carpetbagger

In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical term used by Southerners to describe opportunistic Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, who were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain. The term broadly included both individuals who sought to promote Republican politics (including the right of African Americans to vote and hold office) and individuals who saw business and political opportunities because of the chaotic state of the local economies following the war. In practice, the term ''carpetbagger'' was often applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The term is closely associated with " scalawag", a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.

White Southerners commonly denounced "carpetbaggers" collectively during the post-war years, fearing they would loot and plunder the defeated South and be politically allied with the Radical Republicans. Sixty men from the North, including educated free blacks and slaves who had escaped to the North and returned South after the war, were elected from the South as Republicans to Congress. The majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction were from the North.

Historian Eric Foner argues:

Since the end of the Reconstruction era, the term has been used to denote people who move into a new area for purely economic or political reasons, despite not having ties to that place.

Etymology and definition

The term ''carpetbagger'', used exclusively as a pejorative term, originated from the carpet bags (a form of cheap luggage made from carpet fabric) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. The term is now used in the United States to refer to a parachute candidate, that is, an outsider who runs for public office in an area without having lived there for more than a short time, or without having other significant community ties.

According to Oliver Temple Perry in his 1912 book, "Notable men of Tennessee, from 1833 to 1875, Their Times and Their Contemporaries", Tennessee Secretary of State and Radical Republican Andrew J. Fletcher "was one of the first, if not the very first, in the State to denounce the hordes of greedy office-seekers who came from the North in the rear of the army in the closing days of the .S. CivilWar" within his June 1867 stump speech that he delivered across Tennessee for the re-election of the disabled Tennessee Governor William G. Brownlow:

"No one more gladly welcomes the Northern man who comes in all sincerity to make a home here, and to become one of our people, than I, but for the adventurer and the office-seeker who comes among us with one dirty shirt and a pair of dirty socks, in an old rusty carpet bag, and before his washing is done becomes a candidate for office, I have no welcome."

This was the origin of the term "carpet bag," and out of it grew the well known term "carpet-bag government."

In the United Kingdom at the end of the 20th century, ''carpetbagger'' developed another meaning: in British English it refers to people who join a mutual organization, such as a building society, in order to force it to demutualize, that is, to convert into a joint stock company. Such individuals are seeking personal financial gain through such actions.

Background

The Republican Party in the South comprised three groups after the Civil War, and white Democratic Southerners referred to with two derogatory terms. " Scalawags" were white Southerners who supported the Republican party, "carpetbaggers" were recent arrivals in the region from the North, and freedmen were freed slaves. Although "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" were originally terms of opprobrium, they are now commonly used in the scholarly literature to refer to these classes of people. Politically, the carpetbaggers were usually dominant; they comprised the majority of Republican governors and congressmen. However, the Republican Party inside each state was increasingly torn between the more conservative scalawags on one side and the more Radical carpetbaggers with their black allies on the other. In most cases, the carpetbaggers won out, and many scalawags moved into the conservative or Democratic opposition.

Most of the 430 Republican newspapers in the South were edited by scalawags—20 percent were edited by carpetbaggers. White businessmen generally boycotted Republican papers, which survived through government patronage.

Reforming impulse

Beginning in 1862, Northern abolitionists moved to areas in the South that had fallen under Union control. Schoolteachers and religious missionaries went to the South to teach the freedmen; some were sponsored by northern churches. Some were abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; they often became agents of the federal Freedmen's Bureau, which started operations in 1865 to assist the vast numbers of recently emancipated slaves. The bureau established schools in rural areas of the South for the purpose of educating the mostly illiterate Black and Poor White population. Other Northerners who moved to the South did so to participate in the profitable business of rebuilding railroads and various other forms of infrastructure that had been previously destroyed during the war.

During the time most blacks were enslaved, many were prohibited from being educated and attaining literacy. Southern states had no public school systems, and upper-class white Southerners either sent their children to private schools (including in England) or hired private tutors. After the war, hundreds of Northern white women moved South, many to teach the newly freed African-American children. There they joined like-minded Southerners, most of which were employed by the Methodist and Baptist Churches, who spent much of their time teaching and preaching to slave and freedpeople congregations both before and after the Civil War.

Economic motives

Initiatives such as the Southern Homestead Act, Sherman's field orders, and Reconstruction-era legislation by Radical Republicans aimed to strip the land, assets, and voting rights of Southerners believed, without evidence, to have supported the Confederates during the war. Although the stated purpose of these initiatives was to empower freedmen politically and economically, many carpetbaggers were businessmen who purchased or leased plantations. They became wealthy landowners, hiring freedmen and white Southerners to do the labor through the development of sharecropping.

