important election year issue. For the first time, a controversy involving Jews stood front and center in a presidential campaign.

Grant’s opponents insisted that a man who could expel “Jews as a class” for his war zone was unfit to be president. His supporters insisted that Grant was “steadfast” in his “adherence to the principles of American liberty and religious toleration,” and that General Orders No. 11 was “directed simply against evil designing persons whose religion was in no way material to the issue.”

When the votes were finally tallied, Grant emerged the winner by more than 300,000 votes and a healthy 134-electoral-vote margin. The Jewish vote, whose size pundits at the time greatly exaggerated, scarcely made much difference.

With the election behind him, so nobody could accuse him of pandering for votes, Grant released an unprecedented letter that told his supporters and nervous Jews just what they wanted to hear from the president-elect: “I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit. Order No. 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order.”

During his eight-year presidency, Grant went out of his way to prove just how unprejudiced he had become. He appointed more Jews to public office than all previous presidents combined, became the first president to attend a synagogue dedication and actively intervened on behalf of persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania. After he left office, he maintained friendships with many Jews, became the first president to visit the land of Israel and, in 1881, placed his name atop a call for a public meeting of protest when anti-Jewish violence broke out in Russia. One senses that whenever he interacted with Jews, and especially when he saw them persecuted, embarrassing memories of General Orders No. 11 flooded into Grant’s mind.

As for Cesar Kaskel, he returned to Paducah after General Orders No. 11 was countermanded. He subsequently moved to New York, where he established an upscale clothing store at Broadway and Bleecker Street. In later years, he regaled customers with the story of his Civil War expulsion and its aftermath. He particularly recalled his vigorous and definitive response to the post commander who demanded to know by whose order he had returned to Paducah so soon after Grant had expelled him. It was, he replied, “by order of the president of the United States.”

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Sources: Jonathan D. Sarna, “When General Grant Expelled the Jews”; newspaper clipping, SC-4218, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; Bertram W. Korn, “American Jewry and the Civil War”; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant; John Y. Simon, “That Obnoxious Oder” and Stephen V. Ash, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant’s General Order No. 11,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn (eds.) “Jews and the Civil War.”

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History and chairman of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis University. He is also the chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. His many books include “When General Grant Expelled the Jews” and “American Judaism: A History.”