Carpetbagger

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In United States history, the term carpetbagger was a term for Northerners (Yankees) who moved to the South during Reconstruction between 1865 and 1877. It was a derogatory term, suggesting an exploiter who does not plan to stay. The term is now used without derogatory intent by historians and reference works.

The term

"Carpetbaggers" were so named for the perceived practice of using carpet bags as inexpensive luggage. Since 1900 the term is used to describe any outsider who attempts to gain political office or economic advantage.

Investors

As Foner notes, the Carpetbaggers often purchased or leased plantations and became large landowners. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings 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." The investors were warmly received. Foner 1988 pp 137, 194 However, Foner also 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 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. Not a few had been lawyers, businessmen, newspaper editors, and other pillars of Northern communities. The majority (including fifty-two of the sixty who served in Congress during Reconstruction) were veterans of the Union Army.Foner 1988 pp 294-295

Leading "black carpetbaggers" believed the interests of capital and labor identical and the freedmen entitled to little more than an "honest chance in the race of life." " Foner 1988 pp 289

Many Carpetbaggers and Scalawags shared a Whiggish vision of modernizing the South, one that would overthrow the crippled Southern plantation regime and replace it with industrial capitalism. Other goals were to improve education and infrastructure. The Carpetbaggers were especially successful in taking control of Southern railroads--abetted by state legislatures. In 1870, Northerners controlled 21% of the South's railroads (by mileage); 19% of the directors were Carpetbaggers. By 1890 they controlled 88% of the mileage and 47% of the directors were Carpetbaggers. [Klein 1968 p 269]

Reforming Impulse

Many schoolteachers and religious missionaries moved South as well. Many were former abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; many of these became employees of the Freedmen's Bureau.

Politics

A large majority of Carpetbaggers joined the Republican Party coalition in southern states, along with Freedmen, free blacks, and Scalawags (native white southerners). The Republican coalition controlled every state until it was overthrown by a conservative-Democratic coalition of Redeemers in the 1870s.

About 10,000 to 15,000 of the most prominent ex-Confederates had been disenfranchised by Congress (the exact number is unknown). Carpetbaggers often filled the political vacuum and were elected to local, state and national office. Many of them represented railroad and industrial interests and used political power to help those economic interests.

Foner concludes that, "Over time, as Republican leaders increasingly came under the sway of Northern railroad men and industrialists, the Republican Party would abandon its commitment to the rights of African-Americans, acquiescing in the overthrow of Reconstruction and the imposition of segregation." The Nation, July 27, 2000, http://ericfoner.com/articles/072700nation.html

State politics

Mississippi

Union general Adelbert Ames, a native of Massachusetts was the appointed military governor and had himself elected as Republican governor of Mississippi. Ames tried unsuccessfully to ensure equal rights for black Mississippians. His battles with the Scalawags and African Americans ripped apart his party.

The "Black and Tan" (biracial) constitutional convention in Mississippi in 1868 included 29 Scalawags, 17 blacks and 24 Carpetbaggers, nearly all of whom were veterans of the Union army. They include four who had lived in the South before the war, two of whom had served in the Confederate army. Among the more prominent were General Beroth B. Eggleston, a native of New York, but who had enlisted as a private in an Ohio regiment; Colonel A. T. Morgan, of the Second Wisconsin Volunteers; General W. S. Barry, formerly 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. These were among the founders of the Republican party in Mississippi, and were more or less prominent in the politics of the state down to 1875, but nearly all left Mississippi in 1875-76. Garner 187-88

• Albert T. Morgan, the carpetbagging Republican sheriff of Yazoo, Mississippi, received a brief flurry of national attention when insurgent whites 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 Nov. 6, 1875 Hiram Revels, a Mississippi Republican and the first African American U.S. Senator, wrote a letter to President Grant that was widely reprinted. Revels denounced Ames and the Carpetbaggers for manipulating the Black vote for personal benefit, and for keeping alive wartime hatreds:

Since reconstruction, the masses of my people have been, as it were, enslaved in mind by unprincipled adventurers, who, caring nothing for country, were willing to stoop to anything no matter how infamous, to secure power to themselves, and perpetuate it..... My people have been told by these schemers, when men have been placed on the ticket who were notoriously corrupt and dishonest, that they must vote for them; that the salvation of the party depended upon it; that the man who scratched a ticket was not a Republican. This is only one of the many means these unprincipled demagogues have devised to perpetuate the intellectual bondage of my people.... The bitterness and hate created by the late civil strife has, in my opinion, been obliterated in this state, except perhaps in some localities, and would have long since been entirely obliterated, were it not for some unprincipled men who would keep alive the bitterness of the past, and inculcate a hatred between the races, in order that they may aggrandize themselves by office, and its emoluments, to control my people, the effect of which is to degrade them. full text in Garner pp. 399-400

