Should We Expel the Jews From Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi?

The open-government lobby in Washington is highly influential. From the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to the First Amendment Center, and with many stops in between, there are dozens of organizations fighting against government secrecy, even in cases where secrecy is essential for the protection of our national security.

But if some of this is heedless and even mindless, it does not follow that everything the open-government lobby does is bad. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), one of the most influential groups in the lobby, is on the Left–sometimes the far Left–on many issues. FAS posts an immense collection of documents pertaining to national security, some of them open-source material, some of them declassified by the U.S. government, and some of them “declassified” after being published by FAS itself.

Whether such private acts of declassification are a good or bad thing is a subject for another day. But the FAS website, especially its Secrecy News blog run by Steven Aftergood, almost always touches on important subjects and is a daily stop on my tour of the World Wide Web.

In its most recent post, FAS features some open-source material from the American Civil War. The subject is, of all things, “Abraham Lincoln and the Jews.” More specifically, it is Order No. 11, issued by General Ulysses S. Grant on December 17, 1862, expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, where his forces had taken the field. Why did Grant take this action, and what was Lincoln’s response? To find out, click here.