Unnamed Northern White Men

Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers "carpetbaggers" (222), the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War. The term referred to a kind of luggage made out of the heavy cloth from which rugs were also made. Depending upon one's point of view (or political allegiance), these men came south either to help former slaves or to exploit them for selfish or vindictive reasons.