Editing Carpetbagger (section)

===Reforming impulse===
Beginning in 1862, Northern [[Abolitionism in the United States|abolitionists]] moved to areas in the South that had fallen under Union control.<ref>Willie Lee Rose, ''Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment'' (1976).</ref> Schoolteachers and religious missionaries went to the South to teach the freedmen; some were sponsored by northern churches. Some were abolitionists who sought to continue the struggle for racial equality; they often became agents of the federal [[Freedmen's Bureau]], which started operations in 1865 to assist the vast numbers of recently emancipated slaves. The bureau established schools in rural areas of the South for the purpose of educating the mostly illiterate Black and [[Poor White]] population. Other Northerners who moved to the South did so to participate in the profitable business of rebuilding railroads and various other forms of infrastructure that had been destroyed during the war.<ref>Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ''The Scalawag in Alabama Politics. 1865–1881'' (University of Alabama Press. 1991).</ref><ref>Richard Nelson Current, ''Those Terrible Carpetbaggers'' (Oxford University Press. 1988)</ref>

During the time most blacks were enslaved, many were prohibited from being educated and attaining literacy. Southern states had no public school systems, and upper-class white Southerners either sent their children to private schools (including in England) or hired private tutors. After the war, hundreds of Northern white women moved South, many to teach the newly freed African-American children. They joined like-minded Southerners, most of which were employed by the Methodist and Baptist Churches, who spent much of their time teaching and preaching to slave and freedpeople congregations both before and after the Civil War.<ref>Godbey, William Baxter, "Autobiography of Rev. W.B. Godbey, A.M.", God's Revivalist Office. Cincinnati. 1909.</ref><ref>Williams, Heather Andrea, ''Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom,'' University of North Carolina Press,</ref>