Scalawag: Difference between revisions

Scalawags (see also Unionist) were Southern whites who joined the Republican party in the South during Reconstruction, forming a coalition with Freedmen (African Americans) and Carpetbaggers (whites who came from the North) to take political control of their states. They were defeated by conservative Democrats called Redeemers by 1877. Because they had not been Confederate officials they were able to swear the "ironclad oath, required by federal law affirming that they had not taken part in the regime of the Confederacy. The majority of Southern whites were unable to take the oath and (for a while) they were not allowed to vote.

In Alabama, Scalawags dominated the Republican party. (Wiggins 131-38) One hundred seventeen Republicans were nominated, elected, or appointed to the most lucrative and important positions (state executive and judicial offices and federal legislative and judicial offices) between 1868 and 1881. They included 76 white southerners, 35 northerners. [citation needed] Included were six blacks. In state offices during Reconstruction, white southerners were even more predominant, as 51 won nominations, compared to 11 carpetbaggers and one black. Twenty-seven scalawags won state executive nominations (75%), 24 won state judicial nominations (89%), and 101 were elected to the legislature (39%). However, fewer scalawags won nominations to federal offices: 15 were nominated or elected to Congress (48%) compared to 11 carpetbaggers and 5 blacks. Forty-eight scalawags were members of the 1867 constitutional convention (49.5% of the Republican membership); and seven scalawags were members of the 1875 constitutional convention (58% of the miniscule Republican membership.)

The term was originally derogatory but is now commonly used by all historians. Scalawags were denounced as corrupt by Redeemers. The Dunning School of historians sympathized with the claims of the Democrats. The two most prominent scalawags were Lee's top lieutenant, General James Longstreet, and Joseph E. Brown, the wartime governor of Georgia.

Scalawags "had for years smarted under a system that gave every advantage to the planter class, to which very few of them belonged. They bitterly resented the course of action, pursued by the planter class, which had led to a war that, from their point of view, became more and more a "poor man's fight". (John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 99)

"No group of postwar Southern leaders has been reviled or castigated—or misunderstood—more than loyal native Southerners, commonly known as "scalawags", said Franklin, a contemporary historian who traced the term scalawag to Scalloway, a district in the Shetland Islands where small, runty cattle and horses were bred.

As more and more Southerners took the oath, Franklin said (p. 100)

A curious assortment of native Southerners thus became eligible to participate in Radical Reconstruction. And the number increased as the President granted individual pardons or issued new proclamations of amnesty.

Their primary interest was in supporting a party that would build the South on a broader base than the plantation aristocracy of ante-bellum days. They found it expedient to do business with Negroes and so-called carpetbaggers; but often they returned to the Democratic party as it gained sufficient strength to be a factor in Southern politics.

The term "scalawag" was intended as an insult by the opponents of the Republicans to attack political enemies who lost status by associating with blacks. . The name-calling originated with the planter class. For example, Wade Hampton, a lieutenant general in the Confederate States Army and previously owner of vast plantations and slaves, called the Scalawags "the mean, lousy and filthy kind that are not fit for butchers or dogs."[Franklin, p. 101]

However, Franklin said, that white Southern supporters of the Republican Party "must take at least part of the blame" for graft and corruption. "But their most serious offense was to have been loyal to the Union during the Civil War or to have declared that they had been loyal and thereby to have enjoyed full citizenship during the period of Radical Reconstruction." (Franklin, p. 101)

The Democrats, who were the conservatives of the Reconstruction era, alleged the scalawgs to be financially and politically corrupt, and willing to support bad government because they profited personally. One Alabama historian claimed: "On economic matters scalawags and Democrats eagerly sought aid for economic development of projects in which they had an economic stake, and they exhibited few scruples in the methods used to push beneficial financial legislation through the Alabama legislature. The quality of the bookkeeping habits of both Republicans and Democrats was equally notorious." [Wiggins p 134] However, historian Eric Foner argues there is not sufficient evidence that scalawags were any more or less corrupt than politicians of any era, {Foner, Reconstruction], including Redeemers.

In terms of racial issues, "White Republicans as well as Democrats solicited black votes but reluctantly rewarded blacks with nominations for office only when necessary, even then reserving the more choice positions for whites. The results were predictable: these half-a-loaf gestures satisfied neither black nor white Republicans. The fatal weakness of the Republican party in Alabama, as elsewhere in the South, was its inability to create a biracial political party. And while in power even briefly, they failed to protect their members from Democratic terror. Alabama Republicans were forever on the defensive, verbally and physically." [Wiggins p 134]

Social pressure forced most Scalawags to join the conservative/Democratic Redeemer coalition. A minority persisted and formed the "tan" half of the "Black and Tan" Republican party, a minority in every southern state after 1877. (DeSantis 1998)

