Creating "The Propaganda of History": Southern Editors and the Origins of "Carpetbagger and Scalawag"

Abstract

ONE READS THE TRUER DEEPER FACTS OF RECONSTRUCTION WITH A GREAT despair, wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. (1) Du Bois's words from nearly three quarters of a century ago still resonate. How could something so noble end in such anguish and injustice? Historians have offered many explanations for the precipitous collapse of Radical Reconstruction. They have stressed the North's failure to redistribute confiscated southern lands to ex-slaves, leaving freedpeople economically dependent on white landowners. They have explained that southern governments based on black suffrage never obtained legitimacy in the eyes of most white Americans. They have assessed the terrible damage done by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues. They have observed the waning idealism of northern Republicans and how quickly the North wearied of deploying the U.S. Army to protect southern radicals. They have studied the harm done by corruption and by the chronic factionalism that crippled southern Republican regimes. They have observed that southern freedpeople, with their constant cries for government protection, came to be seen in the North--like striking factory workers--as enemies of a free labor economy. And time and time again historians have pointed to the common denominator underlying all of these factors: the profound racism that permeated American society, North and South. (2) In their manifold efforts to explain Reconstruction's demise, however, historians have largely overlooked a key element: the hostility of southern journalists. In 1867 Congress nullified the postwar governments created by President Andrew Johnson, leaving the Democratic press as the only institution in the South fully under the control of native whites and in a position to oppose northern policy. Southern newsmen picked up the gauntlet and, at the moment of seeming northern triumph, mounted a counteroffensive against what they saw as alien, radical governments being imposed on the region. Before the North realized it, southern editors had seized the rhetorical high ground, crying Negro Rule with renewed vigor. They coupled this old trope with the new symbols scalawag and carpetbagger, castigating Negro-scalawag rule and, even more effective, Negro-carpetbag rule. The result was a trio of symbols that defined the ideological parameters of the era. By 1870, no political actor in either the North or the South could discuss the future of Reconstruction without--in some fashion--engaging this rhetoric. While historians of the postwar South have extensively used newspapers as sources, the southern press as an institution remains largely unexplored. The only general work is Hodding Carter's short book of printed lectures, Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace (1969), which surveys the entire period from 1861 to 1877 in thirty-two pages. Of the 2,904 entries in David A. Lincove's exhaustive Reconstruction in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (2000), a bare handful of entries concern the southern Democratic press. The only book, excepting Carter's, is a study of Charleston News and Courier founder and editor Francis Warrington Dawson; the remaining twenty-one relevant entries are locally focused journal articles and a 1976 dissertation. (3) Ironically, scholars know more about the region's incipient (and largely ephemeral) Republican newspapers than about the infinitely larger and vastly more influential Democratic press. (4) This work is a study of Reconstruction symbolism and rhetoric as expressed in the writings of southern journalists during the transition from Presidential to Radical Reconstruction (1867-1868). It examines those newsmen' s creation of the words carpetbagger and scalawag and demonstrates that they created the epithets as counter-Reconstruction weapons at the precise moment when they would do the most damage: during the radical constitutional conventions that were meeting in conformity with the Reconstruction Act--and while public sentiment about the radical program was only beginning to crystallize. …