Before 1776 what eventually became the U.S.A. was a collection of British colonies; in 1619, when black Africans aboard a Portuguese slave ship, taken as bounty by English privateers (aka “pirates”), came ashore in the New World, they did so near Hampton in the British colony of Virginia. At that point, there was nothing “American” about it, other than its location. (The Portuguese, by the way, were among history’s worst black-African slavers, directing the bulk of the transatlantic slave trade to their colony, Brazil. Yet somehow slavery is “America’s original sin.”)
Instead, slavery was a cause for which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. On these first few days in July 1863, in the midst of the Civil War that may have started as a rebellion but turned into a war to free the slaves, Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade electrified the nation with the news of their twin victories at Vicksburg, the last of the southern citadels on the Mississippi River, and at Gettysburg, a small town in southern Pennsylvania where Robert E. Lee’s defective generalship finally caught up to his inflated reputation, and killed the Confederacy’s hopes at point-blank range during Pickett’s Charge. It was a blunder that made Grant’s worst military decision, Cold Harbor, look almost sensible.
This is the same Grant who called the “cause” of the Confederacy “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” In a forgotten bit of history, the capture of Vicksburg also vindicated General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” which advocated choking the South to death by blockading its ports and seizing its principal waterways. Which is exactly what Grant—who served under “Old Fuss and Feathers” in the Mexican War—did.