Mississippi Scalawags

FAIN: FT-10820-70

David G. Sansing
University of Mississippi (University, MS 38677-1848)

Study of the Mississippi scalawags during Reconstruction. The term scalawag, meaning a southern white Republican, has become a symbol for political immorality. Fellow's preliminary research indicates that this image is only an apparition fashioned during the period of disillusionment following the Civil War. Rather than being renegades, scalawags were reformers who sought to readjust Southern society to the realities of military defeat and Negro suffrage. Few studies of the Reconstruction exist and those that do are too often clouded by the post-war biases of Southerners and Northerners alike.