For the Lord’s sweet sake, bubba-—they WERE carpetbaggers and scalawags not “investors”— they were thieves. There wasn’t any mystery, the “usual suspects” as you call them were the citizens of the South, who knew them for what they were, and that is why they were run out of town on a rail.
Someone comes into your town at the side of an imposed military government, empowered by Freedmen’s bureaus of corrupt kleptocrats who ripped off their own people. It took the removal of the Union army of occupation, and people pulling themselves up by their own hard labor and personal investment... to THEN work with proper investment channels to develop and recover from the devastation.
The Radical Republicans would have NONE of any kind of recovery that they did not 1.)profit from and 2.) control. These same were mighty glad Lincoln wasn’t around anymore, the same ones who profited greatly from “shoddy” and the misery of war. Stanton and his corrupt pals, who tried to off Seward as well, and impeached Johnson.
Some kind of “community organizer’s” view of the post war South—clintonian in scope and malaprop wording—”investors” and “developers”—LOL. Like Ambassador Dodd’s naivete in 1933 Germany— no clue.
No, the Radical Republicans wouldn’t have the people that started the insurrection violate the rights of citizens of African heritage.
That is why Reconstruction became more invasive. First southern treachery, then consequences.
In response to southern treachery, honest people just wouldn’t invest there, wouldn’t travel there. So the south became a backwater until the legal system treated people ‘not from there’ fairly. That took a few generations. Southern schools still don’t teach that Hood burned Atlanta.
The point is, locals would tar anyone from outside as a carpetbagger. Anyone who cooperated with anyone from outside was a scalawag.
Oh, but one could move from outside, but you would have to bribe one or more local leader of the KKK, and then so long as he/they was placated, you could live. Until he/they wanted more. And more. And more....
That unconstitutional tax on enterprise, lead to ambitious people going elsewhere. People invested in the west, where there may have been little law, but at least law was not uniformly subservient to rampant corruption. And so the south didn’t develop until the tax became lower. Eventually the oil business in Texas flourished, because the KKK wouldn’t/couldn’t mess with roughnecks. Eventually Atlanda became too busy to hate.
It did take a while though.
Southern people today are among the most decent of folks. Greenville NC is in a ‘research triangle’ that finds brilliant people working side by side. My brother got his PHD in Starkville Missippi, and the folks there are brilliant researchers.
People are people, and most are decent enough when they are permitted to be. Sadly the south had insitutions that coerced people to be more cruel than I hope you can imagine. It is good that is over.