Carpetbaggers also established banks and retail businesses. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings and energy in this promising new frontier, and civilians lured south by press reports of "the fabulous sums of money to be made in the South in raising cotton." Foner notes that "joined with the quest for profit, however, was a reforming spirit, a vision of themselves as agents of sectional reconciliation and the South's "economic regeneration." Accustomed to viewing Southerners—black and white—as devoid of economic initiative, the "Puritan work ethic", and self-discipline, they believed that only "Northern capital and energy" could bring "the blessings of a free labor system to the region."

Carpetbaggers tended to be well educated and middle class in origin. Some had been lawyers, businessmen, and newspaper editors. The majority (including 52 of the 60 who served in Congress during Reconstruction) were veterans of the Union Army.

Leading "black carpetbaggers" believed the interests of capital and labor were identical, and that the freedmen were entitled to little more than an "honest chance in the race of life."

Many Northern and Southern Republicans shared a modernizing vision of upgrading the Southern economy and society, one that would replace the inefficient Southern plantation regime with railroads, factories, and more efficient farming. They actively promoted public schooling and created numerous colleges and universities. The Northerners were especially successful in taking control of Southern railroads, aided by state legislatures. In 1870, Northerners controlled 21% of the South's railroads (by mileage); 19% of the directors were from the North. By 1890, they controlled 88% of the mileage; 47% of the directors were from the North.

Prominent examples in state politics

Mississippi

Union General Adelbert Ames, a native of Maine, was appointed military governor and later was elected as Republican governor of Mississippi during the Reconstruction era. Ames tried unsuccessfully to ensure equal rights for black Mississippians. His political battles with the Southerners and African Americans ripped apart his party.

The "Black and Tan" (biracial) constitutional convention in Mississippi in 1868 included 30 white Southerners, 17 Southern freedmen and 24 non-southerners, nearly all of whom were veterans of the Union Army. They included four men who had lived in the South before the war, two of whom had served in the Confederate States Army. Among the more prominent were Gen. Beroth B. Eggleston, a native of New York; Col. A. T. Morgan, of the Second Wisconsin Volunteers; Gen. W. S. Barry, former commander of a Colored regiment raised in Kentucky; an Illinois general and lawyer who graduated from Knox College; Maj. W. H. Gibbs, of the Fifteenth Illinois infantry; Judge W. B. Cunningham, of Pennsylvania; and Cap. E. J. Castello, of the Seventh Missouri infantry. They were among the founders of the Republican party in Mississippi.

They were prominent in the politics of the state until 1875, but nearly all left Mississippi in 1875 to 1876 under pressure from the Red Shirts and White Liners. These white paramilitary organizations, described as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", worked openly to violently overthrow Republican rule, using intimidation and assassination to turn Republicans out of office and suppress freedmen's voting. Mississippi Representative Wiley P. Harris, a Democrat, stated in 1875:

If any two hundred Southern men backed by a Federal administration should go to Indianapolis, turn out the Indiana people, take possession of all the seats of power, honor, and profit, denounce the people at large as assassins and barbarians, introduce corruption in all the branches of the public administration, make government a curse instead of a blessing, league with the most ignorant class of society to make war on the enlightened, intelligent, and virtuous, what kind of social relations would such a state of things beget.

Albert T. Morgan, the Republican sheriff of Yazoo, Mississippi, received a brief flurry of national attention when insurgent white Democrats took over the county government and forced him to flee. He later wrote ''Yazoo; Or, on the Picket Line of Freedom in the South'' (1884).

On November 6, 1875, Hiram Revels, a Mississippi Republican and the first African-American U.S. Senator, wrote a letter to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant that was widely reprinted. Revels denounced Ames and Northerners for manipulating the Black vote for personal benefit, and for keeping alive wartime hatreds:

Elza Jeffords, a lawyer from Portsmouth, Ohio who fought with the Army of the Tennessee, remained in Mississippi after the conclusion of the Civil War. He was the last Republican to represent that state in the U.S. House of Representatives, having served from 1883 to 1885. He died in Vicksburg sixteen days after he left Congress. The next Republican congressman from the state was not elected until eighty years later in 1964: Prentiss Walker of Mize in Smith County, who served a single term from 1965 to 1967.

