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- In US history, derogatory name for the
- entrepreneurs and politicians from the North
- who moved to the Southern states during
- Reconstruction 1861-65 after the Civil War.
- With the votes of newly enfranchised blacks
- and some local white people (called
- scalawags), they won posts in newly created
- Republican state governments, but were
- resented by many white Southerners as
- outsiders and opportunists. The term thus
- came to mean a corrupt outsider who profits
- from an area's political instability,
- although some arrivals had good motives. They
- were so called because they were supposed to
- own no property except what they carried in
- their small satchels made of carpeting.
-