Creating "the propaganda of history": southern editors and the origins of carpetbagger and scalawag.

ONE READS THE TRUER DEEPER FACTS OF RECONSTRUCTION WITH A GREAT despair," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. "It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile." (1) Du Bois's words from nearly three quarters of a century ago still resonate. How could something so noble end in such anguish and injustice? Historians have offered many explanations for the precipitous collapse of Radical Reconstruction. They have stressed the North's failure to redistribute confiscated southern lands to ex-slaves, leaving freedpeople economically dependent on white landowners. They have explained that southern governments based on black suffrage never obtained legitimacy in the eyes of most white Americans. They have assessed the terrible damage done by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues. They have observed the waning idealism of northern Republicans and how quickly the North wearied of deploying the U.S. Army to protect southern radicals. They have studied the harm done by corruption and by the chronic factionalism that crippled southern Republican regimes. They have observed that southern freedpeople, with their constant cries for government protection, came to be seen in the North--like striking factory workers--as enemies of a free labor economy. And time and time again historians have pointed to the common denominator underlying all of these factors: the profound racism that permeated American society, North and South. (2)

In their manifold efforts to explain Reconstruction's demise, however, historians have largely overlooked a key element: the hostility of southern journalists. In 1867 Congress nullified the postwar governments created by President Andrew Johnson, leaving the Democratic press as the only institution in the South fully under the control of native whites and in a position to oppose northern policy. Southern newsmen picked up the gauntlet and, at the moment of seeming northern triumph, mounted a counteroffensive against what they saw as alien, radical governments being imposed on the region. Before the North realized it, southern editors had seized the rhetorical high ground, crying "Negro Rule" with renewed vigor. They coupled this old trope with the new symbols scalawag and carpetbagger, castigating "Negro-scalawag rule" and, even more effective, "Negro-carpetbag rule." The result was a trio of symbols that defined the ideological parameters of the era. By 1870, no political actor in either the North or the South could discuss the future of Reconstruction without--in some fashion--engaging this rhetoric.

While historians of the postwar South have extensively used newspapers as sources, the southern press as an institution remains largely unexplored. The only general work is Hodding Carter's short book of printed lectures, Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace (1969), which surveys the entire period from 1861 to 1877 in thirty-two pages. Of the 2,904 entries in David A. Lincove's exhaustive Reconstruction in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (2000), a bare handful of entries concern the southern Democratic press. The only book, excepting Carter's, is a study of Charleston News and Courier founder and editor Francis Warrington Dawson; the remaining twenty-one relevant entries are locally focused journal articles and a 1976 dissertation. (3) Ironically, scholars know more about the region's incipient (and largely ephemeral) Republican newspapers than about the infinitely larger and vastly more influential Democratic press. (4)

This work is a study of Reconstruction symbolism and rhetoric as expressed in the writings of southern journalists during the transition from Presidential to Radical Reconstruction (1867-1868). It examines those newsmen' s creation of the words carpetbagger and scalawag and demonstrates that they created the epithets as counter-Reconstruction weapons at the precise moment when they would do the most damage: during the radical constitutional conventions that were meeting in conformity with the Reconstruction Act--and while public sentiment about the radical program was only beginning to crystallize. This article argues too that editors in all parts of the South quickly discerned that carpetbagger was a far more effective propaganda tool than scalawag. As molded by newsmen, images of Yankees, carpetbags in hand, more fully expressed white southerners' outrage at radical government than depictions of scalawags did. Equally important, carpetbagger imagery undermined Reconstruction's legitimacy in the North in a way that scalawag imagery did not. Not surprisingly, northerners demonstrated far more sensitivity to the alleged sins of carpetbaggers--ex-Union soldiers and Yankee businessmen--than to those of scalawags, who were largely anonymous southerners. These powerful images tied to the emerging radical governments a figurative ball and chain from which they never escaped.

For better or worse, emblematic words such as carpetbagger and scalawag are inescapable features of political rhetoric. "Politics," political scientist Michael Walzer writes, "is an art of unification; from many, it makes one. And symbolic activity is perhaps our most important means of bringing things together." Without symbols, men and women could not elect presidents and Congresses, write laws and constitutions, and make war. Nor could they act together, as white southerners did after the Civil War to overthrow Radical Reconstruction. (5)

To Walzer, words such as carpetbagger and scalawag are "units of discourse," key components of symbolic language that enable men and women to act together for political ends. (6) Another scholar refers to such words as "ideographs." An ideograph is a symbolic word construction, such as Slave Power, Free Silver, or Liberal Media, that has the capacity to convey ideological concepts and influence political behavior. (7) Whatever the terminology, carpetbagger and scalawag were crucial to the political language of Reconstruction. They expressed white southerners' ideas and emotions about their predicament under radical rule and, indeed, became integral to their identity as white southerners. Because the rhetoric emotively expressed the attitudes and values of the white South, it shaped southerners' worldview and formed the "building blocks" of an ideology of resistance, an ideology essential to the overthrow of Reconstruction. So successful was the result that for over a hundred years after Reconstruction, few white southerners--few white Americans, in fact--could hear the word carpetbagger without conjuring up melodramatic images of villainy and oppression. (8)

The etymology of carpetbagger can be traced to the demand for cheap luggage created by the antebellum transportation revolution. A new industry arose; urban craftsmen cut up secondhand carpets and used the heavy, florid fabric to make sturdy travel bags, literally "carpetbags," purchasable for about a dollar. (9) Although they came in a variety of colors, russet being a favorite, in the writings of southern editors, postwar northern migrants invariably carried black carpetbags (or black valises), and those bags eventually became freighted with a heavy load of ideological symbolism.

During and shortly after the Civil War, several thousand northerners--former Union soldiers, Freedmen's Bureau agents, businessmen, lawyers, cotton planters, small farmers--settled in the former Confederate states. Most of these newcomers were young men whose lives had been disrupted by the war. They came in search of opportunity. In the words of Richard N. Current, the postwar South "was a new frontier, another and a better West." (10) The region needed rebuilding, land was cheap, and opportunity beckoned. Few of the newcomers entertained thoughts of political careers when they headed south. Some of them adopted the racial and social mores of southern whites and blended in with the dominant white population. Others adhered to northern free labor values and aspired to reform southern society along northern lines. The men in this latter group were disproportionately from New England and the "little New Englands" of the upper North. (11) Historians have written extensively about New England influences on abolitionists and Radical Republicans, but they have paid scant attention to the upper North-New England origins of carpetbaggers. Postwar southern editors, on the other hand, were very much aware of New England's stamp on the newcomers and needed no reminders of the region's antislavery history or of its cutting-edge role in American commerce. Long before the Civil War, southerners had come to see these archetypal Yankees through clouds of prejudice. They were small-minded, acquisitive creatures, it was said, lacking the manly virtues of southern planters; others of the breed, even more loathsome, were dangerous fanatics cut from the mold of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown. (12)

Carpetbagger, like scalawag and "Black and Tan Convention," was a figurative counter-Reconstruction epithet created out of white southerners' desire to combat Radical Reconstruction. Their need for the terms arose in late 1867 when the new "Black and Tan" constitutional conventions, mandated by the Reconstruction Act, met in the former rebel states and included African Americans among the delegates. "Black and Tan" was among the least pejorative terms that southern editors applied to these gatherings. Editors routinely prefixed "convention" news with such uncomplimentary epithets as "Menagerie," "Mongrel," "Nigger," "Bones and Banjo," "Piebald," and "Black Crook." (13)

Traveling circuses helped popularize "Menagerie" as a caption for the state conventions. In fall 1867 three "circus and menagerie companies" toured the Deep South. In Georgia and Alabama analogies between the big top spectacles and the radical conventions became a daily journalistic ritual. (14) The etymology of "Black Crook Convention" can be traced to an 1866 theatrical production in New York. Often described as "the first American musical comedy," The Black Crook was a smash-hit "musical extravaganza," the first Broadway show to run for over a year. Based on the Faust legend, the play featured five and a half hours of "fantastic stage effects, mammoth production numbers, opulent ballets, and the sensual display of female beauty," with scantily clad chorus girls singing "March of the Amazons" and "You Naughty, Naughty Men." (15) In late 1867 productions of the show opened in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and other southern cities just as the radical conventions were getting underway. The play had nothing to do with African Americans or Reconstruction. The name, however, was irresistible to southern newsmen writing about the conventions. The "Mississippi Black Crook performance" opens today, read one story in New Orleans, "[b]ut their Black Crook cannot equal ours." The antics of the Louisiana convention "were never seen before on earth.... We defy the Mississippi Convention to be as ridiculous as ours." (16) Whether the conventions were called "Black Crook" or "Black and Tan," when they settled down to business, southern Republicans began to exert real influence, and Radical Reconstruction ceased to be an abstract threat; it was immediate, and it was visceral.

All eyes were on Alabama. The Alabama convention was the first to meet, and it was the only radical body that completed its work in 1867. The delegates met in Montgomery, the state capital, on November 5 and adjourned just a month and a day later on December 6. By contrast, the Louisiana, Virginia, and Georgia conventions, which also met in late 1867, deliberated all winter and did not finish their work until March or April. Simply put, Alabama was a bellwether in the early days of Radical Reconstruction and a breeding ground of Reconstruction-era terminology. (17)

In the fall of 1865 Joseph Hodgson, a well-educated erstwhile Virginian in his late twenties, took over as chief editor of the Montgomery Daily Mail, one of the oldest newspapers in Alabama. Hodgson had moved to Montgomery shortly before the war and had practiced law. Although opposed to secession, he had fought in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of colonel. After the war he returned to Montgomery, where he devoted himself to journalism and Democratic Party politics. (18) He made his mark during Presidential Reconstruction as a relentless critic of "Southern loyalists," meddling Yankees, "free niggers," and the Freedmen's Bureau. His record provoked Horace Greeley's New York Tribune to brand the Mail "the leading rebel organ in Alabama." (19)

Like most of its peers, the Mail was a cottage-industry gazette; Hodgson and an assistant editor worked out of a single office without salaried reporters. Despite its limitations the Mail exerted a profound influence on the political and intellectual life of Alabama and neighboring states. In an era in which newspapers were well-nigh the only form of mass communication, the press was a civic (semi-public) institution. (20) The editorial pages of papers like the Mail were nerve centers of regional opinion. In towns and villages across Dixie, editors like Hodgson articulated white southerners' fears about black freedom and Reconstruction. Editors also provided a print soapbox that permitted southern leaders such as Wade Hampton, Benjamin L. Orr, Alexander H. Stephens, and Benjamin H. Hill to reach a mass audience. Hill of Georgia, for example, wrote a series of articles titled "Notes on the Situation," which were reprinted throughout the region. In sum, southern editors directly and indirectly played a major role in shaping public debate on Reconstruction. (21)

