Reconsidering Ulysses S. Grant, the Jews, the Native Americans, and the Reconstruction South
The 18th president's reputation took a huge leap in my book after I read Ron Chernow's 2017 biography. This Democrat admires many Republicans, and Grant is -- with Lincoln -- tops among them.
Acknowledgement that our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, had Connecticut roots. We’re told in his biographies that he was raised in Ohio and later lived in Galena, Illinois.; he was a Westerner who came east to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. But Grant’s paternal ancestors had earlier moved west from Connecticut.
Generally, I’m in agreement with Mr. Bailey’s opinions, and I admired him as a reporter before he was bumped several years ago to the editorial pages.
But yesterday’s column annoys me because it takes an unfair swipe at someone whose reputation has become greatly enhanced in recent years, since the 2017 publication of Ron Chernow’s great biography simply entitled Grant.
There’s a reason — many reasons, indeed — why Grant and his wife, Julia Boggs Dent Grant, originally from Saint Louis, were entombed in the mausoleum high above the Hudson River in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
Grant died of throat cancer in 1885 at age 63 in a cottage on Mount McGregor, highest of the Palmertown Range of mountains just south of the better-known Adirondacks. The former president had willed himself, despite excruciating pain, to stay alive barely long enough to complete his two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant with Mark Twain’s guidance. The memoirs were published posthumously in a successful plan so that the ever-short-of-funds Grant could provide financially for Julia and their children via the revenues from sale of the books.
So Ulysses and Julia came eventually to rest in aa building constructed using what at the time was the largest fund-raising campaign in American history. In effect, when the Grant National Memorial opened on Grant’s 75th birthday in 1897, it was the best example of what came to be called crowd-sourced funding.
Some 90,000 people contributed funds to erect “Grant’s Tomb.”
The Grant National Memorial, funded privately by more than 90,000 donors but now managed by the U.S. National Park Service, decorated in bunting and flags for an annual observance of Grant’s birthday on April 27th. This past April 27th was Grant’s 201st birthday. (NPS photo)
Epitaph on the Grant National Memorial. (NPS photo)
I shall presently review what Mr. Bailey wrote and then proceed to shred, or take it apart, well, actually, critique it.
But before I get to Mr. Bailey and his column of Sunday, let’s start with that very august name, Ulysses S. Grant.
It’s not the name he was born with.
Hiram Ulysses Grant, his birth name, entered the world in 1820 at Point Pleasant, Ohio, a mere village on the north bank of the river of the same name, about 25 miles southeast of the already established burg called Cincinnati.
At age three, Ulysses’ parents, Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant, natives of Pennsylvania, moved their family 25 miles further east to Georgetown, located in the Southern Ohio hills a few miles inland from the Ohio River.
Jesse Grant, a Whig, had political disagreements with his local congressional representative, Thomas L. Hamer, also a native Pennsylvanian, who practiced law at Georgetown when he was not in Washington. Hamer was a Democrat and an Ohio elector for President Andrew Jackson in 1828.
It became clear to Jesse, who only saw what multitudes would see throughout the life of Ulysses Grant, that the boy who would become commanding general of the Army and then president was, in fact, abysmal at commercial business.
Jesse Grant was himself quite successful in business as a tanner, and he was quite the local politician and abolitionist. He even later became mayor of Bethel, an Ohio town kind of between Point Pleasant and Georgetown.
Jesse prevailed upon Rep. Hamer, his political opponent — but also a neighbor, don’t you know? — to appoint Ulysses (he was always called “Ulysses” despite being named “Hiram Ulysses” at birth) to West Point, the longtime Army post as which the U.S. Military Academy was established in 1802.
Congressman Hamer was not very familiar with the teenager he was now sending off to the shores of the Hudson River, 50 miles north of New York City. Hamer’s appointment letter to the officers at West Point mistakenly ascribed to the fledgling cadet the name of “Ulysses S. Grant.” When the Buckeye arrived at West Point, the name was already in the paperwork and so, as these things do, it stuck. He was nicknamed “Uncle Sam” and then just “Sam.”
Still, Ulysses’ name was not given as Ulysses S. Grant — and since Hamer made up the middle initial, the “S” does not stand for anything. Kind of like Harry S Truman, our 33rd president and, like Julia Grant, a Missourian.
So it is curious that in two places, Grant is remembered as “Ulysses Simpson Grant.”
Yes, “Simpson” was Ulysses’ mother’s maiden name.
And “Simpson” was also the name of one of Ulysses’ younger brothers.
So, where is this inexplicable and erroneous portmanteau of “Ulysses Simpson Grant” to be found? Even Rep. Hamer of Ohio didn’t make that mistake!
I’ve found Ulysses Simpson Grant in two place, and one of them is all too close to home:
On the website of the Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society in the picturesque Mississippi River steamboat town of Galena, in far northwestern Illinois, where Grant arrived in 1860 to help his brothers Orville and Simpson run their leather-goods store. It was from Galena that Grant, already an experienced Army officer and veteran of the Mexican War, was commissioned a colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry in June 1861 at the Civil War’s outset. (I’m pretty sure that Galena remained Grant’s voting residence until after the White House, when he eventually moved to New York City.)
On the “Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Tablet,” a plaque inside the Connecticut Capitol in Hartford. The plaque, placed on October 1st, 1916, by the Connecticut Sons of Veterans, recognizes that Jesse Root Grant’s father, Noah Grant, was born at Tolland and the son of Matthew Grant, one of the first settlers of Windsor. (Windsor, as every Connecticut history buff must know, was the first English settlement in the state, dating to establishment in 1633.) Matthew Grant and his wife, Priscilla, great-grandparents of Ulysses, arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630; Matthew fought in the French and Indian War, which was the North American theater of the larger Seven Years’ War in Europe. Noah fought in the American Revolutionary War battle at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, during the Siege of Boston. Noah later settled in Greensburg, a town in Western Pennsylvania, where he married Rachel Kelley. They became the parents of Ulysses’ father, Jesse. At age five, Jesse was moved by his parents west to Ohio.
Mistaken website of Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society in Galena, Illinois. I also spot another mistake! The time line lists that Grant is “buried in New York City’s Riverside Park.” Not true! You know the old joke, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” The correct answer is: “No one.” Ulysses and Julia Grant are in an above-ground mausoleum, so, to be quite literal, no one is buried at Grant’s Tomb. Which, by the way, is indeed a “tomb,” not a “grave,” which proves the point. It’s said that Groucho Marx made up the question, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb” for his 1950s quiz TV show, “You Bet Your Life.” But the actual inventor of the buried-at-Grant’s-Tomb question was, according to QuoteInvestigator.com, the comedian and newspaper columnist Ed Wynn, who made up the question at age 38 in September 1925. People of a certain age will remember Ed Wynn acting as the eccentric (and floating-below-the-ceiling) Uncle Albert in Walt Disney’s movie Mary Poppins, released in 1964. Wynn appeared in many entertainments from vaudeville in 1903 to radio, to television, before dying in 1966 at age 79. Wynn himself is interred (which I take to mean “cremated” remains) at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Groucho Marx, who indeed popularized the famous question, died at age 86 in 1977. His remains were cremated and interred at Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. So I guess neither Ed Wynn nor Groucho Marx were buried, either. Who’s buried in their tombs? Again, no one.
The mistaken Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Tablet within the Connecticut Capitol at Hartford, placed in 1916 by the Connecticut Sons of Veterans. Photograph by Stacey Renee on the website of ConnecticutHistory.org,
Well, this has taken long enough!
Do you remember Hugh Bailey?
This article is about Mr. Bailey’s column in Connecticut newspapers on Sunday concerning Ulysses S. Grant, our eighteenth president and Civil War hero.
What set me off from what Mr. Bailey wrote?
His column was headlined in its CTinsider.com online form as “Truth and lies in social studies class.” It riffs on social studies education based on his report from a “Meet The Teacher” night for parents of eighth grade students. The column discusses vagaries of social studies, especially history:
Florida schools, for instance, have approved the use of what is called “supplemental curriculum” created by an unaccredited right-wing advocacy group called PragerU. In its telling, the group offers an alternative to “dominant left-wing ideologies” in the state’s classrooms. The Florida Board of Education says the material is in alignment with revised civics and government standards.
What do they show? All kinds of things, much of it comically slanted. In one video, the two generals at the end of the Civil War are shown in mock conversation, with Ulysses S. Grant praising Robert E. Lee as a “good man” and saying, “We were just caught on the opposite side of things.”
In real life, Grant had this to say about Lee’s Confederates: Their cause was, “I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Maybe not just a simple misunderstanding, in other words.
Grant, too, had a complicated history. He’s generally acknowledged as being terrible on issues involving Native Americans, who at the time of his presidency were in the way of what is so benignly referred to as our “westward expansion.” But he did not go as far as others in advocating their extinction, which led some to consider him a moderate on the question. Like anything, there are layers.
Children can handle this. They don’t need coddling, and they certainly don’t benefit from being lied to.
Our schools are not perfect, but in a best-case scenario they will encourage young people to ask their own questions, and not simply take the teacher’s word for it. That’s what an education is supposed to be about.
Mr. Bailey is correct in much of this column, and I agree with his larger points and many of his sub-points. But he is wrong concerning Grant and Native Americans.
Grant graduated from West Point on June 30, 1843, at age 21. He ranked 21st out of a class of 39 cadets. He excelled in mathematics, art, and horsemanship. Math and horsemanship were to distinguish his Army career. He was promoted upon graduation to the rank of brevet second lieutenant.
Despite his superb horsemanship, he was not assigned to the calvary. Instead he was assigned to infantry and was ordered to the Jefferson Barracks near Saint Louis. He was happy there, but looked forward to leaving the Army and teaching math.
Happy, too, because in 1844 he was introduced to Julia Boggs Dent, whose father was a pro-slavery man from Missouri, a border state. It took time for Julia’s father and Ulysses to come to terms. So while he and Julia became engaged, marriage had to wait four years until 1848. Jesse Grant opposed the Dents’ ownership of slaves, so Jesse and Hannah refused to travel to Saint Louis for the wedding at the Dent home.
In the meantime, Grant saw war action.
In 1846, following the U.S. annexation of Texas, war with Mexico broke out.
