Thank you for asserting you opinion.
Name three Presidents of his period that did better.
This is “presentism” judging people of the past by the standards of today.
Let me make this clear- people of the past were by todays standards racist and ignorant.
I can’t say it strongly enough. You are arguing about Grant’s place in history and you clearly don’t know a thing about him. If you can’t read one of the biographies noted above (which are fantastic, I’ve read them both) at least spend 10 minutes on wiki for goodness sake if you are going to write about the guy.
You could make a case that he did more for African Americans than Lincoln did, and that’s saying a lot. For one thing, If Lieutenant Grant dies in the war with Mexico, I think its pretty clear that the North loses the civil war. Not a stretch in the least.
As President, Grant fought, championed and forced through the fifteenth amendment. He killed the Ku Klux Klan (not even comparable to its later incarnation that looks like a reading club in comparison) and repeated sent federal troops to state after state in the south during reconstruction time and time again to defend African Americans lives and their voting rights long after many in the north and of course all Democrats wanted to halt the reconstruction period. Comparing his accomplishments to Bill Cosby is like comparing a cup of water to the ocean. I think it was Fredrick Douglas who said that in Grant “the negro found a protector, the Indian a friend.”
You have Grant all wrong.
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And that’s a very good argument. But decisions should be made in a democracy by reason and not who can summon a mob that reflects the ideology of the DA.
Of course, none of the presidents before 1920 did anything for women - they perpetuated a system that allowed only men (mostly white) to vote. They did not push for equality for LGBTQ under the law. Heck, most of the presidents probably supported prayer in public schools and condoned corporal punishment of children…
Oh wait, were you mentioning judging them by present day standards…?
I think the rule is simple - did the person do more good than bad? How much effort did they put into doing good versus doing bad? (And we’re talking “do”, not “say”)
Washington, Jefferson, Grant - made a major life’s work to create and save the democracy which has been an example to the world despite its flaws. Yes - Condemning them for what was the normal action of the day is “presentism”. The question is not so much “did Washington own slaves?” but is “did he mistreat them beyond the standard of the day”? Owning slaves was not unusual(although, even by 1788 going out of favor with much of the intelligentsia). Displaying a sadistic streak, beating or torturing them, for example, would imply a character flaw that we would truly want to condemn. Being excessively zealous in defending the right to own slaves would be a similarly condemnable character flaw. And so on.
If you look hard enough, you can find a flaw in anyone. The question is, does it outweigh the good?
“The evil men do lives after them. the good is oft interred with their bones…”
The Founding Fathers were transformative figures. Morally flawed by todays standards, but we would not have todays standards without them.
Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal”. He owned slaves so its valid to question his sincerity in that regard. But in 2020, that is the standard we strive to obtain, because of Thomas Jefferson.
No Thomas Jefferson means no Martin Luther King.
No Founding Fathers voting for the Constitution and bill of rights means no Brown vs Board of Education.
The Confederates were Traitors to the United States, their statues should be melted down.
This is true. But any Southerners who weren’t, were traitors to their states. Which is worse?
Obviously, it was more moral to fight against slavery rather than for it, but that’s orthogonal to the “traitor” accusation. Southerners like Robert E. Lee were faced with a gut-wrenching decision. He (for example) had to choose to betray his federal government, or to betray his state and its people. Virginia was on the wrong side of the slavery issue, but the Union wasn’t fighting to abolish slavery (at least not at first).
So we should criticize Lee and other Confederates for fighting for slavery-promoting regimes. But I don’t know that we should criticize them for being traitors. They were going to be traitorous no matter which side they picked.
Powers &8^]
This I do not totally agree with as we have no right to totally rewrite or wipe out history. Confederate leaders were true traitors and I see no point in honoring them in any way. But the statues of military leaders could be relocated to battle fields where they could be properly placed into context as part of the battle. Of course there could be more of them than useful for that purpose so perhaps some could be sold off for private display or scrape.
Some deserve no remembrance such as ones who continued to oppress blacks after the war like Klan founders and participates like Nathan Forest.
I would like to reiterate a point that has been made numerous times in this debate: statues are not history. Whatever happens to the statues (and we can debate about that), there is no “wiping out” of history.
As for rewriting history, that’s precisely what historians do. If we didn’t rewrite history, the textbooks would still be making the same arguments that they were making in the mid-20th century, such as the claim that blacks were generally happy under slavery, and the claim that Reconstruction failed because blacks were inferior to whites and were not ready for civil rights or political power.
If they weren’t rewriting history, there would be no need for historians at all.
This short essay by W.E.B. Dubois in 1928 has been circulating lately. I think it provides a reply to the argument above, which seems to recur in this thread.
From the essay:
…It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.
As I didn’t grow up I the south, I did find it odd when I did spend time in Virginia in my college years that so much stuff was named for Confederates.
I am hardly “Woke”. Skew to the right in fact.
Didnt’ they lose the War? Losers don’t usually get monuments built for them.
This idea that Southerners would have been traitors to their respective states had they not fought for the Confederate cause is not as certain as you may think. While we can trace the faulty reasons for this identification primarily with their states and region, that loyalty was neither inevitable nor universal: forty percent of Virginian officers remained with the Union. Many members of Lee’s own family, including his wife and all but one of his children, were Unionists, as was his mentor, Winfield Scott, who not only remained loyal to the Union but was devastated by the defection of some of the Southern officers who’d served under him. Lee’s family, Scott, and other Virginians didn’t regard fighting for the Union as traitorous to their state.
Nor was Lee’s decision based solely on the notion of being a traitor to Virginia. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a fascinating piece on how the discovery of the Mary Custis Lee letter challenged the conventional wisdom on Lee’s decision.
Sorry, but that is not the case. Lee joined the federal military and, of course, took an oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States of America. He did not take any such oath for Virginia’s constitution. He violated his oath and, in fact, was a traitor to his country. The state of Virginia was never his country.
Once again, they lost the war. Losers don’t get monuments.
The Founding Fathers won. American democracy in 2020, including race relations, is directly related to their efforts.
Unless, of course, you’re a bigoted sod who really, truly, and desperately wishes that your losers had won and the people your losers were subjugating stay subjugated. That’s what this is really all about. It’s utter nonsense to pretend otherwise.
To sum up:
Confederate flag supporter = racist
Confederate “hero” supporter = racist
It really is that simple.
And consider U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s response to those Southerners who told him they would go with their states and not the nation. In the summer of 1861, in
“the belief that his native Maryland would secede, Captain Franklin Buchanan, the popular and influential commander of the Washington Navy Yard, brought his commission to Mr. Welles ‘and with studied pathos and manner, and feelings not unaffected, laid it with emotion and tears’ upon the Secretary [of the Navy]'s table. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘tearing out his heart-strings, parting with what was dear as life to him.’ Welles asked him ‘if he had spent his years in the service of the State of Maryland or of the United States government - had he been employed and drawn pay from the treasury of the former or the latter - had his honors from boyhood to age been derived from the state or the nation?’ [Buchanan insisted his first loyalty still lay with Maryland, and offered his resignation, as did many other Southerners]. Welles refused to accept the resignations of these officers but [instead] dismissed them from the service. All told, 259 naval officers resigned or were dismissed…”
From West, Richard S., Jr., Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1957), pp. 48-49.
Absolutely correct! The idea that someone “was remaining loyal to his state” was the beginning, the foundation, of the myth of confederate heroism and confedeate honor. It’s just bullshit. They were traitors. They knew it and everyone else in the country, Northerners and Southerners alike, knew it damn well, too.
That’s the whole thing. The monuments are their way of saying that they don’t accept that they lost the war.