Greatness of U.S. Grant Comes Into Sharp Relief at 200

He crushed the Confederacy as general and the Ku Klux Klan as president, yet he’s denigrated for a quirk of fate.

Ulysses S. Grant when he was Lieutenant General of the U.S. Army. Wikimedia Commons

On April 27, 1822, Hiram Ulysses Grant was born at Point Pleasant, Ohio. He crushed the Confederacy as general and the Ku Klux Klan as president, yet he’s denigrated for a quirk of fate: He owned a slave for about a year.

This is used to discount Grant’s entire legacy, even though we only know this historical footnote because of the manumission paperwork the general filed to free the man, 35-year-old William Jones.

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