Perhaps Grant issued the order as Sherman was apparently a vicious anti-Semite, equating Jews with Newspapermen and prostitutes.
Its ironic that Jews had such a good relationship with anti-bellum southerners and after the war they became the objects of attack by the KKK along with blacks and Catholics.
"Sherman was apparently a vicious anti-Semite"
In addition to being a psychotic arsonist who was guided by the voices in his head.
"Its ironic that Jews had such a good relationship with anti-bellum southerners and after the war they became the objects of attack by the KKK along with blacks and Catholics."
Makes one wonder, but then it took the South over a century to recover, so scapegoating was a much easier task. Without romanticizing the South, had there been no slavery, it seems that the North's cause may have been interpreted a bit differently by historians. I guess the question is whether they would have even gotten approval for the war based on economic reasons had there been no slavery.
Very much so. As mentioned in the article, Charleston, South Carolina had a large and vibrant Jewish community that lived in peace and prosperity there until the War and its aftermath. I don't know when the worm turned and the KKK and their ilk expanded their hatred to include Jews, but it's definitely worth noting that for Jews in antebellum America, here in the South was the place (generally) where they had the easiest time.
}:-)4
The ante-bellum South was very different from the post-bellum South. It was an almost European feudal society dominated by high church Anglicans and Catholics (I have a theory that this is why most Black clergy wear vestments). The "Bible Belt" didn't emerge until after the Civil War. The ancestor of today's Bible Belt is not the ante-bellum South (as liberals like to maintain) but Puritan New England and the northern Great Awakenings (eg, New York's "burned over district). It was in the ante-bellum North that one found shouting, spasms, and the other phenomena now associated with Southern "holy rollers." Liberals also routinely ignore the inconvenient fact that the victims of Southern racism shared the religious beliefs of the perpetrators, so scientifically "Biblical literalism" is eliminated as a "cause" of white racism and violence.
The original post-war KKK was very different from its twentieth century imitators. It had Catholic and Jewish members (including Dr. Simon Baruch, personal physician to Jefferson Davis and father of Bernard Baruch) and didn't burn crosses. The cross-burning was initiated by Col. Simmons' post WWI Klan based on a fictional cross-burning in Thomas Dickson's novel The Clansman (which served as the basis for the motion picture The Birth of a Nation).
Unfortunately, for all the philo-Semitism of the ante-bellum and Civil War South (and the immediate post-bellum era), anti-Semitic populism eventually reared its head and even today is a component of many neo-Confederate and Southern identity groups (many of whom engage in virulently socialist anti-"banker" rhetoric and clamor for the Northern Hamiltonian protectionism their ancestors fought against). I regard these anti-Semitic, quasi-fascist "Southern" and "Confederate" movements as posers.