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Grant’s legacy toward Native Americans actually started out somewhat progressively for his era. He appointed Ely Parker (one of his most trusted adjutants in the war) as the first Native American head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1869. Grant also opposed the ideology of... https://twitter.com/iwriteallday_/status/1274432130186166273
...white people dominating native tribal peoples. Indeed, the overall number of violent conflicts with western tribes dropped during Grant’s first term. It was during his second term—due in part to the departure of Ely Parker as BIA Commisioner and in part to larger political...
....corruption in the federal government—that his contextually progressive policies began to fall apart. A series of failed peace treaties with tribal leaders like Red Cloud and of economic pressure to exploit land gold-rich areas like the Black Hills compounded upon Grant...
...and pushed him in political directions that his personal religious and moral convictions were against. He even rebuked Custer’s foolhardy attempt to remove Sitting Bull and basically agreed that Custer got what he deserved at the Little Bighorn.
The point of this is that, Grant as a person was actually very “progressive” for the 1860s and 1870s. In a cultural climate where most white people still believed black Americans to be unworthy of freedom and Native Americans as obstacles to be crushed, Grant viewed them...
...as people who could and should be integrated into the newly reformed Union. He succeeded in doing this policy-wise for black Americans during his administration (though later state-leve Jim Crow laws in the South circumvented his efforts) and initially started...
...out well vis-a-vis policies for Native Americans in his first term. His second term floundered on it for sure, but not because of some ingrained hatred toward Native Americans. Rather, large-scale a corruption in the Army and federal government at the time stymied much of...
...Grant’s initial goals. He failed in that regard. But in terms of actively pro-civil rights oriented presidents, especially when historically contextualized, Grant ranks with the likes of Eisenhower and LBJ. So to simply lump him in with the likes of actual racist traitors...
...like Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Lee is not simply an ignorance of history; it’s a willful spitting upon of the legacy of one of the men who devoted his adult life to fighting Southern racism and bigotry. It’s the abandoning of his historical thought...
...in favor of a sort of ideological rage that seeks only self-aggrandizement because that ideology ignores the complexities of history, especially one’s own and elevates itself to some false level of moral “purity” that is only available to God.
Was Grant perfect? Of course not. He acknowledged as much many times. But he did more in his life to empower black Americans’ right to life and liberty than any of the anarchist mob that pulled down his statue in San Francisco.
And for the last time he “owned” a slave only bc of inheritance & then freed William as soon as possible. He didn’t willingly buy a slave; inheritance thrust ownership upon Grant who used his power to free William. Not at all the same as buying slaves. The opposite in fact. End.
