Ulysses S. Grant speaks to woke America from beyond the grave
How are you going to teach American history if you have to gag me, Ulysses S. Grant, even in my grave? After all, if I hadn’t helped Abraham Lincoln and a few hundred thousand Union soldiers fight against the rebellion from 18611865, you 2023 woke Americans wouldn’t have a free-speechAmerica to kick around anymore.
From my grave, and using my printed written words from my “Personal Memoirs,” I, Ulysses S. Grant, am asking you, my fellow citizens, to unplug your ears and listen to topics which are now too sensitive to talk about in politically correct America of 2023.
If I — who defeated the Confederate Army — am comfortable enough to acknowledge the legitimacy of “Confederates” in 1885 after receiving good wishes from them over my cancer death-sentence as I was struggling to finish my “Memoirs,” why cant you woke 2023 Americans acknowledge “Confederates” or their (defeated!) flag?
“It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move ... the universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last.” (pp. 640, 639)
And here I equalize Union and Confederate motivation, something which politically correct 2023 Americans will not dare to do for fear of being labeled soft on slavery.
“But the war between the states was a very bloody and costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles they deemed dearer than life before it could be brought to an end. I commanded the whole of the mighty host engaged on the victorious side.” (p.640)
But I don’t pretend slavery wasn’t a cause of the war . In fact I say it was the cause: “The cause of the Great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery” (p.333). So why can’t you in 2023 say in Florida school systems that slavery was at least “a cause” of the Civil War without fear of being censored?
But I’m no prophet or saint about personal racial segregation/integration. I get it right in this quote from my Memoirs and then immediately I get it wrong. Listen to me do a backflip here:
“Four millions of human beings held as chattels have been liberated; the ballot has been given to them; the free schools of the country have been opened to their children. The nation still lives, and the people are just as free to avoid social intimacy with blacks as ever they were, or as they are with white people.” (p.113)
Worse, almost blasphemously, I advocate as president acquisition of Santo Domingo as a voting state composed entirely of black people:
“
I took it that the colored people would go there in great numbers, so as to have independent states governed by their own race. They would still be states of the Union, and under the protection of the General Government; but the citizens would be almost wholly colored.”
(p.638) Should you Americans in 2023 erase my outdated and culturally biased Santo Domingo proposal because it hurts your feelings to admit your own history is flawed and your own Caucasian heroes might have been wrong?
Even I, Ulysses S. Grant, am human. I may have saved America’s future in 1865 as “one nation, indivisible,” but I may have been wrong in some of my thinking.
Go ahead. Feel free to talk about my flaws. That’s the freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion America that I fought for and — ultimately—- gave my life for on July 23, 1885, three days after completing my “Memoirs” in agonizing pain with throat cancer at age 63.