Carpetbagger

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In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the A

1872 cartoon depiction of Carl Schurz as a carpetbagger

A cartoon threatening that the KKK will lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on March 4, 1869, the day Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, will supposedly become president. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868. The cartoonist had actual local politicians in mind. A full-scale scholarly history analyzes the cartoonː Guy W. Hubbs, Searching for Freedom after the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman (2015)

Historical marker in Colfax, Louisiana that celebrates the Colfax massacre (a mass murder of dozens of African Americans) as "the end of carpetbag misrule in the South." Erected in 1950, the sign was removed in 2021.

Carl Schurz

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Carl Christian Schurz was a German-American revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. He migrated to the United States after the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and became a p

Carpetbagger

…1872 cartoon depiction of Carl Schurz as a carpetbagger In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe opportunistic…

Portrait by Mathew Brady c. 1869–1875

Carl Schurz as a young man

Carl Schurz, [c. 1859–1870]. Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library

"For freedom in Germany and America": West German commemorative stamp featuring Schurz for the United States Bicentennial, 1976