Ulysses S. Grant Anti-Slavery

This is a picture of Ulysses S. Grant.

 Remarks to the Town Hall

In the voice of Ulysses S. Grant

Friends and neighbors,

I will not stand before you tonight and claim I was always certain of what I now know to be true. I was raised in Ohio by a father who despised slavery with his whole heart. Yet I married into a Missouri family that held men and women in bondage, and for a time, I lived among that system without doing enough to oppose it. I even, to my own lasting regret, once held a man in slavery myself before I freed him. I tell you this not to excuse myself, but because I believe a man's history matters less than the direction he is willing to travel.

And I have traveled far from where I began.

When war came to this country, I watched what slavery actually cost us — not in abstractions, but in lives, in families torn apart, in a nation turned against itself. I commanded men in that war, and among the finest soldiers I ever led were Black men wearing the uniform of the United States. They did not fight for an idea. They fought for their own freedom, and for the freedom of every person still in chains. I will not stand here and pretend that any war was cheap. But I will tell you plainly: that war settled a question that should never have needed settling by force. No man has the right to own another man.

Since that war ended, I have watched new dangers rise up to replace the old ones. Men in hoods, riding at night, burning schoolhouses and churches, murdering their neighbors simply because those neighbors dared to vote, or to speak, or to live as free citizens. I want to be direct with you: I consider this violence a continuation of slavery by other means, and I will not look away from it.

As your servant in public office, I have asked the Congress for the power to act, and I have used that power. I have sent federal soldiers into the South. I have suspended the ordinary course of law where the ordinary course of law had already failed the innocent. I make no apology for this. A government that will not protect its own citizens from terror is no government worth the name.

I ask you tonight to consider what kind of nation we intend to be. Not one that ended slavery on paper only to permit it to continue in practice, through fear and violence and the denial of rights. We fought a war to say that liberty is not divisible. I believe that still. And I intend to spend whatever power is entrusted to me defending it — for every citizen of this country, regardless of the color of his skin.

Thank you.

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