Carpetbagger
1872 cartoon depiction of a Carpetbagger
In United States history, carpetbaggers
was the term southerners gave to northern-
ers who moved to the South during the Re-
construction era, between 1865 and 1877.
They formed a coalition with freedmen (freed
slaves), and scalawags (southern whites who
supported Reconstruction) in the Republican
Party. Together they politically controlled
former Confederate states for varying peri-
ods, 1867–1877.
The term carpetbaggers was used to de-
scribe the white northern Republican politi-
cians who came South, arriving with their
travel carpetbags. Southerners considered
them ready to loot and plunder the defeated
South.[1] Although the term is still an insult
in common usage, in histories and reference
works it is now used without derogatory
intent.
In modern usage in the United States, the
term is sometimes used derisively to refer to
a politician who runs for public office in an
area in which he or she is not originally from
and/or has only lived for a very short time.
In the United Kingdom, the term was ad-
opted to refer informally to those who join a
mutual organization, such as a building soci-
ety, in order to force it to demutualize — to
convert into a joint stock company – solely for
personal financial gain.
Background
Reforming impulse
Beginning in 1862, thousands of Northern
abolitionists and other reformers moved to
areas in the South where secession by the
Confederates states had failed. Many school-
teachers and religious missionaries arrived in
the South, some of them sponsored by north-
ern churches. Many were abolitionists who
sought to continue the struggle for racial
equality; they often became agents of the fed-
eral Freedmen’s Bureau, which started oper-
ations in 1865 to assist freedmen and also
white refugees. The bureau established pub-
lic schools in rural areas of the South where
public schools had not previously existed.
Other Northerners who moved to the South
participated in establishing railroads where
infrastructure was lacking.[2][3]