VCU news

By Mary Beth Alford

RICHMOND, Va. – While most Americans consign carpetbaggers to the same rogue's gallery occupied by Chicago gangsters, crooked cops and corrupt Indian agents, much of the credit, or blame for that, belongs to Hollywood. Few moviegoers can forget the scene in Gone With the Wind in which gaudily dressed carpetbaggers jostle and jeer Scarlet O'Hara on the streets of Atlanta.

But how did Reconstruction look from the other side of the Southern divide — from the perspective of carpetbaggers and black Southerners? The latest book by Virginia Commonwealth University history professor Ted Tunnell, Ph.D., takes readers on a trip down the Republican side of the street. The biography, "Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction," was published by Louisiana State University Press this year.

"Every year," says Tunnell, "we get more books about the usual suspects — Civil War generals, Lincoln and Andrew Johnson — books that, for the most part, plow the same old fields. Twitchell’s story is new. His manuscripts are a gold mine. He breaks new ground."

In this biography, Tunnell draws heavily on Twitchell’s own journals. In the telling of Twitchell’s life, Tunnel makes the case that the very word "carpetbagger" was invented as a propaganda weapon in the struggle to preserve the South as a "white man's country."

A Vermont native, Twitchell served three years in the Army of the Potomac before becoming an officer in the United States Colored Troops, where the officers were required to be white. After Appomattox, he served in the Louisiana Freedmen's Bureau, married a Louisiana woman, took up the life of a cotton planter and entered politics almost by accident. Twitchell’s manuscripts tell how his white neighbors came to hate him mainly because of his progressive ideas about the civil and political rights of African Americans — and their need for decent schools.

Twitchell founded a thriving Yankee colony in the heart of the Reconstruction South. His very success made him and his family prime targets of the notorious Louisiana White League. Twitchell's brother, three brothers-in-law and numerous friends and allies were murdered, and in 1876 a would-be assassin gunned him down. Although the carpetbagger lived, both of his arms had to be amputated. Of the nine members of the family who settled in Louisiana, only Twitchell and his mother survived.

"’Edge of the Sword’ is an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary individual," wrote Paul A. Cimbala, Ph.D., Fordham University. "The [book] makes for chilling reading while reminding readers that for many Americans the war did not end in the spring of 1865."

Tunnell, who earned his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley, is the author of "Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877" and is the editor of "Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell."