Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and Redeemers
White People in the Post-Civil War South

If you were white and politically active in the post-Civil War South, you’d be a carpetbagger, a scalawag, or a redeemer. The fact that two of these terms are pejorative – and they both refer to supporters of Reconstruction – reveals that a pro-slavery version of US history has prevailed in our public discourse.

A carpetbagger was a northern-born white who went south after the Civil War to participate in politics or administration. “Carpetbagger” comes from the cheap luggage they carried, stitched together from carpet remnants.

While pro-Southern historians and filmmakers of the “Gone With the Wind”school portray carpetbaggers as greedy opportunists looking for a fast buck, most were educated middle-class northern abolitionists who went south with the intention of helping formerly enslaved people exercise their Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment rights.

Many were teachers who opened schools for the formerly enslaved. Others found work with the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal agency charged with assist-ing formerly enslaved people to establish farms or businesses. Among the carpet-baggers were a large number of well-educated free blacks from the north.

Their work was necessary, too, because one of the objectives of Reconstruction was to decapitate the former rebellion – to remove the old planter class from political power.

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the South into military districts under federal occupation. The Fourteenth Amendment barred from public office anyone who had previously sworn an oath to the USA and then participated in the Confederacy – in short, almost every former Con-federate military officer or government official. This ban was enforced by the so-called “Ironclad Oath,” which required every office-seeker in the South to swear they’d never rebelled against the USA.

As a result of these legal actions, many formerly enslaved persons were elected to office under the banner of the Republican Party, and many carpetbaggers rose to important positions in administrative posts in the South.

Scalawags were southern-born whites who supported the Republican Party and Reconstruction. Some were former pro-union people who’d had to lay low

during the secession. Others were former Confederates who sought to accommodate themselves to the new balance of political power in the South.

Some, like the most prominent scalawag, James Longstreet – Robert E. Lee’s righthand man for the last two years of the Civil War – were disqualified from political office but played a big role in business.

On one level, carpetbaggers and scalawags were allies in their support for Reconstruction government and the Republican Party, but they were also rivals for local political power. The scalawags were far from believing in the political or social equality of newly enfranchised Black citizens. Many became Republicans only strategically – it seemed to them the best vehicle for continuing white domination in the South.

The rivalry of these two Republican factions became so bitter in Arkansas that armed clashes broke out in the so-called “Brooks-Baxter War,” 1872-1874. While the carpetbagger faction led by Elisha Baxter won, the war weakened both Republican factions and led to the state reverting to Democratic rule in 1874.

The Democrats who won back control of Arkansas in 1874 were redeemers – called that because their stated intention was to “redeem” the South from Reconstruction and restore the rule of white farmers. The most prominent redeemers were former Confederate officers like Wade Hampton and Jubal Early. Early, by the way, was the original promoter of the “Lost Cause” narrative – which sought to portray the Confederacy as a noble rebel-lion against Northern aggression.

Because the Reconstruction governments relied on federal troops, the redeemers organized armed white supremacist militias – the Ku Klux Klan being the most notorious, but also including the White League, and the Red Shirts. Determined action by the Grant administration smashed the first Klan, but redeemers tried to seize political power by force in several southern states. In 1868, for example, a white militia tried to prevent the election of the Republican slate in Opelousas, Louisiana, killing 200 freedmen in the process.

The disputed presidential election of 1876 brought an end to Reconstruction. In return for recognizing the election of Republican Rutherford Hayes, the Democrats secured a promise to withdraw federal troops from the South and surrender political power there to the redeemers. What followed was almost one hundred years of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, voter suppression, and economic exploitation for Black Americans.