Scalawags

SCALAWAGS

"Scalawag" was a derogatory term used by recalcitrant white southerners after the Civil War and during the dozen years of Reconstruction (1865–1877). It was applied to those white southerners who cooperated with the Union troops and with the Reconstruction State legislatures. Many of these "Scalawags" came from small farm, non-slaveholding backgrounds and in fact had resented the southern planter class and its slave system even before the Civil War. They felt correctly that the existence of slavery hurt them too, because slave labor depressed the bargaining power of wage labor. They argued that slaves would always impoverish its non-slave-owning white neighbors. The Scalawags and many former slaves tried to join the Republican Party in the South to secure their status as full southern citizens. The majority of southern whites, however, looked at the Scalawags with contempt. In their eyes, the Scalawags were traitors to the southern cause and to their fellow whites. Some of these defeated members of the Confederacy joined paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi "Red Shirts" and others. They wanted to intimidate or, in some cases, to kill both the former slaves who were trying to secure their new rights and the Scalawags, who were trying to build an alliance with the exslaves in the southern Republican Party. The intimidation worked, for the most part, and the Republican Party never established itself in the post–Civil War South.

See also: Carpetbaggers