•
Carpetbaggers
:
also a term of mockery, but applied to Northerners
who went South during Reconstruction, motivated by either profit or
idealism. The name referred to the cloth bags many of them used for
transporting their possessions.
Despite the negative connotation of
the name, many carpetbaggers were sincerely interested in aiding
the freedom and education of the former slaves.
•
Scalawags
:
a derogatory term applied to native white Southerners
who supported the federal reconstruction plan and cooperated with
the blacks in order to achieve their ends.
•
Some of the scalawags were entirely above board, having opposed
the Confederacy in earlier times and later wanted a new South to
emerge from the rubble. Others cooperated with or served in the
Republican governments in order to avail themselves of money-
making opportunities.
Scalawags
A Sept. 1868 cartoon in Alabama's
Independent Monitor,
threatening
that the KKK would lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on
March 4, 1869, predicted as the first day of Democrat Horatio Seymour’s
Presidency (a day that actually went to Ulysses S. Grant).
Cont.
•
As a result, African-Americans were represented in the
Congress for the first time in American history in 1870.
•
Although there were some gains in political and civil rights
by African Americans in the early 1870s, by the time Grant
left office in 1877, conservatives in the South had regained
control of state governments, while most blacks lost their
political power for nearly a century.
•
The Compromise of 1877 gave Rutherford B. Hayes the
presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction in the
South.
Rutherford B. Hayes
In Office: March 4, 1877 – March 4, 1881
Compromise of 1877
•
The Compromise of 1877 gave Rutherford B. Hayes the
presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction in the
South.
•
Democrats agreed that Rutherford B. Hayes would become
president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops
from the South and the granting of home rule in the South.
•
President Hayes’ withdrawal of federal troops from
Louisiana and South Carolina marked a major turning point
in American political history, effectively ending the
Reconstruction Era and issuing in the system of
Jim Crow.
This Thomas Nast cartoon, published in 1864, suggested that compromising
with the South was tantamount to betraying the Union
dead.
Image courtesy Library of Congress.
The end of Reconstruction
•
In all, with the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party
abandoned the last remnant of its support for equal rights
for African Americans in the South.
•
With the withdrawal of federal troops went any hope of
reconstructing the South as a racially-egalitarian society
after the end of slavery.
•
As Henry Adams, a black Louisianan, lamented, “The whole
South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of
the very men that held us as slaves.
Cont.