Beforehand, Whig President John Tyler of Virginia had ordered Grant’s Army unit to Louisiana as an army of occupation under Major General (later President) Zachary Taylor, later a reluctant politician under the Whig label, which presaged the future Dwight David Eisenhower, also an Army general who became president despite uncertain political beliefs. And Grant himself, too.
Now in May 1846, Taylor’s successor, President James Knox Polk, Democrat of Tennessee, ordered Grant’s unit to march south to the Rio Grande River to prevent a Mexican siege of Texas.
Grant was in combat for the first time on May 8, 1846, at the Battle of Palo Alto, on the Rio Grande five miles from present-day Brownsville, Texas.
Historical print of the Battle of Palo Alto on May 8th, 1846,, where Grant first saw battle near the Rio Grande on the road from inland Matamoros, Mexico, to Port Isabel, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. By Adolphe Jean-Baptiste Bayot and Carlos Nebel. from National Park Service’s Palo Alto Battle website.
Grant excelled at logistics, a hallmark that followed him throughout the later Civil War. Some 3,700 Mexican troops met 2,300 U.S. troops. The formal declaration of war was three days into the future, but the Americans won due to superior artillery.
It was in the Mexican War, lasting until 1847, that Grant became a leader. Business may have eluded him, but he was exceptional as a regimental quartermaster, and as a combat leader, and even as a valiant messenger. He carried a dispatch past Mexican snipers by hanging off the side of his horse so the animal was between Grant and the enemy.
Somewhere between Louisiana and Mexico City, Grant also came to know Native Americans, whom he would have called “Indians.”
While he carried out orders and performed exceptionally well, Grant was adamantly opposed to the Mexican War. He saw Mexico’s loss and its ceding of 55 percent of its territory in 1848, becoming the U.S. states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, most of Colorado, New Mexico, and part of Wyoming, as a ploy to expand slavery.
"I was bitterly opposed to the measure ... and to this day, regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation," Grant wrote. Still, he found his calling and made the Army his career. Beginning as a quartermaster, he figured out military supply routes, transportation systems, logistics, and the care and feeding — especially feeding! — of a large Army. This led to development of his battle and long-term campaign planning in the Civil War.
Grant’s post-war career took him all over, from a lonely post in Upstate New York to Detroit to California in the Gold Rush. He tried business again, and failed. He tried farming. No good.
In 1860, Grant followed his two younger brothers to Galena, Illinois, to work in their leather-goods shop.
In Galena, he met a critical lifetime ally, Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Nation member, a non-practicing lawyer, and an engineer from the village of Indian Falls, on Seneca land on the Tonawanda Creek in Western New York, 28 miles northeast of Buffalo and 44 miles southwest of Rochester. The creek is a tributary of the Niagara River.
Parker’s Seneca name was Hasanoanda, which means “Leading Name.”
A chance meeting led Parker to be enrolled at the Cayuga Academy, a top-flight school in Aurora, New York, on Lake Cayuga about 25 miles north of the present-day site of Cornell University and Ithaca College.
“Once or twice I have been severely abused. But I returned blow for blow with savage ferocity. Whether I gained the upper hand of my antagonist I leave the public to decide. For mind you, these quarrels were public. Bad business, but it could not be helped.”
The academy provided an excellent education, and the curriculum included Latin, Greek and science. Ely participated in numerous school debates and became the Academy’s leading orator. His fluency in English enabled him to become the translator, scribe, and interpreter for the Seneca elders in their meetings and correspondence with the United States government.
Following three years at the Cayuga Academy, Parker went to Washington, D.C. to lobby for the rights of the Seneca to remain at the Tonawanda reservation. Despite promises of support, a Senate Committee voted against the Tonawanda petition.
At the age of 18, Parker moved to Cattaraugus County in western New York, where he commenced his legal studies in the Ellicottville law offices of Angel and Rice. But when he applied for admission to the New York bar, the New York Supreme Court ruled that only natural-born or naturalized citizens could be admitted to practice and, as a Seneca, he was neither.
Parker then studied civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and when a project to extend the Erie Canal was approved, Parker received appointment as the resident engineer at Rochester, New York. Around this time, the Seneca proclaimed Parker as Sachem of the Six Nations and, with his attorney John Martindale, he continued the 20-year battle to preserve the homelands at Tonawanda for the Seneca by commencing four lawsuits against the Ogden Land Company and their grantees. One case was lost in the New York Supreme Court and a second on appeal to the New York Court of Appeals but, in the other two, both the New York Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the rights of the Seneca. These cases were Fellows v. Blacksmith and New York ex rel. Cutler v. Dibble.
Dr. Stephen Saunders, Maxwell School at Syracuse University, wrote that the Supreme Court decision in the latter case “inspired a Senate Treaty, which permitted the Tonawanda Senecas to use a significant part of the resources set aside for their removal to Kansas to buy back over 7-thousand acres of the Tonawanda reserve. And to establish a permanent home for themselves, as it turned out, a permanent home for that tradition that everyone thought was going to die. This is Ely Parker’s legacy.”
Selection from Pittsford on the Erie Canal, painted in 1837 by George Harvey. Thought to show King’s Bend, a sharp turn in the canal around an obstacle in Pittsford, southeast of Rochester, New York. Coincidentally, this was former Seneca tribal land. It was on the Erie Canal that Ely S. Parker worked as an engineer. Collection of University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. The canal, an invention of DeWitt Clinton, seventh governor of New York, joined the Atlantic to the Great Lakes hinterland via the Hudson River and Mohawk River. In its success, the Erie Canal turned New York Harbor into the global entrepôt that it is today.
Harvard denied Parker admission, because he was a Native American.
Yet Parker was also practically royalty.
Parker’s grandfather was a learned, if conniving and double-dealing Seneca chief named Red Jacket. Red Jacket was given a medal in 1782 by President George Washington. Red Jacket was later a defender of religious liberty, speaking about it in Buffalo on June 23rd, 1796. And considering how the French, English, and Americans double-dealt with the Seneca and their five partner nations in the Six Nations of the Iroquois, perhaps Red Jacket had it right.
Portrait from the U.S. Library of Congress via Britannica.com.This portrait is similar to one on the National Park Service website painted in abou25 by Charles Bird King showing Red Jacket in Native American garb. I don’t know who painted this portrait — perhaps the same Mr. King? — but I chose to publish this painting not because it’s in European garb but because it’s in brilliant color.
In 1852, Parker was given a new name, Donehogawa, meaning “Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois” upon being selected as Grand Sachem of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. He was the last person to hold that title.
It was a huge legacy.
The Six Nations of the Iroquois was formed in about the year 1200, or about 823 years ago. Originally from the land that became New York State and adjoining territories, the Iroquois were originally a five-nation confederacy: Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. The sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined later.
In their language, the Iroquois people call themselves the “Haudenosaunee,” meaning “people who are building the longhouse” and descendants of the great peacemaker Hiawatha. The Haudenosaunee confederacy is now headquartered in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada, located about 75 miles west across the Niagara Peninsula from Buffalo and 60 miles southwest of Toronto.
[The Six Nations of the Iroquois] saw their confederacy as a symbolic version of their traditional longhouse dwellings, stretching across most of what is today New York State. The Mohawks were the guardians of the eastern door in the lower Mohawk Valley area. The Oneidas occupied the upper Mohawk Valley and the area of modern day Oneida, NY. The Onondagas were the keepers of the council fire in the center of the "longhouse," in the modern day greater Syracuse area. The Cayugas occupied the finger-lakes area and the Seneca were the guardians of the western door in the modern Rochester-Buffalo NY area.
Through a matriarchal hierarchy and a men's council, the Six Nations employed great executive ability in governing themselves and other nations. Situated upon the headwaters of the Ohio, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Chenango, Mohawk, and St. Lawrence Rivers, the Six Nations held within their jurisdiction the passageway to the interior of the continent, and could easily travel in any direction. The military successes of the Six Nations left them in a strategically strong position. They traveled far beyond their own borders, conquering many Indian nations making them tributary nations. At one time, their domain reached north to the Sorel River in Canada, south to the Carolinas, west to the Mississippi, and east to the Atlantic. The Six Nations were easily the dominant Indian confederacy in the northeast and northwest areas of America. [NOTE: It’s not easy to find Canada’s Sorel River! I finally figured out it’s an obsolete name for the lower portion of the Richelieu River, flowing north from Lake Champlain through Quebec to the St. Lawrence. The same river was also variously known as the Iroquois River and the Chambly River before French colonists named it for Armand Jean du Plessis, first duke of Richelieu. A statesman and a clergyman, he was also styled as Cardinal Richelieu. Things moved fast for him. Consecrated a bishop in 1607. Appointed foreign secretary to King Louis VIII in 1616. Cardinal in 1622. Chief minister to Louis VIII in 1624. Died at age 57 in 1642.)
The purple area shows the extent of Iroquois Six Nation influence in North America. The pink areas are recognized Iroquois or Haudenosaunee territorial claims today. The vertical line is the 90th degree of west longitude. Wikipedia.
The arrival of Europeans in their lands offered the Six Nations new opportunities of expanding their influence by becoming a dominant force in the fur trade industry. Initially their main trading partners were the Dutch; which then changed to the English after the Dutch ceded their land claims in America to England in 1660. The Confederacy's relationship with France was not amicable, as France had initially aligned themselves with the Abenaki, long time foes of the Nations. Six Nations/French relationships see-sawed back and forth between periods of peace and violence.
With the coming of the French and Indian War in 1755, both France and England actively worked to gain the Six Nations as allies. While the French had some initial success, particularly among the Seneca, the Six Nations ultimately became allies of the English. This allegiance was won largely through the work of one man, Sir William Johnson. Johnson was a poor Irish immigrant who had built an empire in the Mohawk Valley through his dealings with the Indians. He immersed himself in the Indian culture; and as a result of this he was ultimately adopted into the Mohawk Nation. Johnson eventually became Superintendent of Indian Affairs for a majority of the 13 Colonies and Canada. Throughout his life he was a trusted friend, mediator, and advisor to the Six Nations.The English/Six Nations alliance helped to facilitate the building of Fort Stanwix in 1758 on traditional Oneida land. As British allies, the Confederacy gave a measure of safety to English frontier settlements in New York and aided the British on many of their expeditions against the French, which ultimately led to English victory over the French.
