Several recent bios have actually argued that Grant genuinely tried to do right by the Indians more than just about any other post-Civil War President.
As a whitewashing, or actually based on history?
The latter. I hold no brief for Grant, but these are by respected historians.
Do you have any sort of source I could look at to see what it is that you are talking about? It would be useful to be able to evaluate their claims in context, and also to be able to determine their credibility.
Are they saying that he did not wage genocide against the Lakota’s, that he did not deliberately drive their food into extinction?
What exactly does “do right by” mean in this context?
Tried to ensure that the U.S. Government treated them with respect, honored its treaties and dealt fairly and honestly with them. Grant appointed a Seneca man, a former military aide of his, to serve as commissioner of Indian Affairs; he was the first Indian appointed to the post.
For a start: Ulysses S. Grant - Wikipedia
Here are three well-reviewed recent Grant bios to look into. I haven’t read them myself but have read in reviews that they make similar arguments along these lines:
https://www.amazon.com/Grant-Ron-Chernow/dp/0143110632/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=books+u.s.+grant+bio&qid=1594313193&sr=8-3
Other than appointing a Native American, who had been a close adjutant during the war, I’m not seeing how he did right by them, but maybe if I shell out the time and money to buy the books, I’d see how.
They don’t seem to contradict his time in the army, where he absolutely committed genocide and intentionally caused starvation. They don’t contradict that he vetoed congress’s bill that would stop the killing of Bison. He forced relocations, and then, when gold was discovered, made them move off that land too.
Grant doesn’t bother me one way or another, but if someone has a beef with him, they probably are pretty well justified.
Thats not recent. He outright says in his memoirs that the Natives have been mistreated badly, several times and that white men haven’t been honourable in their dealings with them. He spoke about Native rights in his inaugural address.
But he still committed genocide, right?
That he felt bad about it later only assuages his own conscience, maybe.
Doesn’t bring back the people that he killed in the name of white expansion.
No, he never committed genocide. And yes, millions of bison were killed, but not as a government plan to starve the indian.
Buffalo were slow-grazing, four-legged bank rolls. And for a while, there were plenty. Then in 1873 an economic depression hit the country, and what easier way was there to make money than to chase down these ungainly beasts? Thousands of buffalo runners came, sometimes averaging 50 kills a day. They sliced their humps, skinned off the hides, tore out their tongues, and left the rest on the prairies to rot. They slaughtered so many buffalo that it flooded the market and the price dropped, which meant they had to kill more. In towns, hides rose in stacks as tall as houses. This was not the work of the Army. It was private industry. But that doesn’t mean Army officers and generals couldn’t lean back and look at it with satisfaction.
“I read that army commanders were even providing bullets to these hunters,” said Andrew C. Isenberg, author of The Destruction of the Bison , and a professor of history at Temple University. “The military looked at what the private sector was doing and they didn’t need to do anything more than stand back and watch it happen.”
Isenberg said though it was never official policy to kill buffalo in order to control Native Americans on the plains, the Army was certainly conscious about it.
So while indeed some members of the Army were happy to see the buffalo killed, there was no official policy and Grant didnt order it.
During his tenure the Lakota and the US were engaged in a series of wars- wars where both sides were aggressors and both sides were to blame. Note the Little Bighorn.
You know, that word "genocide’ has been thrown around so much it is losing it’s meaning.
From the article that you cited
Yeah, at best there was a bit of a wink wink relationship here. If the Army is outfitting, supplying and guiding the Bison hunters, then it is the policy of the Army to kill Bison, full stop.
If what you are saying is that the Army was acting against Grant’s orders, then please cite that.
Well, who exactly were the aggressors here? Who was taking who’s land?
Genocide has been defended so much that it is starting to lose its meaning.
For reference…
the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.
Sounds like what happened here to me.
My knowledge of Grant is limited, but if there’s a counterpoint or a caution, it’s perhaps that Grant was a more humane president than he was a general in the field. It’s well-documented that he was a fairly obvious racist and skeptic of Black soldiers initially, but he came around and as president he presided over Reconstruction-era attempts to confront white terrorism in the South.
Similarly, it’s true that Jefferson owned slaves, but Jefferson was also in many regards was the intellectual energy and inspiration behind the Bill of Rights, which was one of the earliest legislative attempts that we know of to enshrine any kind of human rights in a constitution. Further, by introducing these rights into the fabric of a new American nation, he essentially guaranteed that the nation would always be wrestling with the issue of black freedom as long as it survived.
That might sound like a reach, but without the bill of rights, there is no overt example of injustice to point to. It gave human rights critics a clear reference point: we’re a country that says we believe in rights, yet the truth says something quite different. Not everyone seems to benefit from these supposed rights.
