It was in the first few days of the new year, 152 years ago, when President Abraham Lincoln heard the news.
Ulysses S. Grant, his general in command of the Department of the Tennessee, had expelled all Jews from the district.
Indeed, his General Orders 11, dated Dec. 17, 1862, stated, "The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department [the military district of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi] orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from receipt of the order.
"Any one returning," it went on to say, "would be be arrested and held in confinement."
Today, we're aware of such orders that came regularly and with malice from German dictator Adolf Hitler in the run-up to, and during, World War II.
Grant, though, at the time, was just one of many Union commanders in Lincoln's army known to have trouble with the bottle and had yet to achieve success at Vicksburg, Miss., and Chattanooga, which would lead to his command of the entire army, his presence at the surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, Va., and eventually his two-term presidency.
The president, upon hearing about the order from Paducah, Ky., Jewish businessman Cesar Kaskel and U.S. Rep. John Addison Gurley of Cincinnati, who had traveled to Washington, D.C., for the specific reason of delivering the news, was aghast. He had no idea about it, the order not having made its way to the capitol.
Without haste, Lincoln commanded the general in chief of the army, Henry Halleck, to countermand General Orders No. 11.
The little known incident is detailed in "When General Grant Expelled the Jews," a 2012 book by Jonathan D. Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and the chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History.
While Grant was in command of the Department of Tennessee, the land area in question stretched from northern Mississippi to Cairo, Ill., and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River in middle Tennessee.
Chattanooga, in southeast Tennessee, had few Jews and was in an area where sympathies were split between the Union and the Confederacy.
"Although there is some record of Jewish settlement in Chattanooga prior to the Civil War," the Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities -- Chattanooga, Tennessee" says, "the beginnings of the first Jewish community appeared in Chattanooga in the years following the war."
Jews in Chattanooga would go on to play a significant role in the economic growth and development of the city with involvement in a variety of industries and businesses over the second half of the 19th century and on to today.
Their population peaked in Chattanooga in 1937 with 3,800 people, the encyclopedia states, but now numbers around 1,400.
Grant, in a move he would regret the rest of his life, painted a people with a broad brush not unlike all police have been painted today in the months following the deaths of several black men who were in police custody or who police were trying to get into custody.
His order, though it was rescinded within weeks, was called "the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history" by Rabbi Bertram W. Korn in his book "American Jewry and the Civil War."
Sarna wrote there were several reasons behind Grant's order.
One was that some Jews, but non-Jews as well, were engaging in smuggling, speculating, price-gouging, swindling and producing "shoddy" merchandise for the military. Further, they were blamed for poorly firing weapons, inedible foodstuffs and other substandard merchandise.
That "some ... took advantage of wartime opportunities for smuggling is hardly surprising," Sarna wrote. But while Grant "expelled Jews to inhibit smuggling," he also "seemed to be hearkening back to an older, corporate view of the Jews common in the Middle Ages and lasting in many places well into modern times."
Another incident, the author wrote, also might have spurred it.
Earlier in the day of the order's issue, Grant, at Holly Springs, Miss., received a visit from his father, Jesse R. Grant. The elder man had brought with him three Jewish clothing manufacturers from Cincinnati and had worked out a deal to receive 25 percent of the profits if they could somehow complete a plan to purchase southern cotton and ship it north undeterred.
Indignant, Grant raged at the manufacturers who "entrapped his old father into such an unworthy undertaking," according to eyewitness journalist Sylvanus Cadwallader, and "expelled the Jews rather than his father."
The soon-to-be-more-prominent general so regretted his decision that, as president, he appointed more Jews to public office than all previous presidents combined, and was a staunch defender of Jewish rights. When he died in 1886, Jews deeply mourned his passing.
However, shortly before his death, having just completed his memoirs, Grant was asked by his son about the omission of the incident from his writing.
"That," he said, "was a matter long past and best not referred to."