Cary, Mary Ann Shadd 335her journalistic endeavors. Shadd Cary was the country’s
fi rst black woman newspaper publisher. She was born the
eldest of 13 children to free, property-owning mulattoes in
Wilmington, Delaware. Her father, Abraham Shadd, was
a well-known abolitionist and was involved in the Under-
ground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves. Because of the op-
pressive racial environment for blacks, the Shadds moved
to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Mary Ann was pri-
vately educated. Aft er Shadd completed her studies at the
age of 17, she relocated to Wilmington and opened up a
school for black children. Mary Ann taught there and in a
number of abolitionist towns such as Trenton, New Jersey,
and West Chester until 1849.
Shadd began writing and publishing her work in 1849.
Her fi rst printed letter appeared in Frederick Douglass’s
North Star newspaper, and she also published a pamphlet
titled Hints to the Colored People of the North. Shadd dis-
couraged blacks from imitating American consumerism
and urged blacks to work hard and be thrift y to escape pov-
erty and the vestiges of racism. One year later, she moved
to New York to teach and also became politically involved
in black political conventions. Even though Shadd was a
woman, and American society frowned upon female po-
litical activism, her family’s connections within abolition-
ist and activist circles allowed her access to powerful and
well-connected white and black abolitionist leaders. In
1851, Shadd attended a convention with pro-emigration
activists and abolitionists Martin Delany, John Scoble, and
Henry Bibb in Toronto, Canada. She was so moved by the
messages of these leaders that Shadd moved to Windsor,
Canada West, in 1851.
Black emigrationists believed that America off ered no
real hope for black freedom and advancement because of
slavery and severe racism. Th ese activists advocated for
blacks to relocate to other countries, such as Canada, Mex-
ico, and Haiti, and some pro-emigration leaders wanted
a black return to West Africa. Shadd argued that Canada
West was best for black migration because of its close prox-
imity to the United States, similar climate, and economic
opportunities. Shadd worked to improve life for Canada
West black émigrés, and in 1851, she opened a racially inte-
grated school for black and white students. She taught there
under the auspices of the American Missionary Associa-
tion, serving as the sole black missionary.
A year later, she published A Plea for Emigration or
Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Politicalexperience reveals that carpetbaggers were a convenient
scapegoat. Th eir misdeeds, some real and some imagined,
were used to help explain the failure of Reconstruction and
the waning infl uence of the Republican Party in national
politics in the last two decades of the 19th century. Carpet-
baggers also bore the brunt of corruption charges leveled
at Republican politicians and came to represent the heavy-
handedness of a group of so-called Radical Republicans.
Northern migrants to the postwar South thus became
known as carpetbaggers not just because of Southern resent-
ment at Northern occupation, but also to mask Republican
embarrassment at the failure of its policies for the postwar
nation. What the carpetbagger shares with the freedmen
he once championed is the fact that he was demonized in
order to avoid the full implications of the Civil War and
Reconstruction. In the case of the freedmen, the war and
its aft ermath raised the prospect of eventual racial equality.
Th e carpetbagger, in contrast, was the vocal proponent of
an outmoded gospel of political economy and thus unwit-
tingly the herald of a new and larger nation state that was
emerging from the ashes of the war.
See also: Congressional Reconstruction; Ku Klux Klan;
Radical Republicans
John A. CaseyBibliography
Current, Richard Nelson. Th ose Terrible Carpetbaggers. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfi nished Revolution,
1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Hume, Richard L. “Carpetbaggers in the Reconstruction South: A
Group Portrait of Outside Whites in the ‘Black and Tan’ Con-
stitutional Conventions.” Journal of American History 64, no.
2 (September 1977):313–30.
Richardson, Heather Cox. Th e Death of Reconstruction: Race,
Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Tourgée, Albion Winegar. A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South
during Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Cary, Mary Ann Shadd
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893) was a journalist,
lawyer, educator, suff ragette, and civil rights activist. She
achieved prominence largely because of her antebellum
work on black immigration to Canada West and through