cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17323832
He’s easily my favorite president, but he chose hands down the worst and most corrupt cabinet members of all time.
He was better for emancipation and reparations of freed slaves than Lincoln, he even had a history of employing them and treating them well during the war and before the great emancipation. His inaugural address alone was enough to earn points with me, but he was also responsible for changes of the Tenure of Office Act which allowed him to remove presidential cabinet members without the senate needing to vote on it, gave suffrage to people of all color via the 15th Ammendment (which almost certainly would have been vetoed by the previous Johnson who took the reigns after Lincoln was assassinated and before Grant was elected), and his administration defeated the KKK via state marshals and federal troops over his 2 terms as president.
To be clear, Grant was a radical of his time. He was fringe and far left from the norm of the time. He treated blacks as equals and as citizens when under the previous president Johnson there were massacres and riots against African American communities. To Grant, they were worth defending with the lives of servicemen like himself.
By comparison Lincoln was a moderate too afraid to give any promise of rights or eventual freedom to slaves because he wanted to avoid any and all conflict. It took two years after secession and war for Lincoln to emancipate slaves. I’m not saying Grant was perfect in every way, mind you, but if I had to pick a president whom I liked the most it would easily be Grant. (It’s not a high bar).
And that’s all you’ll get out of me, go read a book you lazy fuck.
Hi. I just asked a question. You invited a question with an open ended statement that he was “your favorite”. You have no way of knowing what I know or what I have read. You have no idea of my name, my education, what car I drive, or what I like for breakfast.
I don’t have the same knowledge about you.
So instead of making things personal when someone asks a perfectly normal question in a conversation maybe you should ask yourself “Am I the problem?”.
Lincoln was a moderate too afraid to give any promise of rights or eventual freedom to slaves because he wanted to avoid any and all conflict
To be fair in the context of the era, he had his fill of catastrophic conflict during his tenure, and the Thirteen Amendment was passed by the skin of Congress’s teeth. The huge leap was his, the following strides were for somebody else to take.