In the winter of 1867 the Mail and rival southern dailies tracked the tortuous path of Reconstruction legislation through Congress. Modern historians call the pathbreaking act of March 2, 1867, the Reconstruction Act. Southerners of that era, however, read in their newspapers about the "Military Reconstruction Bill" or the "Sherman Military bill" or the "Military Act." (22) In the pages of the Mail and many other southern papers, the controversial law was commonly called the "Sherman Act" or the "Sherman bill." Senator John Sherman of Ohio was indeed one of the principal authors of the law, but when the Mail commented almost daily on the "Sherman Act" or "Sherman plan" and warned of "Shermanized States," most readers likely thought of Senator Sherman's controversial brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman. (23)

The "Sherman Act" tilted the political landscape and put Alabama Republicans under renewed scrutiny. During the summer of 1867 the Dixie sky rained calumnies on the state's newly emerging, federally backed leaders. They were "Southern renegades," "imported Radicals," "Judas Iscariots," "Radical colored-ites," "Southern white simon-pure loyalists," and "Rad Yankees" (24) Then in mid-September Colonel Hodgson penned a seminal story about a Texas radical who had died of yellow fever: "The adventurers who have migrated to the South lately with black valises, having a preponderance of bile in their composition, have fallen victims in large numbers to the javelins of Black Vomito" (the black vomit that precedes death from yellow fever). "Yellow Jack," he wrote, "pounces upon those fellows who wander about without homes through different climes and fail to stay long enough in one locality to become acclimated." Yellow fever, "the Black Demon of the Gulf," says to these wandering northerners, "If you like my complexion, you may have it!" Hodgson advised "these Radical Yankees" to return north before the election of convention delegates, or they would "be quarantined and disinfected with prophylactic fluid!" (25)

A few days later the Mail commented on the nomination from Lowndes County of four northerners to the "bogus Alabama Convention." One of these individuals, Charles A. Miller, "does not even pretend to deposit his black carpet-sack in Lowndes County." Indeed, Miller's "forte seems to consist in not being known to anybody." The Mail claimed to "have made diligent inquiry as to his antecedents ... but the invariable response is 'Don't know him!' 'Think he is from Ohio!'--'Believe he is from Maine!' 'May be he is from Russian America!'" The only certainty, the newspaper report concluded, was that he did not live in Lowndes County. (26) These references to "black valises" and "black carpet-sacks" mark the genesis of carpetbagger.

When the convention met in November, the Mail punctuated its coverage with adjective phrases such as "carpet bag gentry," "carpet bag Bureau man," and "carpet bag fellow," before finally printing carpetbagger as a noun in a headline on November 30: "Carpet Bagers and Negroes to the Front." Then in early December during the last days of the assemblage, the dike burst and denunciations of carpetbaggers filled the newspaper's columns. In the two issues of December 5 and 6, carpetbagger appeared twenty times. A single article on December 4 referred to carpetbags or carpetbaggers eight times. (27)

It was a defining moment in carpetbagger's emergence as a Reconstruction epithet. Louisiana's convention met in late November, and in early December the Georgia and Virginia delegations convened. The early days of the three conventions coincided with a flurry of carpetbagger references in articles about events in Alabama. (28) The biggest story was a widely reprinted column entitled "The Carpet-baggers" that was first published in the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, one of the leading business journals in the South. The Montgomery Daily Mail, the feature read, has given the name carpet-baggers to "the volatile patriots who come from the North to reconstruct the South upon a proper basis. It is an expressive appellation. The man with the carpet bag has very little 'whereby he may be attached.' He is prospecting politically. If he finds a living without capital or labor, he hangs up his carpet bag." On the other hand, "[i]f times are hard or troubles impending, his 'shirt for superfluity' is called in from the wash; his bill, settled or unsettled, offers little impediment, and he may take the evening train" or travel afoot "if the emergency be pressing." These northern men "go through the South to put up constitutional machinery, just as they might be sent out to put up lightning rods or cotton gins. They come as shadows, but they sometimes depart very full and well stuffed." No small number "of these statesmen have been detailed from the Freedmen's Bureau to fix the frame and hang the wheels of the Alabama Constitution." Now, "[h]aving eaten their way through the Bureau into the Convention, they ... propose spinning themselves into the cocoon of a State office." (29)

In the first weeks of 1868, as carpetbagger inched its way into the political lexicon of southern journalism, the New York press discovered the epithet. In mid-February 1868 E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation, wrote that a "good deal of bitterness of feeling has been shown in all the conventions in regard to the presence and great prominence as members, of what the Louisiana people call 'carpet-baggers'--men, that is, who are new-comers in the country." Godkin concluded: "Many of these Northern men are fully deserving of all the contempt bestowed upon them." (30) A week later, the Montgomery correspondent of the New York World, the country's leading Democratic paper, reported on "the Alabama Black Crook" and the new "Political Terms in Vogue in the South." The writer believed the "carpet-baggers" were the dominant force in the southern conventions. This migratory "race of Ichabod Cranes," he wrote, "have overspread the South." They are everywhere--"On the cars, and in the towns, and prowling about in country places, and you can't take up a paper, hardly, or hear a man speak but what there is something about the carpet-bagger. Few know where they come from; nobody knows how they live ... but here they are buzzing about like gad-flies, and seeking the weak points in the country with the unerring instinct of carrion crows. Hounded out of the North for rascality ... they seek and obtain employment in the cause of Reconstruction and come South.... Such is the carpet-bagger. A man who has no stake in the country beyond his satchel, and yet, by the grace of Reconstruction, the ruler of the State." (31)

The New York World's embrace of the carpetbagger epithet was to be expected; northern Democrats had opposed Radical Reconstruction from the start. The Republican editor of the Nation, in contrast, believed the Reconstruction Act was a good law. That Godkin so readily gave credence to the carpetbagger label was an ominous sign. (32)

Unlike carpetbagger, scalawag was in the antebellum American vocabulary. Spelled in a variety of ways, it had two distinct but related meanings, both, in all likelihood, traceable to "Scalloway," a seventeenth-century Scottish village. Reference works such as Joseph E. Worcester's 1860 Dictionary of the English Language defined scalawag as "A low worthless fellow; a scapegrace." Scalawag was also a word for low-grade farm animals. In early 1868 a Mississippi editor observed that scalawag "has been used from time immemorial to designate inferior milch cows in the cattle markets of Virginia and Kentucky." That June the Richmond Enquirer concurred; scalawag had heretofore "applied to all of the mean, lean, mangy, hidebound skiny [sic], worthless cattle in every particular drove." Only in recent months, the Richmond paper remarked, had the term taken on political meaning. (33)

During the transition from Presidential to Radical Reconstruction, southern editors mostly reviled homegrown white Republicans with such terms as "Southern Loyalists," "Southern renegades," and "mean native whites." (34) In late summer 1867, scattered references to scalawags began to appear in Alabama and Georgia newspapers. The word, however, had not yet become a defining epithet for native white Republicans. In August, for example, the Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel advised black people to elect their own kind to Congress in preference to "imported scalawags or pale faced renegades." A month later the Columbus Daily Sun, on the opposite side of the state, printed a like message: Negro representatives were preferable to "the scallawags, great and small, native and imported," now seeking office in the southern states. (35)

That fall newspapers continued to use scalawag--still sparingly--as a catchall term for white Republicans (regardless of their regional origins). The Richmond Daily Dispatch, for instance, censured "scallawags and niggers" elected to the Underwood convention, and a Georgia paper titled an article "Scaliwags and Negroes in Caucus." (36) In fact, editors often used scalawag so broadly as to include all Republicans, even blacks: for example, "Georgia Scalawags in Convention" and "From Richmond: Doings of the Scalawag Convention." As late as April 1868 the Charleston Mercury defined "Scallawagerie" as "the latest Southern term for a reconstruction convention." (37)

In the evolution of scalawag no newspaper played a role commensurate with the Montgomery Daily Mail's creation of carpetbagger; however, the Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, one of the oldest and most influential journals in Georgia, came closest. In March 1866 an ex-Confederate general named Ambrose R. Wright and Henry P. Moore, an Augusta businessman, purchased the Chronicle and Sentinel, and, like Colonel Hodgson in Montgomery, the new owner-editors took a militant stand against the radical drift of Reconstruction politics. Wright and Moore made the Chronicle and Sentinel, in the words of the newspaper's admiring biographers, "a sort of day-journal in which were recorded the many outrages and humiliations of the era." (38) Not only was it among the first southern organs to use scalawag, but it was also probably the first to consistently use the word as an epithet for native white Republicans. In late October and early November 1867 the Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel repeatedly divided the state's radicals into "Yankee emissaries, scalawags and debauched and ignorant negroes." (39) By late November the Augusta paper had begun to reprint carpetbagger news from Alabama. Thanksgiving week, comparing the upcoming radical convention with John Robinson's circus, the Chronicle and Sentinel became the first newspaper to link carpetbagger and scalawag in tandem. General John Pope, commander of the Third Military District and the proprietor of "Pope's circus and menagerie," the paper wrote, "feels confident that his scalawag, African and carpet-bag performances will throw John Robinson's collection all in the shade." (40)

The problems associated with scalawag's exact meaning surfaced in the New York World's discussion of "Political Terms in Vogue in the South." The World correspondent defined carpetbagger with exactitude, but white loyalists presented a problem. Indeed, the reporter felt compelled to use two different terms: moss back and scalawag. The "moss-back" or "mossy-back" was a native radical who had been a Confederate deserter or draft dodger during the war. He "hid out in the woods and swamps, until ... the moss grew upon his back." Claiming "devotion to the Union," the moss back now marketed himself as "a Southern loyalist." In contrast to the moss back, the scalawag was a southerner of intelligence and former reputation. Thwarted ambition, perversity, or latent corruption, however, had embittered the scalawag and estranged him from the community. (41)

The World correspondent notwithstanding, moss back was a term more associated with the war than with Reconstruction. In fact, it rarely appeared in print in the postwar years. Thus, the World article, rather than reviving moss back, helped popularize scalawag as an epithet for native white Republicans at the same time that it helped popularize carpetbagger as an epithet for figures theretofore described in most southern states as northern adventurers or radical Yankees. Scalawag, however, was never to attain the clarity of meaning or breadth of appeal achieved by carpetbagger, but both terms could be used to condemn anyone who questioned whites' domination of politics and society in the South.

