In United States history, scalawag were southern whites who supported Reconstruction and the Republican Party after the Civil War. The term is now in common use among historians.

History[link]

Scalawags were Southern whites who formed a Republican coalition with black freedmen and Northern newcomers (called carpetbaggers) to take control of their state and local governments.

Despite actually being a minority, they gained power by taking advantage of the Reconstruction laws of 1867, which disenfranchised the majority of Southern white voters as they could not take the Ironclad oath, which required they had never served in Confederate armed forces or held any political office under the state or Confederate governments.

The coalition controlled every former Confederate state except Virginia, as well as Kentucky and Missouri for varying lengths of time between 1866 and 1877. Two of the most prominent scalawags were General James Longstreet, one of Robert E. Lee's top generals, and Joseph E. Brown, who had been the wartime governor of Georgia. During the 1870s, many scalawags left the Republican Party and joined the conservative-Democrat coalition. Conservative Democrats had replaced all Republican minority governments in the South by 1877, after the controversial presidential election of 1876, in which the remaining Reconstruction governments had certified the Republican electors despite the Democratic candidate having carried the states.

Franklin gives an assessment of the motives of Southern Unionists. He noted that as more Southerners were allowed to vote and participate:^[1]

A curious assortment of native Southerners thus became eligible to participate in Radical Reconstruction. And the number increased as the President granted individual pardons or issued new proclamations of amnesty....Their primary interest was in supporting a party that would build the South on a broader base than the plantation aristocracy of Antebellum days. They found it expedient to do business with Negroes and so-called carpetbaggers; but often they returned to the Democratic party as it gained sufficient strength to be a factor in Southern politics.

Eventually most scalawags joined the conservative/Democratic Redeemer coalition. A minority persisted as Republicans and formed the "tan" half of the "Black and Tan" Republican party. It was a minority element in the GOP in every southern state after 1877.^[2]

Alabama[link]

In Alabama, Wiggins says calawags dominated the Republican Party. Some 117 Republicans were nominated, elected, or appointed to the most lucrative and important state executive positions, judgeships, and federal legislative and judicial offices between 1868 and 1881. They included 76 white southerners, 35 northerners, and 6 former slaves. In state offices during Reconstruction, white southerners were even more predominant: 51 won nominations, compared to 11 carpetbaggers and one black. 27 scalawags won state executive nominations (75%), 24 won state judicial nominations (89%), and 101 were elected to the Alabama General Assembly (39%). However, fewer scalawags won nominations to federal offices: 15 were nominated or elected to Congress (48%) compared to 11 carpetbaggers and 5 blacks. 48 scalawags were members of the 1867 constitutional convention (49.5% of the Republican membership); and seven scalawags were members of the 1875 constitutional convention (58% of the minuscule Republican membership.)^[3]

In terms of racial issues, Wiggins says:

"White Republicans as well as Democrats solicited black votes but reluctantly rewarded blacks with nominations for office only when necessary, even then reserving the more choice positions for whites. The results were predictable: these half-a-loaf gestures satisfied neither black nor white Republicans. The fatal weakness of the Republican party in Alabama, as elsewhere in the South, was its inability to create a biracial political party. And while in power even briefly, they failed to protect their members from Democratic terror. Alabama Republicans were forever on the defensive, verbally and physically." ^[4]

South Carolina[link]

In South Carolina there were about 100,000 scalawags, or about 15% of the white population. During its heyday, the Republican coalition attracted some wealthier white southerner, especially moderates favoring cooperation between open-minded Democrats and responsible Republicans. Rubin shows that the collapse of the Republican coalition came from disturbing trends to corruption and factionalism that increasingly characterized the party’s governance. These failings disappointed Northern allies who abandoned the state Republicans in 1876 as the Democrats under Wade Hampton reasserted conservative control. They used the threat of violence to cause many Republicans to stay quiet or switch to the Democrats.^[5]

Mississippi[link]

The most prominent scalawag of all was James L. Alcorn of Mississippi. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865, but like all southerners was not allowed to take a seat while the Republican Congress was pondering Reconstruction. He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, as demanded by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the scalawags, who composed about a third of the Republicans in the state, in coalition with carpetbaggers and freedmen. Elected governor by the Republicans in 1869, he served from 1870 to 1871. As a modernizer he appointed many like-minded former Whigs, even if they were Democrats. He strongly supported education, including public schools for blacks only, and a new college for them, now known as Alcorn State University. He maneuvered to make his ally Hiram Revels its president. Radical Republicans opposed Alcorn and were angry at his patronage policy. One complained that Alcorn's policy was to see "the old civilization of the South modernized" rather than lead a total political, social and economic revolution.^[6]

