Scores of Radicals Tear Down Statue of Ulysses Grant, General Who Helped End Slavery, Fought KKK
It’s becoming quite clear that so-called ‘protesters’ are no longer tearing up property and taking down historical monuments and statues in ‘honor George Floyd,’ the black man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police last month sparked weeks of riots and demonstrations.
That’s because some of the history that the mobs are attempting to memory-hole include figures who were, at the time, reflective of the beliefs and values the woke crowd – especially Black Lives Matter – are supposed to espouse.
Like anti-slavery. Anti-confederacy. Freedom and equality. All that stuff that we keep hearing about.
But on Friday, vandals and radical Leftists went after and attempted to destroy a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general who fought the Confederacy to a surrender and was instrumental in fighting against the Ku Klux Klan (which, since we’re on that subject, was founded by Southern Democrats after the Civil War).
About 400 people went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco last night and pulled down his statue that was featured there. They also tore down the statues of St. Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key, the author of the lyrics for the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Was Grant perfect? Of course not. Far from it. In fact, two years after his presidency, the New York Sun would write that he was “the most corrupt President who ever sat in the chair of Washington” – an allegation that lacks context.
There were many scandals during his presidency, yes, but none involving him directly. Rather, his administration was filled with ‘professional’ politicians – today we call them ‘establishment politicians’ – who were prone to graft and other levers of corruption.
But that said, there was much more to Grant, the man, and grant the president, as History.com notes:
Preserving the Union and preventing a second Civil War were high on Grant’s agenda, and that outcome was by no means assured when he took office. While not as accommodating to Southern interests as Andrew Johnson, Grant oversaw the readmission of the Confederate states into the Union and took a far less punitive approach to the defeated Confederacy than other presidents might have. …
While the 13th amendment to the Constitution had granted freedom to the former slaves, and the 14th amendment had recognized them as citizens, roughly 4 million African Americans throughout the South still had little political power or representation when Grant took office. In his inaugural address and from that day forward, Grant pushed for a 15th amendment, which would guarantee federal and state voting rights to all male citizens regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
Most dramatically, Grant used both federal troops and the newly established Justice Department to fight terrorism against Southern blacks, particularly by the Ku Klux Klan, which had grown into a large and formidable force in the years after the Civil War. “By 1872, under Grant’s leadership,” Chernow writes, “the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South,” although another group of the same name would emerge in 1915.
“To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass remarked after Grant’s death. “When red-handed violence ran rampant through the South, and freedmen were being hunted down like wild beasts in the night, the moral courage and fidelity of Gen. Grant transcended that of his party.”
Biographer Ron Chernow concludes that, “Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln, for what he did for the freed slaves.”
Now, his statue is lying in ruins in San Francisco, hauled down by a bunch of radical ignoramuses who were obviously never taught anything about this man in school.
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