General Order No. 11 was a Union army order issued by Major General Ulysses S. Grant on December 17, 1862, during the Vicksburg campaign of the American Civil War. The order expelled all Jews from Grant's military district, comprising areas of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Grant issued the order in an effort to reduce corruption among Union soldiers and stop the illicit trade in Southern-produced cotton, which he perceived as being run "mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders". During the war, the Lincoln administration had authorized licensed traders to do business with the Union army, which created a market for unlicensed ones. Union army commanders in the South were responsible for administering the trade licenses and trying to control the black market in Southern cotton, in addition to their regular military duties.

At Holly Springs, Mississippi, the supply depot of Grant's troops, Jews were rounded up and forced to leave the city on foot. On December 20, 1862, three days after Grant's order, Confederate States Army troops led by Major General Earl Van Dorn sprang the Holly Springs Raid, which prevented the potential expulsion of more Jews. Although delayed by Van Dorn's raid, Grant's order was fully implemented in Paducah, Kentucky, where thirty Jewish families were forcibly expelled from the city.

Jewish community leaders protested, and there was an outcry against the order from newspaper editors and members of the United States Congress. President Abraham Lincoln responded by countermanding the order on January 4, 1863. Grant later claimed, during his 1868 presidential campaign, that he had not issued the order due to antisemitism on his part, but rather as a way to address a problem that "certain Jews had caused". Nevertheless, he expressed regret for his decision. Historians and Grant biographers have generally been critical of the order.

Background Military operations

On November 2, 1862, Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant, launched the aggressive Vicksburg Campaign to take the Confederate citadel of Vicksburg, Mississippi. On November 13, Grant's cavalry had advanced on and captured Holly Springs, Mississippi, and set up an advanced supply station. On December 1, Grant's cavalry continued to move South, crossed the Tallahatchie River, and captured Oxford, Mississippi. On December 8, Grant informed Henry Halleck, his commanding general, of his military convergence plan to advance on Vicksburg overland, while Union Major General William T. Sherman would advance on Vicksburg from the Mississippi River. The Confederate commander of Vicksburg was General John C. Pemberton, who was stationed at Jackson, Mississippi, which was from Vicksburg. Grant's own Union military advance was made vulnerable to Confederate attack by a railroad supply line.

Grant's plan to capture Vicksburg by a joint venture with Sherman was thwarted by two Confederate raids. On December 10, 1862, breaking from Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest began a series of raids that disrupted Union positions. Forrest destroyed Grant's rail and telegraphic communications, and inflicted 1,500 casualties on the Union army. Grant's northern communications were cut off from Jackson, Tennessee to Columbus, Kentucky. On December 20, Confederate General Earl Van Dorn led the Holly Springs Raid on the Union supply station at Holly Springs, Mississippi, destroying "shops, depots, and warehouses." Grant was defeated, extended into enemy territory, and forced to withdraw to Tennessee, his army foraging the land. On December 29, Sherman's assault on Vicksburg at Chickasaw Bayou was repulsed by Pemberton.

Refugee cotton labor While Grant prepared to attack Pemberton's Confederate army, his army was flooded by fugitive slaves, considered contrabands by the federal government. In early November, Grant initiated a labor camp system where former refugee slaves would pick cotton, shipped north, to aid the Union War effort. Grant ordered Chaplain John Eaton to take charge of the contrabands. In return the black refugees would be protected by the army and the profits from the sale of cotton would be given to the black workers to "compensate for food, clothing, and shelter." Grant believed the labor camp system would "make the Negro a consciously self-supporting unit...and start him on the way to self-respecting citizenship." In November 1862, the first labor camp was established at Grand Junction. The Lincoln administration authorized Grant's program five days later. In December, Eaton was appointed by Grant to be superintendent of contrabands. African American common-law marriages were legalized. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that expanded the war, to end slavery in the rebelling states.

Cotton, illegal trade, smuggling

While Grant's Army marched deeper into the Confederate South, enemy territory, as far as Oxford, Mississippi, northern traders followed, to profiteer in the cotton trade, driven by the North's "consuming need" for the highly sought after product, used to make Union tents. The Union naval blockade forced Southern cotton planters to find alternatives to exporting their product. 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 U.S. Government permitted limited trade, licensed by the Treasury and the U.S. Army. Corruption flourished as unlicensed traders bribed Army officers to allow them to buy Southern cotton without a permit.David S. Surdam, "Traders or traitors: Northern cotton trading during the Civil War," Business & Economic History, Winter 1999, Vol. 28 Issue 2, pp 299–310 online 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.Jonathon D. Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (2012), pp 5–8.

Grant received contradictory information from Washington. The Treasury Department wanted to restore trade with the South, while the War Department believed profiteering from the sale of cotton aided the Confederacy and prolonged the war. Traders were allowed permits as long as the traders did not cross into Confederate held territory. Grant found this difficult to enforce, while he tried to stop cotton traders, including Jewish traders, from moving south with his army.

The practice of cotton smuggling infuriated Grant. Criticism of Jewish traders spread throughout the Union army, although non-Jewish traders' involvement with illicit trade was rampant. Jewish traders were singled out and called "sharks" who fed upon soldiers. As part of his command, 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. Grant resented having to deal with the distraction of the cotton trade. He perceived it as having endemic corruption: the highly lucrative trade resulted in a system where "every colonel, captain or quartermaster ... [was] in a secret partnership with some operator in cotton."See also Feldberg, M. (ed.), "General Grant's Infamy," Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History (American Jewish Historical Society 2002), at p. 119. He issued a number of directives aimed at black marketeers.

Escalating hostility 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."Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (1951), p. 143. The following day he instructed Colonel Joseph Dana Webster: "Give orders to all the conductors on the [rail]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."Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, p. 199. Harvard University Press, 1994.

Grant explained his anti-Jewish policy to the War Department. Grant said that Treasury Department regulations were violated: "mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders". In reference to Jewish traders Grant said: "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 or landing 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 permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes, which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold." Grant proposed that the federal 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."

Grant and the cotton trade took on a more personal tone when his father Jesse Grant, and the Mack brothers, Jewish clothing contractors, visited Grant at his Southern base of Oxford. Jesse and Grant got along well with each other for a couple of days. Grant also treated his Jewish guests respectfully. The Mack brothers needed cotton to make Union army uniforms. Jesse Grant had been promised by the Mack brothers to receive a quarter of the profits, after Jesse had gotten his son Ulysses to bestow permits to buy cotton, which would then be shipped to New York. When Grant found out about the business agreement between Jesse and the Mack brothers, he was livid. Grant abruptly sent Jesse and the Mack brothers packing north on the next train. Grant may have felt betrayed to find out that his own father was involved in the cotton trade that he despised.

At the start of December 1862, Grant focused on Jewish traders as the primary cause of smuggling. On December 5, Grant told Sherman 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." 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." As the days went by, Grant's anger mounted. Grant was not satisfied only with punishing Jewish traders, he desired to expel all Jewish people from his district.

Issue of the order

On December 17, 1862, Grant was angered when he had received complaints by mail concerning Jewish traders in his department. The same hour, Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling "Jews, as a class" to strengthen his earlier prohibition. Jewish persons who did not obey the order were to be arrested and forcibly removed as prisoners. John Rawlins, Grant's lawyer and Asst. Adjt. Gen., strongly warned Grant not to issue the order. Grant refused to take Rawlin's advice concerning the order and told him: "Well, they can countermand this from Washington if they like, but we will issue it anyhow."

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Letter to Wolcott In a letter of the same date sent to Christopher Wolcott, the United States Assistant Secretary of War, Grant explained his reasoning:

Enforcement