USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Three groups comprised the Republican Party in the South after the Civil War. “Scalawags” were white Southerners who supported the party, “carpetbaggers” were recent arrivals from the North, and freedmen were freed slaves.

Detailed explanation-2: -Politically, the carpetbaggers were usually dominant; they comprised the majority of Republican governors and congressmen. However, the Republican Party inside each state was increasingly torn between the more conservative scalawags on one side and the more Radical carpetbaggers with their black allies on the other.

Detailed explanation-3: -Carpetbagger” and “scalawag” are derisive epithets which southern Democrats, or Conservatives, applied to white Republicans, or radicals, during Congressional or Radical Reconstruction. Carpetbagger referred to Republicans who had recently migrated from the North; scalawag referred to southern-born radicals.

Detailed explanation-4: -White southern Republicans, known to their enemies as “scalawags, ” made up the biggest group of delegates to the Radical Reconstruction-era legislatures.

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.