White Southern Republicans included formerly closeted Southern abolitionists as well as former slaveowners who now supported equal rights for freedmen. (The most famous of this latter group was Samuel F. Phillips, who would later argue against segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)). Included, too, were people who wanted to be part of the ruling Republican Party simply because it provided more opportunities for successful political careers. Many historians have described scalawags in terms of social class, showing that on average they were less wealthy or prestigious than other whites. (Baggett 2003)

The mountain districts of Appalachia were often Republican enclaves. (McKinney 1998) They had few slaves, poor transportation, deep poverty, and a standing resentment against the low country politicians who dominated the Confederacy and conservative Democracy in Reconstruction. Their strongholds in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, western North Carolina and the Ozark region of northern Arkansas, became Republicans bastions to the present day. These rural folk had a long-standing hostility toward the plantation class; they had harbored pro-Union sentiments during the war. Andrew Johnson was their representative leader. They welcomed Reconstruction and much of what the Radical Republicans in Congress advocated.

As Thomas Alexander (1961) has shown, there was a persistent Whiggery (support for the principles of the defunct Whig Party) in the South after 1865. Many ex-Whigs became Republicans who advocated modernization through education and infrastructure--especially better roads and railroads. Many also joined the Redeemers in their successful attempt to replace the brief period of civil rights promised to African Americans during the Reconstruction era with the Jim Crow era of segregation and second class citizenship that persisted into the 20th century.

Baggett (2003) profiled 742 whites who supported Reconstruction and the Republican Party, comparing them to 666 Redeemers who opposed and eventually replaced them. He compares three regions, the Upper South, the Southeast, and the Southwest. Baggett follows the life of each scalawag before, during, and after the war, with respect to birthplace, occupation, value of estate, slave ownership, education, party activity, stand on secession, war politics, and postwar politics.

Baggett thus looked at 1400 political activists across the South, and gave each a score:

• score = 1 an antisecessionist Breckinridge supporter in 1860 election
• 2 1860 Bell or Douglas supporter in 1860 election
• 3 1860-61 opponent of secession
• 4 passive wartime unionist
• 5 peace party advocate
• 6 active wartime unionist
• 7 postwar Union party supporter

He found the higher the score the more likely the person was a Republican (that is a Scalawag).

The most prominent scalawag was James Lusk Alcorn of Mississippi. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like all southerners, was not allowed to take a seat as Congress was pondering Reconstruction. He supported suffrage for Freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, as demanded by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the Scalawags, who comprised about a third of the Republican party in the state, in coalition with carpetbaggers and Freedmen. He was elected by the Republicans as governor in 1869, serving, as Governor of Mississippi from 1870 to 1871. As a modernizer he appointed many like-minded former Whigs, even if they were now Democrats. He strongly supported education, including public schools for blacks only, and a new college for them, now known as Alcorn State University. He maneuvered to make his ally Hiram Revels its president. Radical Republicans opposed Alcorn, angry at his patronage policy. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South modernized" rather than lead a total political, social and economic revolution. [Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1988) p 298]

Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator (1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African American senator. Senator Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of whites southerners and rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by federal legislation (Congressional Globe, 42 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 246-47); he denounced the federal cotton tax as robbery (Ibid., pp. 2730-33) and defended separate schools for both races in Mississippi. Although a former slaveholder, he characterized slavery as "a cancer upon the body of the Nation" and expressed the gratification which he and many other Southerners felt over its destruction (Ibid., p. 3424).

Alcorn led a furious political battle with Senator Adelbert Ames, the carpetbagger who led the other faction of the Republican party in Mississippi. The fight ripped apart the party. In 1873 they both sought a decision by running for governor. Ames was supported by the Radicals and most African Americans, while Alcorn won the votes of conservative whites and most of the scalawags. Ames won by a vote of 69,870 to 50,490, and Alcorn retired from state politics.

• Carpetbagger
• Freedmen
• Reconstruction
• Redeemers

• Thomas B. Alexander, “Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, l860—77," Journal of Southern History 27 (1961) 305-29, in JSTOR
• Baggett, James Alex. The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction Louisiana State University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8071-2798-1
• DeSantis, Vincent P. Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877-1897 (1998)
• Donald, David. "'The Scalawag in Mississippi Reconstruction.” Journal of Southern History 10 (1944) 447-60 in JSTOR
• Ellem, Warren A. “Who Were the Mississippi Scalawags?” Journal of Southern History 38 (May 1972): 2 17—40 in JSTOR
• Franklin, John Hope. Reconstruction after the Civil War (University of Chicago Press: 1961) ISBN 0226260798
• Garner; James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi 1901. Dunning school monograph
• Hyman, Rubin. South Carolina Scalawags (2006)
• Kolchin, Peter. “Scalawags, Carpetbaggers, and Reconstruction: A Quantitative Look at Southern Congressional Politics, 1868 to 1872” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979) 63-76, in JSTOR
• McKinney, Gordon B. Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865-1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (1998)
• Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics 1869-1879 (1984)
• Wiggins; Sarah Woolfolk. The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1881 (1991) online at Questia

• Lynch, John R.