The word carpetbagger took hold around 1867, when Tennessee politician Andrew J. Fletcher mocked Northern newcomers arriving with one dirty shirt and a pair of socks in a rusty carpet bag. This episode looks at who the label actually covered during Reconstruction, roughly 1865 to 1877. Alongside opportunists came Union veterans, lawyers, editors, missionaries and hundreds of Northern women who taught freed children, in a region whose planter elite had kept taxes low and built almost no public schools. Republicans in the South drew on three groups, and Democrats branded two of them: scalawags and carpetbaggers.

The episode profiles Louisiana governor Henry C. Warmoth, accused of profiting from state bonds while defending Black voting rights against the White League, and William Hines Furbush, born enslaved in Kentucky, who served in a Union colored regiment, photographed in Liberia, and won a seat in the Arkansas House. It covers the Red Shirts, the flight of Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames, Milton Littlefield’s railroad bond fraud, and the Dunning School that cast the era as a mistake. It ends with the word’s later lives in politics, British building societies, an OSS operation and a stuffed steak.

• By 1890, Northern investors controlled 88 percent of the railroad mileage in the South.
• Furbush and state senator Richard Dawson sued a Little Rock saloon that refused them service and won the only successful case under Arkansas’s 1873 civil rights law.
• In 1878 Furbush became the first known Black Democrat elected to the Arkansas General Assembly.
• Hiram Revels wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 accusing Northern adventurers of exploiting Black voters.
• A 1950 highway marker in Colfax, Louisiana, called a massacre the end of carpetbag misrule and stood until 2021.