Radical Reconstruction aroused the fury of white southerners because it threatened the color line. The nineteenth-century South was a "Herrenvolk Democracy" in which all whites were members of the Herrenvolk, or master race. Skin color accorded all whites a position superior to nonwhite inferiors such as black people and Indians. (42) It was an article of faith among white southerners that they were the natural, legitimate rulers of the region. Because all whites were members of the Herrenvolk--whether yeoman farmers or great planters--they shared a perceived community of interest with one another against nonwhites. In the Herrenvolk vocabulary of Reconstruction, whites composed the true community of "the people." On the other side of the racial divide stood the black freedmen and their demagogic white controllers; by definition, the latter were debased men without honor. Without their leadership, there could be no "Negro rule." With unconscious hypocrisy, then, southern editors argued that carpetbaggers and scalawags pandered to narrow class and racial interests opposed to the broader interests of the community. The Reconstruction Act notwithstanding, whites who joined a Negro party were renegades whose only motive was personal gain. Constitutions and state governments dominated by such "mongrels" were usurpations. Historian Winthrop D. Jordan's comments about white southerners' fears of black rule in the colonial era are relevant to Reconstruction: The South under the "Sherman Act" was similarly "an appalling world turned upside down, a crazy nonsense world of black over white, an anti-community which was the direct negation of the community as white men knew it." (43)

Editors' expositions on the meaning of carpetbagger and scalawag dwelt endlessly on racial connotations of the terms. Scalawags were "pale faced renegades," "white niggers," apostates, and Judases who had joined the Black Crook against their own color. Colonel Hodgson commented on the "Black Vomito" imparting African complexion to northern newcomers. Most carpetbags, like most leather valises, came in shades of brown, not black; yet, in Hodgson's columns and those of his fellow editors, newcomers from the North always carried black valises and black carpetbags. The association of carpetbaggers with blackness was pervasive. "[F]emale carpetbaggers" paraded the streets of Montgomery with a black convention delegate "sandwiched between them!" (44) The New York World article defining southern political terms depicted carpetbaggers "seeking the weak points in the country" like black "carrion crows." Even the World's description of carpetbaggers as Ichabod Cranes had a racial motif. In Washington Irving's story, Ichabod Crane "was the admiration of all the negroes." (45)

Of the two species of anti-Herrenvolk white renegades, which posed the greater threat, the "New England outlaws" or the "Southern Apostates"? By the numbers, the latter were a majority of white Republicans in every Reconstruction state. They dominated the governorship in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina and held most of the offices in the others. Historians usually think of South Carolina as being dominated by carpetbaggers and blacks, but one of the state's U.S. senators and three of four representatives elected in 1868 to the Fortieth Congress were scalawags. Even in Louisiana, the state where carpetbaggers were most clearly in charge, most of the whites in the constitutional convention, the legislature, and the courts were natives. The "pattern is clear," Carl N. Degler has written, "the Northerners who came South, the so-called carpetbaggers, were always too few in number to play a numerically significant role in the exercise of political power." In Degler's view, "white Southerners dominated Radical Reconstruction, even though in Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana the governors were usually Northerners." (46)

Anecdotal evidence has often been used to suggest that white southerners feared and detested scalawags more than carpetbaggers. During the 1868 presidential election, for example, the Columbus Daily Sun predicted that Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour's defeat would bring domination by "niggers, bayonets, carpetbaggers, and what is infinitely worse, native scallawags." Eric Foner writes that Democrats viewed scalawags as lepers, "even more reprehensible than the hated carpetbaggers." Foner quotes an ex-governor of North Carolina as saying that a northerner who "fought against us" was understandable, "but a traitor to his own home cannot be trusted or respected." James M. McPherson has Democrats saying that "the blackest man that can be found" was preferable to the base traitors "who have dishonored the dignity of the white blood." And Hodding Carter writes, "Reasonable Southerners would admit that an honestly Republican Yankee was not as bad as a home-grown, nigger-loving Scalawag." (47) In individual cases, scalawags may indeed have been more hated--and more vilified--than carpetbaggers, but for scalawags as a group the evidence points to a contrary conclusion.

In October 1868 the Nashville Republican Banner published "Our Imported Masters: Carpet-bag Monopoly of Offices in the South," a state-by-state enumeration of governorships and seats in Congress held by northerners. Comparable stories counting carpetbag officeholders at sundry levels of governance appeared in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and doubtless every state in the region. (48) No such tabulations of scalawag officeholders have come to light. Throughout 1868 editors accorded carpetbaggers far more news coverage than they did scalawags. In Louisiana, as the referendum on the radical constitution neared, the Democratic press scarcely noticed the latter, while carpetbagger stories were everywhere. (49) On the election days, April 17 and 18, the New Orleans Bee and the New Orleans Picayune commented on carpetbaggers twenty times, scalawags once. Over an eleven-day span in February that included Alabama's vote on its Reconstruction constitution, Montgomery's two leading newspapers printed carpetbagger fifty times, scalawag eleven. (50) In the pages of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, neither carpetbagger nor scalawag gained currency while the state's constitutional convention was in session. Carpetbagger began to appear in March 1868, but it was late May before both terms became common in the state's leading newspaper. Then, between May 27 and July 31, during which time Arkansas was readmitted to the Union, the Gazette censured carpetbaggers by the now-generic sobriquet fifty-two times, and scalawags twenty. (51)

To be sure, in 1868 carpetbaggers seized the governorship and most major offices in Louisiana and Arkansas. Though Alabama never had a carpetbag governor, both of the state's senators and five of its six representatives elected to the Fortieth Congress were northerners, leading one native Alabama Unionist to complain, "What can a native Union man do, expect, or calculate on in the future? The Carpet-baggers have already landed everything that is Republican in Hell.... The political offices, the University, Schools, all carpet-bagged." (52) In short, the predominance of carpetbaggers in high-profile offices in these states does much to explain the rhetorical imbalance.

Carpetbagger rhetoric in Texas, Georgia, and the upper South, however, admits of no such explanation. Few Yankees, for example, ventured into postwar Texas, and native whites dominated the governorship and other public offices to a degree unmatched in the South. In 1867 only 7 percent of prominent Texas Republicans were Yankee newcomers, and a year later such northerners made up only 6 percent of the delegates in Texas's constitutional convention. (53) When the delegates met in June, carpetbagger and scalawag were just coming into vogue in the state's interior. The convention adjourned temporarily in late August 1868 and reassembled two weeks before Christmas. (54) That November and December, the Galveston News, one of the state's leading dailies, printed carpetbagger fifty-eight times, scalawag seventeen. In the same period, the eight issues of the Dallas Weekly Herald mentioned carpetbagger sixteen times, scalawag six.

The mountains of East Tennessee probably numbered more white Republicans than the seven states of the Deep South combined. The only former Confederate state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee had reentered the Union in 1866 under Unionist-Republican governor William G. "Parson" Brownlow, a native of Virginia and a longtime Tennessee resident. Under Brownlow, native white Republicans dominated state and local government to a degree exceeded only in Texas. Because it had accepted the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee was the only ex-Confederate state exempted from the "Sherman Act." (55) Thus, as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and other states began Radical Reconstruction, they looked to Brownlow's regime as a model of radicalism already in place, and what they saw was horrifying to them. Not only was Tennessee under "Negro Rule," but also a strict loyalty oath disfranchised tens of thousands of ex-Confederates, the governor exercised dictatorial power over elections, and a State Guard--with black and white units--formed "Brownlow's Militia." The system made Brownlow and his allies unbeatable, as they demonstrated in the elections of July 1867. (56)

In the southern press, no obloquy was too harsh for Brownlow. He was a tyrant, a demagogue, and a "gorilla"; his name was synonymous with "personal and political infamy"; his associates were thieves, pimps, and murderers. (57) Northern Democratic journals in Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and New York reiterated the charges. (58) Independent papers such as James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald liked him no better. "It is a pity," lamented the Herald, that this "irritable, ill-natured, narrow-minded and pugnacious man happens to be Governor of Tennessee." (59) Most alarming to Democratic editors in both the North and the South was the likelihood that Brownlow's Tennessee was Congress's "idea of a reconstructed State." "Tennessee," declared the Columbus Daily Sun, "is the first Southern State where negro suffrage has been tried ... and the result is prophetic to the other States of the saddest hopes and the most wretched experience." Whites delude themselves, warned Georgia's Benjamin H. Hill, "if they suppose the Reconstruction Bill means anything but a Brownlow government for the Southern States." (60) Editors in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama expressed the same fear: "if Tennessee is a fair sample of a reconstructed state, it is not [at] all strange that the excluded states are not enamored of reconstruction." (61) In sum, as Radical Reconstruction began, Tennessee was the only extant model of a state suffering the ignominy of so-called Negro rule, and Brownlow was the best known, most hated Republican in the South. No Yankee newcomer or black Republican had anything like his notoriety.

Parson Brownlow's ill fame notwithstanding, the Nashville Republican Banner, one of the most influential newspapers in the state, was far more concerned about carpetbaggers than scalawags as the presidential election neared. In an eight-day period in late September, the Republican Banner hammered carpetbaggers 131 times, compared to only 20 raps against scalawags. (62) Day after day, week after week, the newspaper pressed the attack. Carpetbag numbers burgeoned "like a rank exotic or dung-hill flower"; the newcomers were usurpers, thieves, and incendiaries; they were selling blacks into slavery in Cuba. One column even blamed the "Brownlow dynasty" for imposing "carpet-bag rule in Tennessee." (63) The Memphis Daily Appeal devoted less space to politics than the Republican Banner did, but in the closing weeks of the presidential election (September 23 to November 3), the Daily Appeal nonetheless printed carpetbagger 54 times, scalawag 27. Equally telling, the Daily Appeal featured carpetbagger in four headlines in this period, scalawag in none. (64) In neither the Daily Appeal nor the Republican Banner, moreover, was Brownlow described as a scalawag. Likewise, E. Merton Coulter's biography of Brownlow, still the standard, defines and discusses carpetbaggers, but scalawag is neither included in the book's index nor discussed in the text. For that matter, there is no mention of scalawags in any of the standard works on Reconstruction in Tennessee, though many of them date to the Dunning era. (65)

While Tennessee had Unionist-Republican mountaineers and Parson Brownlow, North Carolina had like-minded mountaineers in its western quadrant and radical governor William W. Holden, a native Tar Heel who was only a notch or two below Brownlow on the white South's index of radical infamy. During the war Holden ran unsuccessfully for governor as a peace candidate; after the Confederate surrender, President Johnson appointed him provisional governor. A founder of North Carolina's Republican Party, in April 1868 Holden won election as the state's first radical governor. Like many native whites, Holden distrusted northerners; and the governor and his allies, according to recent scholarship, "minimized carpetbag officeholding" in the state. (66)

The Raleigh Daily Sentinel, chief conservative organ in the state capital, saw Holden as a "malignant and crazy imitation of Brownlow." In late September 1868 the Daily Sentinel lashed Holden and his minions, but instead of attacking scalawags, the journal went after the governor's "'carpet-bag' friends." (67) In the ensuing weeks of the presidential campaign, the Daily Sentinel maligned carpetbaggers 149 times, scalawags 83. And even though Holden's most recent biographer describes him as a "Scalawag Governor," not once during those six weeks did the Sentinel describe him as a scalawag. (68)

