“Dunning school” of historians asserted that reconstruction had been a tragic failure: the so-called “carpetbaggers”—a derogatory term for Northerners come to teach, invest, or to farm—had invaded the South merely to plunder and then profit from its white misery. Freedmen and -women had been nothing more than inferior beings easily manipulated; and the Ku Klux Klan was a patriotic guild that repaired the dignity of white folk. Andrew Johnson had been maligned and mistreated.
