No, Sean Wilentz, Grant was NOT all that

I get tired of professional historians, who should know better, who claim President Grant was such a stalwart defender of Reconstruction. Only in terms of the soft bigotry of low expectations of comparison with Andrew Johnson was he so.

Simply not true in general. The bits of truth that are there were largely from Grant's first term. By a year or so into his second term, he was already largely abandoning Southern blacks to their fate.