Ulysses S. Grant’s greatest regret: His anti-Semitic order haunted — and drove — him

The Boston Globe reports on Grant the Jew-hater:

In December 1862, with the Civil War raging, the Union Army’s efforts to control the movement of Southern cotton was bedeviled by illegal speculation and black marketeers. Like many of his contemporaries, Major General Ulysses S. Grant — then commanding a vast geographic swath called the Department of the Tennessee — shared a crude stereotype of all Jews as avaricious, corner-cutting swindlers. That ugly prejudice boiled over in General Orders No. 11, the most infamous anti-Semitic injunction in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from this department within 24 hours.”

Tenured historians are quite forgiving of Grant and Lincoln.