A similar rhetorical pattern took shape in neighboring Virginia. In early 1868 the Washington National Intelligencer, the leading Democratic paper in the nation's capital, wrote that "[b]eyond all question" James W. Hunnicutt was "the great man" of the moment in Virginia. His rise was meteoric: "Until a year or two ago none of us had ever heard of him." To be sure, the newspaper added, Hunnicutt owed his prominence to power and audacity, not to his moral or intellectual gifts. General John M. Schofield, commander of Military District No. 1 (Virginia), also rated Hunnicutt "the representative man of the extreme Radicals"; he backs confiscation, the general wrote, and has "unbounded influence over the negroes." (69)

James W. Hunnicutt was the kind of native white Republican who, had he not existed, would have been invented by southern editors. "The rebels have forfeited all their rights," he was wont to say, "and we will see that they never get them back." A native of South Carolina, an ex-slaveholder, and a former Baptist minister, before the war he had edited the Fredericksburg Christian Banner, a tiny religious journal. An ardent Unionist, he had spent part of the war in Philadelphia, where he had published The Conspiracy Unveiled, a study of the "Horrors of Secession." (70) In March 1866 he established the New Nation in Richmond, the journal's title emblematic of the regenerated America that had arisen from the crucible of Civil War. Unlike Parson Brownlow, Hunnicutt had become a committed advocate of black rights. The credo of the New Nation proclaimed the "equal rights of loyal Americans before the law, without regard to race or color." Virginia, he wrote in May 1866, "has to be revolutionized politically, religiously, morally ... and economically." Her "people must be uneducated and educated anew." A good Republican, he allegedly said in mid- 1867, must accept the Fourteenth Amendment, "every reconstruction act," and the "iron-clad oath." Most important, a true Republican must accept "the nigger.... Yes, the nigger--his head, his feet, his hide, his hair, his tallow, his bones, and his suet!" (71)

Hunnicutt failed to live up to his press notices. He never became governor, never held other high political office, and is little remembered today even by specialists. In 1867 and the spring of 1868, however, to Democratic editors above and below the Potomac, Hunnicutt was among the two or three most notorious Republicans in the South, his name mentioned in the same breath with Parson Brownlow and Governor Holden. The Charleston Mercury anointed him "the Brownlow of Virginia." Editors often referred to Virginia's constitutional convention not as the Underwood but as the "Hunnicutt Convention" or as "Hunnicutt Hall." (72) Writers in the far comers of the South held up the ex-Baptist preacher's speeches and editorials as models of radical extremism. He was "King of the negro mob" and leader of the state's "indigenous scallawags." He gulped "the poisoned bowl of Radicalism" and then, "like OLIVER TWIST," demanded more. (73) Despite Hunnicutt's reputation as the first radical of Virginia, the Richmond Weekly Enquirer set carpetbagger to type forty-three times and scalawag just sixteen between March 26 and April 16, 1868, the final weeks of Virginia's constitutional convention.

Only in Georgia did scalawag initially hold its own with carpetbagger in editors' rhetoric. During the last month of the constitutional convention, the Augusta Constitutionalist and the Columbus Daily Sun combined mentioned carpetbaggers 38 times, scalawags 35. As the year wore on, though, the rhetoric of the two papers fell in line with the rest of the South. Between September 20 and the presidential election, carpetbagger outscored scalawag in the two organs, 168 to 78. Georgia's Republican governor, elected in mid-1868, was Rufus B. Bullock. A native New Yorker, Bullock had moved to Georgia in 1857. During the war he had employed his considerable knowledge of railroads and the telegraph on behalf of the Confederacy. Allowing for literary license, Georgia newspapers could have labeled him either a carpetbagger or a scalawag. Judging by the Columbus Daily Sun, they preferred the former label; in October and early November, the Daily Sun called him a carpetbagger 4 times, a scalawag once. (74)

As epithets, carpetbagger and scalawag share equal billing in the writings of modern historians. There is little in the works of Kenneth Stampp, Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, Richard N. Current, and other writers to suggest that one term was more important than the other. Conventional wisdom would lead one to expect that in states in which northerners held the governorship and a disproportionate share of major offices--Louisiana and Arkansas, for example--Democratic editors would have concentrated their rhetorical fire--as indeed they did--on carpetbaggers. By the same logic, one would expect that in Texas, Tennessee, and North Carolina--ruled by native whites-editors would have aimed most of their editorial bullets at scalawags. However, this was clearly not the case. On the contrary, in the early days of Radical Reconstruction in every part of the South, journalistic enmity to carpetbaggers greatly exceeded that against scalawags. Judged solely by newsprint, Texas, Tennessee, and North Carolina seemingly suffered the indignities of carpetbag rule every bit as much as states in which northerners were really in charge. Without exception, editors wrote as if scalawag were merely the tail on the carpetbagger kite.

To understand this phenomenon, consider why carpetbagger and scalawag were created in the first place. The words certainly reflected deep-seated prejudices against outsiders and dissenters who challenged the prevailing social and political order. (75) But much more than prejudice was involved. From their inception, carpetbagger and scalawag were rhetorical tools--indeed, rhetorical weapons--created to discredit Radical Reconstruction. The terms thus emerged in conjunction with the first constitutional conventions under the Reconstruction Act. In other words, at the exact moment that the radical conventions began drafting organic law giving ex-slaves the basic civil and political rights of full-fledged citizenship, southern editors began maligning the white Republican delegates as carpetbaggers and scalawags.

Worth asking, too, is why carpetbagger in particular emerged as the key descriptive epithet for northern newcomers. After the war, and especially after the Reconstruction Act, southern editors exhausted their lexicons decrying the northerners in their midst, calling the new arrivals "rag-tag Yankee Radicals," "Northern adventurers," "floaters," "unclean birds of the North," "Northern squatters," "outside white[s]," "Radical emissaries," and countless other terms. (76) Carpetbagger, though, had decisive advantages over such competing words and phrases. It was fresh, concise, and catchy, one of those terms--like Manifest Destiny or Lost Cause--that resonated in the ear and, once heard, was all but unforgettable. Unlike "floater" or "outside white," carpetbagger lent itself to evocative visual imagery of the sort treasured by political cartoonists. It also expressed an element of material truth; newcomers from the North really did carry carpetbags.

Scalawag was catchy, but it lacked carpetbagger's visual imagery. Carpetbagger, moreover, far more than scalawag, contradicted deep-seated American convictions against newcomers in public office. Since early colonial days, Americans had assumed an organic connection between political representation and locality. A proper lawmaker or magistrate, if not actually born in a particular county or legislative district, ought at the very least to have lived in the area for many years and to identify thoroughly with local interests. In April 1868, for example, Isaac W. Hayne, attorney general "of the old WHITE MAN'S SOUTH CAROLINA," questioned the suitability of Republican Daniel H. Chamberlain to be attorney general. "Who is Mr. Chamberlain?" he asked. Possibly Chamberlain was a gentleman, he allowed, and "aught I know, learned in the law. But is he a citizen of the State? and if so, how long? Is he a member of her Bar? Is he a member of any Bar at all? How long has he practiced the profession of the law?" Hayne had nothing personal against Chamberlain, he said, "[b]ut so far as is known to the voters of South Carolina, he is a citizen of Massachusetts, who has come into South Carolina since the war, and settled down as A PLANTER on Wadmalaw Island. Whether he is a lawyer AT ALL ... is not known to the voters." (77) Carpetbaggers were, in short, meddlers in southern affairs.

The federal Constitution imposed residency requirements on members of Congress and the president; state constitutions included similar conditions for both voting and holding office. This concept of representation was not inherited from England (where very different practices prevailed), nor has it been the norm in much of the modern world. It was ingrained in Americans, though, in all sections of the country. Southern editors appealed to this distinctive American notion of representation when, as they were fond of doing, they quoted "Mr. Lincoln on Carpet Baggers." President Abraham Lincoln had attempted to restore southeastern Louisiana to the Union as early as 1862. There is "some apprehension," he had then written the military governor of Louisiana, "that Federal officers, not citizens of Louisiana, may be set up as candidates for Congress in that State." The election of such people, the president believed, would be most unfortunate: "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected, as would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous; and were I a member of the Congress here, I would vote against admitting any such man to a seat." (78)

The appeal to Lincoln, hardly a beloved figure in the postwar South, underscores an important reason why southern editors devoted more venom to carpetbaggers than to scalawags; the case that northern newcomers were bogus representatives of southern localities resonated not just with white southerners but with white northerners too. Southern editors closely monitored the ebb and flow of northern news stories about Reconstruction. They traded news columns with their Democratic counterparts in northern cities like small boys trading marbles. Knowing that their work was widely reprinted in the North, journalists in the southern states crafted their propaganda with one eye on the home audience and the other on northern readers. Whether it was cold calculation or instinct, editors clearly perceived that carpetbagger made better propaganda than scalawag. Northern Democrats reached the same conclusion. From Omaha to New York City, editors had little to say in 1868 about scalawags but gleefully reiterated southern attacks on carpetbaggers. (79) Some northern editors went so far as to lift carpetbagger out of its southern context; in October, widespread reports blamed the Democratic Party's losses in Indiana and Ohio in part on "carpetbaggers from New York and Michigan." (80)

Nor, as Republican E. L. Godkin exemplified, were Democratic editors the only ones who heeded the South's carpetbagger stories. Murat Halstead, conservative Republican editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, was also appalled when Arkansas's senators-elect, both northerners, arrived in Washington in the spring of 1868, soon to be followed, he noted, by like delegations from South Carolina and other states. "They are adventurers," he wrote, "representatives of little more than their own audacity." To Halstead, radical policy was creating "rotten borough states" in the South. "Could anything be more fatal to our perpetual public content and good order," he asked, "than the admission of such states?" (81) In a similar vein, James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald blamed the chaotic condition of the South in the presidential election on "carpet-bag squatters" and "carpet-bag officials." (82) In a thirteen-day period (September 18-30), the Herald succeeded in denouncing carpetbaggers twenty-four times (while mentioning scalawags twice).

The fate of Radical Reconstruction ultimately rested on its credibility with northern public opinion. Anything that weakened the northern public's faith in the radical program diminished the ability of southern Republicans to remain in power and reshape southern society. And, crucially, 1868 was a presidential election year, in which the main issue was the legitimacy of Radical Reconstruction.

