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Updated: May 28, 2025
President Andrew Johnson could not check the fury of the radical reconstructionists; and a new political era began in a riot of dogmatic and insolent dictatorship, which was intensified by the mob of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen in the South, and not abated by the lawless promptings of the Ku-Klux to regain patrician leadership in the home of secession nor by the baneful resentment of the North.
The keener-sighted of the Northerners began to suspect that Reconstruction in the South often amounted to little more than the looting of the governments of the Southern States by the greedy freedmen and the unscrupulous carpetbaggers, with the troops of the United States standing by to protect the looters.
Later, after the scalawags had for the most part left the radicals, there were contests among the carpetbaggers themselves for the control of the Negro vote and the distribution of spoils. The defeated faction usually joined the Democrats. In Arkansas a split started in 1869 which by 1872 resulted in two state governments. Alabama in 1872 and Louisiana in 1874-75 each had two rival governments.
They were called "carpetbaggers" because of the type of traveling bag which they usually carried, and this term later became synonymous with "political adventurer." These men sought to advance their political schemes by getting the Negroes to vote for certain men who would be favorable to them.
The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870, brought the total in the former slave states to 931,000, with about seventy-five thousand more Negroes in the North. The Negro voters were most numerous, comparatively, in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. There were a few thousand carpetbaggers in each State, with, at first, a much larger number of scalawags.
They began by persuading the negroes that their old masters were about to put them back into slavery, that it was only by electing Union men to office that they could remain free; and having by this means obtained control of the negro vote, they were made governors and members of Congress, and were sent to the state legislature, where, seated beside negroes who could neither read nor write, but who voted as ordered, these "carpetbaggers," as they were called, ruled the states in the interest of themselves rather than in that of the people.
The other Federal departments were in similar difficulties, and at last women and "carpetbaggers" were appointed.
Corrupt state officials had two ways of getting money by taxation and by the sale of bonds. Taxes were everywhere multiplied. The state tax rate in Alabama was increased four hundred percent, in Louisiana eight hundred percent, and in Mississippi, which could issue no bonds, fourteen hundred percent. City and county taxes, where carpetbaggers were in control, increased in the same way.
Notwithstanding the fact that the very best arrangements had been made at Washington and in the states for the running of the radical machine, everywhere there were factional fights from the beginning. Usually the scalawags declared hostilities after they found that the carpetbaggers had control of the Negroes and the inside track on the way to the best state and federal offices.
Such was the machinery used to sustain a party which, with the gradual defection of the whites, became throughout the South almost uniformly black. At first few Negroes asked for offices, but soon the carpetbaggers found it necessary to divide with the rapidly growing number of Negro politicians.
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