Talk:Scalawag

message: Yeah, this whole thing is ridiculous...
Please someone else rewrite...
This doesn't actually say anything at all...
*Which is why I've rewritten most of it.  It still needs work, however.  Someone else want to take over?--dogcanteen
*Not sure when these comments were written, but article looks pretty good now. "Nice Job" to whomever. --Satori Son 13:46, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wow 

message: It's easy to research such things on the Internet, at  or perhaps .
dino 03:38, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: etymology

message: This paragraph cries out for conversion to plain English. It is terrible writing and not understandable by ordinary readers. If someone wants to rewrite it in plain English, please do so. Otherwise, it will be safe on this page.  
:Baggett (2003) shows that Scalawags were for the most part long-time doubters or opponents of the Confederacy. He explains that along the continuum of "an 1860 antisecessionist Breckinridge supporter/1860 Bell or Douglas supporter/ 1860 antisecessionist / passive wartime unionist / peace party advocate / active wartime unionist / postwar Union party supporter" the farther an individual moved along this line the greater his chances of becoming a Republican (p. 271).
Skywriter 02:12, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: it seems clear enough to me: Baggett looked at hundreds of people and gave eash a score:
*score = 1 an 1860 antisecessionist Breckinridge supporter
*2 1860 Bell or Douglas supporter
*3 1860 antisecessionist 
*4  passive wartime unionist 
* 5 peace party advocate 
* 6 active wartime unionist 
* 7  postwar Union party supporter
The higher the score the more likely the person was a Republican (that is a Scalawag). Rjensen 02:25, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: it's true that people who are ignorant of basic history will either have to click and learn or forever be ignorant of the 7 factors that led to Scalawagism. On the other hand people who are interested in one of the basic questions of Reconstruction just may learn something from Baggett's extraordinary research. Rjensen 13:37, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anybody know what this means?

message: Woolfolk is heavily quoted in this article yet there is no information about the book. Skywriter 20:48, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Woolfolk

message: :
In Alabama, white southerners dominated the Republican party. (Woolfolk, 131ff) One hundred seventeen Republicans were nominated, elected, or appointed to the most lucrative and important positions (state executive and judicial offices and federal legislative and judicial offices) between 1868 and 1881. They included 76 white southerners, 35 northerners.  Included were six African Americans. In state offices during Reconstruction, white southerners were even more predominant, as 51 won nominations, compared to 11 carpetbaggers and one black. Twenty-seven scalawags won state executive nominations (75%), 24 won state judicial nominations (89%), and 101 were elected to the legislature (39%). However, fewer scalawags won nominations to federal offices: 15 were nominated or elected to Congress (48%) compared to 11 carpetbaggers and 5 blacks. Forty-eight scalawags were members of the 1867 constitutional convention (49.5% of the Republican membership); and seven scalawags were members of the 1875 constitutional convention (58% of the miniscule Republican membership).
1. this is not sourced
2. it is unclear, and ignores that African Americans were among the carpetbaggers, or Northerners who participated in government in the South during Reconstruction.
::this is sourced in the very first line (Woolfolk pages 131 ff-- full title is in references. This article is about white southern Republicans = Scalawags. It has very precise details about them. Rjensen 01:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: moving section to talk page

message: please do not delete summaries of scholarly books and articles. Please do not slip in POV (like "promises" that somebody made when to whom?) Rjensen 01:45, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  do not delete scholarship 

message: I believe the misunderstanding is due to your incorrectly entering the author's name in the text. 
You confuse Woolfolk when it should be Wiggins. Woolfolk is not findable by looking at the first words in the bibliography, and Woolfolk is not the author's surname in any search of book publishing records. And yet, the referenced text in this article is to Woolfolk. In short, this is a reader's nightmare. Skywriter 05:46, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: scholarship not deleted, error discovered

