Scalawags is the name given to native or local whites who supported the Rep party. The origins of the word is uncertain but the term came from Scalway, a district in Sheton Island, where small cattle lived. Used in US before the Civil war to mean scrawny or undersized cattle. It was also a synonmy for good for nothing. Southern conservative whites found the scalawags uniquely hateful. Blacks were considerable more understand then the faults of a scalawags who was considered a traitor to the south and his own white race.
They were primarily thought to be poor whites who had opposed the southern aristocracy and the confederacy and who now sought personal and class gains through the republican party. “The mean and lousy filty kind that are not fit for butlers or dogs. ” Numbering in the 10s of thousands, they blurred the stark contrast in black/white racial division in southern politics. Thus, they provided an indigenous power base and respectabilty to the republican party that was recognized as crucial to its permanance in the south. “A party sustained by only black votes will not grow old.
It is impossible to maintain the republican party in the south without a division of the white votes: it could not maintain unless it got the votes of some whites. But conservative whites called them “white negroes. ” For a time Scalawags dominated the state governments of 5 southern states: Ala, Ge, Tenn, Tx, NC. They also played a major role in Miss. Ex of two Scalawags who closely fit the conservativestereotype: Franklin Moses Jr, despite his pledge of honest administration was to provide SC with its worst governortorial administration of the reconstruction era.
When he was speaker of the house in SC, he accepted bribes and submitted fradulent pay certificates. On one occasion, the members of the house reimbured him for his loses on a horse race. He missappropiated arms funds. He also took money for pardons and appointments. “He betrayed not only his state, but his class, his college, the negroes who voted him in the office and himself. When he finished his term as a governor, he was an hopeless bankrupt. His associates abandoned him. Because of Chamberlain’s (carpetbagger) effort to erase the corruption left by Moses, some democrats thought about relected him.
His wife divorced him and he went to Mass where he was moderator of the town meetings Another Ex: Christopher Columbus Bowen (SC): best resembles the conservative stereoptye. Born in RI, he moved to Ge where he made his living as a card dealer. He joined the confederate army. Courtmarshalled and jailed in Charleston but was freed when the Union army occupied the city in 1865. In 1868, he was jailed again for alledgedly embezzling money from the freedmen. Acquited in 1872 on a bigomy charge. Pardoned by President Grant. Served two terms in the national house of reps.
Most common elements of these native southerns who became republican were: Unionist background, lingering attachment to Whiggery, and a closely related attraction to the economic philosophy of the Rep party. Republicans also attracted number of urban and small town artisans and among southern’s foreign born working men. Some unionists and former whigs would not consider joining the democratic party for any reasons. Some never abandoned the whig party but became republican later on b/c not want to join the democratic party.
Historians David Donald: he found most Scalawags in Miss to have been former members of the Whig party in the black belt and wealthy men: the large planters and rr and industrial promoters who turned naturally to the party which in nation was dominated by business interests, the Republican party. Nationalists in orientation, these formerwhigs had opposed succession and they still opposed the equalitarian and states rights leanings of Miss democrats and they were anxious to guide the state republican party in a sensible direction.
Donald believed that most whigs initially supported the Miss republican party but they were soon alienated by the radical demands and growing power of blacks and carpetbaggers within the state republican party organization. They were esp hostile to further racial equality and the result, defection was the major cause of republican defeat in the Miss. 15-20,000 whites were Rep in Miss, but the true figure is about 9,000, 15% of the total white electorate in Miss was Scalawag. James Lusk Alcorn was the leader of the Miss Scalawag.
He had been wealthy delta planter before the war and after a brief stint he had opposed succession and after a brief stint in the southern army, he retired to his plantation. He smuggled contraband cotton into northern hands along the Miss river and invested his profits in land and in Union currency, not in Confederate bills or bonds. After the war, he sought to set up a republican party in Miss, which would rest on a collition of old line whigs, like himself, and newly enfranchised black voters.
As a governor of Miss, Alcorn favored legal equality for blacks in exchange for their support of his legislation. He called for rebuilding levies along the Miss river at state expense so that planters like himself could drain their floodes fields and grow corn again. The leasing of convicts to private individuals or corporations, a reduction in land taxes, and state aid for rr construction. Even though he eventually became disenchanted with reconstruction, be refused to go over to the Democratic party, his lifelong political armies: “I was a whig and a glory in the fact that I am not a democrat.
Allen W. Trelease: a study of votin patterns in the south in the presidential election of 1872 concluded that “most white republican voters of 1872 were small famers, noticible poorer than the southern average and had little in common of the slave owners who had dominated the affairs in their respective state. ” The 1872 election was the first postwar election in which all 11 states had been readmitted to the Union. (11 states participated in the election and Grant had been reelected.
Coming from counties that relatively poor and contained few blacks and these people were less likely to be swayed by appeals to white supremacy, since the few blacks among them posed no threat. Geographically, the counties containing the largest proportion of white republicans “were chiefly contentrated in the mt. regions of E Tenn, W NC, and NW Arkansas (the ozarks). Other centers of white republican strenghts were the hilly northern parts of Ala and Ge, SW Missouri, SW Virginia. These my counties had been regions of Union strength in 1860 and of war time loyalism to the Union during the war.
And they are precisely the area, according to this person, where white republicans …. In 1872. In Texas, the greatest amount of white republicans were found among the mexican pop along the Rio Grand and among the large german element in central texas, in San Antionio. The german of SW texas comprised of the largest block of Southern immigrants. (The republicans offered the blacks economic opportunity but the republicans were denied he funds and had to resort to highter taxes and alienated the common white consituency).
In 1872, in no state taken has a whole were white republicans even close to a majority of all white voters. According to Trelease, white Republicans cast a total of about 150,000 popular votes in 1872 in the 11 states; almost half in Tenn and NC. Throughout the south, White republicans cast 10% of all the votes cast by whites and blacks. In other words, about 1 in 10 were scalawags. About 20% of those cast by whitemen (1 in 5) was a republican in the south. And about 80% of the republican votes in the south were blacks.
Trelease also challenges that portion of Donald’s thesis which held that most scalawags were former whigs, writing that a sound basis for identifying prewar whigs with postwar republicans exists only in Tenn, NC, and to some extent in Virginia. Elsewhere, most of the white republican in 1862 seems to have been Jacksonian democrayts before the war, that would have been true in eastern Tenn but not true in W NC, which was whig. Portions of Trelease’s methodology have been challenged and recent studies of Miss, Ala, and Lous together with studies of the whig heritage have strengthened Donald’s thesis.
