This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [144]
But the invisible cause of the order — the thing that turned it from a simple tightening up of controls on illicit cotton brokerage into a blind, shotgun blast at the Jewish people — was the fact that Grant at all times reflected the age in which he lived; and this age, which lived by the American dream and which was now paying a stupendous price to broaden it, had nevertheless failed almost totally to understand the dream’s power and splendor. It was an age in which race prejudice in all of its forms could stalk unchecked and almost unrebuked.
For Americans of the blood interpreted their birthright narrowly and guarded it with fierce jealousy, treating those whose origins were not as theirs with fear, hatred, or contempt. The country was changing. Year after year the packet ships had been bringing in more and more folk from beyond the ocean, people drawn by many factors, among which was the wild and intoxicating notion that to be an American need not be exclusively a matter of birth. It could also be a matter of conscious choice; one could elect oneself a member of this free society, breaking with the past, sharing in the great pilgrimage toward a dazzling future not because one had been fortunately born but because one wanted to share in it. People came from all over — from Germany and from Ireland and from many other places — bringing languages and creeds and folkways that the nation had not known before and that struck many of the native-born as bewilderingly strange and therefore ominous.
It was not yet a decade since a powerful political party had grown up, built entirely on this fear: the Know-Nothings, who campaigned unashamedly on blatant prejudice, electing governors and senators, coming tolerably close to winning the presidency itself, and demanding that all newcomers be excluded or reduced to second-class citizenship. People who were not infected by this fear nevertheless tended to deny full humanity to the newcomers by seeing them as stereotypes, usually more or less comic. Germans were “Dutchmen,” fat and rather stupid folk who talked an amusing brogue and drank too much beer; Irishmen were clumsy bog-trotters who talked an even funnier brogue and who were devoted to fighting and to whiskey; Jews were bearded, hook-nosed sharpers who peddled goods from wagons and who could be denounced and expelled en masse by an angry general; and Negroes — —
Negroes were in some inexplicable manner what the war itself was mostly about. Their status seemed mysteriously to be changing, and as it changed — if it changed — there must be corresponding changes in each of the social levels that lay above, and finally in the way Americans looked upon their fellow human beings. For the most fundamental change of all was that it was becoming necessary to look upon the Negro as a man rather than as a thing. Let that once take hold, and racism in all of its forms must receive a mortal wound, even though it might be a very long time dying. What was won for the least of these would finally be won for everybody; and once a common humanity was admitted, an incalculable victory would have been gained, because sooner or later the admission would have to be acted on.
Yet victories are won in odd ways, sometimes by men who are thinking about something very different. The General Grant who could express a subconscious but profound racial prejudice in his order expelling the Jews — an order that, by direction of President Lincoln, he very shortly withdrew — could at the same time be working most effectively to destroy racism’s foundations,