message: The sourced definition of scalawag in current version is an accurate description. White Southerners were taunted for pledging that they had not furthered the aims of the Confederacy, not for party membership, as was mistakenly added. I do not see the other edits as friendly. If you wish to discuss them one by one, please do so here. As with every Wikipedia article, it is useful to be able to verify sourced claims. Without the use of citations, various edits fall into a nether land of not being verifiable.Skywriter 16:48, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: let's not mix up wartime Unionist (which has its own entry) with Scalawag, which was only used after the war. Baggett has much more complex and useful definition than in Franklin's olfd book, which misses the scholarship of last 45 years. Rjensen 19:41, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Party membership not required for scalawag label

message: Still not got a NPOV - it's very American centric. For example many countries have "whites" and "Republican parties". All countries have a North and South. --08:33, June 22, 2006 (UTC)
*I believe this has been addressed by Zocky's addition of "In the United States..." at the beginning.  I don't think this was ever a POV issue, actually, but it is much clearer now either way. --Satori Son 13:57, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  American POV 

message: It is unclear whether the article refers to the old Democrats (who are now the Republicans) or the new Democrats (who then was the Republicans. 213.173.232.178 13:53, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The Democratic and Republican parties of the 1860s are the same parties as today. Rjensen 15:03, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Party History 

message: The lack of NPOV is clear in the fact that it is impossible to link to "Southern Unionist" in articles. Can these two threads be separated, or at least Scalawag subordinated as a subsection of Southern Unionist?--Kenmayer 18:20, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: as this article explains, scalawag was the postwar term and southern unionist was a wartime term. The two groups partly overlapped but were not identical. In 2007 all scholars use the term "Scalawag" for the postwar southern whites who supported the Republican party--it is not a POV. Rjensen 09:29, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why does Southern Unionist redirect here rather than vice versa? 

message: Scally wag is a term I and all my family for generations have used for a boy (or girl) who is a "cheeky rascal".
The origin was thought to be northern England.
However, I had to work in The Shetland Islands for some time and found the term was used locally, even though now regarded as old fashioned. It referred to people from Scalloway. Scalloway is the Shetland port on the west of the Islands and was once the capital of the Shetlands. The term is mildly derogatory and everyone knew it but did not explain it. It seemed again to be "cheeky rascal" but they implied it was more than that. Shetlanders said it went back many centuries, i.e. long before the American references given in the main article. I am sure the American references  are correct in themselves but the Shetland reference probably predates them and might, perhaps, be linked.
The only other point that may be relevant is that the style of speech in Shetland makes Scallywag and Scalawag sound almost the same.
Does this contribute usefully? Does anyone else have any more or better information? 
Thanks - Mike Bruce - 10 Aug 2007
Dmmbruce 15:46, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scallywag is being redirected to scalawag, is it just variations in old spelling? Here is a different option. 

message: Who is this?  Introduced out of nowhere.
dino (talk) 04:45, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Who is Baggett 

message: Something is missing from the beginning of the second of these paragraphs:
By October 1868 a Mississippi newspaper was defining the expression scathingly in terms of Redemption politics.[3] The term continued to be used as a pejorative by conservative pro-segregationist southerners well into the 20th century.[4] But historians commonly use the term to refer to the group of historical actors with no pejorative meaning intended.[5]
designed to bring the South back to normal as soon as possible, while the Radical Republicans used Congress to block the president, impose harsh terms, and upgrade the rights of the Freedmen (the ex-slaves). In the South, Black Freedmen and White Southerners with Republican sympathies joined forces with Northerners who had moved south (called "Carpetbaggers" by their southern opponents) to implement the policies of the Republican party.
Koro Neil (talk) 11:17, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that an edit made on 25 March 2016 lost the heading "History" as well as part of a sentence.  Robert McClenon (talk) 02:23, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

text: Fixed.  Not sure that I agree with treating Lincoln and Johnson the same, but I have restored the previous text.  Robert McClenon (talk) 02:26, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text lost? 

message: The section labeled "history" should be removed from the article. The proper subject for the article is what the term means, who used the term and how they used it. The article makes the serious mistake of accepting the slur and then presenting a history of an invented group based on that slur. You can talk about who called who a scalawag and what they meant by using the word. But talking about "scalawags" if it were a political movement is wrong. 107.193.104.112 (talk) 01:28, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  bad article that should be rewritten