Who Were the Scalawags?

Abstract

IN THE DEMONOLOGY OF RECONSTRUCTION NO REPUTATION IS BLACKER than that of the native white Republican. The illiterate and poverty-stricken Negro was often an object of compassion, and the carpetbagger could be partially excused as an outlander with no ties of kinship or sentiment in the land he plundered. But native white Republicans were traitors to race and section alike, and thus deserving of the deepest contempt. The term scalawag, by which they were designated, is said to have come from Scalloway, district in the Shetland Islands where small, runty cattle and horses were bred. Later it became a synonym for scamp, loafer, or rascal, whence it found its way into the lexicon of Reconstruction politics. In this context some people would confine the term in all its impurity to actual officeholders or office seekers. The Dictionary of Americanisms, however, defines scalawag more broadly as Southerner who supported the Congressional plan of reconstruction.' It includes, therefore, white Republican voters, who are the real subject of this article. Like so much of the conventional view of Reconstruction, the caricature of the scalawag as a traitor to race and section gained more and more currency with the lapse of time, as the original receded from sight. What began as a political canard was carried over into canon within a generation by historians and the general public North and South, who came to accept the Democratic opposition's view of Reconstruction as historical truth. Many historians, like the Southern Conservatives of the period, made little or no effort to explain the alleged treason of the scalawags beyond assigning them such character deficiencies as disloyalty, cowardice, greed, or lust for power.2 Others identified them with wartime 1 John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961), 98;