One hundred sixty years ago, on the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died in Washington, D.C., from a single bullet to the head shot by John Wilkes Booth the night before.
The assassination of America’s 16th president climaxed the four-year Civil War between the United States and 11 of its southern slaveholding states, known as the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was determined to preserve the country as a single entity, even through war. Over 600,000 soldiers on both sides are estimated to have been killed in the Civil War.
Just five days before Lincoln was shot, the war ended with the Confederacy’s surrender to the Union.
The lieutenant general who commanded the Union to victory and accepted the surrender of his counterpart, General Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, was Ulysses S. Grant. Three years later, Grant was elected U.S. president, and in 1876, a year before leaving office, he attended the dedication of a synagogue five blocks from the theater where Lincoln was murdered.
Grant had been the source of a difficult episode in Lincoln’s presidency — and it involved Jewish Americans.
That occurred in late 1862, when Grant, then holding the rank of major general, led Union forces fighting the Confederate army in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Wanting to limit black marketeering by unauthorized suppliers, especially in the cotton trade, Grant issued a military order on November 9 that prohibited such merchants from venturing into parts of the Deep South. The order singled out one group, those Grant called “the Israelites,” stating that “Jews and other unprincipled traders” were violating the Treasury Department’s wartime restrictions. A month later, Grant issued two more orders targeting Jews. On December 8, his General Order No. 2 called for cotton speculators, whom he specified as being “Jews and other Vagrants,” to leave his military district, known as the Department of the Tennessee, encompassing parts of the states of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. And on December 17, he issued General Order No. 11, which went much further: “Jews as a class” would be “required to leave” the district.
Jewish Americans sent telegrams to the White House to protest Grant’s order. Some traveled to Washington to lobby Lincoln directly. The president reportedly told them that he was opposed to an entire “class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”
In early January 1863, Lincoln cancelled the eviction orders. There’s no evidence that Lincoln knew about Grant’s decree beforehand or that he communicated with him about the matter afterward, said Jonathan Sarna, author and co-author, respectively, of the books When Grant Expelled the Jews (2012) and Lincoln and the Jews (2015).
Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, near Boston, said that he wrote the Grant book because the subject “is of great importance, and relates to the place of Jews in American society.”
As to his work on Lincoln, about whom thousands of books have been written (at least 450 of them being in NLI’s collection), Sarna said, “I am deeply interested in people who support and admire Jews when those around them do not.”
He added in an e-mail: “In Lincoln’s lifetime, Jews grew from a tiny community (perhaps 3,000) when he was born to a major community of 150,000 by the Civil War. Some might have been frightened or alienated by so many Jewish newcomers; Lincoln was not and included them.”
Grant’s order formed the backdrop for Family Secrets, a novel published in 2016 by Barry Spielman, an American immigrant to Israel who works in hi-tech.
The main character’s ancestor lived through the edict, dramatizing the inconsistency of the north’s having “had this image of [being] holier than thou, going to war to free the slaves,” while then “kicking Jews as a class out of a region that came under their control just like the best of the antisemitic edicts in history,” said Spielman, who for decades has researched the Civil War.
A round-number anniversary (160) provides a fine opportunity to ponder a historical event like Lincoln’s assassination, and an extra-round number offers an extra-fine opportunity. So it was that in July 2013 I wrote a feature story for the N.Y. Times on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the Civil War because the Union repulsed a Confederate attack in Pennsylvania.
On the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, I attended a night-time gathering on Washington’s 10th Street, N.W., which was closed to traffic for the occasion of a reenactment of the chaotic scene there in 1865. Costumed actors portrayed the roles of military and medical officials delivering updates on Lincoln’s condition to a concerned throng. Like the 500 or so others in attendance at the free event, I imagined what the mood was like a century and a half earlier on the spot where I stood, about midway between Ford’s Theater, where Booth shot Lincoln, and the brownstone house directly across the street to which the unconscious Lincoln was carried to be treated.
That’s when I noticed a famous American walking from the theater to the parking garage next door. It was Colin Powell, by then retired. He was with his wife Alma. The Powells were dressed to the nines, likely having just attended a performance in the infamous building, which remains a theater to this day.
Powell, a general, had served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. I recalled the only previous time I’d seen Powell in person. It was at a conference of a Jewish organization. Powell spoke of having grown up in New York City with so many Jewish immigrants for neighbors that he spoke Yiddish. He mentioned doing favors for them as a Shabbos goy: a non-Jewish person performing basic tasks on Shabbat that Jews are prohibited by religious law from doing, such as turning light switches on and off.
Powell’s long-ago predecessor as the U.S.’s top uniformed soldier, Grant, denied that he’d knowingly issued the three orders or that he held animosity toward Jews. As president, he atoned for those actions by appointing many Jews to positions in his administrations.
History’s timing is unknowable but spurs curiosity. Consider a reversal of roles: Powell, a black American, commanding Union troops and reporting to Lincoln; Grant, serving in Powell’s era of unprecedented accomplishment and integration for both black Americans and Jewish Americans.
As to Lincoln, his legacy in reversing Grant’s edict is this, Sarna said: It “reassured [Jews] about America. Immigrants continued to arrive.”
Editor-writer Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
