USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Scalawags A derogatory term for Southerners who were working with the North to buy up land from desperate Southerners.

Detailed explanation-2: -These “carpetbaggers”–whom many in the South viewed as opportunists looking to exploit and profit from the region’s misfortunes–supported the Republican Party, and would play a central role in shaping new southern governments during Reconstruction.

Detailed explanation-3: -In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical term used by Southerners to describe opportunistic Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, who were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain.

Detailed explanation-4: -Most of those termed “scalawags” during Reconstruction had been: non-slaveholding white farmers from the southern upcountry prior to the Civil War. Sharecropping: was preferred by African-Americans to gang labor (because they were less subject to supervision).

Detailed explanation-5: -scalawag, after the American Civil War, a pejorative term for a white Southerner who supported the federal plan of Reconstruction or who joined with black freedmen and the so-called carpetbaggers in support of Republican Party policies.