U.S. Grant was declared a slaveholder last night and his statue toppled in Ohio. There was truth there; he owned a slave for two years. But history and human understanding suffered. Grants views evolved over the course of a bloody war to end slavery. By 1863 he #thread

came to support Emancipation, writing: “It became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery ... I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the

question is forever settled.” Does this make of Grant an evolved penitent by our modern standards? No. He was a white man of his time and captive to racist as well as anti-semitic attitudes. He married a woman whose father was a slaveholder.

But for reasons practical and apparently moral - such matters are by definition hazier and more difficult to locate - he came to embrace the view that blacks deserved freedom and that the Civil War was, at its core, a war to destroy slavery.

Grant's presidency was an unmade bed but its glory was the 15th Amendment, which gave Black Americans the right to vote. Mississippi, Texas and Virginia could not reenter the Union until their officials ratified it. As Frederick Douglass noted: "To Grant more than any other

man the Negro owes his enfranchisement.” We properly would note today that this accomplishment owed to soil irrigated with the blood of so many Black women and men, and to whites who fought in the Union Army as well. We can, however, probably forgive Douglass his overstatement.

As for Grant, the passage of time bequeathed on him a clear eyed view: “As time passes," he wrote "people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.”

This, again, did not absolve Grant of the racism and atavism that haunt too many still. It left him that familiar figure, a flawed hero, and man of his time, admirable and flinch-worthy, and worth reckoning with. I'd pull that statue up again ...