Full Text of Article:
The genus carpet-bagger is becoming rare in this section of the South since
the election, and lest the characteristics of the tribe should be lost to
history, we will essay to delineate them for the instruction, if not the
benefit of the future. The genuine carpet-bagger is a descendant in a direct
line from the Pilgrim Fathers, who were the original progenitors of the
migratory tribe. The wandering gypsies who have infested Europe since the
days of the Gauls, differ in many respects from the Yankee carpet-bagger.
The former claim no house and may be said to be cosmopolites, free to go
where and do as they please. The Yankee is an adventurer, avoiding the wild
forests and lonely places to settle, for the
time being, among the masses, make money and instill into the minds of the
unenlightened the particular notions of his people. The almighty dollar is
always before him, and his motto is "make money, honestly if you can, but
make it at all events." Speculation is his great object--his home and home
associations are nothing to him, for in youth he had been taught that to
become great was to become rich; meanness and deceit were imbibed from the
maternal breast, and what the liberal world considers unprincipled he was
taught by his Puritan father to consider honorable. The termination of the
war, so humiliating to the chivalric Southerner, opened a wide field to the
speculative mind of the restless carpet-bagger. He thought he could make
capital out of her misery--he saw a willing tool in the untutored negro
placed suddenly upon a footing with his late master. With the little of
worldly goods his niggardly father had granted him packed in a small bag, he
goes into the land of promise, for he cares but little for the place of his
birth, and, with a silvery tongue and "nary red" in his pocket, he harangues
the gaping and thick-lipped crowd, tells them of their newly-acquired
rights, their power at the polls, their claims to offices of emolument, the
wrongs inflicted upon them by the disfranchised white rebels, and the duty
they owe themselves and children to cut the throats of all their former
persecutors and burn their houses to the ground. He stands firmly upon the
platform that advises eternal hatred to the white "rebel," and elevation of
the African race. The nasal twang of his ancestors may be heard in his
speeches at Loyal Leagues flattering and cajoling his colored brethren and
making them believe that he is an angel sent from Heaven announcing the
millennium! Alas, alas--that his glorious aspirations should be so
short-lived,--that all his visions of fat offices and money in both pockets
should so soon pass away. The carpet-bagger, in Virginia, is no more.
"Othello's occupation's gone."
