“A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorrent for a Nation to indulge in,” Grant told Congress in his first annual message in December 1869. As with all his presidential addresses, he composed it himself. “I see no remedy for this except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.”26 This hopeful, idealistic path, paved with good intentions, had been touted by well-meaning presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. Grant saw absorption and assimilation as a benign, peaceful process,
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