Unnamed Carpetbaggers 3

In its brief summation of the experience of Jackson, Mississippi, during Reconstruction Requiem for a Nun evokes the stereotypical bogeyman of the Yankee carpetbagger. According to this account, during the Civil War these men made profits from selling the Union military "spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules"; after the surrender they came South carrying "carpet bags stuffed with ballot-forms" to exploit the freedmen (87). During Reconstruction they "cover the South like a migration of locusts" (187).