North Carolina

Corruption was a powerful charge for Democrats in North Carolina, notes historian Paul Escott, "because its truth was apparent." [Escott 160] For example, General Milton S. Littlefield, dubbed the "Prince of Carpetbaggers," 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 to win support in the legislature for state money for his railroads, and Democrats as well as Republicans were guilty. [Foner 387] 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 160]

Extravagance and corruption were inflating taxes and the costs of government in a state that had always favored low expenditure, Escott points out. "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," primarily 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 refference to the taxes that are rung from the labouring class of people. With out a speedy refformation I will have to resign my post." [Escott 160]

South Carolina

• The leading carpetbag politician in South Carolina was Daniel Henry Chamberlain, a New Englander who was an officer in a predominantly Negro regiment. He served as South Carolina's attorney general from 1868 to 1872 and as Republican Governor from 1874 to 1877, losing his office as a result of the Compromise of 1877. In South Carolina, Chamberlain was a strong supporter of Negro rights, but he later became a white supremacist, a result of his conversion to states' rights, laissez-faire, and evolution. By 1896, liberty meant the right to save oneself from the rising tide of equality. Chamberlain justified white supremacy by arguing that, in evolutionary terms, the Negro obviously belonged to an inferior social order.
• Charles Stearns, also from Massachusetts, wrote an account of his own carpetbagging 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 L. Cardozo, a black minister from New Haven, Connecticut, served as a delegate to South Carolina's Constitutional Convention (1868); he made eloquent speeches advocating that the plantations be broken up and distributed among the freedmen.

Louisiana

• Henry C. Warmoth, the Republican governor of Louisiana from 1868 to 1874, represents a decidedly less idealistic strand of carpetbagging. As governor, Warmoth was plagued by accusations of corruption that continued long after his death. He supported voting rights for blacks, but at the same time he used his position as governor to trade in state bonds for his own personal benefit. The newspaper company he owned also had a contract with the state government. Warmoth remained in Louisiana after Reconstruction, dying in 1931 at the age of 89.

Alabama

• George E. Spencer was a prominent U.S. Senator. His 1872 Senate reelection campaign in Alabama opened him to allegations of "political betrayal of colleagues; manipulation of Federal patronage; embezzlement of public funds; purchase of votes; and intimidation of voters by the presence of Federal troops." [Woolfolk 1966] Foner (1968 p 295) notes that he was a major speculator in a distressed financial paper.

Georgia

• Tunis Campbell, a black New York businessman, was hired in 1863 by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to help former slaves in Port Royal, South Carolina. When the Civil War ended, Campbell was assigned to the Sea Islands of Georgia, where he engaged in an apparently successful land reform program for the benefit of the freedmen. He eventually became vice-chair of the Georgia Republican Party, a state senator, and the head of an African-American militia which he hoped to use against the Ku Klux Klan.

Arkansas

• William Hines Furbush, born a slave in Kentucky in 1839, left Ohio, where he received an education, for Helena, Arkansas in 1862. Back in Ohio in February 1865, he joined the Forty-second Colored Infantry at Columbus. After the war, Furbush migrated to Liberia through the American Colonization Society. He returned to Ohio after 18 months and had moved back to Arkansas by 1870.[Wintory 2004] Furbush was elected to two terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1873-74 (Phillips County) and 1879-80 (Lee County). In 1873, following the passage of the state's civil rights law, Furbush, with three other black leaders, including the bill's primary sponsor, state senator Richard A. Dawson, sued a Little Rock barkeeper for refusing the group service--the suit resulted in the only successful Reconstruction prosecution under the state's civil rights law. In the legislature, he worked to create a new county, Lee, from portions of Phillips, Crittenden, Monroe and St. Francis counties. Following the end the 1873 legislative term, he was appointed sheriff by Republican Governor Elisha Baxter. Furbush won reelection as sheriff twice and served from 1873 to 1878. During his term, he adopted a policy of "fusion," a post-Reconstruction power-sharing compromise between Democrats and Republicans. Furbush was originally elected as a Republican but switched to the Democratic Party at the end of his time in the sheriff's office. In 1878 he was again elected to the Arkansas House. His election is noteworty, because he was elected as a black Democrat in an election season notorius for the intimidation of black and Republican voters in black majority eastern Arkansas. Furbush is the first known black Democrat elected to the Arkansas General Assembly. In March 1879, he left Arkansas for Colorado, where he worked as an assayer and barber. In Bonanza, Colorado, he avoided a lynch mob after shooting and killing a town constable. In his trial he was acquitted of murder. He returned to Little Rock, Arkansas by 1888, following another stay in Ohio. In 1889, he and E. A. Fulton, a fellow black Democrat, announced plans for the National Democrat, a party weekly that was supposed to attract black voters ot the Democratic Party. After failing to get black voters in the Democratic Party and with the passage Arkansas's 1891 Election Law that disfranchised many black voters in the state, Furbush left Arkansas. He traveled to South Carolina and Georgia. His last stop was in October 1901 at Marion, Indiana's National Home for Disabled Veterans. Furbush died at the Home on September 3, 1902, and was interred at the Marion National Cemetery. [Foner Freedom's Lawmakers" p. 79; Wintory 2004, [2006]]