The peace that came with the end of the French and Indian war was short lived however, as colonists pushed further into Indian lands. In an effort to stem further bloodshed, English Colonial, and Six Nations leaders met at Fort Stanwix in 1768 to establish firm boundary lines. This "Boundary Line Treaty" signed between England and the Six Nations (who were also signing for the Shawnee, Delewares, Mingoes, and others both with and without their consent), established a firm line between Indian and European lands. In the end however, the treaty did very little to stop the flood of settlement into Indian lands.
The coming of the war between England and her colonies brought new problems and concerns to the Six Nation Confederacy. They did not fully understand why the English were quarreling with one another, and had no desire to be drawn into what they perceived as a civil war. Early in the revolution, Oneida leaders sent a message to the governor of New York stating: "We are unwilling to join either side of such a contest, for we love you both, Old England and New. Should the Great King of England apply us for aid, we should deny him —- and should the colonies apply, we shall refuse. We Indians cannot find or recollect from the traditions of our ancestors any like case."
This neutral course could not be maintained for long however, as pressure increased from both England and the 13 States. The English particularly were insistent that the Confederacy fulfill its obligations as allies of England. In the end, the civil war aspects of the American Revolution spilled over into the Six Nations. Unable to agree on a unified course of action, the Confederacy split, with not only nation fighting nation, but individuals within each nation taking different sides. Due to the old alliances and a belief that they stood a better chance of keeping their lands under the English, the majority of the nations supported England in some form or another. Only the Oneida and Tuscarora gave major support to the Americans.
The Confederacy members supporting the English, such as Joseph and Molly Brant, helped their allies launch numerous devastating raids throughout the war on the frontier settlements of New York and Pennsylvania. The Oneida and Tuscarora gave valuable service to the Americans as scouts and guides, and even supplied men to the Continental Army for a short time. Both sides raided and destroyed each other's villages.
The Treaty of Paris bought the war to an end in 1783. In this treaty however, neither the English nor the Americans had made provisions for their Six Nations allies. The Confederacy was forced to sign a separate treaty with the United States in 1784. This treaty was negotiated and signed at the ruinous Fort Stanwix, and resulted in the English allied Confederacy members giving up significant amounts of their traditional lands; in the end it was no more binding than the 1768 treaty had been. The Oneida and Tuscarora would receive little way in compensation for their support of the United States.
The end of the Revolutionary War brought peace, but no victory, to the Haudenosaunee of either side. The war left their confederacy and culture shattered, and their lands and villages devastated and destroyed.
So in 1860, Parker, age 32, found himself far from Western New York. He was literally on the edge, the very edge, of the Iroquois former sphere of influence. Galena was on the east bank of the Mississippi River. This was the western boundary of Iroquois influence.
Parker was in Galena as an engineer for the U.S. Treasury, assigned to build a customs house.
In Galena, Parker and Grant became friends.
Parker was to become a tribal diplomat acting as Grant’s emissary, first from his Army command and then from the White House, to Native Americans across the continent.
It was to become one of Grant’s most important relationships.
Yet in Galena in 1860, Parker may have seemed the far better man, but for being an Indian. Grant was an almost forgotten Army captain working in the shop belonging to his younger brothers.
The article Mr. Bailey cited in his column is from the National Park Service. Far from depicting Grant as “terrible on issues involving Native Americans” — those are Mr. Bailey’s words, not mine — the NPS article shows Grant sympathetic to Native Americans. From a posting in the Columbia Barracks in Washington Territory in 1853, Grant wrote to Julia: “[Indians] about here are the most harmless people you ever saw. It is really my [opinion] that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.”
Yes, Grant was of his time. In his first inaugural address, he proposed that “the proper treatment of the original occupants of the land, the Indian, is one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course towards them which tends to their civilization, Christianization and ultimate citizenship.”
Note that final point.
Grant proposed to turn Native Americans into U.S. citizens. Just like the immigrants from Europe, the Jews and the Catholics. And, of course, all the emancipated African-Americans, whose cause was the raison d’être of the Civil War.
Citizenship for all. That was Grant’s goal, and Parker’s, too.
Three days later on April 15th, the still-new President Abraham Lincoln — Republican of Illinois, do not forget — called for 75,000 union volunteers. The next day, in Galena, Grant attended the first of several meetings to muster Illinois troops and, for himself, to seek a suitable command.
The sixteenth president, the first Republican national chief executive, Civil War leader, Grant’s patron and admirer, the Great Emancipator, martyr, lawyer, humorist, Kentuckian, Hoosier, and Illinoian. Abraham Lincoln. Speaking at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863 four months after the war’s deadliest battle, Lincoln urged his fellow Americans in just 271 words to make certain “that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The State of Illinois owns one of the five known copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s own handwriting. This copy, housed in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum at Springfield, is called the “Everett Copy” because Lincoln prepared it for The Reverand Edward Everett, who was listed as the main speaker at the Gettysburg dedication and charged with recollecting the great battle in precise detail. Everett, a Unitarian minister from Boston, former Harvard president, Whig, and former governor, senator, and Secretary of State, spoke for two hours. He was followed by Lincoln — who spoke for two minutes.
Six days later, Ulysses wrote to his father: “"We have a government and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots."
On April 29th, U.S. Representative Elihu Benjamin Washburne of Galena, an ally of Lincoln, caused Grant to be appointed by Illinois Governor Richard Yates (yet another Illinois Republican) as personal military aide to Yates. Grant mustered no fewer than ten regiments — typically each with two battalions of about 800 men each, or a total of perhaps 16,000 men! — into the Illinois militia. On June 14th, again at Washburne’s behest, Grant was appointed colonel of the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment and then headed to Saint Louis to kick the Confederate Army out of Saint Louis at President Lincoln’s order.
The war was on, especially along the critical Mississippi River down to its mouth south of New Orleans. It was imperative that the river remain in Union hands. On August 5t, 1861, Grant was appointed by Lincoln as an Army brigadier general, leading troops across the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.
As Grant headed south, Parker headed from Galena back east, to New York State.
He tried to raise a regiment of Iroquois volunteers but was rebuffed by the Republican governor, Edwin Denison Morgan. (A native of Massachusetts, Morgan had, like Grant’s great-grandfather, lived in Windsor, Connecticut, and then was a grocer and City Council member in Hartford before moving to New York City.)
Parker could not raise volunteers because they were Indians.
Next, Parker tried to enlist himself in the Army as an engineer. Lincoln’s secretary of war, the former U.S. Rep. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, personally turned Parker down, saying an Indian could not serve the country.
Finally, Parker found his way to his friend from Galena, the new war hero, Ulysses Grant. Grant caused Parker to commissioned an Army captain in May 1863 and had him sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to become chief engineer of the 7th Division during the siege of that city. The Army was rather short on engineers, so Parker fit in.
Vicksburg, along with Gettysburg, became the west and east turning points in the Civil War. For the Union, it was critical was to control Vicksburg, located on high bluffs with a commanding view of the Mississippi River, making it a harrowing choke point for Northern traffic headed upriver and downriver to and from New Orleans.
After agonizing campaigns, Vicksburg fell to the Union in August 1863. Parker became Grant’s adjutant — essentially Grant’s chief administrative officer. Lincoln brought Grant east. Grant brought Parker and now made him a lieutenant colonel as well as his personal military secretary.
Undated photograph on the U.S. Defense Department website. Photo in collection of Harvard University Art Museum. General Grant is seated in the middle, surrounded by his staff. Lieutenant Colonel Parker is seated at the far left. Standing to Parker’s left and Grant’s right is Brigadier General Adam Badeau of New York City, later a writer for newspapers and magazines who helped Grant with his memoirs as well as serving a long time as U.S. consul in London and a short time as consul in Havana. Badeau instigated a fight with the Grant family over payment for his role helping Grant with his memoirs. Badeau spread false rumors Mark Twain had ghostwritten the memoirs and successfully sued Grant’s heirs to obtain payment for his services. Standing to Grant’s left is Vermonter General Orville Elias Babcock, Grant’s aide-de-camp, a West Point graduate and a member of the Corps of Engineers. Babcock after the war was promoted to brigadier general and traveled for Grant extensively throughout the South and the West.. In 1867, Babcock informed Grant that a whiter supremacist insurgency was using Confederate symbols to intimidate African Americans. He also confronted Mormon leader Brigham Young over polygamy in Utah, calling it “fanatical.” When Grant entered the White House in 1869, Babcock became secretary to the president — today called “chief of staff.” Babcock got into all kinds of trouble including staffing a failed attempt by Grant for the United States to explore the annexation of Santa Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. Babcock later became a longtime federal inspector of lighthouses under four presidents, dying on the job in 1884 by drowning in Mosquito Inlet in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s reported that Babcock displayed no racial animosity toward African-Americans, in contrast to many contemporaries, which led to his advocacy on the Santa Domingo project. Finally, to Babcock’s left and seated is Pennsylvanian Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter, an ordnance officer and personal secretary to Grant and then to General William Tecumseh Sherman. After the war, Porter became vice president of the Pullman Company, which produced railroad passenger cars in Chicago, and then U.S. ambassador to France. He lived later in New York City and played a major role in establishing the Grant National Memorial.
Grant’s memoirs are still in print, available on Amazon. My copy is on my Kindle.
As military secretary to Grant, Parker was literally with Grant to the end of the war.
When the Civil War broke out, Parker returned to New York and tried unsuccessfully to enlist in the Union Army. Finally, with the help of his friend Grant, who was no longer a failure, but instead a renowned general on the brink of defeating the Confederates at Vicksburg, Parker won an appointment as a military secretary. He first served General John Smith and later Grant himself. From Chattanooga to Appomattox, Parker always could be seen at Grant’s side, usually carrying a stack of papers and with an ink bottle tied to a button on his coat. When Lee finally surrendered, it was Ely Parker who wrote down the terms.
You read that right: The South’s surrender to the North was composed in the handwriting of the Seneca Ely S. Parker, Grand Sachem of the Six Nations of Iroquois.
On April 9th, 1865, the Confederate States of America surrendered via General Robert Edward Lee of Virgina to the Union under General Ulysses S. Grant of Ohio and Illinois inside the McLean family’s house in the small village of Appomattox Court House in Central Virginia. Lee and the CSA staff are on the left, with Lee seated and his hat on his knee. Grant is seated next to Lee. Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker of the Seneca Nation is standing third from the right with his left arm draped on the chair in front of him. The instrument of surrender was composed by Ely Parker in his own handwriting and signed by Lee. Image from Historical Society of the New York Courts.
