Considered the most original genius of the American Civil War and “the first modern general,” William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author best known as the general of the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-1865), during which he earned broad recognition for his military strategy but also much criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies that he implemented in his military campaign against the Confederacy.
The most creative and intuitively brilliant of all the high-ranking Civil War Union generals, he employed the groundbreaking practice of total warfare during his signature “March from Atlanta to the Sea” campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas when, determined to bring the war home to the heart of the South, to punish the south for its secession from the Union, and to expose the weakness of the Confederacy, he led an army of 62,000 men with 35,000 horses and 2,500 war wagons on an overland march to Savannah. Though there was little actual fighting involved, he earned the eternal enmity of southerners for the utter path of destruction his army left in its wake and for his large-scale destruction of military and civilian infrastructure, a systematic policy that successfully undermined the ability and willingness of the Confederacy to continue fighting. His masterful warfare tactics ended the Civil War with a Union victory – and saved thousands of lives on both sides – much sooner than it would have otherwise. Famously declaring that “war is hell,” he was a leading contributor to producing that hell during the War Between the States through his seemingly unlimited ruthlessness and cold psychological/military calculations.
After commanding a brigade of volunteers at the First Battle of Bull Run (1861), Sherman was transferred to the Western Theatre, where he forged a close relationship with General Ulysses Grant. He served under Grant in 1862 and 1863 in various battles, including the Battle of Fort Henry, the Battle of Fort Donelson, and the Battle of Shiloh, campaigns that led to the fall of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and the Chattanooga campaign, which routed the Confederate army out of Tennessee. When Grant went east in 1864 to serve as the General of the Union Armies, Sherman succeeded him as the commander in the Western Theater, in which capacity he led the capture of Atlanta, a strategic victory which many commentators argue was seminal to Lincoln’s reelection. He accepted the surrender of all the Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in April 1865 and, when Grant was elected president in March 1869, Sherman succeeded him and served as Commanding General of the Army until 1883, in which capacity he led the American engagement in the Indian Wars. His memoirs (1875) are still considered one of the best-known first-hand accounts of the Civil War.
In an 1858 correspondence, Sherman described Jews as “without pity, soul, heart, or bowels of compassion.” On July 30, 1862, during his time in Union-occupied Memphis, he wrote that “I found so many Jews and speculators here trading in cotton,” and he argued that the order permitting the cotton trade “is worse to us than defeat” so that he felt compelled to intervene. On August 11, 1862, he wrote to the Adjutant General of the Union Army warning that “the country will swarm with dishonest Jews who will smuggle powder, pistoles [sic], percussion-caps, &c., in spite of all the guards of precautions we can give.”
In another correspondence dated August 11, 1862, to Secretary of the Treasury (and later Supreme Court Justice) Salmon P. Chase, he wrote that “… the commercial enterprise of the Jews soon discovered that ten cents would buy a pound of cotton behind our army; that four cents would take it to Boston, where they could receive thirty cents in gold.” In another infamous letter written from Memphis on November 2, 1862, he specified avaricious Jews as the leading smugglers who were “instigated by a sense of gain:”
A great deal of smuggling is going on to the Holly Spring Army, but this is mostly managed by Union Men & Jews instigated by a sense of gain. It is no use shutting our eyes to the fact that the entire South is united against us.
At the start of December 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant, agreeing with Sherman, turned his focus to Jewish traders as the primary cause of smuggling. On December 5, he responded to Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.” and he tightened restrictions to try to reduce the illegal trade. Grant’s views on the Jews were shared by Sherman, who complained that “we must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering, and robbing.”
Only a few weeks later, on December 17, 1862, Grant issued his infamous General Order No. 11, one of the most shameful and reprehensible antisemitic events in American history. Though antisemitism was quite common in Civil War America, Grant – instigated by Sherman and with Sherman’s strong support – was the only army officer to officially codify it:
HEADQUARTERS, 13th ARMY CORPS
DEPARTMENT OF THE TENNESSEE
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 24 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 any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
Exhibited here is a short, but historic, handwritten note by General Ulysses S. Grant regarding his father’s religious affiliation, which was undoubtedly written in response to a query regarding Grant’s overt perpetration of Jew-hatred and which had its origins in his father’s relationship with Jewish traders, the very people whose patriotism, Grant believed, “was measured in dollars and cents.”