When the New York World depicted carpetbaggers as a "race of Ichabod Cranes," it struck a chord that resonated with southern editors. A Connecticut schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane is the central character in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." A tall, gangly man with a small head and big ears, Ichabod is an altogether ridiculous looking fellow. He boards with local farmers to supplement his poor purse, changing habitations weekly. His vaunted education is largely confined to "Cotton Mather's History. of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed." His piety masks greed. He woos the daughter of a well-to-do farmer more for "her vast expectations" than any love of her person. The hapless schoolteacher is a coward to boot. In sum, Ichabod Crane is a caricature son of Puritan New England, totally lacking manly appearance and virtue, superficially educated, superstitious, greedy, and hypocritical. (83) In calling carpetbaggers Ichabod Cranes, the World expressed a motif common in southern journalism's critique of northern newcomers, a theme with deep roots in southern history: hatred of New England.

When Dixie editors dwelt on individual carpetbaggers, the journalists remarked on the northerners' home states, be it Maine or Ohio. When they wrote about the generality of carpetbaggers, however, they wrote as if the North were New England writ large and all carpetbaggers hailed from the Puritan states. Almost without exception, stories about carpetbagger origins focused on New England or Puritanism. In late 1867, for example, a journalist reported on the "animals" in Georgia's "Reconstruction Menagerie." The northern beasts, he claimed, were native to the mountains of "Maine and Vermont and Massachusetts." (No other states were mentioned.) These predatory New Englanders, the writer added, "have a very peculiar nasal bark or yelp." Another journalist reported "on good authority" that the entire northern contingent of Alabama's convention was composed of "squatters from New England, whose business before the war ... was the manufacture of tin pans, wooden nutmegs, and brass clocks." (84)

Editors' hostility to all things New England is difficult to exaggerate. They never tired, for example, of sarcastic comments on the "nasal whine" of New England speech. Beyond such sneers, their writing abounded with barbs at "New England fungi," "pumpkin pie eating Puritans," "New England schoolmarms," "Mr. Radical Codfish," "Puritan despotism," "New England negro-worshippers," "'poor white trash' from Plymouth Rock," and so on. The Galveston News equated the whipping of New England schoolchildren with the whipping of slaves. Another newspaper rehashed the Salem witchcraft trials as the purest expression of New England culture. One editor claimed that Satan was "the first Puritan." (85) The radical party, wrote the Memphis Bulletin, was made up "for the most part of ranting, raving New England Puritans, who hate a Southern gentleman and all his belongings, on the same principle that the devil does holy water.... The hatred of the New England Puritan of the Southern gentleman is the inherited hatred of the 'roundhead' of the 'cavalier,' and can no more die out, than can the leopard change his spots." (86) In a widely circulated letter, Benjamin H. Hill warned that approval of Georgia's radical constitution would deluge the state with "New England Governors; New England Congressmen, New England judges; New England superintendents of our great railroads, of the Asylums for our lunatic, deaf and dumb, and blind; New England tax collectors; New England treasurers; New England teachers, and New England adventurers...." (87)

Like the concern about newcomers in public office, the anti-New England motif had wide appeal in the North. Certainly most northern Democrats were no admirers of Puritan ways, and many Republicans were ambivalent as well. Alter all, the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," depicting Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane as a coward and a fool, was an American, not a southern, classic. At a time when Boston was still the intellectual capital of the United States, many northerners resented New England's cultural hegemony and moral arrogance almost as much as southerners did. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune printed an excellent example in late May 1865, just six weeks after Appomattox. "We hear" from the South, the editorial read, "that many of the Blacks, thoroughly distrusting their old masters, place all confidence in the Yankees who have recently come among them, and will work for these on almost any terms." This was very much to be regretted, the writer said, because while some Yankees would justify black people's trust, "others will grossly abuse it." Like southern editors, the author assumed that the Yankee newcomers were New Englanders. He allowed that while New England produced many good people, it also sired "some of the very meanest beings that ever stood on two legs--cunning, rapacious, hypocritical, ever ready to skin a flint with a borrowed knife and make (for others) a soup out of the peelings." Such miscreants had been "'run out'" of their hometowns and now wandered the land "shuffling and swindling." If freedmen started trusting Yankees just because they were Yankees, the writer said, "this unclean brood will overspread the South like locusts, starting schools and prayer-meetings, at every crossroads." As businessmen, Yankees of this ilk would buy up plantations, then sell and make a financial killing, "leaving the negroes in rags and foodless, with Winter just coming on." If the author had put carpetbags in the hands of his prototypical New Englanders, the New York Tribune would have claimed the dubious honor of inventing carpetbagger more than two years earlier than the Montgomery Daily Mail. (88)

The imagery of a carpetbag invasion from New England appealed to emotions akin to nativism. The northerners were seen as "Abolition emmissaries [sic]," agents "of a treacherous foreign influence," the same foreign influence that had spawned militant antislavery activism and Radical Republicanism. If these carriers of New England viruses planted themselves on southern soil, southern culture would be destroyed from within. New England influence even helped explain the despised James W. Hunnicutt. In 1866 the Richmond New Nation announced that its press and type had been donated by the "good and loyal people of New England." The radical paper lamented that the people of the South did not "know and understand" New Englanders better and added menacingly, "They will by and bye." (89)

Seeing prejudice instead of what Du Bois labeled "The Propaganda of History," historians have failed to appreciate the central role of carpetbagger-scalawag rhetoric in the counter-Reconstruction movement that swept the South in the early years of Radical Reconstruction. (90) The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan as the military arm of the southern Democratic Party in 1868 coincided with the rhetorical blizzard manufactured by southern editors. This was no more coincidental than the first appearance of the discourse in conjunction with the constitutional conventions. The Klan was counter-Reconstruction's spear point. Such an "antimovement," rhetorician Leland M. Griffin has written, has an inner "rhetorical movement," a scaffolding of ideas whose purpose is to mobilize public opinion in support of transforming or destroying existing structures and beliefs. Seen in this light, editors and Klansmen were brothers-in-arms. The white press guarded the Klan's exposed flank, minimizing the violence or blaming it on victims. Even more important, it created a structure of beliefs that justified the Klan's actions. (91)

Toward this end, carpetbagger again chalked up tangible advantages over scalawag. Far more than the latter term, carpetbagger heightened white southerners' sense of grievance against the North, long a crucial element of southern identity. Historian Sheldon Hackney has argued that southern violence, which was prevalent in the region during Radical Reconstruction, was rooted in white southerners' "siege mentality" and deep feelings of "persecution." In his analysis, white southerners were "most conscious of being southerners" and most prone to violence when they felt under "attack from outside forces." (92) Carpetbaggers clearly represented such outside forces; moreover, to an overwhelming degree southern editors insisted that carpetbaggers came from New England, the nucleus of evil in the southern worldview.

In the late 1860s, as southerners looked back at Appomattox, they believed they had laid down their arms in good faith and then during Presidential Reconstruction had abided by the conditions set for the South's restoration to the Union. In their view, the North had repaid these good-faith efforts by sending cruel Yankee emissaries to rule over them and by elevating Negroes over white men. The plight of the southern people, wrote Benjamin H. Hill in one of his 1867 public letters, was pitiable: "They are helpless. They have no arms.... They are poor. Little Bureau officers daily insult them. Little sergeants daily oppress them. Little assessors and collectors daily rob them. Black and white spies daily dog them." (93) White southerners, in short, were victims of Yankee despotism, and carpetbaggers--both the group and the word--came to epitomize their sense of injury, thereby reinforcing their identity as a people oppressed and legitimating counter-Reconstruction intimidation and violence.

The language of carpetbagger infestation, moreover, not only justified Klan terrorism to white Southerners (akin to preaching to the choir) but also justified that same violence to millions of northern Democrats who had opposed Radical Reconstruction from the beginning. Furthermore, most northern Republicans were far from immune to the South's siren song; for them the jury was still out on the benefits of the great radical experiment. To malign a Republican leader as a scalawag merely discredited an indigenous southerner, about whom northerners were inclined to be ambivalent. On the one hand, such a person could be seen as a loyal Union man who had endured wartime persecution; on the other hand, there was always the taint of the "moss back," the turncoat, and the collaborator about such people. In contrast, the swelling chorus of carpetbagger propaganda in southern and northern newspapers undermined the legitimacy and sullied the reputations of those southern Republicans with whom the great northern public most readily identified: young white men from middle-class northern families, brave soldiers and Freedmen's Bureau agents, idealistic planters and businessmen--all endeavoring to plant the seeds of northern free-labor civilization in the benighted South. In tagging the North's free-labor emissaries as carpetbaggers (with encumbering mythology), southern editors pierced the heart of Reconstruction's legitimacy in a way that calling men scalawags did not.

Carpetbagger was a ricochet bullet that careened into multiple targets: elected officials--governors, congressmen, sheriffs--the Freedmen's Bureau, the Loyal Leagues, the missionary aid societies, and the army of occupation. Carpetbagger targeted the North's self-image, insinuating that the North's best people in the South were tainted with Puritan fanaticism, miscegenation, and corruption. In making carpetbagger the preeminent symbol of Reconstruction, southern newsmen in effect forced the Yankee migrants to shoulder the burden of what David W. Blight has called the "emancipationist legacy." (94) In discrediting carpetbaggers, southern editors discredited the emancipationist legacy itself and with it the ideological raison d'etre of Radical Reconstruction.

Northern victory in the Civil War crushed more than the Confederacy and the southern economy; it despoiled as well the symbolic foundations of slave society--the South's so-called symbolic polity. Gone were tattered flags and Confederate images on stamps and money; gone, too, were auction blocks, holding pens, slave patrols, and slave codes; above all, gone were the slaves for which the war had been fought. In their place were restive black men and women who wanted wages, land, dignity, and marriages registered with the Freedmen's Bureau. As the old regime toppled, the core conviction that the South was a white man's country was imperiled. At first, like European clerics and aristocrats resisting Old World revolutions, southern custodians of the symbolic polity (chief among whom were newspaper editors and lawmakers) responded with "dogmatic reiterations" of the "old symbolism.... amazing elaborations of the old images and analogues." But "symbolic activity" is an ongoing process, and postwar southern symbol-making, while reactionary, was not stagnant. (95) Gradually, new and more creative modes of symbolic expression emerged, including not only greedy carpetbaggers and Judas scalawags but also Lost Cause iconography, bold Klansmen, heroic redeemers, and caricatures of free blacks. Facing the unprecedented challenge of Radical Reconstruction, southern editors--more than anyone else--reordered the southern symbolic world and used the new symbolism to forge a rhetorical language that defeated Reconstruction in the short term and ultimately staved off full implementation of the North's Reconstruction goals for another hundred years. So viewed, the creation of carpetbagger in particular was a rhetorical stroke of genius because its protean symbolism played in both North and South and undermined radical policy on multiple levels. The rhetoric of "Negro-scalawag rule" was one-dimensional and regional; the rhetoric of "Negro-carpetbag rule" was multi-dimensional and national. It was essential, moreover, that the new symbolism, the new ideology, succeed at the national level. It was not enough to undermine Reconstruction at home; to truly throw off the yoke, it had to be discredited above the Potomac too. Adroitly, carpetbagger contributed to this end.

