Chad Ulysses S. Grant vs. Virgin Thomas Jefferson

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• PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Explanation: US President Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, despite having a negative view of slavery in the abstract, because he would have had to provide funds to prevent said slaves from immediately becoming paupers under Virginia law, not to mention the profits he would lose out on, and Jefferson had rare books to buy and ornate architectural renovations to go into debt for. Far more important than something like “the freedom of actual human beings”!

  Future US president and war hero Ulysses S Grant, before the US Civil War which catapulted him to fame, was a poor farmer in the American West, whose poverty was so total that he had to sell his watch to buy his family Christmas presents (Grant was always a family man). Grant’s father-in-law gave Grant a slave as a ‘present’ during this time.

  Grant was raised in an abolitionist household, but was not, himself, an ideological abolitionist at this point in time - he was overwhelmingly and professedly just a poor man trying to get by in day-to-day life without worrying much about the greater state of politics. Nevertheless, the abolitionist standards he was raised with made him deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of owning another human being, and despite the fact that his family was poor and he desperately needed the labor, or the money he could have gotten from selling the man he was ‘gifted’, Grant opted to free the man outright, for no gain on his part.

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  • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Jefferson, despite all the media I consumed as a child that loved…glazing is the term I hear now, he creeped me the fuck out.

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    • PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I used to really be into Jefferson, until I learned in high school that all his cool rhetoric about liberty covered a very… questionable life.

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