Carpet Baggers and Scalawags – Reconstruction, The Freedmen’s Bureau and Post-War Politics

By Dr. Charles Pendley
Contributing Writer

The year 2021 was our county’s Bicentennial year, marking 200 years since our county’s founding by an act of the Georgia state legislature. It is altogether fitting to look back on the last two centuries, on the people and events that made Henry County what it is today and – hopefully – to draw some lessons from our county’s long and eventful history.
Coming articles in this series will follow the long arc of our county’s history during a period of unprecedented growth and change from the devastation of the Civil War in 1865, the brief period of Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau from 1865 to 1872, religious revival, the rise of towns and new communities, the resurgence of “King Cotton,” new industries based on wood, textiles and farm machinery to the crashes of the “boll weevil depression” in the early 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

During these six decades, Henry County’s population, prosperity and its towns, communities and institutions like churches, schools and civic groups saw rapid growth. Here we see Henry County’s population from 1860 to 1920.
The Civil War resulted in an improvement in the legal status of the newly freed people who now had the freedom to move from the plantations into growing towns throughout the South and even to northern cities as far away as Chicago, where there was a demand for cheap labor. Those who stayed on former plantations became tenant farmers, sharecroppers and hired labor. The ownership of land and other productive assets was still concentrated in the hands of former landowners and new settlers with the means to buy land.

Few if any of the newly freed people had money to buy land, tools or farm implements of their own. Those who had skills like carpentry, blacksmithing, wagon and buggy making, mechanics and other useful skills could find paying jobs in growing towns like Bear Creek (later Hampton), McDonough, Locust Grove and Stockbridge.
Those who stayed behind on the land became tenant farmers, sharecroppers or paid laborers. For plowing, pulling wagons and many other jobs requiring strength beyond what people could do, mules reigned supreme. They had not yet been put out to pasture by the arrival of tractors in the 20th century.

Politics after the Civil War
While this section looks at state politics, they affected Henry County as well. It is assumed that Henry County was somewhat more liberal and progressive than most other parts of the state.
In December 1865 the newly elected Georgia General Assembly ratified the 13th Amendment ending slavery, and in July 1868 the 14th Amendment, granting United States citizenship to freed men. It would be another half century before women of any color would get the right to vote. It took a third amendment, the 15th amendment in February 1870, to protect the right of freed men to vote. The first presidential election after Georgia was the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union took place in 1870. In 1868, Georgia and most likely Henry County, voted for the Democratic Party candidate, Horatio Seymour, who was running against the Republican candidate and former union General Ulysses S. Grant. U.S. Grant, as General Sherman’s former commander, was understandably not very well liked by many Georgia voters.

Georgia’s first Republican Governor, Rufus Bullock, was elected in 1868. He supported equal economic opportunity and political rights for both blacks and whites. He promoted public education for all and encouraged railroads, banks and industrial development. He also sought the federal military to help ensure legal rights of freedmen, which made him in the eyes of many, “the most hated man in Georgia” and a “scalawag.” (Scalawag, along with Carpetbagger, were derogatory names for white southern-born Republicans and Republicans who had recently migrated from the North, respectively.)

Georgia lost its right to representation in the US Congress when the state’s General Assembly expelled 28 freedmen members and prevented freedmen from voting in the 1868 Presidential election. President U.S. Grant then put Georgia under military rule once again in 1869. The state’s Democrats, who included many former planters and Confederate-era leaders, opposed the Republican Party, Governor Bulloch and Reconstruction so strongly that Governor Bulloch was forced to resign and flee the state in 1871.

Part II of this column will be published in the April 6, 2022 edition.