• [Daniel Phillips Upham]

• [Gov. Powell Clayton]

Texas

Carpetbaggers were least visible in Texas, as Campbell (1994) shows. Republicans were in power from 1867 to January 1874. Only one state official was a carpetbagger, and one justice of the state supreme court. About 13%-21% of district court judges were carpetbaggers, along with about 10% of the delegates who wrote the "radical" constitution of 1869. Of the 142 men who served in the 12th legislature, only 12 to 29 were carpetbaggers. At the county level they included about 10% of the commissioners, county judges, and sheriffs.

New Yorker, George T. Ruby, was sent by the Freedmen's Bureau to Galveston, Texas, where he settled. As a Texas state senator, Ruby was instrumental in various economic development schemes and in efforts to organize African-American dockworkers into the Labor Union of Colored Men. When Reconstruction ended, Ruby became a leader of the Exoduster movement, which encouraged Southern blacks to homestead in Kansas.

Other prominent carpetbaggers

• Albion W. Tourgée, formerly of Ohio and a friend of President James A. Garfield, was a lawyer and judge in North Carolina. He once claimed that "Jesus Christ was a carpetbagger." Tourgée later wrote A Fool's Errand, a largely autobiographical novel about an idealistic carpetbagger who is persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

• Hundreds of white women moved South, many to teach newly freed African-American children.

Carrie (in some sources, "Carolyn") Highgate, was the African-American wife of Albert T. Morgan.

Historiography

The Dunning school of American historians (1900-1950) viewed carpetbaggers unfavorably, arguing that they degraded the political and business culture. The revisionist school in the 1930s called them stooges of Northern business interests. After 1960 the neoabolitionist school emphasized their moral courage.

Contemporary use

In the United States

"Carpetbagger" is in common use when a politician runs for office in a new district or state. In 1964 Robert Kennedy moved to New York to run for the Senate, and deflected the carpetbagger image with humor, opening one speech with, "My fellow New Yorkites!" In 2000, critics attacked Hillary Clinton as a "carpetbagger" when she moved to New York to run for the Senate. Both Kennedy and Clinton were elected. In 2004 Republican Alan Keyes was called a carpetbagger when he moved to Illinois only one month before the election for Senator, which he lost. See also: parachute candidate

The term is also used in a more jocular manner to refer to the masses of northerners who have relocated to the South since the 1960s. The word is commonly used in areas of massive influx such as Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas. The Raleigh suburb of Cary, North Carolina is commonly referred to as a Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees (or alternatively Containment Area for Relocated Yankees).

The Mississippi punk metal band The Cooters have a well-known song called "Carpetbaggers" which updates the term for modern usage. In their lyrics, carpetbaggers are portrayed as greedy businessmen who exploit the people. The song incites the listeners to fight back against such carpetbaggers as MTV, McDonalds, and Oxford American. The song is catchy and humorus and one of the staple songs of The Cooters.

In the United Kingdom

Carpetbagging was also used in the Britain in the 1990s during the wave of flotations of building societies, the term indicating the advocates of these conversions. Investors in these mutuals would receive shares in the new public companies, usually distributed at a flat rate, thus equally benefiting small and large investors, and providing a broad incentive for members to vote for conversion-advocating (carpetbagging) leadership candidates. The word was first used in this context by the chief executive of one of the building societies under threat, who introduced rules removing new savers' entitlement to potential windfalls and stated in a press release, "I have no qualms about disenfranchising carpetbaggers."

In the 2005 general election, Respect MP George Galloway was accused of being a carpet-bagger by Labour's Constitutional Affairs Minister David Lammy during an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Galloway, who hails from Scotland, ran for office in London's Bethnal Green and Bow constitutency on an anti-war platform. It was suggested that he targeted this constituency because of its largely Muslim population, pushing the issue of war in Iraq for his own gain while ignoring the basic concerns facing this area, one of the UK's poorest constituencies. His response was that his old constituency had been dissolved and that it is perfectly reasonable for a new party to stand its best known candidate in the area it has the strongest support.

