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In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly 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. (Because they ran to the south with their positions in a suitcase made of Carpet ) 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 negro 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 not having ties to that place.
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. War", in the 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"
"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 Demutualization, that is, to convert into a joint stock company, seeking personal financial gain by that means.
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:
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,
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
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.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, 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, serving from 1883 to 1885. He died in Vicksburg, Mississippi 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, Mississippi, who served a single term from 1965 to 1967.
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."Elliott, Mark, Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy V. Ferguson, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 119 Tourgée later wrote A Fool's Errand, a largely autobiographical novel about an idealistic carpetbagger persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.Hill, Christopher, "Summary" of a Fool's Errand, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/tourgee/summary.html
Some historians of the early 1800s, who belonged to the Dunning School that believed that the Reconstruction era was fatally flawed, claimed that Chamberlain later was 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.
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.
George Luke Smith, a New Hampshire native, served briefly in the U.S. House from Louisiana's 4th congressional district but was unseated in 1874 by the Democrat William M. Levy. He then left Shreveport for Hot Springs, Arkansas."George Luke Smith", Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
After the war, Furbush migrated to Liberia through the American Colonization Society, where he continued to work as a photographer. He returned to Ohio after 18 months and moved back to Arkansas by 1870. Furbush was elected to two terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1873–74 (from an African-American majority district in the Arkansas Delta, made up of Phillips and Monroe counties.) He served in 1879–80 from the newly established Lee County.Eric Foner Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (1993) p. 79Blake Wintory, "William Hines Furbush: An African American, Carpetbagger, Republican, Fusionist and Democrat." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 63 (Summer 2004): 107–165. Blake J. Wintory, "African-American Legislators in the Arkansas General Assembly, 1868–1893." Arkansas Historical Quarterly (2006): 385-434.
In 1873, the state passed a civil rights law. Furbush and three other black leaders, including the bill's primary sponsor, state senator Richard A. Dawson, sued a barkeeper in Little Rock, Arkansas for refusing to serve their group. The suit resulted in the only successful Reconstruction prosecution under the state's civil rights law. In the legislature, Furbush worked to create Lee County, Arkansas, from portions of Phillips County, Crittenden County, Monroe County, and St. Francis County in eastern Arkansas, which had a black-majority population.
Following the end of his 1873 legislative term, Furbush was appointed as county sheriff by Republican Governor Elisha Baxter. Furbush twice won re-election as sheriff, serving from 1873 to 1878. During his term, he adopted a policy of "fusion", a post-Reconstruction power-sharing compromise between Populist Democrats and Republicans. Furbush originally was elected as a Republican, but he switched to the Democratic Party at the end of his time as sheriff. Democrats held most of the economic power and cooperating with them could make his future.
In 1878, Furbush was elected again to the Arkansas House. His election is notable because he was elected as a black Democrat during a campaign season notorious for white intimidation of black and Republican voters in black-majority eastern Arkansas. He was the first-known black Democrat elected to the Arkansas General Assembly.
In March 1879, Furbush left Arkansas for Colorado."William Hines Furbush (1839–1902)" in The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture (2010) He returned to Arkansas in 1888, setting up practice as a lawyer. In 1889, he co-founded the African American newspaper National Democrat. He left the state in the 1890s after it disenfranchised black voters. Furbush died in Indiana in 1902 at a veterans' home.
George Ruby, an African American from New York City, who grew up in Portland, Maine, worked as a teacher in New Orleans from 1864 until 1866 when he migrated to Texas. There he was assigned to Galveston, Texas as an agent and teacher for the Freedmen's Bureau. Active in the Republican Party and elected as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1868–1869, Ruby was later elected as a Texas state senator and had wide influence. He supported construction of railroads to support Galveston business. He was instrumental in organizing African-American dockworkers into the Labor Union of Colored Men, to gain them jobs at the docks after 1870. When Democrats regained control of the state government in 1874, Ruby returned to New Orleans, working in journalism. He also became a leader of the Exoduster movement. Blacks from the Deep South migrated to homestead in Kansas in order to escape white supremacist violence and the oppression of segregation.
The new investors in those mutuals would receive shares in the newly created public companies, usually distributed at a flat rate, which equally benefited small and large investors, providing a broad incentive for members to vote for leadership candidates who were pushing for demutualisation. Carpetbaggers first was used in this context in early 1997 by the chief executive of The Woolwich, who announced the society's conversion with rules removing the entitlement of the most recent new savers to potential windfalls, stating in a media interview, "I have no qualms about disenfranchising carpetbaggers."
Between 1997 and 2002, a group of pro-demutualization supporters, "Members for Conversion", operated a website, carpetbagger.com, which highlighted the best ways of opening share accounts with UK building societies, and organised demutualisation resolutions. That led many building societies to implement anti-carpetbagging policies, such as not accepting new deposits from customers who lived outside the normal operating area of the society. Another measure was to insert a charitable assignment clause for new members into the constitution of the organisation, requiring customers opening a savings account to sign a declaration agreeing that any windfall conversion benefits to which they might become entitled would be assigned to the Charities Aid Foundation.
The term continues to be used within the co-operative movement to, for example, refer to the demutualisation of housing cooperatives.
The term carpetbagger has also been applied to those who join the Labour Party but lack roots in the working class that the party was formed to represent.
The term was also used by John Fahey, a former Premier of New South Wales and federal Liberal finance minister, in the context of shoddy "tradespeople" who travelled to Queensland to take advantage of victims following the 2010–2011 Queensland floods.
Notable examples
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