When historians ranked U. S. presidents in a C-SPAN survey in 2000, Ulysses S. Grant placed among the ten worst.
Fourteen years later, a U. S. News & World Report survey again criticized Grant, with corruption ranking as his worst-reviewed area of presidential performance. Grant himself was never a beneficiary of that corruption, which was unprecedented in scale.
The post-Civil War era and his delegative leadership style contributed to the problems. As Grant himself put it: “My failures were errors of judgment, not of intent. ”
His reputation has risen in recent years, thanks to his well-written presidential memoirs and a new interpretation of Reconstruction-era history. Grant is now credited with aggressively pursuing reform measures in the South.
He is praised for supporting and enforcing the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. From the perspective of white Southerners, both laws were controversial. Historically, they produced only short-term gains for the freedmen, but they were a beginning in a difficult time. His efforts on behalf of African Americans and Native Americans are widely considered honorable and were viewed as courageous at the time.
Contemporaries also described him as strikingly calm, balanced, deeply respectful of the law, and personally honest. In the most recent C-SPAN historian survey in 2021, Grant ranked twentieth among all American presidents. When judged among the fourteen presidents who served between 1849 and 1901, he places third, behind only William McKinley and Abraham Lincoln.