(first published in the North State Journal 8/7/19)
At a time when our very real history in America is under siege from those want to expunge any mention of the sins of our past, Ron Chernow’s well-written and researched biography of former Union Army General and 2-term US President Ulysses S. Grant is an important book to read.
At a time when our very real history in America is under siege from those want to expunge any mention of the sins of our past, Ron Chernow’s well-written and researched biography of former Union Army General and 2-term US President Ulysses S. Grant is an important book to read.
Eradicating all mention of slavery in the full context of
American history would render our shared life together as “fake history”, not
“real” history. There is no way to talk about how great it was that “Lincoln
freed the slaves!” without bringing up how Africans were brought to the US in
bondage in the first place.
If you listen closely to the abolitionists of our collective
US history because slavery existed in the beginning of our Republic, they
really want to ban all mention of the so-called ‘peculiar institution” of
slavery. The only mention of it presumably would be in footnotes with the
comment that “slavery was terrible and perpetuated by a rich, ruling class of
entitled white men in the Southern aristocracy”.
Try to imagine what would be lost if we stopped talking
about slavery in the South altogether. We would lose perspective on how far
America has come since then in terms of racial integration and diversity since
1865.
We would lose the fact that 2 million white Union soldiers fought
to preserve the Union and eradicate slavery from the South, 350,000 who died
doing so.
Why would leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and white
abolitionists in the North sacrifice so many soldiers to the cause of preserving
the Union while ending slavery unless it was the right thing to do morally,
spiritually and ethically?
If we stop talking about slavery and the Civil War, historians
10,000 years from now would look back on the United States of America as a
small blip on the scale of human progress instead of a seminal event where a
free society of mostly white people, the Union, prosecuted a war that freed 3
million black people from slavery instead of re-enslaving them as ancient
Romans and Greeks regularly did.
Abraham Lincoln and General Grant employed revolutionary enlightened forward-thinking primarily as a tool to expediate the end to the war but later both adopted as the right thing to do as a matter of policy.
Mid-way through the first year of the Civil War, Chernow
writes:
“A central aim was to have newly liberated blacks work on
abandoned plantations, picking cotton and corn that could be shipped north to
assist the war effort. ‘We together fixed the prices to be paid for negro
labor”, Grant recalled. “whether rendered to the government or to individuals”.
It was a remarkable moment—the sudden advent of a labor
market for former slaves, who could now be rewarded for picking cotton. Grant
found himself overseeing a vast social experiment, inducting his black charges
into the first stages of citizenship. Taking the proceeds from their labor, he
created a fund that was “not only sufficient to feed and clothe all, the old
and young, male and female, but to build them comfortable cabins, hospitals for
the sick, and to supply them with many new comforts they had never know
before.”
Think of it as the first ESOP corporate takeover in American
history.
“This brand-new Grant never wavered to his commitment to
freed people” Chernow went on to say.
Not as Lieutenant General of the Union forces. Not as
President of the United States for 2 terms from 1869-1876 when he mercilessly
attacked and severely diminished the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South and implemented
Reconstruction along the terms of enlightened racial relations that he knew
President Lincoln would have pursued had he survived to serve a second term and
possibly more.
We should never forget the lessons of slavery and the Civil
War. Perhaps we should try to teach it better to our children.
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