Pencil sketch of the McLean home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9th, 1865. Drawing by Eustice Collett. The surrender was sign in the left-hand parlor on the first floor of the home. National Park Service.
Even at Appomattox, Parker’s Native American status was on display.
It’s noted by the National Park Service that Parker at the McLean house made a formal ink copy of Grant’s letter spelling out the terms of surrender.
“Having finished it, I brought it to General Grant, who signed it, sealed it and then handed it to General Lee,” Parker recalled.
At the surrender meeting, seeing that Parker was a Native American, General Lee remarked to Parker, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker later stated, “I shook his hand and said, 'We are all Americans.'”
Among Grant’s team, Parker was known for fine handwriting, knowledge of the law, a sense of humor, and a good man to have around during a fight. Parker once described himself as “a savage Jack Falstaff of 200 weight.”
From the National Archives, Parker as photographed by the famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
After the Civil War, Parker was commissioned as a colonel in the U.S. Cavalry and continued to serve Grant, still a general into Reconstruction, as a member of the Southern Treaty Commission. His job was to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes that had sided with the Confederacy. Parker then resigned from the Army with the brevet rank of brigadier general.
… Grant often sent Parker, now an adjutant general, to meet with tribes in the Indian Territory and farther west in Montana and Wyoming. Parker listened as tribal leaders described how their country was being overrun by miners, cattlemen, railroad workers, farmers, immigrants from Europe, and freedmen from the South.
Parker reported everything back to Grant and together they worked out the details of a policy with the main goal of citizenship for the Indians. The army would protect Indians on their reservations as they transitioned from their old ways and entered the mainstream of American life, learning how to support themselves through new livelihoods like farming or ranching. It might take a generation or two, but eventually Indians would be able to vote, own businesses, and rely on the protections guaranteed to them in the Constitution.
Now in 1868, Grant had been reluctantly elected as a Republican to enter the presidency in 1869 following the awful post-assassination term of Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean and impeached seventeeth president.
Grant appointed Parker as his commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Writes Stockwell:
The man elected president in 1868—Ulysses S. Grant—was determined to change the way many of his fellow Americans understood citizenship. As he saw it, anyone could become an American, not just people like himself who could trace their ancestry back eight generations to Puritan New England. Grant maintained that the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants pouring into the country should be welcomed as American citizens, as should the men, women, and children just set free from slavery during the Civil War. And, at a time when many in the press and public alike called for the extermination of the Indians, he believed every Indian from every tribe should be made a citizen of the United States, too.
Grant was sworn into office as president in 1869, and set forth his vision in his first inaugural address. Calling American Indians the “original occupants of the land,” he promised to pursue any course of action that would lead to their “ultimate citizenship.” It was not an idle promise. In the spring of 1865, he had been appointed the nation’s first General of the Army, a post that involved overseeing all the armies of the United States—including in the West, where conflicts with native tribes had raged throughout the Civil War. In this position, Grant had relied on his good friend and military secretary, Ely S. Parker, a member of the Seneca tribe, for advice. Now, as the newly inaugurated president of the United States, he was ready to implement his plans for the Indians, with Parker at his side as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
<snip>
As president, Grant made Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Parker began working to implement the president’s plans, appointing dozens of army officers to oversee the superintendencies, agencies, and reservations in the West. Grant and Parker were so certain of the wisdom of their policy that they failed to see how many people opposed it. Congressmen, who had previously rewarded their supporters with jobs in the Indian service, resented the fact that Grant had taken away these plum positions. Many Americans, especially in the West, complained that the president sided with the Indians rather than with his own countrymen. Reformers, who wanted the government to impose radical changes on the Indians, doing away with tribal identity and dividing reservations among individual property owners, criticized Grant and Parker for allowing the Indians to make changes at their own pace. Tribes that had not yet been brought onto reservations vowed to fight any attempt by the army to do so. Tribes in the Indian Territory, especially the Cherokee, wanted to remain independent nations.
But no one opposed Grant’s policy as strongly as the Board of Indian Commissioners, a 10-man committee of wealthy Americans that Grant had appointed as part of his new Indian policy. Grant had expected the board to audit the Indian service, but the board demanded instead to run it.
Now blatant racism and corruption began to work hand in hand, targeting Parker. The Board of Indian Commissioners, chaired by William Welsh of Philadelphia, moved against Grant and Parker. They claimed good motives to help Native Americans — but they also scoured for supply contracts and wanted to hand the future of Native Americans to Christian philanthropists — who sought to Christianize the people they purported to serve.
The board wholeheartedly supported the efforts of Congress to overturn Grant’s Indian policy. The first step came in the summer of 1870 when Congress banned active duty military personnel from serving in government posts—primarily, Grant believed, so that Congressmen could appoint their supporters instead. To counteract this move and prevent the Indian service from sliding back into the corruption of political patronage, the president appointed missionaries to run the reservations. Grant was still determined to win American citizenship for every Indian, and he hoped that the missionaries would guide them along the path toward it. But the Board of Indian Commissioners remained just as determined to oppose Grant. William Welsh, the board’s first chairman, believed the president’s policy could be overturned by toppling the “savage” who stood at its center, Ely Parker. Welsh was infuriated that a man like Parker could hold such a high position. He was also appalled that Parker had married a young white woman, Minnie Sackett, and that the couple was the toast of Washington society.
To take down Parker, Welsh accused him of negotiating a bloated million-dollar contract to supply the Sioux in the summer of 1870 and pocketing most of the money himself. Welsh demanded that Congress investigate Parker and hand over the management of the Indian service to the Board of Indian Commissioners. Congress obliged, forcing Parker to submit to a public trial before a committee of the House of Representatives. Although Parker was ultimately exonerated, Congress passed legislation recognizing the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners as the supervisors of the Indian service. Humiliated and with no real power, Parker resigned his position as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871.
Without an ally like Parker at his side, Grant watched his plans for the Indians come undone. A succession of Commissioners of Indian Affairs replaced Parker, but none had his vision. Before long, Grant ordered the army, which he had once hoped would protect the Indians, to fight against the tribes in a series of bloody wars, including the Modoc War in 1873, the Red River War in 1874, and the Great Sioux War in 1876. By the time Grant left office in 1877, his “peace policy,” as the press had nicknamed it, was judged a failure by all.
Since then, Grant has been remembered as a “circumstantial” reformer, at best, or as the clueless tool of wealthy men like Welsh, at worst. His accomplished friend Ely Parker has been wrongly dismissed as little more than a token. Americans would not realize until the 20th century that the vision of the two friends had been correct. In 1924, Congress granted citizenship to all American Indians who had not already achieved it.
Sadly, the friendship between Parker and the president came undone along with Grant’s Indian policy. After resigning his post in 1871 and moving away from Washington, Parker saw Grant only twice more. When the former president lay dying in the summer of 1885, Parker came to visit him, but Grant’s oldest son Fred always turned him away. While Grant never reflected on the failure of his policy, Parker always regretted that the plans he had made with his quiet friend from the leather goods store in Galena had ended so badly.
Parker’s mere two years as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs were a total disappointment to end a brilliant career. Today, two more Native Americans, Deb Haaland, a Pueblo from New Mexico, and Bryan Newland, an Ojibwe from Michigan, serve as secretary of the interior and assistant secretary for Indian affairs. Though the title has changed, the office has not. Newland is Parker’s direct successor.
The Panic of 1873, stemming from Europe and crushing banks in the American Heartland, was referred to at the time as the “Great Depression,” until the real thing came along 60 years later. Parker never succeeded in business after that — he had something in common with Grant on that.
Two years later, he was reīnterred beside some Seneca ancestors at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.
While Grant cannot be accused of seeking to mistreat Native Americans, the same cannot be said, at least initially, about his treatment of American Jews.
But, in the season of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we can report that Grant atoned.
Grant’s initial action was harsh, reactive, probably racist.
And it was promptly countermanded by the commander-in-chief, President Lincoln.
The origins lie in 1862, when Grant had notched striking successes in the Western Theater and was attracting Lincoln’s attention at a time when the war had not fared well in the East. Bad generals in the East plagued Lincoln, but Grant was turning out to be outstanding in directing action in the West.
Grant’s forces in February 1862 caused the Confederate army to surrender at Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and then surrender again a week later at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. These rivers were important to retaining control of the Mississippi River and Union navigation all the way south to New Orleans.
These were the first two major Union victories of the year-old war.
In April, in southwestern Tennessee, along the Tennessee River, Grant paid the price in blood but prevailed at the Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing. Another victory.
Battle of Shiloh, April 1863, on the Tennessee River in southwestern Tennessee. Print by Swedish immigrant artist Thure de Thulstrup, who moved to New York City in 1873 from Paris by way of Canada. These prints were created after 1873 — or ten years after the battle occurred. They were published by Louis Prang of Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts. Prang is also father of American Christmas cards.
Now entering the war’s second winter between 1862 and 1863, Lincoln’s government was being criticized. The war? Not good. Lincoln hoped to focus the way on abolition of slavery, and he issued the “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation” on September 22nd, 1862. The South had 100 days to end the rebellion or lose their slaves.
Even more immediate: cotton.
Cotton was the Confederacy’s cash crop, and the rebels needed their slaves to make the economics feasible. Behind cotton: sales of tobacco and rice.
To cut off sales of cotton, tobacco, and rice to buyers from the North and buyers from overseas, the North imposed a blockade on the South, all along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines.
If blockade runners from the North could buy products from the South, this would inject cash into the Confederacy and prolong the war.
Write the NPS historians: “General Grant was not happy with his father when he made this attempt to use his position as a military officer for monetary gain, and he was not happy with the Jewish clothiers who had tried to get a permit for purchasing cotton through his father. Grant denied the Mack family the purchasing permit and sent them back home. This incident may have been prominent in Grant’s mind when he issued General Orders No. 11.”
This was to be a constant problem, intrusions into Ulysses’ public affairs from his dad.
The Treasury Department’s system was riddled with corruption, however, and unlicensed traders bribed Army officers to allow the purchase of southern cotton without permits.
