The Grant Administration.

The campaign slogan of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868, "Let Us Have Peace," expressed a waning of support for additional federal initiatives to reconstruct the South. Grant's margin of victory over Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour was remarkably narrow considering the national admiration for the victorious Union commander, and Seymour may well have carried a majority of the white voters in the country. Most of the Southern states had been readmitted to the Union in June, when the Fourteenth Amendment was declared in effect. One of the most powerful Radical Republicans, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, died later in the summer; as he had requested, he was buried in a racially integrated cemetery "to illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of Man before his Creator." Before Grant's inauguration took place Congress submitted to...