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Updated: May 21, 2025
Whether he had learned from Antrum, the despised carpet-bagger for Machlin & Company, or had taken his instructions at first hand from the great Machlin himself, was in the eighties an open question in Dinwiddie.
It did not seem so strange that this silent General with the baggy trousers was the man who had risen by leaps and bounds in four years to be general-in-chief of our armies. His face looks older and more sunken than it did on that day in the street near the Arsenal, in St. Louis, when he was just a military carpet-bagger out of a job. He is not changed otherwise.
Every traveler is of necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpet-bagger; his acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark Twain's knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal and complete.
The South had no excuse for its course, and the leaders of its public opinion at that time will always, and justly, be held to a strict accountability. When Mr. Johnson issued his proclamation of reconstruction, the hated carpet-bagger was an unknown element in the Southern states.
"And, instead of going to the Congress of the United States and saying there is no distinction made in Mississippi, because of color or previous condition of servitude, tell the truth, and say this: 'We tried for many years to live in Mississippi, and share sovereignty and dominion with the Negro, and we saw our institutions crumbling.... We rose in the majesty and highest type of Anglo-Saxon manhood, and took the reins of government out of the hands of the carpet-bagger and the Negro, and, so help us God, from now on we will never share any sovereignty or dominion with him again." Governor JAMES K. VARDAMAN, Mississippi, 1904.
A flashy, plausible, shallow-pated, carpet-bagger, that is what all the world knows of him. The man's a political adventurer, he snatches a precarious, and criminal, notoriety, by trading on the follies of his fellow-countrymen. He is devoid of decency, destitute of principle, and impervious to all the feelings of a gentleman. What do you know of him besides this?
So he and a good many others gave themselves to raising cotton, and for a while left the choice of State officers and legislators to "niggers," "carpet-baggers," and "scalawags." A "scalawag" was any Southern white who allied himself politically with the negroes, and a "carpet-bagger" was a Northern adventurer, for whose worldly goods a gripsack sufficed, or, in general, any Northerner whatever.
Hunter, bridling, began formally and almost severely, "Pardon me, Captain Bodine, I do not wish to be presuming or officious, but I fear you have been absent from the city so long that you are not aware of the general estimation in which this Northern carpet-bagger is held." "I certainly have had a chance to form my own opinion of him, Mrs.
"It is gentlemen like yourself to whom we must look for the preservation of our civilization," said General Keith, and introduced him personally to every man he met as, "the gentleman who has bought my old place not a 'carpet-bagger, but a gentleman interested in the development of our country, sir." Mr.
I mustered one regiment afterwards, when my services for the State were about closed. Brigadier-General John Pope was stationed at Springfield, as United States mustering officer, all the time I was in the State service. He was a native of Illinois and well acquainted with most of the prominent men in the State. I was a carpet-bagger and knew but few of them.
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