Ulysses S. Grant

Grant used federal power to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people as no president would again for nearly a century. He signed the Enforcement Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, created the Justice Department in 1870, and suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties to break the Klan, which led to hundreds of prosecutions. Critics then called it military despotism. Northern fatigue and Supreme Court rulings narrowing the Fourteenth Amendment undid much of it after he left office.