(1) W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 186-1880 (1935; 2nd ed., New York, 1962), 728. The author would like to thank Michael Les Benedict and Heather Cox Richardson for their instructive comments on an earlier version of this paper, presented April 4, 2003, at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. The author especially thanks his friend and colleague James Tice Moore for his laborious readings and insightful commentaries on the many drafts of this essay. Finally, the author is grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 2005 Summer Stipend and to Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Humanities and Sciences for a 2006 Career Scholarship Enhancement Award grant.

(2) Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction. 1865-1877 (New York, 1965), 122-31, 188-213; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961), 152-73, 197-209; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), especially pp. 346-92: James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (3rd ed.; New York, 2001), 633-37; Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), especially pp. xii-xv. For incisive analyses of Radical Reconstruction's systemic weaknesses, see the essays in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region. Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), and Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr., eds., The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge, 1991).

(3) Hodding Carter, Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace (Athens, Ga., 1969): David A. Lincove, Reconstruction in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 2000), 160, 267, 277-78, 289, 298, 327, 331, 335, 348, 356-57, 364, 388, 452, 457, 469-70; E. Culpepper Clark, Francis Warrington Dawson and the Politics of Restoration: South Carolina, 1874-1889 (University, Ala., 1980); Charles F. Ritter, "The Press in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina and the End of Reconstruction, 1865-1877: Southern Men with Northern Interests" (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1976).

(4) Richard H. Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction South, edited by John W. Quist (Athens, Ga., 2004).

(5) Michael Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science Quarterly, 82 (June 1967), 194-95.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Michael Calvin McGee, "The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66 (February 1980), 1-16.

(8) Ibid., 7.

(9) Carl H. Moneyhon, "Carpetbaggers," in Ron Tyler et al., eds., The New Handbook of Texas (6 vols.; Austin, 1996), I, 984. Before the Civil War, denizens of the western frontier had sometimes described wildcat bankers as "carpetbaggers," and on occasion antebellum southerners may have used the term to describe peddlers and other suspicious strangers. Richard N. Current, "Carpetbaggers," in David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1979), 182-83; Franklin, Reconstruction, 93. However, carpetbagger does not appear in any of the standard dictionaries or reference works on American language that were published prior to Reconstruction.

(10) Richard N. Current, "Carpetbaggers Reconsidered," in David H. Pinckney and Theodore Ropp, eds., A Festschrift for Frederick B. Artz (Durham, N.C., 1964), 139-57 (quotation on p. 148). For analyses of the size of the carpetbagger migration, see Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1984), 137-38: and Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2nd ed; New York, 1998), 6-7.

(11) Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 107. Richard L. Hume has examined the 159 northern delegates who served in southern constitutional conventions, and he found that the great majority came from New England and the mid-Atlantic states (especially New York). Hume, "Carpetbaggers in the Reconstruction South: A Group Portrait of Outside Whites in the 'Black and Tan' Constitutional Conventions," Journal of American History, 64 (September 1977), 318-19. A similar pattern emerges with respect to the 61 carpetbaggers who served in Congress during Reconstruction. Thirty-seven (61 percent) of the carpetbagger congressmen and senators were born and raised in New England and upstate New York. Five more hailed from northern Pennsylvania, Ohio's Western Reserve, northern Illinois, and Wisconsin. In sum, 42 of the 61 carpetbaggers (69 percent) represented New England and the upper North. The author has relied on Current, "Carpetbaggers Reconsidered," 147, for the list of carpetbaggers in Congress, with this exception: Thomas Haughey, born in Scotland, was living in Alabama when the war broke out, making him in my judgment a scalawag, not a carpetbagger. Thus, whereas Current counted 62 carpetbaggers in Congress, I have counted 61. Like Current, l used the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-1989 (Washington, D.C., 1989) for data about the legislators. The upper North lower North breakdown of the carpetbaggers is mine. My categorization is based on where individuals were born and grew up rather than where they were living at the time of the Civil War.

(12) William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961); Michael C. C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 (Cambridge. Mass., 1978); Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 138-39.

(13) New Orleans Times. December 20, 1867 ("Black and Tan Convention"); Natchez Democrat, January 13, 1868 ("Black-and-Tan Convention"); Montgomery Daily Mail, November 8 ("Piebald Convention"), 17 ("Composition of the Menagerie"), 20 ("Piebald Asylum" and "Menagerie"), December 3, 4, 5, 7 (all "Menagerie"). 1867, January 12, March 17, 1868 (both "Black Crook"): Augusta Constitutionalist. November 13 ("Montgomery menagerie"), December 10 ("Georgia Nigger Convention"), 1867, January 18 ("Bones and Banjo Convention"), 1868; Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 27 ("Meeting of the Circus and Menagerie"), December 18 ("Pope's Menagerie"), 1867: New Orleans Bee, January 8, 1868 ("Mississippi Black Crook"); Charleston Mercury, December 12, 1867 ("Black Crook"); Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 14, 1867 ("Mongrel Convention"). This note and some notes that follow document clusters of short quotations and cite a large number of newspaper articles. On these occasions the parenthetical words and phrases in the notes are sometimes the headlines of articles and are sometimes taken from the text of articles, which are often untitled. The newspapers of the time are always quite short, and the quotations can easily be located even in untitled articles. Three of the newspapers used--Richmond New Nation, Richmond Southern Opinion, and Tuscaloosa (Ala.) Independent Monitor--were only published in weekly editions. In all other instances, unless specifically indicated, citations are to daily editions of journals.

(14) Montgomery Daily Mail, October 11 ("Circusses" [sic], "circus and menagerie companies"), November 17 ("Composition of the Menagerie"), December 3 ("The Menagerie"), 4 ("Be Gone With You, Carpet-Baggers!"), 5 ("Negroes to the Rear"), 1867: Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 27 ("Meeting of the Circus and Menagerie"), December 25 ("Visit to the Reconstruction Menagerie Sketch of the Principal Animals"), 1867.

(15) David Ewen, Complete Book of the American Musical Theater (New York, 1958), 346-48 (quotations); Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York, 1984), 81-82.

(16) Untitled article, New Orleans Bee, January 8, 1868. See also "The Latest Theatrical Novelty--Black Crook Eclipsed," Charleston Mercury, December 12, 1867; untitled article, ibid., January 22, 1868: "Local Affairs," Montgomery Daily Mail, January 12, 1868; "What is Said about the Radical Defeat in Alabama," ibid., February 14, 1868; and "Alabama," ibid., March 17. 1868.

(17) "Alabama," in The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1867 ... (New York, 1868), 30-35: "Georgia," ibid., 366-67; "Louisiana," ibid., 464: "Virginia," ibid., 763; "Georgia," in The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1868 ... (New York, 1869), 308: "Louisiana," ibid., 428; "Virginia." ibid., 758: "Radical Circus," Montgomery Daily Mail, December 7, 1867.

(18) Untitled article, Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, October 16, 1867; Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (4 vols.; Chicago, 1921), III, 823-24; Willis Brewer, Alabama: Her History, Resources, War Record and Public Men, from 1540 to 1872 (2nd ed.; Spartanburg, S.C., 1975), 482, 677-78, 684.

(19) "General Howard on the Bureau," Montgomery Daily Mail. August 16, 1866 (second quotation); "Amusing the Friends of the President"), ibid., August 16. 1866: "A. J. Hamilton, of Texas," ibid., August 24, 1866 (first quotation); "Curious Facts," ibid., February 21, 1867: "No Convention," ibid., March 12, 1867; New York Tribune quoted in "'A Virulent Rebel Sheet,'" Montgomery Daily Mail, August 4, 1867 (third quotation). For comparison with another Alabama editor, see John Kent Folmar, "Reaction to Reconstruction: John Forsyth and the Mobile Advertiser and Register, 1865-1867," Alabama Historical Quarterly, 37 (Winter 1975), 245-61; and Carl R. Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press: Editorial Spokesmen of the Nineteenth Century (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 118-48.

(20) A valuable guide to newspapers of the period is American Newspaper Directory (New York, 1873). On the role of the press in Reconstruction, see Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, xi-xiii; Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill, 2005), 12, 192-94; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1994); and Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

(21) Michael Perman, "Benjamin Harvey Hill." in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (24 vols.: New York, 1999), X, 771-72; Benjamin H. Hill Jr., Senator Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia: His Life, Speeches and Writings (Atlanta, 1891).

(22) Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, March 26, 1867 ("Military Reconstruction Bill"); Montgomery Daily Mail, March 29, 1867 ("Sherman Military bill"); Charleston Mercury, February 26 ("Military Act"), March 1 ("Military Bill"), March 8 ("Military Act"), 1867. Other examples are Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 14 ("Military Bill"), February 19 ("Senator Sherman's Reconstruction Bill"), March 8 ("Sherman Law"), 1867; Augusta Constitutionalist, February 26, 1867 ("Military Bill"); and Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 1 ("military bill"), March 28 ("military reconstruction bill"), 1867. Most northern papers used similar terms; see, for example, articles in the New York Times, March 1, 2, 3, 1867; and the New York Tribune, March 2, 3, 4, 5, 1867.

(23) Montgomery Daily Mail, March 5 ("Military-Sherman Bill"), April 10 ("Shermanized States"), June 30 ("Shermanize the fairest land" and "Sherman plan"), July 17 ("Sherman Act" and "Sherman plan"), 1867; Mobile Advertiser and Register, March 2 ("Sherman's Bill"), 12 ("Sherman military bill"), 13 ("Sherman bill"), 1867; Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, February 20 ("Sherman Bill"), March 1 ("Sherman Bill"), 6 ("Sherman bill" and "Military Government bill"), 1867; Richmond Daily Dispatch, March 8 ("Sherman Law"), 11 ("Sherman Bill"), June 12 ("Sherman bill"), 1867; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 17 ("Sherman bill"), 26 ("Sherman bill"), 1867.

(24) Montgomery Daily Mail, August 2 ("imported Radicals" and "Southern renegades"), September 21 ("Rad Yankees," "Radical colored-ites," and "Southern white simon-pure loyalists"), 1867; Columbus Daily Sun, August 6, 1867 ("Judas Iscariots").

(25) "The Black Vomit," Montgomery Daily Mail, September 17, 1867.

(26) "Republican Nominations in Lowndes County," ibid., September 28, 1867.

