Grant Moves South (54 page)

At first, Grant was cordial enough—glad, as any son might be,
to meet businessmen who were good friends of his father. Then the truth of the matter dawned on him. What Jesse and the Macks wanted was permits to buy and ship cotton, and Grant's own authority was being put up for sale. By the next train, under orders, the Cincinnati merchants went back North, lacking permits. The Chicago newspaperman, Sylvanus Cadwallader, wrote that Grant was bitter, indignant and mortified; and on December 17, at Holly Springs, Grant put his fury into an order which would leave a queer enduring stain on his own name. This order, published for the guidance of the whole department, read as follows:

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.
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Concerning all of which there is much to be said.

The first thing to say is that the brothers Mack, unfortunately, were Jewish. The second is that the Army officers of that time and place, infuriated by the activities of the traders who were infesting western Tennessee and northern Mississippi, had long since concluded that most traders were Jews (which was not at all the case) and were using the word “Jew” much as superheated Southerners at the same time were using the word “Yankee”—as a catch-all epithet which epitomized everything that was mean, grasping and without conscience. The third is that there did exist then, in the United States, latent for years, but now suddenly blooming under forced draft, a violent Ku Klux spirit, hang-over perhaps from the recent Know-Nothing era, a spirit which could rise to what now seem incredible heights of misunderstanding and hatred for all people who were not Northern Americans of English descent. All of these, taken together, were reflected in Grant's famous General Orders Number 11.

On November 9, Grant had told General Hurlbut, at Jackson, to let no civilians go south of Jackson, adding the injunction: “The Israelites especially should be kept out.” The next day he told General Webster, in charge of his railroad supply line: “Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad south 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.” And on the day he issued General Orders Number 11 he wrote to C. P. Wolcott, Assistant Secretary of War, a detailed explanation of his action:

I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into post commanders, the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officers at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come south, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood-yard on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves they will act as agents for someone else, who will be at a military post with a Treasury agent to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold. There is but one way that I know of to reach this case; that is, for Government to buy all the cotton at a fixed rate and send it to Cairo, St. Louis or some other point to be sold. Then all traders (they are a curse to the army) might be expelled.
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Grant's emotions are clear enough, and his idea about the best way to handle the cotton traffic was excellent, but his language was confused. He wanted to get the traffic under decent control so that he could get on with the war, and like many other officers at that time and place he was using the words “Jews” and “cotton traders” interchangeably. In the same way, Dana had been warning Stanton about the get-rich-quick mania that had infected “a vast population of Jews and Yankees,” and Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, complaining about the bargain-hunting that was going on,
was denouncing unprincipled sharpers, Yankees, bloodhounds of commerce, and Jews all in one sentence, making all of the words mean the same thing.
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Grant himself, later on, seemed honestly puzzled by the furore his order had raised. Talking with a rabbi after the war, he tried to explain what he had done: “You know, during war times these nice distinctions were disregarded. We had no time to handle things with kid gloves. But it was no ill-feeling or a want of good-feeling towards the Jews. If such complaints”—that is, complaints about extortionate practices in the cotton trade—“would have been lodged against a dozen men each of whom wore a white cravat, a black broadcloth suit, beaver, or gold spectacles, I should probably have issued a similar order against men so dressed.”
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There were some odd aspects to the whole business. A week before Grant issued his order, the Commanding Officer at Holly Springs, Colonel John V. Dubois, announced that “all cotton speculators, Jews and other vagrants having no honest means of support except trading on the miseries of their country” must leave town within twenty-four hours or be conscripted into the Army; Grant revoked this order and Dubois was transferred to other duty—an unfortunate shift, perhaps, since he was replaced by the Colonel Murphy who would surrender so meekly when Van Dorn demanded it. There was also persistent gossip to the effect that Grant himself did not devise General Orders Number 11. Old Jesse told Congressman Washburne that the order was issued on instructions from Washington; several newspaper stories said the same thing; and one witness asserted that one of Grant's subordinates prepared and issued the order without Grant's knowledge.
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But, however all of this may have been, the order did come out—to stand as a melancholy example of the kind of prejudice which was taken for granted in the 1860's.

It remains to be said that it did not stand very long. Within two weeks Grant received instructions to revoke the offending order, which he promptly did. Shortly afterward, Halleck sent an oddly worded note of explanation: “The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order; but, as it is in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President
deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
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As a footnote, there is the fact that Congressman Washburne sent a hurried letter to President Lincoln, saying he believed Grant's original order “the wisest order yet made by a military commander,” and urging: “As the friend of that distinguished soldier Gen. Grant I want to be heard before the final order of revocation goes out if it be contemplated to issue such an order. There are two sides to this question.”
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If Washburne was heard he changed nobody's mind. General Orders Number 11 died, and no more was heard about it. The whole affair created much more of a stir in later years than it did at the time. Examination of contemporary newspapers indicates that neither the order nor the act of revocation drew very extensive newspaper headlines or coverage.

