Before the Carpetbaggers: White Southern Images of the North in the Aftermath of Defeat

Slangwhangers, reptiles, dogs, fanatics, meddling Puritan bigots, false philanthropists, racially-prejudiced hypocrites, and unwomanly women. In the aftermath of the Civil War, and before white Southerners established the term ‘carpetbagger’ by early 1868, they developed a rich trove of images by which to reimagine the North. While they drew on prewar imagery and on the wartime demonization of Yankees, white Southerners gave these narratives new meanings to fit their subjugation. Yankees had gone from sectional antagonists to conquerors; from personifying cowardice and barbarity to occupying the South as victors; and from representing the threat of social and racial upheaval to embodying its reality. And their images in the minds of white Southerners changed accordingly.

This paper argues that the imagery of Yankeedom that white Southerners established before ‘carpetbagger’ came into vogue was a critical first stage in their attempt to reconstruct their own identity in the aftermath of defeat.  Southerners wove stories about the North that did crucial cultural and political work: they explained Southern defeat, de-legitimized Reconstruction, and shored up the identity of a virtuous, traditional Southern society. Wielding images of a North inflamed by passion, more racially intolerant than the South, and plagued by disordered domesticity, Southerners spun gendered and racialized narratives about the North that elevated the South by the contrast. As northerners after the war fixed their gaze on the South, southerners developed a counter-narrative of the North, one that saw the North, rather than the South, as the national problem to be reckoned with.