Major General Ulysses S. Grant was responsible for issuing licenses in the areas his army controlled in Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi, and viewed the cotton trade as a distraction from his primary goal — capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Only a few of the traders and merchants peddling goods to soldiers were Jewish, but Grant focused his ire on them, partly for personal reasons. On December 17, 1862, his father, Jesse R. Grant, visited accompanied by prominent Jewish clothing manufacturers from Cincinnati. Jesse Grant had partnered with the Mack family, expecting to get them valuable cotton permits. According to one eyewitness, Grant was infuriated, excoriating the Macks for entrapping “his old father into … an unworthy undertaking.”
That same day, from his headquarters at Oxford, Mississippi, Grant issued General Order No. 11 expelling all Jews from the Department of the Tennessee within twenty-four hours. Jewish traders in Oxford and nearby Holly Springs were immediately ordered to leave the area. All thirty Jewish families in Paducah, Kentucky, were ordered to vacate within 24 hours.
A raid by Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest cut a number of telegraph lines, so news of Grant’s proclamation spread slower than it would have otherwise. Once Jews in St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and elsewhere learned of it, they swiftly organized protests.
Meanwhile, as promised, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Though celebrated by many, it also faced fierce and widespread opposition, not the least of which was coming from within the Union army. In what is now dubbed the Harrison Landing Letter, Major General George B. McClellan, Commander of the Army of the Potomac, wrote to Lincoln, “Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master; except for repressing disorder as in other cases.” What he really wanted was to end the war by a negotiation that would preserve slavery.
Remarkably, even in the midst of managing the immediate reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was unwilling to allow one of his best generals to wrong a class of people because of their religious background. He immediately overturned Grant’s General Order No. 11.
Had Grant over-reacted? It’s a good guess that he did.
Jews had 24 hours to leave their homes. No exceptions. No waivers, even to go to Army headquarters to appeal. Most immediately, 30 Jewish families in Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River across from Illinois at the point where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio River, were told to evacuate their homes.
A breakdown in telegraph lines slowed transmission of Grant’s General Order No. 11 to other Jewish centers in the West. But Jews elsewhere were distressed.
By January 4, 1863, Grant’s General Order No. 11 reached New York City and ran the next day on the front page of The News York Herald. Note the item just below ir reporting on inoperable telegraph lines to the West. This was the Internet of its day; losing telegraph lines for the news-hungry public then was like Amazon’s servers going down today. Source: Seth Kaller, Inc.
Front page of The New York Herald of January 5th, 1863, the day after Grant’s General Order No. 11 reached NYC amidst downed telegraph lines stymied news from the West. The red box contains the ordere. The battles at Vicksburg were endless during 18 months culminating with the fall of the all-important town overlooking the Mississippi River on July 4th, 1863. The Confederate surrender at Vicksburg followed two assaults in May, a siege for six weeks , a foiled attempt to break the siege, and — at last — the victory. Source: Seth Kaller, Inc.
The damage was all too human, according to a paper by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Jews in the Mississippi communities of Holly Springs and Oxford were ordered to leave immediately. The Holly Springs Jews were denied board on railroad coaches and were forced to walk 45 miles to Memphis, Tennessee.
Thirty families from Paducah, Kentucky, rushed to board an Ohio River boat that took them upstream to Cincinnati. All the Paducah Jews were removed by December 29th, 1862, twelve days after Grant issued General Order No. 11.
Among the Paducah Jews forced to leave were two men who had served in the Union Army. “Contemporary testimonies state that those removed included some of ‘the most respectable Union citizens of the city, had at not time been engaged in trade within the active lines of General Grant...’ The fleeing Jews ‘locked up their homes and shops ... almost abandoning a baby in the pandemonium. Only two sick women were allowed to stay behind.’”
“Five Jews from Paducah — Daniel Wolff, Marcus Wolff, Alexander Wolff, Cesar Kaskel and Julius Kaskel — sent a telegram to President Lincoln at the White House, requesting his ‘immediate attention to this enormous outrage on all law and humanity.’ When Lincoln did not respond, Cesar Kaskel wrote letters to Jewish community leaders and to publishers of Jewish and daily newspapers. These letters were instrumental in provoking protests in Washington; Cesar Kaskel later traveled there to advocate for the revocation of the order.”
Grant had been warned. His highly trusted chief of staff, General John Aaron Rawlins, also from Galena, stayed with Grant for years and became a Cabinet officer during Grant’s presidency. But for now, he objected while Grant had his order printed and distributed. “Well,” Grant told his deputy, “they can countermand this from Washington if they like, but we will issue it anyhow.”
The Gilder Lehrman report continues:
On January 3, 1863, after Cesar Kaskel met with Lincoln, the President sent a note to General [Henry Wager] Halleck [of Oneida, New York], directing him to telegraph instructions to cancel the order. When Jewish delegations from Louisville and Cincinnati arrived in Washington later in the week, President Lincoln “reiterated how astonished he had been to learn of the order and...added that he felt no prejudice against Jews himself and would not tolerate it in others.”\ On January 4, Halleck instructed Grant to recall the Order. Grant's office transmitted the order of recall on January 6, stating that it was “by Direction of General-in-Chief of the Army, at Washington.” On January 5, Halleck sent another note to Grant emphasizing that General Orders No. 11 had applied to all Jews rather than just speculators and profiteers and expressing disapproval of discrimination against Jews as a class. To be clear, Halleck added that the President had no “object[ion] to your expelling traders and Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order.”
The Gilder Lehrman paper argues that Grant was not so impetuous as others have claimed. “In fact, Grant had considered an exclusionary order directed at the Jews for more than a month before issuing General Orders No. 11. For example, in a November 9, 1862 telegram, Grant instructed Major-General [Stephen Augutus] Hurlbut[from South Carolina, but the son of Northerners whose father was a Unitarian minister] to ‘refuse all permits to come south of Jackson [the capital of Mississippi]’ and that ‘the Israelites especially should be kept out.’”
Practically, probably fewer than 100 Jews were seriously affected by General Orders No. 11. A fortuitous communications breakdown, as well as Abraham Lincoln's prompt decision to revoke the order-Lincoln declared that he did not "like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners"-greatly limited its impact.
Still, General Orders No. 11 had lingering effects. It brought to the surface deep-seated fears that, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jews might replace Blacks as the nation's most despised minority. Some Jewish leaders explicitly feared that freedom for slaves would spell trouble for Jews.
Within a year, Grant's victory at Vicksburg had elevated him into a national hero. When, in 1868, he ran for president on the Republican ticket, the memory of General Orders No. 11 sparked passionate debates between those Jews who extolled him as a hero and those who reviled him as a latter-day Haman, a traditional enemy of the Jewish people. For the first time in American history, a Jewish issue was playing a prominent role in a presidential campaign-the issue of multiple loyalties.
In 1868, Grant, seeking the presidency, was compelled to explain himself in a letter to former U.S. Representative Isaac Newton Morris of Illinois. The letter was actually intended for other sets of eyes: those belonging to Morris’ friend, B’nai B’rith leader Adolph Moses of Illinois, a Confederate veteran, and eventually for the eyes of newspaper editors everywhere.
Anti-Semitic charges had marred some presidential campaigns, notably the tempestuous campaign of 1800 when local Federalists desperately tarred their opponents as Jews and foreigners, but nobody imagined that the major party candidates in that election — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — were themselves enemies of the Jewish people. In 1868, by contrast, the candidate himself was the issue. Much of the country loved him, while a great many Jews found it hard to forgive him.
***
No final decision ever resolved this debate. It rises anew, like the phoenix, every time some Jewish issue (most recently support for Israel) intrudes into a presidential campaign. The same intensity, many of the same arguments, and only differences in detail distinguish the debates in Grant’s day from those in our own. Then as now, the tensions inherent in the term “American Jew” — embracing responsibilities to country and to fellow Jews — heighten the challenge of casting a presidential ballot. Nor are Jews alone in facing this dilemma. Parallel tensions face members of almost every ethnic, religious, and special interest group. Weighing up competing claims, establishing priorities among one’s principles and concerns, and reaching a decision about whom to support can make voting an excruciatingly difficult if deeply self-revealing process.
In 1868, many pundits expected that after weighing and balancing all of these different factors the majority of American Jews would vote against Ulysses S. Grant and in favor of Horatio Seymour [the Democratic nominee and former governor of New York]. A journalist from the South who visited a national B’nai B’rith convention in late July of 1868 reported that 90 percent of those in attendance “are heart and soul opposed to Grant.” The correspondent of the London Jewish Chronicle, that same month, informed his readers that American Jews were “uniting to defeat the election of General Grant because he ventured to insult their brethren and their faith.” By October, when many neutral observers were predicting that Grant would win the election, based on state and local election victories by Republicans in eight states, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, noticing the significance of Jewish votes in several key states, still offered the Democrats a ray of hope: “the Israelites in the States of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Indiana,” it declared, “have it entirely in their own power to secure the election of Seymour and Blair and the defeat of Grant and Colfax.” The St. Louis Times and Washington National Intelligencer agreed. Exaggerating the number of “Hebrew voters” by a factor of almost 10 (“there are four or five hundred thousand Hebrew voters in the United States”), the newspapers predicted that “the Hebrew vote of the United States will certainly effect the overthrow of the dominant [Republican] party.”
Such predictions, even if wildly exaggerated, had already moved Ulysses S. Grant to act. In response to a letter from an influential B’nai B’rith leader and lawyer, Adolph Moses of Illinois, a Confederate veteran, on Sept. 14 Grant dispatched a private letter to their mutual friend, former Congressman Isaac Newton Morris, in which he unequivocally distanced himself from General Orders No. 11 and forswore prejudice. The confidential letter was not published at the time. Grant, according to Simon Wolf, the Jewish community’s unofficial government lobbyist, did not want the public to believe that “he was catering for the good wishes and possible votes of American citizens of the Jewish faith.” That, apparently, was acceptable for him to do in private but not in public.
Still, leading Jews undoubtedly saw the letter. After reading it, Moses, probably at the urging of Grant’s staff, composed a long letter of his own that appeared on the front page of the New York Times (Oct. 13, 1868), and in other newspapers, just as the election entered its home stretch. “I have … corresponded with Gen. Grant,” Moses announced dramatically, and Grant had made “a reparation.” Though Moses had earlier criticized Grant in print, he reported that having reviewed the question anew he would now follow his “political inclinations” without reference to the “side issue” of Grant’s order. “The best interests of our country,” he proclaimed, “are subserved by the election of Gen. Grant, and I have no diffidence to declare it to the community.”