(27) Ibid., November 12 ("carpet bag gentry"), 14 ("carpet bag Bureau man"), 19 ("carpet bag fellow"), 30 ("Carpet Bagers and Negroes to the Front"), December 3 ("One of the Representative Men of Radicalism"), 4 ("Radical Nominations for State Officers" and other articles), 5 ("Carpet-Bagism" and other articles), 7 ("Radical Circus"), 8 ("Miscegenation"), 1867. Scattered references to carpet sacks and carpetbags also appeared in Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee during the fall of 1867. The word carpetbagger, as well as the idea behind it, was clearly nascent. Richmond Weekly Enquirer, September 26, 1867 ("unhappy "co-operationists'--who packed their carpet-bags in great haste"): Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, October 5 ("haversack in hand'--description of Tennessee Republican), 11 ("'carpet sack' residents and negroes"), 1867: Columbus Daily Sun, October 27 ("'carpet bag' disciple of New England"), November 13 ("carpet bag itinerants"), 1867; Macon Georgia Weekly Telegraph. November 8 ("carpetbag sect"), 1867: Macon Journal and Messenger quoted in Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 20, 1867 ("carpet-sack bummers").

(28) "General Pope Removing Office-holders," Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 14, 1867; "From Montgomery," Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, December 14, 1867: "From Alabama," Augusta Constitutionalist, December 14, 1867; "From Montgomery," Columbus Daily Sun, December 14, 1867; "Richmond," Dallas Herald, December 21, 1867 (the Herald was confused about the origins of the story); "From Alabama," Washington National Intelligencer, December 14, 1867; "The Men Who Are to Govern Alabama," Montgomery Daily Mail reprinted in Raleigh Daily Sentinel, December 19, 1867; "Prentice on Our Menagerie," Louisville Journal reprinted in Montgomery Daily Mail, December 8, 1867.

(29) "The Carpet-Baggers." New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, December 9, 1867 (reprinted in the Selma Daily Messenger, December 14, 1867, the Columbus Daily Sun, December 17, 1867, the Montgomery Daily Mail, December 13, 1867, and doubtless other newspapers). Between 1867 and 1870, newspapers in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina commented on the origins of carpetbagger and scalawag. No consensus emerged about the origin of scalawag, but in regard to carpetbagger, the southern press agreed with the Commercial Bulletin that the Montgomery Daily Mail had invented the term. See "Carpet Baggers,'" Montgomery Daily Mail, May 18, 1868; "Carpet Baggers," ibid., August 25, 1868; "The Words 'Carpet-Bagger' and 'Scalawag,'" Richmond Daily Dispatch, June 15, 1868; "'Carpet-Baggers' and 'Scallawags,'" Richmond Daily Enquirer and Examiner. June 13. 1868: untitled article, Charleston Mercury, June 18, 1868: and "The Term Carpet-Bagger," New Orleans Bee, June 12, 1870.

(30) "This Week," Nation, February 13, 1868, p. 123.

(31) "The Shackled States: Curious Revelations of the Alabama Black Crook," New York World, February 22, 1868.

(32) "This Week," Nation, February 13, 1868, p. 121.

(33) Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, "What is a Scalawag?" Alabama Review, 25 (January 1972), 56-61; Meridian Mercury quoted in Columbus Daily Sun, February 11, 1868 (It is unclear whether the Meridian editor was being quoted directly or paraphrased.); "'Carpet-Baggers' and 'Scalawags,'" Richmond Daily Enquirer and Examiner, June 13, 1868; Joseph E. Worcester, A Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, 1860), 1,279. The Richmond Daily Dispatch ("The Words 'Carpet-Bagger' and 'Scalawag,'" June 15, 1868) agreed with the Enquirer and Examiner that the term was new to political discourse.

(34) Augusta Constitutionalist, January 4 ("Southern Loyalists"), October 12 ("Southern renegades"), 1867; Macon Georgia Weekly Telegraph, April 12 ("Southern Loyalist"), July 26 ("renegade Southerners"), November 29 ("mean native whites"), 1867; Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 20 ("Southern Loyalists"), July 11 ("so-called loyalists"), 1867: Richmond Weekly, Enquirer, October 10 ("so-called Southern Loyalists"), 1867; Selma Daily Messenger, November 9 ("Southern Loyalists"), 1867, January 15 ("native renegades"), 1868; Montgomery Daily Mail, August 2, October 4, 1867 (both "Southern renegades"): Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, October 16 ("Southern renegades"), December 4 ("Southern vagabonds"), 1867; Montgomery Daily Advertiser, May 24, 1867 ("Southern vagabonds"); Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, September 6, 1867 ("Southern loyalists"): Charleston Mercury, January 29 ("renegade Southerners"), February 28 ("native renegades"), April 8 ("Southern renegades"), 1868; Mobile Advertiser and Register, March 3 ("Southern 'loyalists'"), September 4 ("renegades in the South"), 1867. Two other common propagandistic phrases hurled at native white Republicans were "poor white trash" (Mobile Advertiser and Register, August 7, 1867) and "Southern Apostates" (Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, December 25, 1867).

(35) "Colored Congressmen," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, August 7, 1867; "Cuffee for Congress," Columbus Daily Sun, September 7, 1867.

(36) Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 6, 1867 (first quotation): Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, October 30, 1867 (second quotation). Virginia's Reconstruction convention was called the Underwood Convention after its president, John C. Underwood.

(37) Mobile Advertiser and Register, December 12 (first quotation), 18 (second quotation), 1867: Charleston Mercury, April 7. 1868 (third and fourth quotations).

(38) Earl L. Bell and Kenneth C. Crabbe, The Augusta Chronicle: Indomitable Voice of Dixie. 1785-1960 (Athens, Ga., 1960), 70-80 (quotation on p. 77).

(39) Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, September 4, October 23, 30, November 6, 13, 20, 27 (quotation), 1867.

(40) "Meeting of the Circus and Menagerie," ibid., November 27, 1867.

(41) "The Shackled States: Curious Revelations of the Alabama Black Crook," New York World, February 22, 1868.

(42) Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967), 77-94.

(43) Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 114.

(44) Selma Daily Messenger, July 28, 1867 (first quotation); Alexandria Louisiana Democrat, December 4, 1867 (second quotation); "The Black Vomit," Montgomery Daily Mail, September 17, 1867 (third quotation); "Miscegenation," ibid., December 8, 1867 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(45) "The Shackled States: Curious Revelations of the Alabama Black Crook," New York World, February 22, 1868 (first and second quotations); Carl Van Doren, ed., Tales by Washington Irving (London, 1918), 54.

(46) "Speech on the Situation, By Hon. B. H. Hill," Columbus Daily Sun, March 15, 1868 (first quotation); "Southern Apostates," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, December 25, 1867 (second quotation); Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974), 194; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 183-86; Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 136-59.

(47) Columbus Daily Sun, November 3, 1868; Foner, Reconstruction, 297; McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 599; Hodding Carter, The Angry Scar: The Story of Reconstruction (New York, 1959), 289.

(48) "Our Imported Masters: Carpet-bag Monopoly of Offices in the South," Nashville Republican Banner, October 4, 1868; "Self-Government," Richmond Whig quoted in Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 10, 1868; "Foreign Radicals in the Convention," Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 10, 1868: "Carpet-Bag Government," Columbus Daily Sun, October 17, 1868; ["Florida has elected three United States Senators"], Charleston Mercury, June 30, 1868: "Our White Black List," Montgomery Daih, Mail, February 11, 1868; "Alabama Carpet-Baggers at Washington," New York Herald, July 22, 1868, quoted in Montgomery Daily Mail, July 27, 1868; "The Seven Senators," Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, May 28, 1868.

(49) Ted Tunnell, Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 2001), 125.

(50) Montgomery Daily Mail. February 1-11, 1868; Montgomery Daily Advertiser, February 1-11, 1868.

(51) For the newspapers mentioned above and in the paragraphs that follow, within the designated time frames, the author made copies of every article in which carpetbagger or scalawag appeared and counted the words. In deciding which newspapers to use, the author tried to choose representative Democratic/Conservative papers across the South. He looked in the American Newspaper Directory for information about circulation, influence, and partisanship. He also examined the secondary literature to see which newspapers historians had used in studying particular states. He tended to focus on organs in state capitals. It was also essential that both carpetbagger and scalawag be in a newspaper's lexicon when the count began. While he plainly has not read or counted words in every major newspaper in the South, he has read important journals in every state except Florida. The tallies for every newspaper in which words were counted is included in these pages. With respect to time frame, he counted words when things were happening. In the case of Tennessee, it had no convention, so he chose the presidential election. That research plan led him to study North Carolina during the presidential election and to have another look at Georgia in the same period. While all of the newspapers examined were bitterly partisan, some were more so than others. The Memphis Daily Appeal, Galveston News, and Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, for example, devoted comparatively less space to attacking Republicans than did the Nashville Republican Banner, Montgomery Daily Mail, and Raleigh Daily Sentinel. Hence, in the former journals, articles assailing carpetbaggers and scalawags were fewer. All the newspapers freely reprinted stories from other papers. The author made no distinction between reprinted and original columns, believing that both types reflected the political climate and editorial decision-making.

(52) Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1881 (University, Ala., 1977), 46.

(53) Randolph B. Campbell, "Carpetbagger Rule in Reconstruction Texas: An Enduring Myth," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 97 (April 1994), 587-96; James Alex Baggett, "Origins of Early Texas Republican Party Leadership," Journal of Southern History, 40 (August 1974), 441-54: James Alex Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 2003), 205-6.

(54) "Texas," in The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events ... 1868, pp. 727-33.

(55) Jonathan M. Atkins, "William Gannaway Brownlow," in Garraty and Carnes, eds., American National Biography, III, 772-74: Baggett, Scalawags, 190-92; E. Merton Coulter, William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (3rd ed., Knoxville, 1971), 325-40.

(56) "Letter from Hon. B. H. Hill," Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, reprinted in Columbus Daily Sun, August 7, 1867: "Tennessee," Columbus Daily Sun, August 11, 1867; "A Picture of the Peace Grant Intends to Give Us," ibid., September 30, 1868; "The Despotism of Brownlow Recommended for Alabama," Montgomery Daily Mail, October 29, 1867; untitled articles, Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, June 15, October 2, 1867; "Tennessee," Charleston Mercury, July 31, 1867; "The Latest Murder by Brownlow's Militia," ibid., September 26, 1867; "The Alabama Convention," ibid., November 21, 1867; Coulter, William G. Brownlow, 338-39.

(57) "Brownlow and His Work," July 24, 1868 (first quotation); ["Gov. Brownlow and his thieving pimps"], Memphis Daily Appeal, September 26, 1868; "Tennessee," Charleston Mercury, July 31, 1867 (second quotation): "'A Picture of the Peace Grant Intends to Give Us," Columbus Daily Sun, September 30, 1868.

(58) "Republican Government in Three States," Washington National Intelligencer quoted in Augusta Constitutionalist, October 31, 1868; New York World and Chicago Times quoted in "Senator Brownlow," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 6, 1867 (World); and "Brownlow," ibid., November 27, 1867 (Times); Detroit Post cited in Nashville Republican Banner, September 24, 1868.