Alcorn resigned the governorship to become a U.S. Senator (1871–1877), replacing his ally Hiram Revels, the first African American senator. Senator Alcorn urged the removal of the political disabilities of white southerners, rejected Radical Republican proposals to enforce social equality by federal legislation, he denounced the federal cotton tax as robbery and defended separate schools for both races in Mississippi. Although a former slaveholder, he characterized slavery as a cancer upon the body of the Nation and expressed the gratification which he and many other Southerners felt over its destruction.^[7]

Alcorn led a furious political battle with Senator Adelbert Ames, the carpetbagger who led the other faction of the Republican Party in Mississippi. The fight ripped apart the party, with most blacks supporting Ames, but many—including Revels, supporting Alcorn. In 1873, they both sought a decision by running for governor. Ames was supported by the Radicals and most African Americans, while Alcorn won the votes of conservative whites and most of the scalawags. Ames won by a vote of 69,870 to 50,490, and Alcorn retired from state politics.^[8]

Mountains[link]

The mountain districts of Appalachia were often Republican enclaves.^[9] People there held few slaves, and they had poor transportation, deep poverty, and a standing resentment against the Low Country politicians who dominated the Confederacy and conservative Democracy in Reconstruction and after. Their strongholds in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina, and the Ozark region of northern Arkansas, became Republican bastions. These rural folk had a long-standing hostility toward the planter class. They harbored pro-Union sentiments during the war. Andrew Johnson was their representative leader. They welcomed Reconstruction and much of what the Radical Republicans in Congress advocated.^[10]

Origins of the term[link]

The term was originally a derogatory epithet but is used by many historians as a useful shorthand. The term originally meant rascal. Historian Ted Tunnell explains the origins of the term:^[11]

Reference works such as Joseph E. Worcester's 1860 Dictionary of the English Language defined scalawag as "A low worthless fellow; a scapegrace." Scalawag was also a word for low-grade farm animals. In early 1868 a Mississippi editor observed that scalawag "has been used from time immemorial to designate inferior milch cows in the cattle markets of Virginia and Kentucky." That June the Richmond Enquirer concurred; scalawag had heretofore "applied to all of the mean, lean, mangy, hidebound skiny [sic], worthless cattle in every particular drove." Only in recent months, the Richmond paper remarked, had the term taken on political meaning.

During the 1868-69 session of Judge "Greasy" Sam Watts court in Haywood County, North Carolina, Dr. William Closs, D.D. testified that a scalawag was "a Native born Southern white man who says he is no better than a negro and tells the truth when he says it." Some accounts record his testimony as "a native Southern white man, who says that a negro is as good as he is, and tells the truth when he says so."

Accusations of corruption[link]

Scalawags were denounced as corrupt by Redeemers. The Dunning School of historians sympathized with the claims of the Democrats. Agreeing with the Dunning School, Franklin said that the scalawags "must take at least part of the blame" for graft and corruption.^[12]

The Democrats alleged the scalawags to be financially and politically corrupt, and willing to support bad government because they profited personally. One Alabama historian claimed: "On economic matters scalawags and Democrats eagerly sought aid for economic development of projects in which they had an economic stake, and they exhibited few scruples in the methods used to push beneficial financial legislation through the Alabama legislature. The quality of the bookkeeping habits of both Republicans and Democrats was equally notorious." ^[4] However, historian Eric Foner argues there is not sufficient evidence that scalawags were any more or less corrupt than politicians of any era, including Redeemers.^[13]

Who were the Scalawags?[link]

White Southern Republicans included formerly closeted Southern abolitionists as well as former slaveowners who supported equal rights for freedmen. (The most famous of this latter group was Samuel F. Phillips, who later argued against segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)). Included, too, were people who wanted to be part of the ruling Republican Party simply because it provided more opportunities for successful political careers. Many historians have described scalawags in terms of social class, showing that on average they were less wealthy or prestigious than the elite planter class.^[14]

As Thomas Alexander (1961) showed, there was persistent Whiggery (support for the principles of the defunct Whig Party) in the South after 1865. Many ex-Whigs became Republicans who advocated modernization through education and infrastructure—especially better roads and railroads. Many also joined the Redeemers in their successful attempt to replace the brief period of civil rights promised to African Americans during the Reconstruction era with the Jim Crow era of segregation and second-class citizenship that persisted into the 20th century.

