Ulysses S. Grant was our last president who owned slaves

In the small hours of the morning, I was reading The American Spirit by David McCullough.  He is a superior historian and artful writer.  I like his work which is both varied in topics but consistent in quality.  

The American Spirit is a collection of his speeches.  So far, mostly graduation speeches.  As speeches, I am not particularly gripped.  But he always has content.  I came across this passage which halted me in my tracks.  The facts were not new, merely how they were presented.

Of the first seven presidents, whose combined terms spanned forty-eight years, all were slave masters but two, and they were father and son, John and John Quincy Adams. So for nearly half a century, slave holders dominated in the executive branch.

The first seven presidents were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson.  

Factually, I knew the biographies of all those presidents sufficiently to know who owned and who did not own slaves.  But I had never thought of them in sequence.  I do not know why McCullough drew the line at the first seven.  

Indeed, other than the Adams father and son, the first twelve presidents through Zachary Taylor (i.e. from 1789 to 1850) all owned slaves even though some were opposed to the international trade in slaves, or to expanding slavery into new states or were even personally against owning slaves.  Eight of the ten slave owning presidents owned slaves while they were president.  

The eighth president, Martin Van Buren, illustrates just how complex the issue was for some.  He was a founder of the Democratic Party which before 1860 was a staunch supporter of slavery.  Van Buren also viewed the abolitionists as the greatest threat to the security and integrity of the nation.  However, later in life, Van Buren was a member of the Free Soil Party which opposed the expansion of slavery to new territories.  His father owned five slaves and Van Buren himself owned one slave named Tom.  But when Tom escaped in 1814, Van Buren made no effort to recapture him.  Tom lived freely until he was officially emancipated in 1827 under New York's gradual emancipation law.  

Oddly enough, the last slave owning president was one of the individuals most instrumental in the abolition of slavery, Ulysses S. Grant, our 18th president, serving from 1869-1877.  Grant was given a slave, William Jones, by his father-in-law.  Grant freed William Jones in 1859.  

From the first slave owning president (George Washington) to the eighteenth and last slave-owning president (Ulysses S. Grant), twelve of them owned slaves at some point in their lives and eight of them owned slaves while they were president.  Presidents owned slaves from 1789 till 1863 when Andrew Johnson freed all his personal slaves.  The first seventy-four years of our nationhood.

I draw no moral indictment from this.  The American states were among the very first to formally abolish slavery in the world and the American nation was an ally to the British in the earliest efforts to extirpate the international slave trade.  Again, the contradictions are obvious.  Slave owning president Thomas Jefferson was also the president who outlawed the international trade in slaves with the US and sought to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories.  

Slavery was a global phenomenon and the US, as an embodiment of Age of Enlightenment ideals, was at the forefront of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.  What I had never fully registered was just how intertwined was slavery with the presidency and for how long.