carpetbagger

In US history, derogatory name for any of the entrepreneurs and politicians from the North who moved to the Southern states during Reconstruction (1865-77) after the Civil War, to exploit the chaotic conditions for their own benefit.

With the votes of newly enfranchised blacks and some local white people (called scalawags), they won posts in newly created Republican state governments, but were resented by many white Southerners as outsiders and opportunists. The term thus came to mean a corrupt outsider who profits from an area's political instability, although some arrivals had good motives. They were so called because they were supposed to carry their ill-gotten gains in small satchels made of carpeting.