The genus carpet-bagger is a man with a lank head of dry hair, a lank stomach, and long legs, club knees, and splay feet, dried legs, and lank jaws, with eyes like a fish and mouth like a shark. Add to this a habit of sneaking and dodging about in unknown places, habiting with negroes in dark dens and back streets, a look like a hound, and the smell of a polecat.
Words are wanting to do full justice to the genus scalawag. He is a cur with a contracted head, downward look, slinking and uneasy gait; sleeps in the woods, like old Crossland, at the bare idea of a Ku-Klux raid.
Our scalawag is the local leper of the community. Unlike the carpet-bagger, he is native, which is so much the worse. Once he was respected in his circle, his head was level, and he would look his neighbor in the face. Now, possessed of the itch of office and the salt rheum of radicalism, he is a mangy dog, slinking through the alleys, hunting the governor’s office, defiling with tobacco juice the steps of the capitol, stretching his lazy carcass in the sun on the square or the benches of the mayor’s court.
He waiteth for the troubling of the political waters, to the end that he may step in and be healed of the itch by the ointment of office. For office he “bums,” as a toper “bums” for the satisfying dram. For office, yet in prospective, he hath bartered respectability; hath abandoned business and ceased to labor with his hands, but employs his feet kicking out boot-heels against lamp-post and corner-curb while discussing the question of office.
It requires no seer to foretell the inevitable events that are to result from the coming fall election throughout the Southern States.
The unprecedented reaction is moving onward with the swiftness of a velocipede, with the violence of a tornado, and with the crash of an avalanche, sweeping negroism from the face of the earth.
Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of Alabama who have recently become squatter-
It was in connection with Lakin’s short visit that the Independent Monitor published the famous hanging picture of the carpet-bagger (Lakin) and the scalawag (Cloud).[1727]
The next offer of the presidency was made to R. D. Harper, a Northern Methodist Bureau minister, who at one time was the Bureau “Superintendent of Education” for the state, and who organized the Bureau schools and the Northern Methodist churches in north Alabama. He, after some consideration, declined the position, which, to an alien, was one of more danger than honor.[1728]
Difficulty was also experienced in securing a faculty. Some of the faculty elected by the old board of trustees were reëlected. Geary of Ohio was given the chair of mathematics, and Goodfellow of Chicago, who had previously been a clerk of the lower house of the legislature, was elected commandant and professor of military science. The latter said that he did not know anything about his work, but that he guessed he could learn. General John H. Forney, a Confederate and native, was also elected to a chair, the Board, it is said, voting for him under a misapprehension. The native contingent refused to serve under the regents, and the vacancies had again to be filled.[1729] Loomis of Illinois was elected professor of Ancient Languages; J. De F. Richards of Vermont, professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, etc. W. J. Collins, who was elected professor of Oratory and Rhetoric, wrote, “I except the situation.” The Monitor said, “We predict an uncomfortable time for the aggregation.”[1730] That paper chronicled all the weaknesses, peculiarities, and failings of the faculty. If one of them drank a little too much and staggered on the street, the Monitor informed the public.[1731] Upon the arrival of an heir in the Collins family, Randolph promptly demanded that he be named for him,—Ryland Randolph Collins,—and the name stuck.