Customer Reviews

Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation

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An Civil War eminent historian demolishes the myths about carpetbaggers. The book follows 10 Northerners who became some of the more prominent leaders of the reconstructed South in the post-war era. Their actions belie the stereotypical story of greedy, slippery Northerners that was created to explain away the failure of Reconstruction after the North gave up on it. Read this book along with Eric Foner's masterpiece on the same subject.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Civil War, the South, or race relations. To understand America you need to know the story of Reconstruction - and it is likely not the one you learned in school. A fascinating read.

In this inconsistent but useful work, Richard Current traces the lives and careers of various Northerners who heaed South during Reconstruction and rose to power and prominence. Current shows that the carpetbaggers had very little, if anything, in common. Some wanted to help the freed slaves while others did not. Some of them wanted to stay down South and did (Harrison Reed in Florida and Henrt Clay Warmoth in Louisiana) while others left the moment they were out of power. Current offers some interesting sketches and shows them warts and all-one was a drug addict, one was a murderer, some were well off while others could barely make ends meets, some were corrupt and others incompetent. It's hard to call this work a re-evaluation like Current does in his subtitle since they were an odd mix of men. Current is a solid enough writer and, while race is certainly the key issue in Reconstruction, Current tends to focus on it to the neglect of other matters (such as economic development). Current presents these biographical skecthes in a sequential order so a single chapter could touch on many political leaders across various states. It would have been better had he crafted individual biographical sketches. Still, despite these flaws, Current offers a humanizing look at neglected political leaders but even he seems more interested in some of them than others.

This tome should have been titled (Richard Current's misinterpretation) instead of (A reinterpretation). If Richard Nelson Current is an "eminent Civil War historian" then I wonder just who holds him in eminence. He spends all of his time showing all the BAD things done to those poor innocent Northerners who came south just to help those poor "Godforsaken" people who had so many problems. Come on, go back and read the newspapers and books of the day.

If he can find 10 people to praise, I can find hundreds more that fit the description of Woodrow Wilson that they were "men bent on an expedition of profit, who used the Negroes as tools for their own selfish ends". You must understand that the blacks were for the most part uneducated and were pushed into doing things that were only due to fail and cause animosity between the races. These people did as much or more harm to the Black Man than did the KKK. I can list at least ten members of the KKK that would pass the same "Nice Persons" Test as did Current, but this would not make the KKK a good and kind organization. In fact the KKK came into being due to the work of those Carpetbaggers!

If I am allowed my opinion of this period I would say that it is the reason that it has taken so long for the Black Man to be recognized as an equal, because of the things done while "promoting" and using him, they just built a wall between the races. Evidence shows that though these people were wrongly enslaved before this war, more respect was shown to the Black freeman of that day than was shown to the Black Man after "reconstruction" as late as the 1950's.

Slavery was wrong but a more tolerant North would have eased the wrongs of war. Mr. Current, what about the many elections where the Democratic vote was not counted or a white man was disenfranchised to put a Republican in office? Come on, how ignorant do you take your fellow Americans.

The attitude of the Republicans after the War of Aggression was that "these people must be punished for their rebellion".... Never mind that most were fighting because their homeland had been invaded and had little or nothing to do with the politics that started the conflict.

If you want a true story of these Carpetbaggers, read online the contemporary news articles and writings about them, not some person painting his version almost a century and a half later. By the way I got my copy of this book at Half Price Books for $2.98 and felt about one third through the book that I had wasted my money, especially when I saw that I could have gotten it used from Amazon for 34 cents. I gave it one star because it might cause a person to go seek the truth about Carpetbaggers. I would bet that the previous reviewer feels that Bush gave up on New Orleans because those people did not appreciate him and cooperate.