I don't know why black skin may not cover a true heart as well as a white one.

Reportedly said to a neighbor in 1856, as quoted in A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant (1868), by Albert Deane Richardson, Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, p. 155. According to some other sources, he had also used this phrase in a letter to Robert E. Lee (General of the Confederacy's armies)