Best Two Out Of Three Still Leaves One

A conversation between Otto von Bismarck and Ulysses S. Grant:

Grant (upon accepting an invitation to attend a review of the Crown Prince's soldiers in Berlin): "The truth is I am more of a farmer than a soldier. I take little or no interest in military affairs ..." [here, as in…

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

Grant: "But it had to be done."

Bismarck: "You had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany."

Grant: "Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery.

Bismarck: "I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment."

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

Bismarck: "I had an old and good friend, an American, in Motley, ... who used to write me now and then. Well, when your war broke out he wrote me. He said, 'I will make a prophecy. ... I prophesy that when this war ends the Union will be established and we shall not lose a…

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

  Grant (cont'd): "Our war had many strange features -- there were many things which seemed odd enough at the time, but which now seem Providential. If we had had a large regular army, as it was then constituted, it might have gone with the South. ...

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

Grant (cont'd, etc.): "A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan even then might have organized an army and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or, at the farthest, two years. But that would have saved slavery ... and slavery meant the germs of new rebellion. ...

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

Source: John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant.

— Mitchell G. Klingenberg (@MGKlingenberg) February 4, 2024

We eliminated slavery and saved the Union. But we still haven’t eliminated racism.

Long way left to go.