By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.”87 In this view, Reconstruction imposed “an oppressive peace on honorable men who had laid down their arms.”88 But the South never laid down its arms. When it came to
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