How The Term Came To Be

Southern Democrats, at a convention held in 1867, explicitly decided on ‘carpet-bager’ (later adding the second ‘g’) as a strategic pejorative of choice against Northern emigres. It played into the con man associations already widely associated with the object, going a step further than ‘man with the carpet bag’ by reducing the subject to the object, and turning the archetype into a concise and potent epithet. 

A regional difference that played into the term’s effectiveness was that while Northerners tended to take pride in carrying their carpet-bags on their person, a sign of independence and thrifty humility, Southerners took pride in not carrying them, i.e. having their luggage handled by a porter or servant. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a Southern woman scolds her Northern cousin upon her arrival:  “My dear Miss Vermont, positively you mustn’t come… that way. You must adopt at least a piece of a southern principle, and not walk out under all that load. They'll take you for a waiting-maid.” The ability to relieve one’s self from even light, manageable loads was therefore a palpable sign of white, upper class authority.

The ‘carpet-bagger’ of the Reconstruction era was therefore cast as an untrustworthy con man, who had voyaged to the South for unscrupulous reasons, was unaccustomed to the local culture, and would abandon the region as soon as the Southern man wrested control back from the military oppression of the federal government.