Just 10 days later, a published letter in the New York Herald (Oct. 23, 1868) from another wavering Jewish Republican, a book-keeper in Cincinnati named David Eckstein, revealed that he actually had spoken to Grant for nearly two hours and was likewise now satisfied with the general’s response. Indeed, Grant’s explanations concerning General Orders No. 11 were, in Eckstein’s optimistic view, “sufficient to remove and obliterate every vestige of objection against him on the part of every fair-minded and reasonable Israelite.” He urged Jews to offer “hearty support” both to Grant and to “the party which put the General in nomination.”
What impact these and other last-minute endorsements made on Jewish voters is impossible to know. What really mattered were the results of the Nov. 3 election, and when they were tallied, Grant emerged the winner by 309,584 votes and a healthy 134 electoral vote margin. Except perhaps in New York, where Grant lost by precisely 10,000 votes and fraud was suspected, the Jewish vote could not have made much difference anywhere. Ohio and Pennsylvania, two states where Jewish voters were supposed to help the Democrats, both went Republican by comfortable margins. The vote in Indiana was closer, but the Jewish vote in that state was too small to make a difference. The more than 500,000 African-American votes cast, especially in the South, most of which naturally went to Grant, made much more of a difference in the totals and may actually have swung the election in Grant’s favor.
Contemporaries disagreed as to how Jews finally voted. The Cleveland Daily Herald argued that Jews “were not deceived” by the campaign against Grant, “and very little attention was paid by them to the clamor.” The New York Times, by contrast, estimated that “nearly the entire body of voting Israelites” voted against Grant. All that we know for certain is that a young Jewish student at Yale University named Louis Ehrich, later a prominent collector and dealer of art, agonized over the question of how to cast his first presidential ballot. In the end, he voted Democratic. “My nation is too dear to me,” he explained in his diary, “to allow me to respect one who injured it.”
A fitting epilogue to the tumultuous battle for the Jewish vote appeared in newspapers across the country during the final week of November. With the election behind him, Ulysses S. Grant permitted his private letter to Isaac Newton Morris concerning General Orders No. 11 to be handed over to the press. It told Jews just what they wanted to hear from the president-elect: “I do not pretend to sustain the Order.” While Grant’s self-serving explanation—“the order was issued and sent without any reflection and without thinking of the Jews as a sect or race”—did not actually bear close scrutiny, Jews were thrilled with the general’s forthright, unambiguous, and appropriately italicized concluding declaration: “I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit. Orders No. 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned, and without reflection.”
After months of bitter internecine political battling, Jews cheerfully united in praise of Grant’s “noble and generous” letter. Isaac Mayer Wise, a prominent Reform rabbi and editor, who was the first to receive and publish it, felt sure that it “would be read with pleasure by all of our readers.” B’nai B’rith leader Benjamin F. Peixotto, who admitted to voting against Grant, rejoiced to the New York Times at how the letter “exonerates Gen. Grant from the imputation of prejudice and intolerance against the Jews, so long believed to be one of his characteristics.” The Occident, now edited by Mayer Sulzberger, a future Pennsylvania judge, perceptively viewed the letter as “a guide for those who so easily fall into [Grant’s] errors, but are so far from imitating his virtues.”
What the Times characterized as this “frank and manly confession” lifted the taint of “Haman” from upon Grant’s shoulders. It did much to rehabilitate his image in Jewish eyes, restored Jews’ confidence in the country’s ideals, and added to the spirit of buoyant optimism that characterized American Jewish life as a whole at this time. Across the United States in the late 1860s, Jews were building magnificent synagogues and temples and looking forward with eager anticipation to a glorious “new era” characterized by liberalism, universalism, and interreligious cooperation. In calling for each individual to be judged according to his own merit, Grant’s letter provided reassurance that he shared many of these same lofty goals.
The so-called “upstanding Israelites,” many of them American bred, who labored to bring forth this new era of religious good feeling were far removed from the “Jews as a class” that Grant had expelled in 1862 for trading, smuggling, and speculating. Some of them, particularly Simon Wolf and the Seligman brothers, merchants and bankers, had contributed significantly to the Republican victory. They were, for the most part, self-made men who had been born poor, worked hard, and succeeded—just like the president-elect himself. The question, as Ulysses S. Grant now prepared for his inauguration, was what his future relationship with these upstanding Israelites would be.
If the election of 1868 redeemed Grant, then his actions in office were the atonement.
According to the Park Service, “When Grant was elected to be President of the United States in 1868, he tried to correct his mistake through a number of different actions. He appointing a record number of Jewish Americans to government offices during his eight years as president. When the Adas Israel Congregation opened its new Synagogue in Washington, D.C. in 1876, President Grant attended the three-hour ceremony. Grant also spoke out against Jewish persecution in other countries. While some Jewish people continued to harbor resentment for Grant’s actions, many in the community actually felt that he had become a friend and defender of their rights. When Grant died in July 1885, the Philadelphia Jewish Record exclaimed, ‘None will mourn his loss more sincerely than the Hebrew.’”
Practically, probably fewer than 100 Jews were seriously affected by General Orders No. 11. A fortuitous communications breakdown, as well as Abraham Lincoln's prompt decision to revoke the order-Lincoln declared that he did not "like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners"-greatly limited its impact.
Still, General Orders No. 11 had lingering effects. It brought to the surface deep-seated fears that, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jews might replace Blacks as the nation's most despised minority. Some Jewish leaders explicitly feared that freedom for slaves would spell trouble for Jews.
Within a year, Grant's victory at Vicksburg had elevated him into a national hero. When, in 1868, he ran for president on the Republican ticket, the memory of General Orders No. 11 sparked passionate debates between those Jews who extolled him as a hero and those who reviled him as a latter-day Haman, a traditional enemy of the Jewish people. For the first time in American history, a Jewish issue was playing a prominent role in a presidential campaign-the issue of multiple loyalties.
In addition to Ely S. Parker as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Grant also immediately appointed Simon Wolf as Washington’s recorder of deeds, giving Wolf an office from which he could continue to act as the unofficial Jewish ambassador to Washington. Wolf made sure more Jewish appointments followed — more, believes Sarna, than all previous presidents combined.
Edward S. Salomon, a German Jew, a brigadier general, a Republican, and the clerk of Cook County, Illinois, was appointed by Grant in 1870 to be governor of the Washington Territory. Salomon served there and later moved to San Francisco, from which he was elected to the California legislature. His brother was governor of Wisconsin. Edward Salomon to date has been the only Jewish governor of Washington.
Herman Bendell, M.D., a Jewish surgeon and Civil War veteran from Albany, New York, served Grant from 1871 to 1873 as Arizona’ superintendent of Indian affairs. As we have learned from the life of Ely S. Parker, the ten Indian Affairs commissioners back east were quite interested in Christian-izing the Native Americans. They made life challenging for the Jewish doctor appointed by Grant.
Bendell visited all the tribes to discuss their needs. He obtained good local prices for government contracts, supervised the receipt of the supplies, and directed their distribution to the Indians.
But in spite of all efforts, whether humanitarian or threatening, many hostile tribes would not remain on their reservations.
Settlers at Verde and Camp McDowell fled in the wake of recommenced murder and robbery.
In August of 1872, Dr. Bendell accompanied a delegation of representatives from different tribes on a trip to the east coast and to Washington D.C.
They returned with many gifts, including permission to buy a thresher for the Pima.
The Board of Commissioners praised Dr. Bendell’s accomplishments but still recommended he be replaced by a Christian.
“Dr. Herman Bendell, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Arizona, is a most excellent official, a man of splendid judgment, strict integrity, who has managed the affairs of the office to entire satisfaction, but unfortunately he is not a Christian.” -– Board of Indian Commissioners
After a short stint as Consul to Denmark (President Grant’s consolation appointment) and a year studying ophthalmology at Heidelberg, Bendell and his family settled down to a rewarding life in Albany.
Sarna also writes:
Grant also responded quickly when reports reached him of persecutions against Jews in Europe. He spoke out forcefully against an order expelling 2,000 Jews from border areas of Russia and, following the persecution of Jews in Romania in 1870, he appointed a Jew as America's consul to that country. "The United States," he wrote, "knowing no distinction of her citizens on account of religion or nativity, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same liberal views."
In 1873, Grant won reelection by a landslide, mostly as a result of his domestic and foreign policy successes coupled with Horace Greeley's comically poor showing on the stump. Still, when Grant subsequently expressed satisfaction that "the people had vindicated [my] private character," he might have also had the Jewish people in mind. He had largely won them over.
In his second term, Grant devoted considerable effort to strengthening church-state separation. At the time, Protestant efforts to Christianize the country and the Catholic campaign to win state funding for parochial schools had come to alarm Jews and religious liberals, both of whom favored the high wall of separation advocated by Thomas Jefferson. Jews, newly accepted as insiders, were fearful of seeing their gains reversed. As a result, as historian Benny Kraut has written, a "natural, pragmatic alliance" developed, uniting "Jews, liberal Christians, religious free thinkers, and secularists in common bond, their religious and theological differences notwithstanding." Alliance members sought to shift the emphasis away from Abraham Lincoln's perspective of Americans as a religious people, stressing instead the role of government as a secular institution. Rabbi Max Lilienthal of Cincinnati, for example, proclaimed: "We are going to lay our cornerstone with the sublime motto, 'Eternal separation of state and church!' For this reason we shall never favor or ask any support for our various benevolent institutions by the state; and if offered, we should not only refuse, but reject it with scorn and indignation, for those measures are the first sophistical, well-premeditated steps for a future union of church and state. Sectarian institutions must be supported by their sectarian followers; the public purse and treasure dares not be filled, taxed and emptied for sectarian purposes."
In 1875, Grant (who probably knew nothing of Lilienthal) threw his support behind a parallel vision of "strict separation," insisting that religion be kept out of the public schools and that state aid be denied to parochial schools. "Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contribution," Grant declared in a Des Moines address to veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, the soldiers he had led when General Orders No. 11 was issued. "Keep the church and state forever separate." In his State of the Union message later that year, Grant spoke out in favor of a constitutional amendment which would require states to create free public schools for all children, "forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes…for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination."
