Reconstruction Era: A History from Beginning to End by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

“A few white scalawags were seen to approach the polls during the day, most of them throwing furtive glances to the right and left to see if their presence in the ebony crowd was noticed.”

—Report on an election in 1867 in Augusta, Georgia in the Chronicle & Sentinel newspaper

The word “carpetbagger” had been in use in the United States for some time by the end of the Civil War. It was used to denote a traveler who arrived in a new area with his possessions in a satchel made from pieces of carpet. After the war, it took on a new and more derogatory meaning. The term was used to describe people from the north who came to the southern states in the period immediately after the war in the hope of establishing businesses. Many were businessmen who hoped to buy or lease land or plantations or to find southern partners with whom they could work to rebuild the process of producing cotton.

Initially, such people were welcomed in the south, as they brought much-needed cash which helped to re-establish the economy. Yet before long, this perception changed and northern incomers became viewed as parasites who hoped to become rich by taking advantage of the misfortune of the south. The truth was more complex. Some northerners who came south after the Civil War were rapacious businessmen who believed they could turn a short-term profit from the chaos left by the war. Others were genuine reformers who believed that it would be possible to change southern society to make it more similar to the north—amongst many northerners, there was a belief that the north was more advanced than the south and that people from the north had a moral obligation to help improve the south.

Many of these altruistic northerners found work with the new Freedmen’s Bureaus or took jobs as teachers and journalists in the hope of changing entrenched attitudes. In time, the term carpetbagger came to be applied to any northerner who arrived in the south in the years after the Civil War, and most came to be regarded with suspicion and distrust by the people of the south. Still, there was one thing even more despised in the south than a carpetbagger, and that was a scalawag.

The word “scalawag” was originally used in the United States to denote a farm animal of no use or value. It later came to mean an untrustworthy person of no worth. After the end of the Civil War, it took on a new and very specific meaning in the southern states. Not everyone in the south had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Conservatives in the south had believed that African Americans should not be slaves and should be entitled to vote, though most seem to have believed that there should still be a white-dominated political system. After the Civil War, these people were joined by non-slave owning small farmers as well as businessmen and professional people who had remained loyal to the Union throughout the war.

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