Rahabilitating Grant

I hope you've all seen Sean Wilentz's New York Times op-ed piece in which he debunks the myth that Ulysses S. Grant was a bad president. A representative paragraph:

In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, “on the altar of Radicalism.” That he accomplished as much for freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

The whole thing is worth reading.