Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [32]
It is in the context of this that his notorious General Order #11, expelling Jews from his territory, must be judged. That Grant was enraged by the number of Northern traders who followed his army down the Mississippi, buying up cotton at rock-bottom prices from the defeated Southerners and making fortunes by trading with the enemy, is easy enough to understand—anything to do with trade and money was always an irritant to Grant, to whom the whole subject was a closed book. He was himself not only honest to a fault, but totally hopeless at any kind of business transaction, and the fact that he was now surrounded by people who were good at that kind of thing (and making a fortune out of it) must have been hard for Grant to bear. It did not help that one of them was his own father, Jesse Grant, that astute old rogue, in partnership with a Jewish businessman, or that several members of the Dent family were doing so as well. When Grant lost his temper, it was volcanic and usually short-lived, and General Order #11 was in any case swiftly withdrawn when it reached Lincoln’s attention. It has been suggested that Grant’s staff, possibly the ubiquitous Rawlins, put into his head the notion that most of the traders he objected to were Jewish, but it seems more likely that Grant suffered from the subliminal anti-Semitism of most American Anglo-Saxons of his day where business affairs were concerned, and that when he lost his temper he attacked the Jews rather than his father and his in-laws—a process we would now call “scapegoating.”
Inaction, overwhelming responsibilities for which he was unsuited, and some doubt about what to do next were certainly part of the problem, but worse was to come. Up until then Grant had consoled himself with the thought that he enjoyed Lincoln’s confidence, but two events put doubt into Grant’s mind. The first was a visit from a well-known and respected newspaperman, Charles A. Dana, whom Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, had sent to scout out, on Lincoln’s behalf, whether there was any truth to the rumors about Grant’s drinking that were being spread by his enemies. Dana, as matters would turn out, liked Grant, and his reports to Washington were favorable, but it cannot have eased Grant’s nerves to know that he was being watched by somebody who had the ear of both the secretary of war and the president.
The second was the discovery that Lincoln had also been listening hard to Brig. Gen. John A. McClernand, a fellow Illinois politician and amateur general, who proposed to raise a new force of volunteers for the purpose of taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had given McClernand secret instructions to proceed.
Vicksburg had long been fitfully on Grant’s mind as he sat behind his desk wrestling with such matters as Jewish cotton traders, since it was clear to anybody with a map of the Mississippi at hand that it was the key to opening up the river and splitting the Confederacy. Early in 1862 the navy had seized the city of New Orleans, a serious blow to the Confederacy, but so long as Vicksburg, situated on a high bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi, 166 miles north of New Orleans (as the crow flies), remained in Confederate hands, traffic on the river was effectively blocked. Vicksburg had been fortified; it was protected by large numbers of heavy guns and by geography as well, for it was not only on high ground, but the approach from the north was made difficult by the muddy, low-lying swamps of the Yazoo River, which runs sluggishly into the Mississippi.
How McClernand, a mediocre general of volunteers but an astute politician, planned to take Vicksburg is hard to