white Southerner supporting Reconstruction policies after the Civil War usually for self-interest
If you call a boy or a man a scallywag, you mean that he behaves badly but you like him, so you find it difficult to be really angry with him. It's his idea of a joke, I suppose, the scallywag. = rascal. scalawag a child who causes trouble but not in a serious way - used when you are not angry with them
Any white Southerner who supported the federal plan of Reconstruction after the Civil War or who joined with the black freedmen and the carpetbaggers in support of Republican Party policies
Any white Southerner who supported the federal plan of Reconstruction after the Civil War or who joined with the black freedman and the carpetbaggers in support of Republican Party policies
a scallywag (Perhaps from scallag ). U.S. Southerner who supported Reconstruction. Opponents also applied the pejorative term to those who joined with carpetbaggers and freedmen to support Republican Party policies. The term, of unknown origin, was used from the 1840s to denote a worthless farm animal and later a worthless person. Scalawags included former Whigs and hill-country farmers with Unionist sympathies and constituted nearly 20% of the white electorate after the American Civil War. Many held government positions in the South and advocated moderate reforms