In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, 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 often was applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The word is closely associated with scalawag, a similarly pejorative word used to describe 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 allied politically with the Radical Republicans.Davidson, Guppie, Herman, Lyte, Scoff. Nation of Nations: A Concise Narrative of the American Republic, 3rd edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 2002 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. 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 having no ties to that place.
Etymology and definition The term carpetbagger, used exclusively as a pejorative term, originated from the carpet bag, a form of cheap luggage made from carpet fabric, which many of the newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. It 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 a 1912 book by Oliver Temple Perry, 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 [U.S. Civil] War", in a June 1867 stump speech that he delivered across Tennessee in support of the re-election of the disabled Tennessee Governor William G. Brownlow:
That was the origin of the term "carpet bag", and out of it grew the well known term "carpet-bag government".https://archive.org/details/notablemenoftenn00temp_0/page/126/mode/1up?q=Mason&view=theater "Notable men of Tennessee, from 1833 to 1875, Their Times and Their Contemporaries"
In the United Kingdom at the end of the 20th century, carpetbagger developed another meaning, referring to people who joined a mutual organization, such as a building society, in order to force it to demutualize, that is, to convert into a joint stock company, seeking personal financial gain by that means.
Background The Republican Party in the South comprised three groups after the Civil War, and white Democratic Southerners referred to two in 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. Most of the 430 Republican newspapers in the South were edited by scalawags, and 20 percent were edited by carpetbaggers. White businessmen generally boycotted Republican papers, which survived through government patronage.Stephen L. Vaughn, ed., Encyclopedia of American Journalism (2007) pp 440-41.Richard H. Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction South (2004).
Historian Eric Foner argues:
Reforming impulse Beginning in 1862, Northern abolitionists moved to areas in the South that had fallen under Union control.Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1976). 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 destroyed during the war.Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics. 1865–1881 (University of Alabama Press. 1991).Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (Oxford University Press. 1988)
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. 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.Godbey, William Baxter, "Autobiography of Rev. W.B. Godbey, A.M.", God's Revivalist Office. Cincinnati. 1909.Williams, Heather Andrea, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, University of North Carolina Press,
Economic motives
Carpetbaggers 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."Foner, 1988, pp. 137
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.Foner 1988 pp 294–295 Leading "black carpetbaggers" believed that 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."Foner 1988 pp 289
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.Klein 1968 p. 269
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. Ames tried unsuccessfully to ensure equal rights for black Mississippians. His political battles with the Southerners and African Americans ripped apart his party.Garner (1902); Harris (1979)
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 General Beroth B. Eggleston, a native of New York; Colonel A.T. Morgan of the Second Wisconsin Volunteers; General W.S. Barry, former commander of a Colored regiment raised in Kentucky; an Illinois general and lawyer who graduated from Knox College; Major W.H. Gibbs of the Fifteenth Illinois infantry; Judge W. B. Cunningham of Pennsylvania; and Captain 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.George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984, p.132Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paperback, 2007, pp.80–87Garner 187–88 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, 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 denounces Ames and Northerners for manipulating the Black vote for personal benefit, and for keeping alive wartime hatreds:
Elza Jeffords, a lawyer from 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, serving from 1883 to 1885. He died in Vicksburg, 16 days after he left Congress. The next Republican congressman from the state was not elected until 80 years later in 1964: Prentiss Walker of Mize, who served a single term from 1965 to 1967.
North Carolina