North Carolina

Corruption was a charge made by Democrats in North Carolina against the Republicans, notes the historian Paul Escott, "because its truth was apparent."Escott 160 The historians Eric Foner and W. E. B. Du Bois have noted that Democrats as well as Republicans received bribes and participated in decisions about the railroads.Foner, 1988, pp. 387 General Milton S. Littlefield was dubbed the "Prince of Carpetbaggers", and bought votes in the legislature "to support grandiose and fraudulent railroad schemes". Escott concludes that some Democrats were involved, but Republicans "bore the main responsibility for the issue of $28 million in state bonds for railroads and the accompanying corruption. This sum, enormous for the time, aroused great concern." Foner says Littlefield disbursed $200,000 (bribes) to win support in the legislature for state money for his railroads, and Democrats as well as Republicans were guilty of taking the bribes and making the decisions on the railroad. North Carolina Democrats condemned the legislature's "depraved villains, who take bribes every day"; one local Republican officeholder complained, "I deeply regret the course of some of our friends in the Legislature as well as out of it in regard to financial matters, it is very embarrassing indeed."

Escott notes that extravagance and corruption increased taxes and the costs of government in a state that had always favored low expenditure. The context was that a planter elite kept taxes low because it benefited them. They used their money toward private ends rather than public investment. None of the states had established public school systems before the Reconstruction state legislatures created them, and they had systematically underinvested in infrastructure such as roads and railroads. Planters whose properties occupied prime riverfront locations relied on river transportation, but smaller farmers in the backcountry suffered.

Escott claimed, "Some money went to very worthy causes—the 1869 legislature, for example, passed a school law that began the rebuilding and expansion of the state's public schools. But far too much was wrongly or unwisely spent" to aid the Republican Party leadership. A Republican county commissioner in Alamance eloquently denounced the situation: "Men are placed in power who instead of carrying out their duties ... form a kind of school for to graduate Rascals. Yes if you will give them a few Dollars they will liern you for an accomplished Rascal. This is in reference to the taxes that are rung from the labouring class of people. Without a speedy reformation I will have to resign my post."

Albion W. Tourgée, formerly of Ohio and a friend of President James A. Garfield, moved to North Carolina, where he practiced as a lawyer and was appointed a judge. He once opined that "Jesus Christ was a carpetbagger." Tourgée later wrote ''A Fool's Errand'', a largely autobiographical novel about an idealistic carpetbagger persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

South Carolina

A politician in South Carolina who was called a carpetbagger was Daniel Henry Chamberlain, a New Englander who had served as an officer of a predominantly black regiment of the United States Colored Troops. He was appointed South Carolina's attorney general from 1868 to 1872 and was elected Republican governor from 1874 to 1877. As a result of the national Compromise of 1877, Chamberlain lost his office. He was narrowly re-elected in a campaign marked by egregious voter fraud and violence against freedmen by Democratic Red Shirts, who succeeded in suppressing the black vote in some majority-black counties. While serving in South Carolina, Chamberlain was a strong supporter of Negro rights.

Some historians of the early 1930s, who belonged to the Dunning School that believed that the Reconstruction era was fatally flawed, claimed that Chamberlain was later influenced by Social Darwinism to become a white supremacist. They also wrote that he supported states' rights and laissez-faire in the economy. They portrayed "liberty" in 1896 as the right to rise above the rising tide of equality. Chamberlain was said to justify white supremacy by arguing that, in evolutionary terms, the Negro obviously belonged to an inferior social order.Simkins and Woody. (1932)

Charles Woodward Stearns, also from Massachusetts, wrote an account of his experience in South Carolina: ''The Black Man of the South, and the Rebels: Or, the Characteristics of the Former and the Recent Outrages of the Latter'' (1873).

Francis Lewis Cardozo, a black minister from New Haven, Connecticut, served as a delegate to South Carolina's 1868 Constitutional Convention. He made eloquent speeches advocating that the plantations be broken up and distributed among the freedmen. They wanted their own land to farm and believed they had already paid for land by their years of uncompensated labor and the trials of slavery.

Louisiana

Henry C. Warmoth was the Republican governor of Louisiana from 1868 to 1874. As governor, Warmoth was plagued by accusations of corruption, which continued to be a matter of controversy long after his death. He was accused of using his position as governor to trade in state bonds for his personal benefit. In addition, the newspaper company which he owned received a contract from the state government. Warmoth supported the franchise for freedmen.Foner (1968)

Warmoth struggled to lead the state during the years when the White League, a white Democratic terrorist organization, conducted an open campaign of violence and intimidation against Republicans, including freedmen, with the goals of regaining Democratic power and white supremacy. They pushed Republicans from political positions, were responsible for the Coushatta Massacre, disrupted Republican organizing, and preceded elections with such intimidation and violence that black voting was sharply reduced. Warmoth stayed in Louisiana after Reconstruction, as white Democrats regained political control of the state. He died in 1931 at age 89.

Algernon Sidney Badger, a Boston, Massachusetts native, held various appointed federal positions in New Orleans