After the
Civil War, the top positions in southern state governments went for the most part to
white Republicans, whom the
opposition whites soon labeled "
carpetbaggers" and "
scalawags," depending on their place of birth. The
northern opportunists who allegedly rushed South with all their belongings in
carpetbags to grab the political spoils were more often than not
Union veterans who had arrived as early as 1865 or 1866, drawn
South by hope of
economic opportunity and by other attractions that many of them had seen in Union service. Many other
so-called carpetbaggers were teachers,
social workers, or
preachers animated by a
missionary impulse.
The "scalawags," or native white Republicans, were even more reviled and misrepresented. A jaundiced editor of a Nashville paper called them the "merest trash that could be collected in a civil community, of no personal credit or social responsibility." Most "scalawags" had opposed secession, forming a Unionist majority in many mountain counties as far south as Georgia and Alabama, and especially in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Among the "scalawags" were several distinguished figures, including former Confederate general James A. Longstreet, who decided after Appomattox that the Old South must change its ways. He became a successful cotton broker in New Orleans, joined the Republican party, and supported the Radical Reconstruction program. Other "scalawags" were former Whigs who found the Republican party's economic program of industrial and commercial expansion in keeping with Henry Clay's earlier "American System".