My father has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] Church since 1832.
Union officers, angered by the activities of traders infesting Tennessee, used the term “Jew” as a general catch-all epithet to epitomize everything deemed without conscience, and the terms “Jew,” “profiteer,” “speculator” and “trader” were used interchangeably. Grant had often singled out Jews as offenders in the unsavory business of cotton speculation. On November 9, 1862, for example, he told General Hurlbut to let no civilians travel south of Jackson, “particularly those Israelites” and, the next day, he told General Webster that “no Jews, who seem to think they are a privileged class, are permitted to travel south on the railroad; they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
The proximate cause of Grant’s order to expel the Jews was the dire cotton shortage in the North, which gave rise to a wild black market in Southern cotton. Notwithstanding the centrality of cotton to the Northern economy, and despite demand by Union military commanders for a total ban on trade with the Confederacy, Lincoln decided to allow limited trade in Southern cotton, to be licensed by the Treasury Department and the army. Grant, who was charged with issuing trade licenses in his area, became inundated with merchants seeking trade permits and, with the mercurial increases in cotton prices, unlicensed traders would bribe Union officers to permit them to purchase Southern cotton without a permit. A deeply frustrated Grant was furious to discover that his father, Jesse, had formed a partnership with the Mack Brothers – three Jewish merchants – for the purchase of cotton through which the partnership sought to cash in on the authority of Jesse’s son, the general. On December 17, 1862, an enraged Grant responded by issuing his infamous General Order No. 11.
Grant’s Order was brought to President Lincoln’s attention by Cesar Kaskel, a Kentucky Jew. When Lincoln asked, “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Kaskel responded, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, seeking protection.” Lincoln revoked the Order on January 4, 1863, three days after signing the Emancipation Proclamation. In a telegram to Grant, Lincoln’s General-in-Chief H. W. Halleck explained that “as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” At a meeting with a subsequent Jewish delegation, Lincoln assured the group that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad.”
It is fascinating to note that, notwithstanding his antisemitism, Sherman was a great admirer of Rose Eytinge (1835-1911), a Jewish-American actress and author who rose to become one of the most popular female stars of the 1860s and 1870s and the first American actress to earn a three-figure salary. Exhibited here is an exceedingly rare American piece, a beautiful signed and inscribed CDV of Sherman in civilian clothing, by Benjamin Falk, New York City, Nov 15, 1887. Sherman has signed twice: first, on the front, “W. T. Sherman, General 1887” and, on the verso, a full inscription, “To Mrs. Rose Eytinge, New York City – With best compliments of her friend and admirer. W. T. Sherman, General, New York City Nov 15, 1887.”
A member of photography’s “old guard,” Falk is credited as one of first photographers to embrace dry plates and he began carving his own professional niche as an accomplished society photographer and later as a theatrical photographer. He opened his Broadway studio in 1881, which quickly became known for its stylish celebrity portraits.
Eytinge, notorious for her fiery temperament, capriciousness, and defiance and prone to quarrels with managers and her fellow actors, earned her reputation as an unmanageable, yet brilliant, artist. A trailblazer in challenging then contemporary social and theatrical standards for actresses, she was famous for her female-heavy roles involving displays of ferocious passion, and she thrilled audiences with her violations of bourgeois expectations regarding respectable “womanly behavior.”
Born in Philadelphia to David Eytinge and Rebecca (Savage) Eytinge, the family was likely related to the four Jewish merchant Eytinges, then working in Philadelphia, at least two of whom had emigrated from the Netherlands. (Solomon Eytinge, the well-known illustrator of newspapers and books, including works by Dickens and Tennyson, was a cousin.) After being informally educated in Philadelphia, she embarked at age 17 on her professional stage career, with her professional debut on stage at the Olympic Theatre, where she performed with the renowned actor Edwin Booth (the brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth) in The Fool’s Revenge.
