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11. Of Ambition and Enterprise: The Making of Carpetbagger George E. Spencer
- The University of Alabama Press
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11 of ambition and enterprise The making of Carpetbagger George e. spencer Terry L. Seip in his final speech to the U.s. senate in march 1871, the defensive alabamian carpetbagger willard warner argued that men like him were “like men everywhere; there are some good and some bad among them.” That warner counted himself and his supporters among the “good” perhaps goes without saying, but he also left no doubt as to who epitomized the “bad”—it was his senate colleague and fellow carpetbagger George e. spencer. spencer had just completed the first stage of a rather amazing political maneuver in which he turned on warner and william h. smith, a onetime friend and scalawag governor who was up for reelection in fall 1870. Public sniping between the spencer and warner-smith factions certainly contributed to the republican defeat, and spencer’s opponents charged him with helping alabama elect a Democratic governor and legislature, which in turn selected a Democrat to replace warner in the senate. but this was not all. over the next two years, spencer, now largely in control of federal patronage in the state, worked systematically to deny warner the collectorship at mobile, a prime patronage plum. and then, in an astonishing move, spencer engineered his own reelection to the senate in 1872 by shifting alliances and pushing for the election of a republican governor and legislature. The election results were sharply disputed, but from the political chaos of rival legislatures and spencer’s alleged use of nefarious means throughout the process, he prevailed and would serve until march 1879, nearly five years after alabama had been redeemed, much to the distress of his detractors, republican as well as Democratic.1 George spencer’s political maneuvering in the early 1870s sealed his historical reputation. his carpetbag, scalawag, and conservative opponents piled on the terms of derision: he was unscrupulous, unprincipled, vulgar, coarse, cunning, and corrupt, a schemer, manipulator, intriguer, plunderer, spoilsman, freebooter, and criminal—ill repute freely echoed among early reconstruction historians. even when reconstruction historiography headed into revisionist stages in the 1960s, spencer remained outside those who were rehabilitated, a “memorable model for the concept of the corrupt Carpetbagger interested primarily in his own advance- 192 / seip ment,” as sarah woolfolk wiggins put it in 1966. as historical attention has shifted to the experiences of the freedpeople and black participation in alabama politics, the derisive rhetoric aimed at spencer has fallen a notch, and there is a leaning toward downplaying his activity and influence and some acknowledgment that his support for the freedpeople remained strong and consistent. still, his reputation has not greatly changed and remains primarily based on a rather restricted examination of his activity at the state level.2 This essay deals not with the rancorous partisanship and factionalism of alabama politics after spencer’s selection to the senate in 1868 but his previous thirtyone years, especially his wartime service with northern alabama Unionists and his postwar reasoning for settling among them. Carpetbaggers have generally proven to be elusive targets for biographers, most often because of a paucity of primary evidence on their pre- and post-reconstruction years, but the extraordinary movement and activity of spencer’s early years can be pieced together from widely scattered sources and are invaluable for understanding his later behavior. spencer represents an exaggerated, almost stereotypical case study of the first generation of republican leadership that emerged along the american frontier during the 1850s, a strikingly ambitious, enterprising, entrepreneurial cohort of young men imbued with the tenets of economic mobility at the heart of the republican free labor ideology. most noteworthy is a remarkable consistency in spencer’s consuming economic and political drive across a series of episodes in which alabama, in some sense, was just another stop. born in a crossroads village in upstate New York in 1836, spencer was the last of four sons of a physician who had settled in the frontier area following service in the war of 1812. George and his brothers were raised during the later stages of frontier settlement, where speculation and opening up the land, loaning and borrowing money, and ambition were valued. The family was certainly enterprising; his hardworking father was intensely dedicated to his profession and steadily accumulated property. while the oldest brother followed his father into a stable medical practice , the next two brothers speculated in land, tanneries, and sawmills, but as their enterprises faltered, they left for the western frontier. The first landed well beyond continental...