Baggett profiled 742 Scalawags, comparing them to 666 Redeemers who opposed and eventually replaced them. He compared three regions: the Upper South, the Southeast, and the Southwest. Baggett followed the life of each scalawag before, during, and after the war, with respect to birthplace, occupation, value of estate, slave ownership, education, party activity, stand on secession, war politics, and postwar politics.^[15]

Baggett thus looked at 1400 political activists across the South, and gave each a score:^[16]

• score = 1 an antisecessionist Breckinridge supporter in 1860 election
• 2 1860 Bell or Douglas supporter in 1860 election
• 3 1860-61 opponent of secession
• 4 passive wartime unionist
• 5 peace party advocate
• 6 active wartime unionist
• 7 postwar Union party supporter

Baggett found the higher the score the more likely the person was a Scalawag.

See also[link]

Look up scalawag in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Carpetbagger
• Southern Unionist
• Freedmen
• Reconstruction era of the United States
• Redeemers
• Collaborationism

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Alexander, Thomas B. "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, l860—77," Journal of Southern History 27 (1961) 305-29, in JSTOR
• Baggett, James Alex. The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction. (Louisiana State U.P. 2003). ISBN 0-8071-2798-1
• DeSantis, Vincent P. Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877—1897 (1998)
• Donald, David H. "The Scalawag in Mississippi Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History 10 (1944) 447—60 in JSTOR
• Ellem, Warren A. “Who Were the Mississippi Scalawags?” Journal of Southern History 38 (May 1972): 2 17—40 in JSTOR
• Franklin, John Hope. Reconstruction after the Civil War (1961) ISBN 0-226-26079-8
• Garner; James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901). online edition
• Ginsberg, Benjamin (2010). Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction. Johns Hopkins U.P.. http://books.google.com/books?id=44uF943aw18C. 
• Kolchin, Peter. "Scalawags, Carpetbaggers, and Reconstruction: A Quantitative Look at Southern Congressional Politics, 1868 to 1872” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979) 63—76, in JSTOR
• McKinney, Gordon B. Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865—1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (1998)
• Pereyra, Lillian A., James Lusk Alcorn: Persistent Whig. (1966).
• Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics 1869—1879 (1984)
• Rubin, Hyman. South Carolina Scalawags (2006)
• Tunnell, Ted. "Creating 'the Propaganda of History': Southern Editors and the Origins of Carpetbagger and Scalawag," Journal of Southern History (Nov 2006) 72#4 online at The Free Library
• Wiggins; Sarah Woolfolk. The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865—1881 (1991) online at Questia

Sources[link]

• Fleming, Walter L. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial 2 vol (1906). Uses broad collection of primary sources; vol 1 on national politics; vol 2 on states
• Memoirs of W. W. Holden (1911), North Carolina Scalawag governor

Damian Marley
Background information
Birth name	Damian Marley
Also known as	Jr. Gong, Gongzilla
Born	(1978-07-21) July 21, 1978 (age 33) Kingston, Jamaica
Genres	Reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, reggae fusion, ragga
Years active	1996–present
Labels	Tuff Gong, Ghetto Youth International, Universal
Associated acts	Bob Marley, Ky-Mani Marley, Ziggy Marley, Stephen Marley, Julian Marley, Nas, SuperHeavy

Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley (born July 21, 1978) is a Jamaican reggae artist who has won three Grammy awards.^[1] Damian is the youngest son of Bob Marley.

Damian was two years old when his father, Bob Marley, died; he is the only child born to Marley and Cindy Breakspeare, Miss World 1976. Damian's nickname Junior Gong is derived from his father's nickname of Tuff Gong. Marley has been performing since the age of 13. He shares, along with most of his family, a full-time career in music.

