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Updated: May 28, 2025
The Negroes were given minor positions when offices were more plentiful than carpetbaggers. Later, after some complaint, a larger share of the offices fell to them. The League counted its largest white membership in 1865-66, and after that date it steadily decreased. The largest Negro membership was recorded in 1867 and 1868. The total membership was never made known.
When these men, who were property owners and taxpayers, found that the carpetbaggers, by means of the negro vote, were plundering and robbing the states, they determined to prevent the negro from voting, and so drive the carpetbaggers from the legislatures. To do this, in many parts of the South they formed secret societies, called "The Invisible Empire" and "The Ku Klux Klan."
Before the end of Reconstruction, several of these were forced to flee to avoid arrest for malfeasance in office. In those States where mixed schools alone were provided, white children did not attend and were thus cut off from educational opportunities at public expense. Where separate schools were provided, the teachers were often carpetbaggers who strove "to make treason odious."
We are determined to tolerate no scalawags, nor carpetbaggers among us. Beware, the sacred serpent has hissed." But Louis, brave and resolute, kept on the even tenor of his way, although he never left his home without some forebodings that he tried in vain to cast off.
In 1868, with Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas unrepresented, the first radical contingent in Congress from the South numbered 41, of whom 10 out of 12 senators and 26 out of 32 representatives were carpetbaggers. There were two lone conservative Congressmen.
The moral support behind the government was that of President Grant and the United States army, not that of a free and devoted people. Of the twenty men who served as governors, eight were scalawags and twelve were carpetbaggers, men who were abler than the scalawags and who had much more than an equal share of the spoils.
Every state, except perhaps Virginia, was under the control of a few able leaders from the North generally called carpetbaggers and of a few native white radicals contemptuously designated scalawags. These were kept in power by Negro voters, to some seven hundred thousand of whom the ballot had been given by the reconstruction acts.
The Southern Presbyterians and the Episcopalians established separate congregations and missions under white supervision but sanctioned no independent Negro organization. Consequently the Negroes soon deserted these churches and went with their own kind. Resentment at the methods employed by the Northern religious carpetbaggers was strong among the Southern whites.
The Civil War changed the whole organization of Southern society, it is true, but it did not modify its essential attributes, to quote the ablest of the carpetbaggers, Albion W. Tourgée. Reconstruction strengthened existing prejudices and created new bitterness, but the attempt failed to make of South Carolina another Massachusetts.
As the Federal soldier marched out of the public buildings everywhere, the Confederate soldier marched in. These men had led in the contest against the scalawags and the carpetbaggers and many had suffered thereby. Now they came into their own. In some States the organization of voters was almost military.
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