Carpetbaggers was a term of scorn and hostility used by white Southerners to describe Northerners active in the Republican Party in the South after the American Civil War. Northern Republicans were influential in the South after the war, during the period known as Reconstruction (1865-1877). During Reconstruction, the Republican Party, which was based in the North, extended its organization to the South. The party gained control of Southern state governments and granted civil rights to Black citizens, including the right to vote. It also worked to establish public schools and to increase opportunities for ordinary white Southerners.
The South’s traditional leaders feared that these policies would further reduce their power and change their way of life. They charged that the Northerners were people of little ability and lowly origins whose personal possessions were so small that each had carried them south in a single carpetbag. Carpetbags, suitcases made of carpet material, were widely used at the time.
Southern Democrats used the term carpetbagger as part of a propaganda campaign to convince other Southerners that the Republican Party was non-Southern and undesirable. The Democrats also excluded the Republicans from social affairs and used violence against them. They even had some assassinated. By the early 1870’s, this treatment made it difficult for most Northerners to remain in Southern politics or even to remain in the South.
Some of the people called carpetbaggers were unprincipled and corrupt. But most were not, and many came to the South for honorable reasons. Some were Union soldiers who after the war decided to stay in the South to begin a new life as farmers or as operators of small businesses. Others worked in the South for the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency that aided people who had been enslaved. Another group consisted of people experienced in Northern politics who felt they could be useful and influential in the Republican Party in the South.
The people known as carpetbaggers played an important role in the Republican Party as well as in the progressive Southern state governments the party controlled during Reconstruction. Many of these people served as governors, state legislators, or members of Congress. Today, the term carpetbagger is still used to describe outsiders who try to exert influence where they are not wanted.
See also Reconstruction.
