Carpetbagger

For the Harold Robbins novel, see The Carpetbaggers

In the United States, the term carpetbagger was an epithet used to refer to a Northerner (Yankee) who lived at the South during post-U.S. Civil War Reconstruction between 1865 and 1877. It was embraced by some of the Northerners involved (One of the most prominent said "Jesus Christ was a carpetbagger") and is now the common term, even when no insult is intended. (Compare Wobbly, Quaker, Mormon)

The epithet

"Carpetbaggers" were so named for the purported practice of carrying their belongings in carpet bags, and were commonly perceived by white Southerners as threatening to bring racial equality or "black rule." Carpetbaggers were distinct from scalawags, i.e., Southern white Republicans.

Northerners in the South during Reconstruction

Early 20th Century American historians, many of them Southern in origin or sympathy, tended to view carpetbaggers unfavorably, assuming á priori that they were grafters, thieves, and vagabounds. In truth, many were former abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; many of these became employees of the Freedmen's Bureau. Others moved South for personal rather than political reasons. Some migrated for the sake of the climate; others were relatively affluent and brought investment capital to start businesses. And, because so many Southern business and political leaders had been impoverished by the war or disenfranchised for rebellion, many Northern migrants became mayors, governors, and business leaders. In any case, the evidence suggests that most carpetbaggers were former soldiers in the Union army. A large majority supported the creation of a strong Republican Party in the defeated South.

Carpetbaggers and scalawags shared a vision of a new South, one that would overthrow the crippled Southern plantation regime and replace it with industrial capitalism. Other goals were to improve education and infrastructure —hence "reconstructing" the region.

Probably the best-known carpetbagger was Albion W. Tourgée, formerly of Ohio and a friend of President James A. Garfield. Tourgée later wrote A Fool's Errand, a largely autobiographical novel about an idealistic carpetbagger who is persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan. The retired Union general Adelbert Ames, a native of Massachusetts and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, was elected Republican governor of Mississippi. Ames tried unsuccessfully to ensure equal rights for black Mississippians. 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). 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 leave. He later wrote Yazoo; Or, on the Picket Line of Freedom in the South (1884).

Henry C. Warmoth, the Republican governor of Louisiana from 1868 to 1874, represents a decidedly less idealistic strand of carpetbagging. As governor, Warmouth 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.

White, male carpetbaggers have received the most attention from historians despite the existence of dozens of black carpetbaggers. Francis L. Cardozo, a Protestant 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. Tunis Campbell, a 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. Another New Yorker, George T. Ruby, had a similar career. The Freedmen's Bureau sent him to Galveston, Texas, where he decided to settle. 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, Hardy became a leader of the Exoduster movement, which encouraged Southern blacks to move West.

The only relatively well-known female carpetbagger remains Carrie (in some sources, "Carolyn") Highgate, the African-American wife of Albert T. Morgan. Nevertheless, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women moved below the Mason-Dixon line after the Civil War, many to teach newly freed African-American children.

Contemporary use

Current use is rare, and tends to be confined to American Southerners.

When used, the term "carpetbagger" is used to describe "an outsider who moves someplace to exploit the natives and enrich himself at their expense," or "a politician who moves to another state for political reasons, such as ease of election."

In 2000, Republican political commentator Alan Keyes referred to Democrat Hillary Clinton as a "carpetbagger" when she moved to New York to run for the United States Senate. The accusation ended up coming back to politically hurt Keyes in 2004, when he ran for a Senate seat from Illinois, having moved from Maryland to Illinois three months before the election, which he lost to Barack Obama.

See also: parachute candidate

UK usage

Carpetbagging was also used in the United Kingdom in the 1990s during the wave of flotations of building societies (mutuals), 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."

Major building societies which converted included Northern Rock, Halifax, Bradford and Bingley and Woolwich.

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 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.