Item #310576 Passport document of Elihu Smead, signed by Fish as Secretary of State. Hamilton Fish.

Passport document of Elihu Smead, signed by Fish as Secretary of State.

Washington, D.C: August 1871.

Price: $350.00


About the item

Partially printed on one quarter-folded page. Folio. Printed on paper bearing the watermark of the United States Department of State. Splitting at central folds, one small tear to lower front, else well-preserved.

Item #310576

This passport document, made out to Elihu Smead, a dark-complexioned, black-haired man with a "long" face and a "roman" nose, was signed by Fish, President Ulysses S. Grant's Secretary of State, at a notable period in the history of Jewish-American relations. During his tenure as Major General of the United States Army in the Civil War, Grant had issued an order expelling Jewish citizens from Union-controlled areas in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky under the suspicion that they were participating in the black market cotton trade. Though President Lincoln quickly reversed the order, during his own presidency Grant felt compelled to establish relationships with Jewish communities within the United States and to offer support to Jews facing persecution abroad. His administration appointed an unprecedented number of Jews to public office and Grant himself became personally involved with Jewish causes and organizations.

Though Elihu Smead and his wife, whom the document does not reference by name, are not known figures, a passport signed to a presumably Jewish man (and his spouse) represents tangible proof of this time of intensifying Jewish-American relations.

Fish is himself considered one of the most accomplished Secretaries of State in American history, despite his ambivalence to Grant's anti-racist Reconstruction projects. At the time of this document he would have been managing complex diplomatic relations with Great Britain and Latin America as well as a minor invasion of Korea. Several of his descendents later served as notable Republican congressmen and diplomats.