Ironically, Eytinge would later perform as Florence Trenchard in the Winter Garden production of Our American Cousin, during the performance of which at Ford’s Theatre Lincoln would be assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Writing about the severe adverse effect that John Wilkes’s crime had on Edwin, she described how “shrinking and cowering under the weight of that great sin and shame, for which he was in no way responsible, but the consequences of which he suffered deeply and bitterly, withdrew himself from the world and avowed his determination never to appear in public again, and how it was only after a long time, and after not only his friends and admirers but the whole country clamored for him, that he reconsidered that determination and consented to appear again upon the stage.”
With Booth and others, she toured Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, where President Lincoln attended several of her performances and invited her to the White House. She records in her memoirs that when she was presented to the president, whom she found to be simple and warm, he took her hand, looked down on her from great height, and said, “So this is the little lady that all us folks in Washington like so much!” She distinguished herself in the playing of heroines driven to emotional and physical extremes, like Nancy Sykes in the stage version of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Famous for taking on physically demanding roles, she became particularly renowned for creating the role of Laura Courtland in Augustin Daly’s melodrama, Under the Gaslight (1867), in which, amid the roar of a speeding train, she axed her way out of a locked tool shed and rescued a Civil War veteran bound to the railroad tracks.
In 1855, Eytinge married the newspaperman and author David M. Barnes (1820-1900), but they divorced in 1862. After her 1869 marriage to Colonel George H. Butler, then serving as U. S. Consul General to Egypt – whose “accomplishments” include dismissing all consular agents, auctioning off their commissions, and purchasing dancing girls – she paused her acting career for several years and left the country for Egypt with her new husband. Characterizing Egypt as a “heathen land,” she recorded her experiences in the Orient, including her observations about the poor treatment of women there, as the result of which she claimed a deepened appreciation for the status of American women. In articles she sent back to the United States, and later in her autobiography, she maintained that she had the perspective not only of an “American” but also of a “Christian” and an “Anglo-Saxon;” she apparently thought little of her Judaism, never played any Jewish roles, and, indeed, in her autobiography, Memories of Rose Eytinge, she made no mention at all of her Jewish heritage. Nonetheless, although she seems to have concealed her Jewish ethnicity, she was often described as “the black-eyed, black-haired Jewess.”
From 1869 to 1883, a group of fifty American military officers, veterans of the Union and Confederate armies, were dispatched to Egypt to help establish a national army and a military training program based on the West Point model. This “Americans on the Nile” project was launched by the enlightened Khedive of Egypt, the administrator for the Ottoman Empire and in 1872, General Sherman paid a visit to the Americans in Egypt, during which he met Eytinge for the first time. After his time abroad, Sherman returned home and lived the rest of his life in New York City. He was devoted to the theater and was much in demand as a colorful speaker at dinners and banquets, in which he indulged a fondness for quoting Shakespeare.
After divorcing Butler due to his alcoholism and abusive behavior, Eytinge became severely depressed, made arrangements with a lawyer for the distribution of her property, and attempted suicide in June 1876 by taking an overdose of laudanum; fortunately, she was found by her cousin in time for her stomach to be pumped and she survived. After her return to New York City, where she resumed her career with the Union Square Theatre Company, she played one of her most famous roles, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, drawing on her Egyptian experience for the role, and Sherman became a great fan and admirer. Other leading roles after her return to the United States include Nancy Sykes in Oliver Twist, Ophelia in Hamlet, and Desdemona in Othello. Her literary works include the novel It Happened This Way, the play Golden Chains, and adaptations of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Browning’s Colombe’s Birthday, and her personal memoirs were published in 1905.
Eytinge traveled to England in 1880, where she was celebrated by the likes of Dickens and Gladstone, and, upon her return to the United States in 1884, she embarked on a successful acting tour of the Western states, performing as the leading lady in California, Nevada and Utah theaters. Rarely appearing after 1884, she gave her final performance in 1907 and devoted herself to training pupils for the stage and to establishing a school of acting in New York (1890) and later in Portland, Oregon. She died of a stroke on December 20, 1911, at the Brunswick Home of Amityville, N.Y., where she had been supported by the Actors Fund of America. She had originally planned to be buried in Washington, D.C., where her younger two children were buried but, because she was indigent at the time of her death – in fact, when she needed extra income to supplement her spendthrift lifestyle, she engaged in smuggling silks, satins, and other precious cloth from England – the Actors Fund paid for her funeral in the Evergreens cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
