Exactly right Jim. If you look at how the accusation of corruption against Grant's administration was used at the time, it was always used to discredit the very attempt to bring democracy to the south, and was always used against the very policies that might have enforced Reconstruction. It was a concerted campaign, aimed at stopping the attempts to enforce the Reconstruction constitutions, and attempts to make black freedom and political participation a reality. But the kind of corruption that became normal after Grant has simply been ignored. People could steal whole railroad franchises through strategically placed bribes of senators and administration officials, business men could buy whole state legislators in the west, and nobody would complain the way they complained about Grant's "corruption" and the "corruption" of the Reconstruction south. And yet Carl Remnck just goes along with this silly southern Revanchist view of corruption without thinking it through one bit.