I don't think the carpetbaggers deserve the red-carpet treatment ... "
Margaret Mitchell
Carpetbaggers are worse than Sherman's March to the Sea ... "
Margaret Mitchell
Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101
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Red-carpet treatment is an idiom that means to treat someone with special care and attention. It comes from the practice of rolling out a carpet for a particularly esteemed visitor to walk on. Rolling out the red carpet means to welcome someone with special treatment. The red-carpet treatment is treating someone as if he is special and important.
extraordinary level of pomp and ceremony.
The Russian president and his delegation were greeted at a Beijing airport with lavish red carpet treatment, flanked by an honor guard composed of members from all three branches of the Chinese military.
making this event extra special.
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Carpetbagger
In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain. The term broadly included both individuals who sought to promote Republican politics (including the right of African Americans to vote and hold office), and individuals who saw business and political opportunities because of the chaotic state of the local economies following the war. In practice, the term carpetbagger often was applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The word is closely associated with scalawag, a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.
White Southerners commonly denounced carpetbaggers collectively during the post-war years, fearing they would loot and plunder the defeated South and be allied politically with the Radical Republicans.[1] Sixty men from the North, including educated free blacks and slaves who had escaped to the North and returned South after the war, were elected from the South as Republicans to Congress. The majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction were from the North.
Since the end of the Reconstruction era, the term has been used to denote people who move into a new area for purely economic or political reasons despite not having ties to that place.
Etymology and definition
The term carpetbagger, used exclusively as a pejorative term, originated from the carpet bag, a form of cheap luggage, made from carpet fabric, which many of the newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. It is now used in the United States to refer to a parachute candidate, that is, an outsider who runs for public office in an area without having lived there for more than a short time, or without having other significant community ties.
According to a 1912 book by Oliver Temple Perry, Tennessee Secretary of State and Radical Republican Andrew J. Fletcher "was one of the first, if not the very first, in the State to denounce the hordes of greedy office-seekers who came from the North in the rear of the army in the closing days of the [U.S. Civil] War", in the June 1867 stump speech that he delivered across Tennessee in support of the re-election of the disabled Tennessee Governor William G. Brownlow:
"No one more gladly welcomes the Northern man who comes in all sincerity to make a home here, and to become one of our people, than I, but for the adventurer and the office-seeker who comes among us with one dirty shirt and a pair of dirty socks, in an old rusty carpet bag, and before his washing is done becomes a candidate for office, I have no welcome."
That was the origin of the term "carpet bag," and out of it grew the well known term "carpet-bag government."
In the United Kingdom at the end of the 20th century, carpetbagger developed another meaning, referring to people who joined a mutual organization, such as a building society, in order to force it to demutualize, that is, to convert into a joint stock company, seeking personal financial gain by that means.
Background
The Republican Party in the South comprised three groups after the Civil War, and white Democratic Southerners referred to two in derogatory terms. Scalawags were white Southerners who supported the Republican party, "carpetbaggers" were recent arrivals in the region from the North, and freedmen were freed slaves.
Most of the 430 Republican newspapers in the South were edited by scalawags and 20 percent were edited by carpetbaggers. White businessmen generally boycotted Republican papers, which survived through government patronage.
Historian Eric Foner argues:
...most carpetbaggers probably combine the desire for personal gain with a commitment to taking part in an effort "to substitute the civilization of freedom for that of slavery"...Carpetbaggers generally supported measures aimed at democratizing and modernizing the South – civil rights legislation, aid to economic development, the establishment of public school systems.
Reforming impulse
Beginning in 1862, Northern abolitionists moved to areas in the South that had fallen under Union control. Schoolteachers and religious missionaries went to the South to teach the freedmen; some were sponsored by northern churches. Some were abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; they often became agents of the federal Freedmen's Bureau, which started operations in 1865 to assist the vast numbers of recently emancipated slaves. The bureau established schools in rural areas of the South for the purpose of educating the mostly illiterate Black and Poor White population. Other Northerners who moved to the South did so to participate in the profitable business of rebuilding railroads and various other forms of infrastructure that had been destroyed during the war.
During the time most blacks were enslaved, many were prohibited from being educated and attaining literacy. Southern states had no public school systems, and upper-class white Southerners either sent their children to private schools (including in England) or hired private tutors. After the war, hundreds of Northern white women moved South, many to teach the newly freed African-American children. They joined like-minded Southerners, most of which were employed by the Methodist and Baptist Churches, who spent much of their time teaching and preaching to slave and freedpeople congregations both before and after the Civil War.
Economic motives
Map of the United States in 1872, showing the disparity of wealth between the North and South during the Reconstruction Era
Carpetbaggers also established banks and retail businesses. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings and energy in this promising new frontier, and civilians lured south by press reports of "the fabulous sums of money to be made in the South in raising cotton." Foner notes that "joined with the quest for profit, however, was a reforming spirit, a vision of themselves as agents of sectional reconciliation and the South's "economic regeneration." Accustomed to viewing Southerners—black and white—as devoid of economic initiative, the "Puritan work ethic", and self-discipline, they believed that only "Northern capital and energy" could bring "the blessings of a free labor system to the region." Carpetbaggers tended to be well educated and middle class in origin. Some had been lawyers, businessmen, and newspaper editors. The majority (including 52 of the 60 who served in Congress during Reconstruction) were veterans of the Union Army.
Leading "black carpetbaggers" believed that the interests of capital and labor were identical and that the freedmen were entitled to little more than an "honest chance in the race of life."
Many Northern and Southern Republicans shared a modernizing vision of upgrading the Southern economy and society, one that would replace the inefficient Southern plantation regime with railroads, factories, and more efficient farming. They actively promoted public schooling and created numerous colleges and universities. The Northerners were especially successful in taking control of Southern railroads, aided by state legislatures. In 1870, Northerners controlled 21% of the South's railroads (by mileage); 19% of the directors were from the North. By 1890, they controlled 88% of the mileage; 47% of the directors were from the North.
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Sherman's March to the Sea (also known as the Savannah campaign or simply Sherman's March) was a military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia from November 15 until December 21, 1864, by William Tecumseh Sherman, major general of the Union Army. The campaign began on November 15 with Sherman's troops leaving Atlanta, recently taken by Union forces, and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces followed a "scorched earth" policy, destroying military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property, disrupting the Confederacy's economy and transportation networks. The operation debilitated the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender. Sherman's decision to operate deep within enemy territory without supply lines was unusual for its time, and the campaign is regarded by some historians as an early example of modern warfare or total war.
Following the March to the Sea, Sherman's army headed north for the Carolinas campaign. The portion of this march through South Carolina was even more destructive than the Savannah campaign, since Sherman and his men harbored much ill-will for that state's part in bringing on the start of the Civil War; the following portion, through North Carolina, was less so.
Etymology
The March to the Sea owes its common name to a poem written by S. H. M. Byers in late 1864. Byers was a Union prisoner of war held at Camp Sorghum, near Columbia, South Carolina. During his imprisonment, Byers wrote a poem about the Savannah campaign which he titled "Sherman's March to the Sea", which was set to music by fellow prisoner W. O. Rockwell. When Byers was freed by the Union Capture of Columbia, he approached General Sherman and handed him a scrap of paper. On it was Byers' poem. Reading the paper later in the day, Sherman was so moved by Byers' poem that he promoted Byers to his staff where the two became lifelong friends. The poem would go on to lend its name to Sherman's campaign, and a version set to music became an instant hit with Sherman's Army and later the public.