The real sin was that the colonies themselves were founded on a racist economic system, which was inherited by the author of the Declaration and Framers of the Constitution.
Jefferson was president when the importation of slaves was banned (1807?). Not sure how much of a role he played in that.
As for Grant - the Indian wars were basically regular ongoing campaigns to “teach the natives a lesson” when they objected to what the white man was doing. Slaughtering buffalo - free for the taking - was not only a money-maker for assorted entrepreneurs, but also freed up the land for ranchers and farmers, who were moving west in large numbers after the civil war. I’m going to assume the white people were rarely in the right, but once one side or other started hostilities or retaliated, the army had to come in to establish peace and punish the perpetrators, which more often than not meant persecute those on the native side who would not peaceably allow themselves to be overrun.
(Perhaps an analogy would be the occupation of Iraq. The army consistently moved in on Iraqis who were fighting to get the US army out of their homeland, occasionally with collateral damage. It’s just in the 1870’s nobody got agitated about killing natives.)
Before you go on a rant against Grant, you should do yourself a favor and read up on the guy. One can argue that there was no better supporter of African Americans or Native Americans in the White House than Grant. Lincoln and LBJ could make an argument for the former but it would be close. Grant made a significant effort to support Native Americans, but the Black Hills gold rush was unstoppable and left Grant with no good options. He’s underrated as a President, and his support of these groups was well above average.
Forget it Jake. No one is perfect so they are all assholes, and genocidal maniacs, havent you heard?
It is not a rant against Grant, it is a recognition of the very real harms that he caused, and how there may be those who do not think that honoring him sets a great example.
When we judge those in the past, to vilify them by our standards is not fair, I’ll agree, but we are not talking abut vilifying, we are talking about honoring.
And I do think that those we honor should be those that we can look back on and say were on the right side of history.
Should we dig up Grant and kick him in the balls? Nah, he’s earned his rest. Should we set him as an example for others to follow? I do think that we can point to others who lead a better path.
I consider myself pretty progressive and I’m most likely to the left of most people on a range of issues, including posters on the dope. However, we shouldn’t see things as either good or not good. There are degrees.
I frequently disagree with the “But it’s history” defense as it applies to confederate statues for two reasons. One is that the statues themselves were put up after the Civil War ended, and for the express purpose of providing cultural reinforcement of white supremacy, which was alive and well at the time they were erected. Beyond that, statues are erected to honor people for one reason or another. In the United States of America, in 2020, there is absolutely no reason to honor traitors who killed fellow Americans and actively sought to destroy the Union. Moreover, there is no reason to honor those who sought to preserve a society based on human slavery. That doesn’t mean that they were inherently evil. They were probably good men, good leaders, good fathers and husbands, and even good citizens at a local level. But statues are an honor for people we respect for the enduring contributions that they have made and appreciate years later. There’s nothing for us as a society to appreciate about confederate war dead.
I see Ulysses Grant, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington differently. They were flawed people. They were, like many men of their time, though not all men of their time, white supremacists and bought into the inferiority of non-whites. But unlike confederate war dead, they gave us other contributions that most of us have benefited from. Their contributions also made it possible for the nation to change and evolve into what it is now.
Could we not honor him for leading the army the defeated the salve holding Confederacy when others could not? Isn’t that alone enough to be honored for? What the hell even comes close to negating that?
Sure, have his accomplishments and good deeds remembered. Also along with his flaws and misdeeds.
That is different from “honoring”. That is when you look up to someone as someone to follow.
What obligation do we owe those dead and gone? What does “honoring” even mean, what do they get out of it? The statues are for us, they are not for the dead. And if they do not reflect the morals that we wish our people to follow, then they should not be raised on a pedestal to be “honored”.
I understand the perspective that Grant got enough wrong to not be held up as a role model to follow. I do not say that I entirely agree with that perspective, but I do empathize with it, and also acknowledge that as one who unambiguously did benefit from Grant’s actions, my perspective could be biased.
Sorry, had another thought on this.
Bill Cosby has done a tremendous amount for the black community. My father is a bit of a racist, but he still loved his comedy. We didn’t watch “In Living Color” in my house, but we did invite the Huxtables into our living room, to laugh and to empathize with a black family that was just like us.
He worked as a role model and spent quite a bit of his Jello money on education and other social programs and charities.
I could argue that Bill Cosby did far more for black people in this country than Grant did. And I could also point out that he harmed far fewer women than Grant did.
We tore down the statues to Cosby, and I heartily applauded this decision.
Do you agree that there is nothing in Cosby’s past that justifies his behaviors, nor that there is anything he can do in the future to atone for them in a way that we’d be putting up statues to him to honor what he did do right?
Grant should be honored as a military leader who served his country very well in the worst of times. To compare Bill Crosby to him is pathetic.