Carpetbaggers, the Klan and the End of Reconstruction
Three Labels That Are Easy to Get Wrong
Three groups dominate the Reconstruction story in the South: carpetbaggers, scalawags and the Ku Klux Klan. The three are constantly confused. The first two are political labels for Republican supporters of Reconstruction. The third is a terror group that targeted them. Untangling the labels is the foundation of any top-band answer on this topic.
Carpetbaggers were Northern Republicans who moved South after 1865. Scalawags were Southern white Republicans who backed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan was a white-supremacist group founded by Confederate veterans in 1866 to attack BOTH groups, plus their Black political allies. The Klan was NOT founded by carpetbaggers.
Carpetbaggers in Reality
Around 50,000 Northerners moved to the South during Reconstruction. The label ‘carpetbagger’ was applied dismissively by Southern Democrats who claimed these incomers carried everything they owned in a cheap carpet bag — the implication being that they had nothing to lose and everything to plunder. Modern historians, especially Eric Foner and Lawrence Powell, have shown the cliche is largely false. Most carpetbaggers were professionals: teachers (many of them women working in Freedmen’s Bureau schools), Union army veterans seeking economic opportunity, lawyers, ministers and businessmen investing in the cotton recovery. Some served in Reconstruction state governments and were genuinely committed to multiracial democracy. A minority were corrupt, but the majority were not.
Scalawags: Native Southern Republicans
Scalawags were native white Southerners — many of them yeoman farmers from upland regions like east Tennessee, north Alabama and western North Carolina that had opposed secession in 1861. They joined the Republican Party for a mix of reasons: hostility to the planter class, support for federal infrastructure and education funding, and acceptance of emancipation. The label was a Southern insult borrowed from Scots dialect for a worthless animal. Scalawags were essential to Republican electoral success in the South: without them, Reconstruction governments would have rested on Black voters and carpetbaggers alone.
The Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865 or early 1866 by six Confederate veterans, originally as a fraternal social club. By 1867 it had been militarised into a white-supremacist terror organisation under former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as its first Grand Wizard. Klansmen wore hooded white robes to hide their identities, attacked Black voters, schoolteachers and Republican politicians, and burned schools and freedpeople’s churches. By 1870 they were active across nearly every Southern state. Estimates of Klan-linked killings during the late 1860s and early 1870s run into the thousands.
Federal Response: The Enforcement Acts
Congress and President Grant moved against the Klan with three laws known together as the Enforcement Acts. The first (1870) made interference with voting rights a federal crime. The second (February 1871) put federal supervisors over congressional elections. The third (April 1871, the Ku Klux Klan Act) authorised the President to use federal troops, suspend habeas corpus and bring conspiracy charges. Grant invoked it in nine South Carolina counties in 1871; thousands of Klansmen were indicted, hundreds tried, and the original Klan was largely broken by 1872. Crucially, however, white-supremacist violence simply moved into looser organisations — the White Leagues of Louisiana, the Red Shirts of South Carolina and Mississippi.
Federal Retreat and the Compromise of 1877
Federal will faded after 1873. An economic depression that year sharpened Northern concern about taxes and turned Republican voters against further Southern intervention. The Supreme Court’s 1873 Slaughter-House Cases narrowed the reach of the 14th Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause. By 1875 most Southern states had been ‘redeemed’ — that is, retaken by white Democratic governments calling themselves Redeemers. Only South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida still had Republican governments by 1876.
The 1876 presidential election was so close it triggered a constitutional crisis. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden each claimed victory, with three Southern states’ results disputed. The unwritten Compromise of 1877 awarded the disputed electoral votes to Hayes; in return, Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South. Reconstruction ended.
With federal troops gone, Southern state legislatures gradually built a system of racial segregation and disfranchisement known as Jim Crow. Literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses cut the registered Black vote in Louisiana from around 130,000 in 1896 to about 5,300 by 1900. The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) gave constitutional cover to ‘separate but equal’. The federal government would not seriously revisit the question for another sixty years. The Compromise of 1877 was therefore not just an end to Reconstruction but a long-term tilt of the federal-state balance back toward state control of civil rights.
Federal action against the Klan peaked with the 1870-71 Enforcement Acts, which Grant used decisively in South Carolina in 1871. After 1873’s economic depression and the Slaughter-House Cases, Northern political will faded. The Compromise of 1877 awarded Hayes the presidency in exchange for withdrawing federal troops, ending Reconstruction.