| carpetbaggers | Pejorative term used by Southerners to describe white men from the North, most of them veterans from the Union army, who moved into the former Confederacy after the war, often to take advantage of economic opportunities as hopeful planters, businessmen, or professionals.
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| factors | Brokers in the economic system of the Old South who marketed planters’ crops.
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| scalawag | Pejorative term used by Southerners to refer to southerners who cooperated with the Republican regimes of Reconstruction. Scalawags were usually former Whigs who had never felt comfortable in the Democratic party or farmers who lived in remote areas where there had been little or no slavery.
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| sharecroppin | Economic system prevalent in the South after the Civil War where (often black) tenants worked their own plots of land and paid their (white) landlords either a fixed rent or a share of their crop.
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| solid South | Refers to the fact that the South became overwhelmingly Democratic as a reaction to Republican actions during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Democratic domination of Southern politics persisted for over a century despite occasional cracks, especially in presidential elections.
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| spoils system | The political equivalent of the military axiom "To the victor belong the spoils." In the nineteenth century, the victorious political party in national, state, and local elections routinely dismissed most officeholders and replaced them with workers loyal to the incoming party. The "spoils" were the many patronage jobs available in the government. At the national level, this included thousands of post office and customs positions. Political organizations especially adept at manipulating spoils to remain in power were often called machines. Civil-service reformers demanded that non-policymaking jobs be filled on the basis of competitive examinations and that officeholders would continue in office as long as they performed satisfactorily.
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| Unionists | Residents of the Confederate states who counseled against secession and who often remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. Unionists were more common in upcountry regions of the South, where the slave-based plantation economy was less influential than in coastal areas of the South. Some Unionists left the South during the Civil War, but many remained.
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| veto/pocket veto | The president's refusal to sign a bill passed by Congress. He must send it back to Congress with his objections. Unless two-thirds of each house votes to override the president's action, the bill will not become law. A pocket veto occurs when Congress has adjourned and the president refuses to sign a bill within ten days. Because Congress is not in session, the president's action cannot be overridden. (See the Constitution, Article I, Section 7.)
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