In popular culture

In 1911, Ginn and Company published the first edition of David Saville Muzzey's An American History, which with a few minor changes would become one of the most widely-used high school history texts of the next two decades. Muzzey referred to carpetbaggers as "low-minded adventurers and rascally, broken-down politicians" who poisoned the minds of African-Americans "against the only people who could really help them begin their new life of freedom well--their old masters." In a footnote, Muzzey added: "The carpetbaggers tempted the negroes away from industrial pursuits into politics."

In Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers, the word has the generic meaning of a presumptuous newcomer who enters a new territory seeking success. In this case, the territory is the movie industry, and the newcomer is a wealthy heir to an industrial fortune who, like Howard Hughes, simultaneously pursued aviation and moviemaking avocations.

Operation Carpetbagger in WW2

During World War II, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services surreptitiously supplied necessary tools and material to anti-Nazi resistance groups in Europe. The OSS called this effort Operation Carpetbagger, and the modified B-24 aircraft used for the night-time missions were themselves referred to as "carpetbaggers." (Among other special features, they were painted a non-glare black to make them less visible.) Between January and September of 1944, Operation Carpetbagger ran 2263 sorties between Harrington, England and various points in occupied Europe.

References: Reconstruction era

• Ash, Stephen V. When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 U of North Carolina Press 1995.
• Barnes, Kenneth C. Who Killed John Clayton Duke U.P. 1988; violence in Arkansas
• Brown, Canter, Jr. "Carpetbagger Intrigues, Black Leadership, and a Southern Loyalist Triumph: Florida's Gubernatorial Election of 1872" Florida Historical Quarterly 1994 72(3): 275-301. Issn: 0015-4113. Shows how African Americans joined Redeemers to defeat corrupt carpetbagger running for reelection
• Campbell, Randolph B. "Carpetbagger Rule in Reconstruction Texas: an Enduring Myth." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 1994 97(4): 587-596. Issn: 0038-478x
• Richard Nelson Current. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (1988), a favorable view
• Currie-Mcdaniel, Ruth. Carpetbagger of Conscience: A Biography of John Emory Bryant Fordham U.P. 1999; religious reformer in South Carolina
• Durden, Robert Franklin; James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850-1882 Duke University Press, 1957
• Paul D. Escott; Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900, University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
• Foner, Eric. Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory Of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, Revised, 1996, LSU Press.
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) New York: Harper & Row, 1988, recent standard history
• Fowler, Wilton B. "A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy." North Carolina Historical Review 1966 43(3): 286-304. Issn: 0029-2494
• James Wilford Garner. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1902)
• Harris, William C. The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi Louisiana State University Press, 1979
• Harris, William C. "James Lynch: Black Leader in Southern Reconstruction," Historian 1971 34(1): 40-61. Issn: 0018-2370; Lynch was Mississippi's first African American secretary of state
• Klein, Maury. "Southern Railroad Leaders, 1865-1893: Identities and Ideologies" Business History Review 1968 42(3): 288-310. Issn: 0007-6805 Fulltext in JSTOR
• Morrow, Ralph E.; Northern Methodism and Reconstruction Michigan State University Press, 1956
• Olsen, Otto H. Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee (1965)
• Tunnell, Ted. Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction LSU Press, 2001, on Louisiana.
• Wiggins, Sarah Woolfolk; The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1881 University of Alabama Press, 1991
• Woolfolk, Sarah Van V. "George E. Spencer: a Carpetbagger in Alabama," Alabama Review 1966 19(1): 41-52. ISSN: 0002-4341
• Wintory, Blake. "William Hines Furbush: African-American Carpetbagger, Republican, Fusionist, and Democrat," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 2004 63(2): 107-165. Issn: 0004-1823
• [Wintory, Blake. "William Hines Furbush (1839–1902)" Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (2006).]

Primary Sources: Reconstruction Era

• Bryant, Emma Spaulding. Emma Spaulding Bryant: Civil War Bride, Carpetbagger's Wife, Ardent Feminist; Letters and Diaries, 1860-1900 Fordham U. Pr., 2004. 503 pp.
• Fleming, Walter L. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial 2 vol 1906. Uses broad collection of primary sources.
• Louis F. Post. "A 'Carpetbagger' in South Carolina," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1925), pp. 10-79 in Jstor; autobiography
• Twitchell, Marshall Harvey. Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell. ed by Ted Tunnell; Louisiana State U. Press, 1989. 216 pp.

 

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