(59) "The Condition of Tennessee," New York Herald, September 18, 1868.

(60) "Letter from Hon. B. H. Hill," Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, reprinted in Columbus Daily Sun, August 7, 1867 (first and fourth quotations): "Negro Suffrage and Negro Labor," ibid., August 11, 1867 (second and third quotations).

(61) Untitled articles, Little Rock Daily Arkansas Gazette, June 15, October 2, 6 (quotation), 1867; "Tennessee," Charleston Mercury, July 31, 1867; "Another Letter from Gov. Perry of S.C.," Montgomery Daily Advertiser, June 11, 1867; "The Despotism of Brownlow Recommended for Alabama," Montgomery Daily Mail, October 29, 1867.

(62) Nashville Republican Banner, September 23-30, 1868.

(63) "The Majesty of the Law," ibid., September 29, 1868 (second and third quotations); "A Horrible Revelation: One Hundred and Fifty Alabama Freedmen Sold Into Slavery by CarpetBaggers," ibid. (text of story reprinted from the Mobile Register); "Our Municipal Atrocity," Nashville Republican Banner, September 30, 1868 (first quotation; text of story reprinted from the Louisville Journal). Some (though certainly not all) of the Republican Banner's carpetbagger rhetoric is explained by Nashville's northern-born mayor. See Robert M. McBride, "'Northern, Military, Corrupt, and Transitory': Augustus E. Alden, Nashville's Carpetbagger Mayor," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 37 (Spring 1978), 63-67; and Gary L. Kornell, "Reconstruction in Nashville, 1867-1869," ibid., 30 (Fall 1971), 277-87.

(64) The headlines in the Memphis Daily Appeal are "Brownlow on the "Carpet Baggers,'" September 28; "Carpet-Bag--Trunks" and "Five Car Loads of Arms for the Carpetbaggers," October 3; and "A Carpet-bagger on the Hunt for an Office," October 6, 1868.

(65) In addition to Coulter, William G. Brownlow, see James Welch Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1860-1869 (2nd ed., Gloucester, Mass., 1966); Thomas B. Alexander, Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville, 1950); Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge, 1988); and Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869 (Chapel Hill, 1997). Brownlow only appears as a scalawag in the works of modern scholars writing general histories. See Degler, Other South, 192-94: Foner, Reconstruction, 301: and Baggett, Scalawags, 21. 26-27.

(66) Baggett, Scalawags, 187.

(67) Untitled article, Raleigh Daily Sentinel, September 24, 1868 (first quotation); "Why Did the White Radicals Fail to Come to the Late Radical Mass Meeting in This City?" ibid., September 23, 1868 (second quotation).

(68) Ibid., September 23 to November 3, 1868. William C. Harris entitles two of his chapters "Scalawag Governor: Part I" and "Scalawag Governor: Part II" in William Woods Holden: Firebrand of North Carolina Politics (Baton Rouge, 1987).

(69) "The Career of a Radical Representative Man in the South," Washington National Intelligencer, January 7, 1868 (first, second, and third quotations); Richard Lowe, "Virginia's Reconstruction Convention: General Schofield Rates the Delegates," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 80 (July 1972), 346 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(70) "Speeches of Hunnicutt, Conway, and others," Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 18, 1867 (quotations); Richard Lowe, Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1856-1870 (Charlottesville, 1991), 57-59; James W. Hunnicutt, The Conspiracy Unveiled: The South Sacrificed; or, The Horrors of Secession (Philadelphia, 1863).

(71) Richmond New Nation, March 22, May 24 (first, second, and third quotations), 1866; "Republican Convention ... Hunnicutt Inflames the Mass--Gives Cold Comfort to New Recruits," Richmond Daily Dispatch, August 2, 1867 (fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations).

(72) "Senator Brownlow," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 6, 1867; "Wisdom and Foolishness," Augusta Constitutionalist, February 20, 1868, quoting the Washington National Intelligencer; untitled article, Charleston Mercury, May 15, 1868 (first quotation); "The Hunnicutt Convention," Richmond Southern Opinion, December 14, 1867; "The Hunnicutt Convention," Washington National Intelligencer, January 6, 1868; "Lights in the Virginia Convention," Montgomery Daily Mail, December 11, 1867 ("Hunnicutt Hall"); "Scallawag Complaints," Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 8, 1868 ("Hunnicutt Hall").

(73) "Registration," Memphis Daily Appeal, January 25, 1868; "The Elections in Georgia," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, November 13, 1867; "A Loyal Leaguer Impaled," Macon Georgia Weekly Telegraph, April 12, 1867; "Virginia Politics," Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, June 5, 1867; untitled article, ibid., October 11, 1867; "'At Home Again,'" Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 11, 1868 (first quotation): "The War of the Carpet-Baggers upon the Native Union Men," Richmond Weekly Enquirer, April 9, 1868 (second quotation); "A Terrible Beast," Augusta Constitutionalist, October 2, 1867 (third and fourth quotations). Although Richard Lowe (Republicans in Reconstruction Virginia, 131) says that Hunnicutt was also called a carpetbagger, the Richmond newspapers consistently described him as a scalawag.

(74) Columbus Daily Sun, February 10 to March 10, 1868: Augusta Constitutionalist, February 10 to March 10, 1868; Elizabeth Studley Nathans, "Rufus Brown Bullock," in Garraty and Carnes, eds., American National Biography, III, 907-9. For the references to Bullock see Columbus Daily Sun, October 8 ("carpet-bagger"), 23 ("inflated carpet bagger"), 24 ("scalawag excellency"), 28 ("carpet-bagger"), November 1 ("carpet-bag Governor"), 1868.

(75) Foner, Reconstruction, 294.

(76) Montgomery Daily Mail, September 21 ("rag-tag Yankee Radicals"), 27 ("Northern adventurers" and "Northern emissaries"), 1867; Charleston Mercury, March 6 ("outside white"), April 4 ("Northern squatters"), 1868; Augusta Constitutionalist, January 7, February 14, 1868 (both "'floaters"); Mobile Advertiser and Register, August 7 ("imported Radicals"), November 5 ("unclean birds of the North"), 1867; Jackson (Miss.) Daily Clarion, February 27, 1868 ("Radical emissaries").

(77) Isaac W. Hayne, "Another Card," Charleston Mercury, April 13, 1868.

(78) "Mr. Lincoln on Carpet Baggers," Charleston Mercury, May 14, 1868. The Columbus Daily Sun printed this Lincoln letter under the title "What Mr. Lincoln Thought," August 10, 1867, before carpetbagger had been coined. In 1868 the Raleigh Daily Sentinel (May 5) printed the letter under the same title as the Mercury, and the Richmond Southern Opinion (October 24) published it as "Mr. Lincoln's Opinion of 'Carpet-Baggers.'" The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette (June 21) printed it without any title. The letter doubtless appeared in other newspapers.

(79) New York World, February 14 ("Southern Correspondence: Georgia"), September 19 ("The Great Bugbear"), September 30 ("Whew!"), 1868; Washington National Intelligencer, February 11 ("Negroes in Congress"), 14 ("The Alabama Election), 17 ("The Alabama Election"), March 23 ("Reconstruction in Arkansas"), 1868; New York Herald, September 18 ("Rejoicing Among the Carpet-Baggers"), 20 ("Eastern Texas and Northern Louisiana"), 22 ("Virginia"), 1868; New York Times, July 27, 1868 ("South Carolina"); Baltimore Sun quoted in Montgomery Daily Mail, March 27, 1868; Omaha Herald quoted in Montgomery Daily Mail, March 28, 1868.

(80) Northern election reports reprinted in Raleigh Daily Sentinel, October 20 (quotation), 22, 23, 29, 1868; and in Augusta Constitutionalist, October 21, 27, 1868.

(81) Murat Halstead quoted in "The 'Trooly Loll' Senators," Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, June 3, 1868.

(82) "Eastern Texas and Northern Louisiana," New York Herald, September 20, 1868 (first quotation); "Florida," ibid., September 27, 1868 (second quotation).

(83) "The Shackled States: Curious Revelations of the Alabama Black Crook," New York World, February 22, 1868 (first quotation); Van Doren, ed., Tales by Washington Irving, 35-65 (second quotation on p. 41; third quotation on p. 43).

(84) "A Visit to the Reconstruction Menagerie--Sketch of the Principal Animals: Special Correspondence of the Louisville Courier," Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, December 25, 1867 (first, second, third, and fourth quotations); "The Personnel of the Alabama 'Unconditionally Loyal' Convention," Montgomery Daily Mail, December 3, 1867 (fifth and sixth quotations; quoting New York Metropolitan Record). See also "Composition of the State Convention," Charleston Mercury, January 6, 1868; and "Sell Not Your Birthright for a Mess of Pottage," ibid., April 7, 1868.

(85) Augusta Constitutionalist, November 1, 1868 ("nasal whine"); Mobile Advertiser and Register, September 12, 1867 ("New England fungi"); Augusta Weekly Chronicle and Sentinel, January 1 ("New England schoolmarms"), 8 ("the first Puritan"), 1868; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 3, 1867 ("'poor white trash' from Plymouth Rock"); Macon Georgia Weekly Telegraph, August 23, 1867 ("Mr. Radical Codfish"); Columbus Weekly Sun, July 7, 1867 ("pumpkin pie eating Puritans"); New Orleans Picayune. April 18, 1868 ("Puritan despotism"); Galveston News, November 1 ("New England negro-worshippers"), December 31 ("whipping-post"), 1868; Montgomery Daily Mail, August 27, 1867 ("witches at Salem").

(86) "Longstreet's Epistles," Memphis Bulletin. quoted in Montgomery Daily Mail, June 13, 1867.

(87) Untitled letter from B. H. Hill, Charleston Mercury. April 7, 1868.

(88) Untitled article, New York Tribune, May 24, 1865.

(89) The Land We Love quoted in Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, November 13, 1867 (first quotation): "The Freedmen's Bureau," Montgomery Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1868 (second quotation): Richmond New Nation, May 24, 1866 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations).

(90) Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, chap. 17, "The Propaganda of History."

(91) Leland M. Griffin, "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 38 (April 1952), 184-88 (quotations on p. 185).

(92) Sheldon Hackney, "Southern Violence," American Historical Review, 74 (February 1969), 924-25.

(93) Untitled letter from B. H. Hill, Columbus Daily Sun, September 12, 1867. For a discussion of white southerners' postwar sense of victimization, see Rubin, Shattered Nation, 143-45, 156-57, 244.

(94) David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 65, 75, 85, 92, 128, 134, 366.

(95) Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," 198.

MR. TUNNELL is a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University.