This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [143]
3. The Face of the Enemy
Part of the time the enemy was the terrible curse of war itself; mud, weariness, the steady erosion of human values, the ugly sickness that came upon young men who ate bad food, wore shoddy clothing, and went to sleep wet to wake up cold. At other times it was the visible human foe in gray and butternut, who bore the same curse himself but who always stood ready to fill the hills and woods with fire and smoke and the echoing crash of gunfire. But underneath everything else the real enemy was a deep blindness of the spirit, an ancient constriction of the mind that fatally narrowed the circle of humanity. This enemy had to be defeated at any cost, even though final triumph might be delayed for generations; the war was just a skirmish in the unending fight, but if it was to repay any part of its cost the skirmish must make final victory a little more likely.
Nobody had consciously made up his mind to fight this enemy. The decision was subconscious; it was being worked out painfully, far below the surface, by men who went about their jobs in the steaming swamps along the Mississippi and in the echoing drill fields above the Rappahannock. Trying to win the visible war, they were being forced to grapple with a foe within themselves — the blind, arrogant assumption that some people are by birth and by nature superior to others, so that anything that democracy might finally do must be funneled out through an opening too narrow for any but the lucky few to pass.
This enemy appeared in many forms. It peered out, mocking and hideous, from an order issued early in the winter by U. S. Grant, which read as follows:
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
“Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and anyone returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with a permit from these headquarters.”1
Back of this order there were two moving causes, one obvious and immediate, the other coming out of the air men breathed in those days, as old as sin and no better to think about.
The obvious immediate reason was cotton. Northern mills and northern exporters desperately needed cotton, and with the war on they were getting very little of it. Whenever a Union army got down into cotton country the speculators would follow if they had half a chance, and there seemed to be nothing at all that they would not do, no length of bribery or chicanery they would not approach, in order to get cotton and send it north. Ormsby Mitchel had got into trouble in 1862, when his men held northern Alabama, because of cotton. To pay the cost of operating a railroad line he held, he had seized Rebel cotton, had invited New York dealers to come in, had sold the cotton to them to get the funds he needed, and then he had helped the dealers move their cotton north. Only the fact that he was an administration pet, probably, had saved him from dismissal. In New Orleans the cotton speculators were everywhere; in Memphis they were sniffing about, frantically eager for any chance to buy cotton and move it north.
What had touched Grant off, apparently, was an alliance made by his father, Jesse Grant, a shrewd little leather merchant who had business dealings in Ohio and Illinois and who possessed both an unerring eye for the main chance and a total lack of understanding of the standards which ought to guide the father of a major general.
Jesse appears to have formed connections with some cotton dealers, and he took them down to see the general. Grant was highly cordial, until he discovered that what his father’s friends