 In 1868, the Republicans unanimously chose Ulysses S. Grant as their presidential candidate.Grant won favor with the Radicals after he allowed Edwin Stanton, a Radical, to be reinstated as secretary of war.As early as 1862, during the Civil War, Grant had appointed the Ohio military chaplain John Eaton to protect and gradually incorporate refugee slaves in west Tennessee and northern Mississippi into the Union war effort and pay them for their labor.