From History.com
He was responsible for dismantling the KKK during Reconstruction.
After the newly formed
Ku Klux Klan began murdering and terrorizing black Americans in the late-1860s, President Grant mobilized the Justice Department and secured thousands of indictments against their leaders. In 1871, he also oversaw passage of the so-called “Ku Klux Klan Act,” which armed him with the power to declare martial law and suspend habeas corpus in areas deemed to be in a state of insurrection. The law got its first test later that year, when Grant sent troops into South Carolina and ran thousands of Klansmen out of the state. Thanks to his administration’s efforts, the hooded extremists were effectively cowed into submission over the next few years. They wouldn’t resurface in force until the 1910s.
From the Washington Post
...As much as any person not named Abraham Lincoln, Grant saved the Union. He went on to serve two terms as president and write some of the most celebrated memoirs in the history of American letters.
He pushed for passage of the 15th Amendment giving male African Americans the vote, sent federal troops to fight the Ku Klux Klan and reformed the government’s Indian policy.
German leader Otto von Bismarck said to Grant that it was a shame that the United States had to endure so terrible a war. Grant answered, “But it had to be done.”
Bismarck: “Yes, you had to save the Union.”
Grant: “Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery.”
Frederick Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
Bewildered indeed Magoo...