General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The original carpetbaggers showed up in the South after 1865, often with ties to the Republicans at some level, but chose not to do anything to make life better in the region(or to help freed blacks in any meaningful sense)but simply to try to make money off of the misery that many people experienced in the South after the war. Their actions helped cause the resentment that was then displaced onto freed slaves(and which led, after the Republicans gave up all their principles and agreed to end Reconstruction in the name of hanging onto power-in-name in the 1876 presidential election, to the institution of the "Jim Crow" laws). They also did almost nothing to actually repair the war damage in the South at all.
You can see a lot of carpetbagger values in play in postwar Iraq.