"If I thought this war would free the negro... Gen. Grant...

 "More than two-thirds of the soldiers never realized until after they were in service some time, that the war was to enfranchise the negro. Many of them complained and threatened to revolt at prospects of such a calamity, when they were assured that such was not the case by some of the officers. Grant himself said: "If I thought this war would free the negro I would put my sword in its scabbard and go home." (The Cause of the War” The Unwritten South: Cause, Progress and Result of the Civil War--Relics of Hidden Truth after 40 Years, J Clarence Stonebraker, first published in 1903.)

Grant, born in Ohio, is said by some of his biographers to have detested slavery, but a man could find slavery abhorrent and still not want to have former slaves hanging around his neighborhood. A man could dislike slavery, yet not wish to go out and bleed in order to free them instantaneously. Grant may have had enough sense to know that Southerners had already begun freeing slaves long before the war---that, certainly, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as most other Southern states were full of freed slaves--that Robert E. Lee and other leading Southerners had freed their slaves. And some of the freed folks owned slaves of their own. Grant did keep at least one of his slaves (claiming his wife owned the slave) until long after the end of the War. Lincoln, of course, did not free any slaves in the North with his emancipation propaganda proclamation.

Grant was a bosom buddy with Sherman, according to Sherman’s own words. Sherman found black folks repugnant and made no bones about it. It is unlikely that there could be wide differences of opinions in two such close friends. Sherman wrote that he supported Grant when Grant was a drunkard and Grant supported him when Sherman was crazy, so these two men were close. When Grant became bankrupt, Sherman went to his aid.

Unlike Sherman, Grant aligned himself very closely with numbers of those Lincoln’s “Radical Republicans” whom we identify today as including many of Karl Marx’s followers. (Walter Kennedy and Al Benson: Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War.) Grant, perhaps harboring presidential desires, may not have been as outspoken about his anti-black feelings as was Sherman, since the Radicals were very likely the instigators of the emancipation proclamation in the middle of the war when the North was losing it.

Sherman wrote Thomas Ewing, Jr., a leading Republican in Kansas in December 1859, “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery.... Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves.”

He wrote to Ellen, “like Burton in ‘Toodles, I say, ‘damn the niggers.’ I wish they were anywhere [else] or [could] be kept at work" (Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, University Press of Kansas, Random House, 1995, p. 74).

Grant, of course, aligned himself with Lincoln’s “Radical Republicans” which we know now was loaded with Karl Marx’s followers.

Although slavery was abolished in 1802 in Grant's Ohio, when Virginian John Randolph's 518 slaves were freed in in 1803, a codicil on Randolph's will provided the money to transport and settle them in Ohio. When an Ohio congressman learned this, he threatened that the banks of Ohio River would be lined with men with muskets to prevent the blacks from entering.

***