Perhaps more interesting to reflect on what might have happened if Grant had lived, and had not been advised against running for a third term by the Republican Establishment. Grant did enforce the postwar Amendments. The deal ending the Hayes-Tilden standoff and the subsequent withdrawal of Federal troops had as much to do with the failure of Reconstruction as Lincoln's murder.
Actually, that's a very fair statement.
I have always thought that Grant has been overly vilifed, given his good performance in that most crucial aspect of the post-war period: Reconstruction.
I've come to the conclusion that the Southern faction, of course, HATED Grant in memory because of Reconstruction, and that no Southern historian would write anything good about him. And then when the early movie era glamourized and glorified the old South, most spectacularly in Gone With The Wind, that the shift in popular sentiment (and the desire to reunify the country, and more than a little bit of Northern racism provoked by the Great Migration) muted the voices that might have once defended Grant, while allowing the voices that were always going to tear him to shreds full sway.
I read over and over about how terribly, awfully, rottenly corrupt the country was under Grant.
I have to say I doubt it.
I seriously doubt that the country has ever been much more or much less corrupt than its usual norm, which hovers in the "somewhat corrupt" meter, better than Mexico, worse than Holland. Probably corruption worsened during Prohibition.
Most likely, that which was CALLED corruption - Northern carpetbagging, the gulling of naive newly freed slaves for political votes, etc., was not really corruption per se, just sharp practice in a political environment so full of hatred that Americans had just killed a million of their own kind, give or take.
Grant was probably a heroic President to whom history has become unkind because of the necessity of reunifying the country.
Andrew Johnson, by contrast, seems to have been a pretty lousy President, who paradoxically had his moment of heroism when he defied the Tenure of Office Act, thereby protecting the independence of the Presidency and preventing the slide of the US into Parliamentary democracy. Of course he got impeached for it...and probably wouldn't have had the confrontation in the first place if he had otherwise been heroic on Reconstruction.
Tough bit of history for the US.