Music[link]

Marley has described his music as "dancehall and reggae. I've noticed...people trying to separate the two of them," he continues. "It's Jamaican culture in general. I don't try to classify or separate."^[2]

At age 13, he formed a musical group by the name of the Shephards, which included the daughter of Freddie McGregor and son of Third World's Cat Core. The group opened the 1992 Reggae Sunsplash festival.^[3] The band fell apart in the early 1990s and Damian started his solo career.^[4]

With the backing of his father’s label, Tuff Gong, he released his 1996 debut album Mr. Marley which surprised many who were unaccustomed to hearing a Marley deejaying rather than singing.^[5] Damian’s brother, Stephen Marley, was a producer and co-author for this album.^[4]

His second album, Halfway Tree was released in 2001. The cover of Halfway Tree depicts him standing under the clock at halfway tree. This is an embodiment of his parent’s different social origins with this mother from uptown and his father from the ghetto. In Kingston, Jamaica the Halfway Tree was used as a shady halfway point for farmers and vendors who would pass the tree on their route to transport their goods to the downtown market.^[6] It brought him much recognition, remaining on the Billboard top reggae albums chart for 158 weeks,^[7] and winning the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album.^[5]

His third album, Welcome to Jamrock was released in September 2005, named after the hugely successful song of the same name. The lyrics to the single "Welcome to Jamrock", which was performed over a riddim produced by Sly and Robbie for Ini Kamoze some 20 years earlier,^[8] centered around poverty, politics and crime in Jamaica. While the single was controversial at home over its perceived negative viewpoint of the island,^[9] many praised the content of the song. Dr. Clinton Hutton, professor at the University of the West Indies, said of the single, "'Jamrock' uses the icon of the inner city, of alienation, of despair, of prejudice, but of hope, of Jamaican identity, to remind us of the fire of frustration, the fire of creativity, the fire of warning to open up our eyes and look within to the life we are living. And still some of us don't want to hear and to look and say enough is enough."^[10] The single reached #13 on the UK Singles Chart^[11] and #55 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.^[12] It was also #100 on the Top 100 Songs of the Decade listing by Rolling Stone.^[13]

At the 2006 Grammy Awards, he won Best Reggae Album and Best Urban/Alternative Performance for Welcome to Jamrock. He is the only Jamaican reggae artist in history to win two Grammy Awards on the same night. He is also the only reggae artist to win in the Best Urban/Alternative Performance category at the Grammy Awards. The album sold 86,000 copies in its first week of release,^[9] and was eventually certified gold after selling 500,000 copies in the United States.^[14] Other notable singles from the album include "The Master Has Come Back", "Road to Zion" featuring Nas, and "Khaki Suit" featuring Bounty Killer and Eek-A-Mouse.

On May 17, 2010, Marley released Distant Relatives, a collaborative album with Nas. The album title refers not only to the bond between the artists, but the connection to their African ancestry, which inspired the album both musically and lyrically.^[15] They have previously collaborated on “Road to Zion”, on Marley’s Welcome to Jamrock album. The album joins two different flavors of music with Marley’s dub-rock aesthetic and Nas’ flow. Damian and Stephen produced much of the album. The proceeds of this album will go to building schools in the Congo.^[16]

In a 2011 interview on Tim Westwood, Damian revealed he had started work on a new album. His street single, released in Jamaica was titled "Just Aint The Same". He has also joined Mick Jagger's musical project SuperHeavy with Joss Stone, Dave Stewart and A.R. Rahman. Their debut single "Miracle Worker" was released on June 6, 2011, with the album scheduled for a September 2011 release.^[17] Damian also worked with electronic artist Skrillex on a song called "Make It Bun Dem" in 2012. ^[18]

Personal life and beliefs[link]

Born as Damian Marley, he was nicknamed "Jr. Gong" in honour of his legendary father, Bob "Tuff Gong" Marley. His mother is a Jamaican jazz musician, former model and crowned Miss World 1976 Cindy Breakspeare. After seeing The movie Damien: Omen II, which is about the coming of the Antichrist, one of Bob’s last requests in Germany was to have Damian’s name changed. “Damien being a devil….It was inappropriate for him as a Rastafarian to have a child with that name,” Bob said and Damian’s name was later changed.^[19] He has 13 siblings total; 10 on his father's side and 3 on his mother's side. Damian was two years old when his father died due to the spread of melanoma to his lungs and brain, at 36 years of age.

Marley has been in the music business since he was a child. He is a Rastafarian and his music reflects both his beliefs and the Rastafari guiding principles of one love, one planet, and freedom for all nations. While he travels and tours the better part of the year, his home base is split between Kingston, Jamaica and Miami, Florida in the United States of America. He has a younger half brother Christian and a half sister Leah from his mother Cindy.^[20]

Discography[link]

Singles[link]

Other charted songs[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Damian Marley

• Damian Marley on Myspace