carpet baggers
Outsiders seeking advantage
Carpetbaggers were Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction after the Civil War, named for the cheap luggage they supposedly carried.
The term was derisive, implying opportunists exploiting a defeated region.
Today it describes any outsider who moves somewhere to seek political office or profit: Critics called the Senate candidate a carpetbagger who'd lived in the state for only six months.
- interloperOne who enters uninvited
- outsidersThose not belonging
- transplantMove tissue between bodies
- opportunistOne exploiting circumstances
- exploitersThose who abuse others
speculator · profiteers · fly by night · traveling salesman · Civil War · huckster · overnight success · Jim Crow laws · Freedmen's Bureau · Gilded Age · reconstruction · suitcase · migration · uprootedness · Radical Republicans · Yankee · alienation · old money
carpet baggersnatives
Original local population
locals · native sons · old-timers · indigenous population · townies
carpet baggersSouthern Democrats
Historically conservative regional faction
redeemers · Bourbons · scalawags · Dixiecrats · copperheads