The Leading Facts of American History

Background: Many southern whites, particularly Democrats, never accepted the Reconstruction era’s profound social and political revolution of African American voting and office holding. They saw Black elected officials as uneducated, easily manipulated, and only interested in enriching themselves. Historical accounts such as the one below, published in 1897, cemented this view not just in the South but in textbooks used throughout the country. This interpretation also helped to justify segregation and the suppression of Black voting rights that followed the end of Reconstruction and lasted into the middle of the twentieth century. The first historical scholar to challenge this racist, distorted view was W. E. B. DuBois in 1935, with his book Black Reconstruction, although it would take another fifty years to become widely accepted.

In some of the restored states, especially in South Carolina, there were more negroes than white men. The negroes now got control of these states. They had been slaves all their lives, and were so ignorant that they did not even know the letters of the alphabet. Yet they now sat in the state legislatures and made the laws. After the war many industrious Northern men settled in the South, but, besides these, certain greedy adventurers went there eager to get political office and political spoils.

These “Carpet-Baggers,” as they were called, used the ignorant freedmen as tools to carry out their own selfish purposes. The result was that the negro legislators, under the direction of the “Carpet-Baggers,” plundered and, for the time, well-nigh ruined the states that had the misfortune to be subject to their rule.

After a time the white population throughout the South resolved that they would no longer endure this state of things. Partly by peaceable and partly by violent means they succeeded in getting the political power into their own hands, and the reign of the “Carpet-Bagger” and the negro came to an end.

Source: David H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of American History (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1897), 328-329.