PADUCAH, KY. JEWS
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Good morning, it’s Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2019. Forty years ago today, Jimmy Carter crossed the street on foot from his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to Lafayette Park. The president, a “born-again” Christian, in the popular parlance of the day, was on an ecumenical mission: He was in the park to light a menorah signifying the start of the eight nights of Hanukkah.
Ever since, the National Menorah Lighting, like the lighting of the National Christmas Tree, has become an annual event.
President Carter’s gesture was sensitive, even if it was theologically imprecise: As all Jews know (and all Christians should know), Hanukkah is nowhere close to the spiritual equivalent of Christmas: Yes, it coincides with the “holiday season,” but Hanukkah is only fourth or fifth on the list of the most spiritually significant Jewish holidays.
Nonetheless, this year’s ceremony, scheduled for Dec. 22, comes amid a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in our country and elsewhere in the world. Yet it also serves as a reminder that although racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance doesn’t move in a straight line, we do progress over time. Jimmy Carter grew to manhood at a time when matrimony between Jews and Gentiles was called “a mixed marriage.” Our current president has a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren. His eldest daughter converted to Judaism and is a Jewish mother, a fact of modern American family life that is rarely remarked upon.
December 17 is an important date in the interplay between U.S. presidents and Judaism for another reason as well. I’ll explain in a moment. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion columns spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters and contributors, including the following:
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In the long litany of abuses, calumnies, injustices, pogroms, and persecutions committed against the Jewish people — and the event I’m writing about was nearly a century before the Holocaust — what happened on Dec. 17, 1862 was one of the least harmful.
No one was killed; homes and property were not seized. A handful of people reported indignities. Two or three said they were jailed overnight; another was forbidden to change out of wet clothes — that sort of thing.
It’s memorable because of who was involved: Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln. And it’s relevant because it’s a reminder to us all how easy it is to slip into the lazy habits of prejudice, which is what Grant, then a general in “Mr. Lincoln’s Army,” did 157 years ago today.
At the time, Grant was leading a huge and lethal army that was trying to take Vicksburg, Miss., and with it the Confederacy’s access to the Mississippi River. The Army commander of a region called the Territory of the Department of the Tennessee, which included much of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, Grant was distracted and chagrined by the profiteers who’d come from the North to make a quick buck off cotton seized by the Union Army.
When Grant’s own father visited his son’s Oxford, Miss., headquarters with a group of such hustlers, several of whom were Jewish, Grant impulsively initiated the kind of step Donald Trump has proposed for other demographic groups: A week before Christmas, Grant issued an edict banning Jews from the territory.
A minor footnote in the Civil War, this event was also a minor footnote in American Jewish history. The Jews living in Paducah, Ky., where Grant’s order was most resented, didn’t actually leave the city during the short time the order was in effect.
One Jewish merchant did depart Paducah, however, and he did so in a hurry. His name was Cesar Kaskel, and he rushed to Washington intending to lodge a protest directly to the commander-in-chief.
Religious freedom was guaranteed by the Constitution, and had been affirmed — directly to the Jewish community — by no less an American eminence than George Washington. It was why people of Cesar Kaskel’s faith had come to these shores, and why there were Jews in Paducah in the first place.
Now, in a war being fought to free the slaves, no less, President Lincoln’s favorite general was causing offense by using the words “profiteer” and “Jew” interchangeably, and issuing edicts forcing them to be refugees in their own land.
What the hell was going on? That’s what some of Grant’s fellow officers wanted to know. Brig. Gen. Jeremiah C. Sullivan, the Union commander stationed in Tennessee, groused that he was “an officer of the Army and not of a church.”
As Cesar Kaskel made his way pell-mell toward Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln was preparing to release the Emancipation Proclamation. News of Grant’s order had been slow to reach Lincoln, but when it did he wasn’t pleased. Meanwhile, Kaskel was proving to be a real dynamo. Upon reaching the capital he made himself into a kind of instantaneous one-man lobbying outfit who planted stories in the press, stirred up Congress, and managed to secure an audience with the president.
Kaskel’s account of their White House meeting is the only one that survives, and is best taken with a grain of salt, but the conversation as he later rendered it included this exchange:
LINCOLN: “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?”
KASKEL: “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”
LINCOLN: “And this protection they shall have at once.”
Making allowances for Kaskel’s purple prose, Lincoln’s “happy land of Canaan” line does sound like the 16th president. However disappointed he was with Grant, Lincoln loved a pun, and his habit of invoking Biblical allusions was in this instance perfectly apropos. In any event, on Jan. 4, 1863, Lincoln ordered Grant to revoke what the general’s own wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order.” The upshot is that Grant’s original order, and its subsequent rescission, serve as unlikely bookends to the Emancipation Proclamation.
After the war, Grant’s imprudence briefly became a campaign issue when he ran for national office. He overcame this stain by apologizing publicly and privately. As president, Grant appointed more Jews than any previous president to positions in his administration, spoke out against European persecution of Jews, and sent an American envoy to Bucharest to try and lend U.S. support to victims of anti-Jewish persecution.
By the time he died in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation in the nation’s Jewish community had been restored, and he was mourned in synagogues all over this country. But life doesn’t offer every sinner unlimited opportunity for atonement. And before Donald Trump, or any other American politician, imparts half-baked ideas on how the United States should treat refugees or religious groups, they might want to keep U.S. Grant’s own words in mind.
“I do not sustain that order,” he wrote later. “It would never have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned, and without reflection.”
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Watchmen On The Pod 