Carpetbagger

White Southerners commonly denounced carpetbaggers collectively during the post-war years, fearing they would loot and plunder the defeated South and be allied politically with the Radical Republicans.

It is now used in the United States to refer to a parachute candidate, that is, an outsider who runs for public office in an area without having lived there for more than a short time, or without having other significant community ties.

[citation needed] According to a 1912 book by Oliver Temple Perry,[3] Tennessee Secretary of State and Radical Republican Andrew J. Fletcher "was one of the first, if not the very first, in the State to denounce the hordes of greedy office-seekers who came from the North in the rear of the army in the closing days of the [U.S. Civil] War", in the June 1867 stump speech that he delivered across Tennessee in support of the re-election of the disabled Tennessee Governor William G. Brownlow: No one more gladly welcomes the Northern man who comes in all sincerity to make a home here, and to become one of our people, than I, but for the adventurer and the office-seeker who comes among us with one dirty shirt and a pair of dirty socks, in an old rusty carpet bag, and before his washing is done becomes a candidate for office, I have no welcome.That was the origin of the term "carpet bag", and out of it grew the well known term "carpet-bag government".

Some were abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; they often became agents of the federal Freedmen's Bureau, which started operations in 1865 to assist the vast numbers of recently emancipated slaves.

They joined like-minded Southerners, most of which were employed by the Methodist and Baptist Churches, who spent much of their time teaching and preaching to slave and freedpeople congregations both before and after the Civil War.

Accustomed to viewing Southerners—black and white—as devoid of economic initiative, the "Puritan work ethic", and self-discipline, they believed that only "Northern capital and energy" could bring "the blessings of a free labor system to the region.

[20][21][22] Mississippi Representative Wiley P. Harris, a Democrat, stated in 1875: If any two hundred Southern men backed by a Federal administration should go to Indianapolis, turn out the Indiana people, take possession of all the seats of power, honor, and profit, denounce the people at large as assassins and barbarians, introduce corruption in all the branches of the public administration, make government a curse instead of a blessing, league with the most ignorant class of society to make war on the enlightened, intelligent, and virtuous, what kind of social relations would such a state of things beget.

[23]Albert T. Morgan, the Republican sheriff of Yazoo, Mississippi, received a brief flurry of national attention when insurgent white Democrats took over the county government and forced him to flee.

Revels denounced Ames and Northerners for manipulating the Black vote for personal benefit, and for keeping alive wartime hatreds: Since reconstruction, the masses of my people have been, as it were, enslaved in mind by unprincipled adventurers, who, caring nothing for country, were willing to stoop to anything no matter how infamous, to secure power to themselves, and perpetuate it...My people have been told by these schemers, when men have been placed on the ticket who were notoriously corrupt and dishonest, that they must vote for them; that the salvation of the party depended upon it; that the man who scratched a ticket was not a Republican.

This is only one of the many means these unprincipled demagogues have devised to perpetuate the intellectual bondage of my people...The bitterness and hate created by the late civil strife has, in my opinion, been obliterated in this state, except perhaps in some localities, and would have long since been entirely obliterated, were it not for some unprincipled men who would keep alive the bitterness of the past, and inculcate a hatred between the races, in order that they may aggrandize themselves by office, and its emoluments, to control my people, the effect of which is to degrade them.

[citation needed] Corruption was a charge made by Democrats in North Carolina against the Republicans, notes the historian Paul Escott, "because its truth was apparent.

Escott concludes that some Democrats were involved, but Republicans "bore the main responsibility for the issue of $28 million in state bonds for railroads and the accompanying corruption.

A Republican county commissioner in Alamance eloquently denounced the situation: "Men are placed in power who instead of carrying out their duties...form a kind of school for to graduate Rascals.

[28] A politician in South Carolina who was called a carpetbagger was Daniel Henry Chamberlain, a New Englander who had served as an officer of a predominantly black regiment of the United States Colored Troops.

He was narrowly re-elected in a campaign marked by egregious voter fraud and violence against freedmen by Democratic Red Shirts, who succeeded in suppressing the black vote in some majority-black counties.

[citation needed] Some historians of the early 1800s, who belonged to the Dunning School that believed that the Reconstruction era was fatally flawed, claimed that Chamberlain later was influenced by Social Darwinism to become a white supremacist.

[citation needed] Francis Lewis Cardozo, a black minister from New Haven, Connecticut, served as a delegate to South Carolina's 1868 Constitutional Convention.

[31] George Luke Smith, a New Hampshire native, served briefly in the U.S. House from Louisiana's 4th congressional district but was unseated in 1874 by the Democrat William M. Levy.

[34] Tunis Campbell, a black New York businessman, was hired in 1863 by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to help former slaves in Port Royal, South Carolina.

When the Civil War ended, Campbell was assigned to the Sea Islands of Georgia, where he engaged in an apparently successful land reform program for the benefit of the freedmen.

Furbush and three other black leaders, including the bill's primary sponsor, state senator Richard A. Dawson, sued a barkeeper in Little Rock, Arkansas for refusing to serve their group.

[40] George Thompson Ruby, an African American from New York City, who grew up in Portland, Maine, worked as a teacher in New Orleans from 1864 until 1866 when he migrated to Texas.

[40] The Dunning school of American historians (1900–1950) espoused White supremacy and viewed "carpetbaggers" unfavorably, arguing that they degraded the political and business culture.

[42] Those so-called carpetbaggers were roving financial opportunists, often of modest means, who spotted investment opportunities and aimed to benefit from a set of circumstances to which they were not ordinarily entitled.

The best opportunities for carpetbaggers came from opening membership accounts at building societies to qualify for windfall gains, running into thousands of pounds, from the process of conversion and takeover.

"[citation needed] Between 1997 and 2002, a group of pro-demutualization supporters, "Members for Conversion", operated a website, carpetbagger.com, which highlighted the best ways of opening share accounts with UK building societies, and organised demutualisation resolutions.

[47] The term has been used at subsequent elections, to describe MPs including Shaun Woodward (Witney to St Helens South),[48] Mims Davies (Eastleigh to Mid Sussex),[49] Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich to Bexhill and Battle),[50] and Richard Holden (North West Durham to Basildon and Billericay).

[60] 2022 Republican nominee for Pennsylvania Senator Mehmet Oz was prominently attacked as a carpetbagger by his opponent John Fetterman for previously living in New Jersey until months before the election.

[65] Alongside its modern usage in politics, the term can still be applied to unscrupulous individuals coming from the north to profit themselves at Southerner's expense, such as in the case of Brian Kelly.

[66] Despite adopting a horrifically fake southern accent and claiming that he'd now have "the resources to win a national championship[67]", Kelly has continued regularly lose to top-10 opponents in embarrassing fashion.