Carpetbagger

In United States history, a carpetbagger was a Northerner who moved to the South after the American Civil War, during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). White Southerners denounced them fearing they would loot and plunder the defeated South. Sixty Carpetbaggers were elected to Congress, and they included a majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction. Historian Eric Foner argues:

"Carpetbagger" was a pejorative term referring to the carpet bags (a form of cheap luggage at the time) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. The term is still used today to refer to a parachute candidate, an outsider who runs for public office in an area where he or she does not have deep community ties, or has lived only for a short time.

Background

Three groups comprised the Republican Party in the South after the Civil War. "Scalawags" were white Southerners who supported the party. "Carpetbaggers" were recent arrivals 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. Politically the carpetbaggers were usually dominant; they comprise 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—only 20 percent were edited by carpetbaggers. White businessmen generally boycotted Republican papers, which survived only through government patronage.