Cotton was one distraction. Curiously allied was another distraction—Negro slavery. What was happening to Grant in this respect was much like what was happening to the government in Washington. The attempt to fight the war without taking a positive stand on slavery was collapsing, for the peculiar institution was central to the whole military problem. No matter where the Union Armies went and no matter what they did, they met the Negro slave, and they had to do something about him simply because he was there. He represented a problem that could not possibly be postponed, and the inner sympathies of the men on whom the problem was being thrust made no difference at all. Generals might hopefully announce that the Army would have nothing to do with the Negro, but that was like saying that it would have nothing to do with the weather. An invading army that did not work out some policy for dealing with the Negro would inevitably be swamped in a rising sea of black folk.

Grant's army was operating in an area where a good many plantations had been hastily abandoned, and the slaves who remained—people who had been left to their own resources, and who had none—were clogging the roads and the lanes, and overflowing into the Army camps, joined in even greater numbers by slaves who had drifted away from bondage in unoccupied areas and were wandering the countryside, pulled by an ignorant, formless hope for they did not quite know what—a people utterly rootless and helpless. The Army might not want to do anything for them, but if it did not
do something about them it would quickly be smothered. The sheer weight of the slave population compelled attention.

Whenever a body of troops was on the march, slaves would line the road to watch, idly expectant. Some of these would be grabbed by officers, to act as servants. A newspaper correspondent believed that even more were pressed into temporary service by weary soldiers, who, “seeing a stout nigger by the roadside, cannot well resist the temptation of loading their knapsacks and guns upon him and trotting him along as a pack horse”; the correspondent said that at the end of the day's march none of the slaves thus put to work would try to get back to their homes. A soldier in northern Alabama wrote that every camp was surrounded by Negroes who were delighted to be given something to do; all of them, he said, were anxious to “go wid yer and wait on you folks,” and he asserted that there were not fifty Negroes in the South who were not ready to risk their lives to get away from the plantation. Chaplain John Eaton of the 27th Ohio said that the flood of colored people brimming about each camp “was like the oncoming of cities,” and he wrote that the tide was irresistible and frightening: “There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it. Unlettered reason or the more inarticulate decision of instinct brought them to us. Often the slaves met prejudices against their own color more bitter than any they had left behind. But their own interests were identical, they felt, with the objects of our armies; a blind terror stung them, an equally blind hope allured them, and to us they came.”

The condition of these refugees, said Eaton, was appalling:

There were men, women and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes. Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean—expecting to exchange labor, and obedience to the will of another, for idleness and freedom from restraint. Such ignorance and perverted notions produced a veritable moral chaos. Cringing deceit, theft, licentiousness—all the vices which slavery inevitably fosters—were the hideous companions of nakedness, famine and disease. A few had profited
by the misfortunes of the master and were jubilant in their unwonted ease and luxury, but these stood in lurid contrast to the grimmer aspects of the tragedy—the women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent death. Small wonder that men paused in bewilderment and panic, foreseeing the demoralization and infection of the Union soldier and the downfall of the Union cause.
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This problem had been on Grant's mind all fall, and at first he tried to cope with it by getting the most helpless cases sent North for attention. In September he started sending groups of Negro women and children to the base at Cairo, Illinois, with the understanding that charitable committees of Northerners would make arrangements for their care, and later on he wired from Holly Springs to Halleck: “Contraband question becoming a serious one. What will I do with surplus Negroes? I authorized an Ohio philanthropist a few days ago to take all that were at Columbus”—Columbus, Kentucky, that is: the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio—“to his state at government expense. Would like to dispose of more the same way.” Halleck wired that this expedient would have to be abandoned.
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Whatever was to be done with the frightening crowd of displaced Negroes, the Army Commander on the spot would have to do it.

In the end, Grant handed the problem to Chaplain Eaton, who turned out to be a good man for the job.

In giving the job to Eaton, Grant was doing what he usually did—meeting a complicated problem by taking the first, most obvious step, and letting future developments grow out of that. All about his army were abandoned farms and plantations, full of cotton waiting to be picked; everywhere there were idle slaves with whom something simply had to be done; the North wanted cotton very badly, the supply and the labor force were at hand—why not get the cotton, use the labor, and as a by-product relieve the chaotic destitution of the immense mob of fugitives? On November 11, Eaton received an order from Rawlins:

Chaplain Eaton, of the 27th Ohio Infantry Volunteers, is hereby appointed to take charge of the contrabands that come
into camp in the vicinity of the post, organizing them into suitable companies for working, see that they are properly cared for, and set them to work picking, ginning and baling all cotton now out and ungathered in the field.

Eaton was dumbfounded. He had no idea what this job would involve, except that on the surface it looked impossible. He had never set eyes on Grant himself, but what he had heard about him was disturbing; as far as Eaton could see, “the order required me to report to an incompetent and disagreeable man … to fulfil a most arduous and unpleasant duty.” He hastened off to Grant's headquarters, next day, to see if he could not talk the General out of it.
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