Guest Post to Gateway Pundit by Larry Johnson

George Santayana is credited with first speaking the aphorism, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And it was Winston Churchill that offered up a slight modification, to wit–Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.”

Put succinctly–if you can’t learn or won’t learn from history you are in a heap of trouble. Count me as an optimist who believes fervently that past events have bits of wisdom and insight relevant to modern life.

So let us look to the life of Ulysses S. Grant, the second four star General of the Army after George Washington and the 18th President of the United States. The superficial and uninformed version of “Sam” Grant’s legacy is built around the meme of drunkenness, corruption and butchery. But that account is unfair and grossly misleading. Grant, along with Abraham Lincoln, played the decisive role in bringing former slaves into the U.S. military and using the power of the Federal Government to combat the racial jihad unleashed against black Americans in the wake of the Civil War by unrepentant Southern racists.

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