I’m curious why you bring this up? It doesn’t seem to serve a responsive purpose to post #179 and presents only a sliver of the true story.
Yes Grant made some use of slaves that his wife’s father held title to - so what? And yes, Grant purchased a slave - which he then manumitted at a time when he was hard-pressed to eke out a living for himself and his family.
To claim him as a “slave owner” as compared to someone like Thomas Jefferson is disingenuous.
That means comparing Grant's performance to Grant's words. The dreaded liberal "h" word: hypocrisy.
There is a history of Texas: "Lone Star" which claims that, as Andrew Jackson closed out his presidency, he had invited Sam Houston, President of the Texas Republic, to the White House as his guest and that, presuming that Texas would become one of "these United States" and noting that Houston was among his youngest proteges and likely to long outlive Jackson, they discussed the future of slavery and of these United States.
Jackson observed that slavery would die an economic death even in the Southland, that the beginnings of its decline could already be observed in the Outer South and that economic reality would kill it off, however slowly, in the cotton belt. What concerned Jackson was that slavery might occasion a civil war in the future long after he was gone. He regarded such a war as the worst calamity that might befall the republic and that, regardless of outcome, the political wounds would take a century or more to heal. He charged Houston to prevent such a war at all costs, to run for POTUS if necessary and to declare war on as many foreign nations as necessary to compel both sides to rally around the flag and avoid fighting each other. When the time came and Texas had been admitted to the Union, Houston, as governor sternly resisted secession to no avail because the legislature acted to secede over his objection, and he had sought but failed to obtain the Democratic Party nomination for POTUS to attempt to carry out Jackson's wishes and to stop any outbreak of civil war. By the time of those events, Houston's age and old war wounds had sapped his health and he died in 1863.
Coincidentally, Abraham Lincoln's chief rival for the Republican POTUS nomination had been William Seward of New York who became Lincoln's Secretary of State. There is no credible evidence that Seward had any awareness of the Jackson/Houston conversation of 1837 but, if you look at Seward's published papers as Secretary of State, one of his first memoranda to Lincoln was to give him essentially the same advice as that previously given by Jackson to Houston. Seward urged international war, as necessary, to make Americans, North and South rally around the flag to fight common foreign "enemies." Regrettably, Seward failed to convince Lincoln. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans of the Union and of the Confederacy died and many others were maimed so that Lincoln (previously an "anti-war" member of Congress for one term during the Mexican War who complained in Congress: this chamber stands knee deep in blood") unleashed the most ruinous war in this nation's history. Arguably, the wounds of that war to the fabric of this nation will never heal.
Ironically, it has been sensibly speculated that the Confederacy would have eventually returned to again merge with the North when slavery had faded and other international issues and wars would have required a restoration of unity. However, the abolitionist firebrands just HAD to shed oceans of blood on both sides to prove their righteousness. The worst of them were centered in my native New England (John Brown was a product of Torrington, CT, and the Bill Ayres/Bernardine Doehrn/Mark Rudd of his time until justly hanged by U. S. military forces under Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart at Harper's Ferry in 1859).
It was a good thing for Lincoln's war effort that John Brown did not discover Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia before John Brown was hanged, or he might have dispatched the Grants by hacking them to death with broadswords as he did to pro-slavery farmers in Kansas (including one actually named William Sherman).
General McClellan might have been in charge instead of Grant in which case he would probably still have been postponing action and calling for more troops and more supplies lest he might have to fight before the outbreak of World War I.