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363 15 Civil War Exodus The Jews and Grant’s General Order No. 11 Stephen V. Ash The popular mind commonly envisages the Civil War in images of battlefield heroics and exalted statesmanship to the exclusion of the more petty manifestations of the human spirit—greed, hatred, prejudice. But the latter were epidemic in America in the 1860s, spawned and nurtured by the virulent nature of the world’s first modern war. An event in late 1862—the forced removal of innocent Jewish families from Paducah, Kentucky— exemplifies this ugly phenomenon clearly and brings to light some less familiar aspects of America’s experience during those years. Though historians have not ignored this episode altogether, they have not yet fully accounted for it. This essay, examining sources never before used in this connection, explores the background of events in Paducah to show that the incident, far from being fortuitous, was in fact the climax to a story of evolving social turmoil in wartime America. In mid-December 1862, the world seemed a cheerless place to Ulysses S. Grant. The more the general reflected upon the exasperating circumstances in which he found himself, the more disconsolate he became. In a letter to his sister Mary he allowed himself an uncharacteristic moment of self-pity. “For a consciencious [sic] person, and I profess to be one,” he said, “this is a most slavish life.”1 Grant was writing from his headquarters in Oxford, Mississippi, the farthest point of advance in his first campaign down the Mississippi Valley against the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg. While General William T. Sherman massed a second force upriver in preparation for a Reprinted, with minor abridgement, with permission of Stephen V. Ash from The Historian 44 (August 1982): 505–523, copyright © 1982 by Phi Alpha Theta. 364 Stephen V. Ash surprise amphibious assault on the city, Grant and his men found themselves alone, advancing more and more deeply into Rebel territory along a fragile railroad line in the hope of decoying the main body of the enemy away from the Vicksburg defenses. Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn flitted annoyingly around the flanks of the army, popping up at inopportune moments. Swarms of “contraband ” slaves trailed behind the blue-clad troops, creating extra problems of administration and supply. To add to Grant’s woes, he was the object of swelling criticism from the victory-starved Northern public for the alleged shortcomings of his strategy; publicly he sloughed off these attacks , but privately he admitted the “mortification” they caused him.2 And as though these vexations were not enough to keep him overworked and miserable, Grant was forced to deal daily with another problem so thorny and maddening that it often made all the rest seem facile by contrast. This was the question of cotton. There were those who claimed that cotton was what the war was really all about. Whether this is true or not, it is certain that cotton became a crucial issue after the conflict began. At the heart of the matter was the fact that the South had cotton and much of the rest of the world wanted it. Abraham Lincoln tried at first to deny the Rebels the benefits of foreign trade by keeping all of the cotton in the South, but he soon had to reconsider the matter. Certain industries and businesses in Europe and America depended heavily on the cotton trade, and they worked vigorously to persuade the president to lift his strict embargo. Border states, particularly Kentucky, wanted trade with the South kept open, and Lincoln, at least early in the war, was afraid to risk offending them. Furthermore, his own armies needed limited amounts of cotton for such articles as tents. The necessity for compromise between the opposing demands of war and politics soon became obvious to Lincoln. Within a few weeks after Fort Sumter, the president and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase resolved to relax the land blockade enough to allow limited trade in those parts of the Confederacy in Union hands; that is, as Chase phrased it, they decided “to let commerce follow the flag.” This policy was welcomed at first by sympathetic army officers who recognized that destitute Southerners in occupied areas often had nothing of value left in the world but a few bales of cotton. Restrictions were gradually lifted so that by the summer of 1862 military authorities were under orders to provide “all possible facilities” for moving cotton out...

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