Unnamed Carpetbaggers 4

According to The Town, when Major de Spain returns from the Spanish-American War determined to modernize Jefferson, "nothing had happened in [the town] since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another renegade Mississippian" (11). The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South. The Reconstruction Era they are associated with ended around 1876.