During the election year of 1868, the scalawag was accused of inciting blacks and giving them the idea that they deserved social equality. The so-called freedmen, one angry journalist blasted, were now the “slaves of the scalawag white trash.” He violated social norms by mixing freely with blacks in public and private places. He invited the black man home to dinner, wounding the sensibility of his proper wife. And yet this worthless, ill-bred creature had suddenly acquired power. The very traits they despised in him—his low-class ways, his willingness to commingle with blacks—made him the
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