Then Grant made history on June 9, 1876 when he became the first American president to attend the dedication of a synagogue. Timed to coincide with the celebration of 100 years of American independence, the president's appearance at Washington's Adas Israel synagogue was particularly laden with symbolism, in effect announcing that Judaism was a co-equal religion in the United States. The president also handed in a pledge card promising the congregation ten dollars (approximately $200 today), earning him the community's sincere thanks for his "munificence and liberality." The man who had once expelled "Jews as a class" from his war zone had personally honored Jews in Washington, DC for upholding and renewing their faith.
One month later, and three years after the founding of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Union's Council (today's URJ Biennial) convened in Washington to mark America's centennial. Grant set aside an hour to meet and greet group members and show them the inside of the White House. Among those who introduced themselves to the president was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. "I know all about you, Doctor," Grant responded, "especially in connection with Order No. 11." That Grant used the occasion to recall his Civil War order banishing Jews indicates that the blot on his record-that he had failed to live up to his own high standard of what it meant to be an American-was never far from his mind.
This encounter with Reform leaders turned out to be Ulysses S. Grant's last major engagement with Jews during his presidency. The following March he turned presidential power over to Rutherford B. Hayes. With that, a brief "golden age" in the history of the American Jewish community came to an end.
<snip>
[I]n 1885, just as Grant immersed himself in writing his Civil War memoirs so as to provide for his family, he was diagnosed with cancer. His health was deteriorating, but his iron will to finish the narrative sustained him. Meanwhile, get-well messages from around the country flowed into the Grant home. On April 13, "the Rabbis of New York and adjacent States" conveyed their "sympathy to the stricken household" and offered prayers "to the Father of all to send strength to the sufferer to enable him to fight this great battle with the heroism worthy of so great a soldier." The Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations likewise extended its "heartfelt sympathy and best wishes for his early restoration to health." Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne of Congregation Gates of Hope in New York City personally visited with Grant at his home.
For Grant, these expressions of sympathy from people of different faiths were a source of pride. "The Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew appointed days for universal prayer in my behalf," he wrote to his eldest son.
Grant died on Thursday, July 23, 1885. The following day, the Philadelphia Jewish Record declared in its Friday edition, "None will mourn his loss more sincerely than the Hebrew…and tomorrow in every Jewish synagogue and temple in the land the sad event will be solemnly commemorated with fitting eulogy and prayer."
The Saturday following Grant's demise coincided with Shabbat Nahamu, the "Sabbath of Consolation," which follows the fast of the 9th of Av commemorating the destruction of the Temple. The prophetic reading set aside for that day, from Isaiah 40, begins, "Comfort ye, comfort ye O my people." Many a rabbinic sermon in Grant's memory opened with this text.
Not everyone was convinced. Cartoonist Bernhard Gilliam of Puck Magazine lambasted Grant for crying crocodile tears over persecution of Jews in Europe while still believing in the spirit of General Order No. 11.
Besides Ely S. Parker, Simon Wolf, Edward S. Salomon, and Herman Bendell, I believe the most important appointment made by President Grant was his attorney general, Amos Tappan Akerman, a Georgia lawyer who became head of the newly organized U.S. Department of Justice.
Akerman was the nation’s 31st attorney general and without any doubt one of its more important and most courageous. He is in a class with Merrick Garland (AG #86), Eric Holder (AG #82), Janet Reno (AG #78), Elliot Richardson (AG #69), Ramsey Clark (AG #66), Bobby Kennedy (*AG #64), Thomas Campbell Clark (ASG #59), Robert Houghwout Jackson (AG #57), Connecticut’s own Homer Stillé Cummings (AG #55), Edward Bates (*AG #26), Richard Rush (AG #8), Caesar Augustus Rodney (AG #6), and Edmund Jennings Randolph (AG #1).
Akerman was a doer. He accomplished things. He believed in justice. He believed in civil rights. And he spread the word and enforced federal civil rights laws in U.S. courtrooms from Washington to Southern state capitals.
Grant appointed him and stood with him.
Akerman served for just two years, from 1870 to 1872. He was a whirlwind.
Left, Akerman’s portrait by Freeman Thorp in the U.S. Justice Department’s collection of portraits of the attorneys general. Right, an interesting polarized photograph of Akerman from the Library of Congress, adjusted by Sanna Dullaway for the alumni magazine of Dartmouth College, where Akerman, born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a member of the Class of 1842 at Hanover.
At age 48, Akerman, practicing law in Elberton, Georgia, a town just west of the Savannah River in the Piedmont 100 miles due east of Atlanta, was nominated by Grant in 1869 as federal district attorney for Georgia. The next year, Grant nominated Akerman as the nation’s attorney general.
After Dartmouth, Akerman had headed south to teach in North Carolina and then at three places in Georgia, ending up in Elberton. He supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Not politically active, he switched sides post-war and joined the Republican Party.
Reconstruction had arrived in the South. Akerman helped to draft Georgia’s new constitution of 1868, guaranteeing equal political rights for African-Americans; it was a condition for any Confederate state to be reädmitted to the Union. That autumn, Aklerman was angered as the white majority in the state legislature expelled 28 duly elected African-American members from its chambers.
In Washington, Akerman stood up the new Justice Department; previously each department had used its own lawyers instead of consolidating all federal litigation at Justice. He began Justice’s investigative office, which morphed into the Federal Bureau of Investigation decades later.
Akerman dealt with railroads — and who wouldn't in the America of the 1870s and robber barons?
But by far the most important issue was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a loosely organized band of white terrorists who threatened white Republicans and African-Americans with harm or death.
Akerman believed in the law.
He was angered that southerners disobeyed the U.S. Constitution, especially the new Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments recognizing that four million freed blacks had the same political and civil rights as white citizens. Justice investigated; that first post-wear iteration of the Klan began to collapse. (It would rise again.)
The Ku Klux, as it was often called then, grew out of a relatively inoffensive social club formed in 1865 by a group of young professional men in Pulaski, Tennessee. In three years it rapidly metastasized throughout much of the South into a band of night-riding white supremacists who attacked Black families and a good many white Republicans as it sought to cripple the party and its supporters.
The Klan’s aims were “to destroy the Republican Party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the Black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life,” writes Eric Foner, the preeminent historian of Reconstruction. He characterizes the Klan as “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.”
Gangs of Klansmen wearing robes and masks rode in darkness to attack their victims, whipping, burning, raping, and killing, often leaving them hanging from trees. They did not spare women and children. Many of the Ku Kluxers were Confederate veterans prominent in their communities: merchants, lawyers, businessmen, even clergy. Sheriffs and local officials often donned masks and joined them. They made few arrests. Victims who sought the intervention of the law found themselves targeted for retribution, sometimes fatally.
As a countermeasure, the solidly Republican U.S. Congress invoked the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying any person the equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth (1870), which prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. To implement these amendments, Congress in 1870 and 1871 passed the Enforcement Acts, a series of laws that made it a federal crime to “go in disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another” to deprive any person of equal protection or to conspire to use force or intimidation to obstruct any person from voting. As Congress intended, Akerman seized upon this significant expansion of federal authority.
The new attorney general’s abhorrence of the Klan’s actions was visceral. “That any large portion of our people,” he wrote in his diary, “should be so ensavaged as to perpetuate or excuse such actions is the darkest blot on Southern character in this age.”
Akerman decided to focus his efforts on the upland corner of York County, South Carolina, where the KKK was pervasive. The Enforcement Acts authorized President Grant to suspend habeas corpus, thereby permitting the arrest and jailing of suspects with no recourse to a court. Akerman prevailed upon Grant to suspend habeas in York and then sent federal marshals — the new law enforcement arm of the U.S. Justice Department — to arrest Klan kingpins. Some leaders fled into neighboring North Carolina, others as far as Canada. Many Klan foot soldiers turned themselves in and, hoping for leniency, provided information on their officers. Some Klan cells surrendered en masse, leaving the marshals with more lawbreakers than they could possibly try.
Akerman wanted to do more than convict motley, low-level hoodlums —he wanted Klan leaders. With the U.S. district attorney for South Carolina — fellow Dartmouth graduate David Corbin, class of 1857 — he devised a litigation strategy. They decided to use the trials of the York County Klansmen to secure rulings from the federal court in South Carolina that confirmed the constitutionality of the Enforcement Acts, which they could then use to convict Klansmen of the atrocities local authorities ignored. The federal government had never before attempted to prosecute those crimes, but Akerman and Corbin felt the newly enacted laws could provide the sweeping expansion of national authority they had in mind.
If Akerman and Corbin succeeded, they would establish that the violent denial of civil rights was not only a new crime but a new kind of crime — a federal offense, to be prosecuted by federal prosecutors in federal courts that bypassed local judges disinclined to crack down on their Klan neighbors.
Akerman had spent 25 years after graduation often aimless and morose — until a tentative step into politics led him in just three years to the highest legal office in the country, an office whose authority he energized and, in many ways, defined.
<snip>
He was a man of some paradox: a New Hampshire native turned Georgian, a Unionist who became a colonel in the Confederate Army, a former slaveowner who at the state convention advocated “equal and political rights for all men,” a man whose opponents found him “cold-blooded, calculating, persistent, energetic, and tireless” and who yet was described by a reporter as a man of “affable manner, with a quiet self-possession, which make him at the same time easy of approach and dignified of demeanor.”
In taking on the KKK, Akerman and Corbin faced formidable headwinds. Southern Democrats raised enough money to retain Reverdy Johnson of Maryland and Henry Stanbery of Ohio, each a former U.S. attorney general, as heavyweight defense counsel for the accused Klan members.
The issue before the court was clear: Could Congress authorize the Justice Department to prosecute and punish men who threatened, abused, and killed Black citizens to prevent them from exercising their constitutional rights? If the U.S. government were denied this authority, the real issue was whether Black citizens would have any constitutional rights at all.
A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1879 criticized efforts by white Southerners to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment with property ownership requirements, poll taxes, and literacy tests. Source: Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
The defense sought to persuade the court to dismiss the defendants’ cases, contending that the Enforcement Acts in no way authorized Congress to create new federal crimes, much less crimes based on threats, assaults, and murders. Such prosecutions were the traditional responsibility of the states, the defense argued, and the national government’s assertion of authority was an unconstitutional overreach.
After seven days of arguments, the court ruled mostly in favor of the defense. But it upheld the validity of indictments against conspiracies that impeded the rights of Black voters. Although the court had rejected their novel constitutional arguments for a muscular reading of the law, Akerman and Corbin pressed forward with prosecutions based on conspiracy, and in the following weeks Corbin won convictions of Klansmen in four cases. The legal duo had successfully developed a strategy that could be used in later trials. As the Department of Justice proceeded to arrest Klansmen when it could and won convictions and prison sentences, Klan members grew unnerved and the group fragmented and collapsed. “By 1872, the federal government’s evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan’s back,” writes Foner, “and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South.”
Still, endemic racism persisted. White supremacists regrouped into small offshoots and Jim Crow laws ensured that former slaves and their descendants would remain subjugated well into the future. Congress repealed the Enforcement Acts in 1876 and the government abandoned Reconstruction. Southern states circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment with literacy tests, poll taxes, and property requirements to deny Black citizens the ability to register and vote. Atrocities continued.
A new generation revived the Klan in the years after World War I. The Supreme Court upheld segregation in schools and public accommodations for 70 years. But the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s mitigated these practices —largely based on the arguments that Akerman and Corbin had raised.
Historian William Shield McFeely, a biographer of Grant in 1981, who set up Yale’s black studies department and was the son of an executive for the Grand Union supermarkets, wrote: “Perhaps no attorney general since … has been more vigorous in the prosecution of cases designed to protect the lives and rights of Black Americans.”
Because conflicts brewed in Grant’s administration, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish of New York was repelled by Akerman’s zeal — as well by his criticism of the railroads. Grant knuckled under, asking for Akerman’s resignation in December 1871.
Akerman returned to Georgia but left Elberton, where his views on black suffrage made him unpopular. He practiced law in a more hospitable town, Cartersville, before dying of sudden rheumatic fever on December 21st, 1880.
In 2019. Georgia placed a roadside historical monument next to Akerman’s home in Cartersville, 40 miles northwest of Atlanta and a long way from Elberton.
Chris Carr, in 2019 and still now, is the Republican attorney general of Georgia. He joined with plenty of other Georgia Republicans to remember Amos Akerman.
“Amos Akerman, in a very short period of time, in those two years, looked evil in the face. And it probably cost him his job,” Carr said.
Galloway continued:
Ultimately, Reconstruction was a failure. The white South lost the war, but won the peace — and so wrote its own version of history. For more than a century after the Civil War, the South was in the thrall of the Lost Cause, the hard-sold myth that the buying and selling of human beings was only incidental to the conflict. A “war of northern aggression” brooked no self-criticism.
It can be rightly said that the carving on Stone Mountain isn’t a monument to the Confederacy, but to the myth that papered over the South’s defeat.
The “Confederate Memorial Carving” at Stone Mountain Park, 15 miles from Atlanta, depicts three Confederate leaders of the Civil War: CSA President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. The carving began in 1923 and was completed with all finishing touches in 1972. The State of Georgia owns the site. The carving is 400 feet above the ground, measures 90 by 190 feet, and is recessed 42 feet into the mountain. The entire surface is three acres — larger than a football and larger than Mount Rushmore. Information dource: Stone Mountain Park..Photo source: Atlanta History Center.
The consequence is that, now and then, we actually find ourselves having to state the obvious: That this first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, like the ones that followed in 1915 and afterwards, was beyond redemption.
[Larry] Thompson [great-great-grandson of a former slave and deputy U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush] told of that time in 1985, while he was a U.S. attorney in Georgia, when he broke up a Klan cell in Carroll County. Five men whipped a white woman in front of her children for allowing a black co-worker into her home.
Only three years ago, a state lawmaker and former history teacher, who is still in the Legislature, claimed that the Klan “was not so much a racist thing, but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.”
You cannot believe in both the Lost Cause and Amos Akerman. If one exists, the other can’t. “I think Akerman is important because he shows that there was something else, that not every Georgian bought into the Lost Cause,” said David Parker, a professor of history at Kennesaw State University. “He serves as a good exception to that.”
<snip>
As mentioned earlier, the re-discovery of Akerman has political implications, too. In the decades after the Civil War, even after World War II, Democrats advertised themselves as “the white man’s party.”
The Southern strategies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes and Donald Trump have forced a cultural and political swapping of name tags. Republicans are now the party of white men, particularly in the South.
But white men are increasingly in short supply. When the Trump era ends, whether in 2020 or 2024, the GOP will need to redefine itself, or be forever consigned to minority-party status.
And if you’re looking for what the next Republican party should look like, how it might reach out to more women and people of color, Amos Akerman is a decent place to start.
The Amos T. Akerman marker,. dedicated in Cartersville by the Georgia Historical Society in 2019 with many Peachtree State Republicans in attendance, Source: Georgia Historical Society.
Plenty of people already say the new book is a winner, taking off where Chernow left off.
“A critically important revisionist history... A penetrating examination of the rise of the KKK, 'the first organized terrorist movement in American history.' For Bordewich, Grant’s decisive move to take on the Klan, though it did not stop the future systematic stripping away of Blacks’ civil rights, proved that 'forceful political action can prevail over violent extremism.' ” — KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED)
“By documenting what really happened in the bloody and vicious post-Civil War South and how it nullified official government policy, this history resonates on many levels... Bordewich introduces readers to Black leaders and white supremacist ideologues, sparing no fact, however grim, in his devastating history of how domestic terrorism tore apart the social, political, and other promises of emancipation.” — MARK KNOBLAUCH, BOOKLIST (STARRED)
“Riveting... An astute assessment of an often overlooked episode in American history. ” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“A gripping, haunting story of how America’s original white supremacist movement used terrorism to crush multiracial democracy—and how, for a time, progressive elected officials in Washington allied with grassroots African Americans and their white allies to rout the reactionaries. This is history we need to vanquish violent intimidation in our own time, this time without quitting before the work is done. ” — NANCY MACLEAN, AUTHOR OF DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS AND BEHIND THE MASK OF CHIVALRY
“An urgent history, in which the conception and spawning of the Klan, its anti-Black atrocities and crimes against humanity, the evolution of a General and President, and the possibilities and limits of political power all come roaring to life. As searing as it is suspenseful, Klan War delivers an incisive angle into a horrific chapter in American history, one that requires knowing today.” — ILYON WOO, AUTHOR OF MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE
“Fergus Bordewich is an expert at turning momentous questions in American history into absorbing narratives. With insight and telling details, he reveals how Grant—by nature no crusader—directed federal resources against Klan attacks on African Americans, only to be undercut by political attempts to appease the hostile Liberal Republicans. A fascinating and foreboding book. ” — T.J. STILES, AUTHOR OF CUSTER'S TRIALS (WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE)
“Grippingly tells the essential story of the unsung heroes who throttled the Ku Klux Klan's murderous domestic terrorism after the Civil War, only to watch helplessly as a tragic loss of political will frittered away much of that triumph. The lessons for meeting today's challenges are unmistakable and chilling.” — DAVID O. STEWART, AUTHOR OF IMPEACHED: THE TRIAL OF PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE FIGHT FOR LINCOLN'S LEGACY
“Bordewich has done it again — this time, resurrecting an incredible American story of one man’s determination to secure civil rights, equality, and justice for millions of African Americans. Deeply researched and delivered through magnificent and gripping prose, Klan Wars reclaims Grant’s historic battle to build a unified nation in the face of a pernicious, hate-filled movement that waged a vicious grassroots campaign to reassert white supremacy. A must read!” — KATE CLIFFORD LARSON, AUTHOR OF BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND
Grant made mistakes.
He also brought us Ely S. Parker and campaigned for citizenship for Native Americans, a right not won until 1924.
He also brought the country into a new relationship with its Jewish population on the edge of the biggest wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe.
And he brought us the crusading justice of Attorney General Amos T. Akerman.
And he saw to ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, ensuring rights that would not be further expanded until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mr. Hugh Bailey, he was a great man, a man worth rediscovering, flaws and all.
The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is the Lost Monument of Washington. It might as well be invisible. No one knows it's there.
Its location is actually spectacular, right at the foot of Capitol Hill, at the opening to the Mall. The memorial features one of the largest equestrian statues in the world, set on a platform 250 feet wide, with ancillary sculptures that are heaving with action and drama. Grant is, appropriately, the calm man at the center of the storm. He stares fixedly down the Mall toward Lincoln in his memorial. His horse is so passive-looking it appears to be waiting for someone to insert a quarter.
Washington is full of statues to Civil War heroes whose achievements have been largely forgotten. Logan. Thomas. Sheridan. Scott. Farragut. McPherson. But at least these folks are surrounded by pedestrians and motorists.
Grant, huge as he is, is dwarfed by the Capitol and is flanked by lots with signs reading "Permit Parking Only." The oceanic Capitol Reflecting Pool was built in 1971 as if to block Grant from charging onto the Mall. The memorial is a hike from the museums, Union Station or any Metro stop. Tour buses stop nearby, but everyone walks toward the Capitol — except groups that pose on the steps of the memorial because it offers an excellent spot to capture the Capitol as a backdrop. Grant is left out of the frame.
One hundred and fifty years ago this spring, Ulysses S. Grant took command of all the armies of the United States. He developed a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy and ultimately, with much struggle, succeeded. As much as any person not named Abraham Lincoln, Grant saved the Union. He went on to serve two terms as president and write some of the most celebrated memoirs in the history of American letters. More than 1 million people, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, attended his funeral procession in New York in 1885 on a national day of mourning.
A million people attended the dedication of his tomb on the northern tip of Manhattan in 1897.
And then the veterans of the war died off, and the populace as a whole largely forgot why they had once revered the little man from Ohio.
Do not forget. History can repeat itself. But it does not have to, and in the United States our wisdom over time ensures we progress ahead.
More. Perfect. Union.
Let. Us. Have. Peace.
On the way to victory at Appomattox , the Union Army of the Potomac, now led by Grant with Lincoln attentively following until his death, fought through Northern Virginia in the war’s first drive to control the Confederate capital at Richmond. In this painting, Grant leads his troops across the Rapidan River toward Richmond in the Battle of the Wilderness, May 5 to May 7, 1864. From The Washington Post.
