NARRATOR
New Orleans in the fall of 1867 was a bankrupt city with just four paved roads. The war had left the whole state of Louisiana, one official lamented, "dirty, impoverished, and hopeless." But in Mechanics Hall, there was excitement about the future. Under the new Reconstruction law, delegates had gathered to draw up a new constitution for the state.

TUNNELL
The majority of the delegates to this convention are black. They were well spoken, they were well dressed, and they play a dynamic role in this convention. The constitution that results from this assembly will, in large part, be their work.

NARRATOR
Among the white delegates was Marshall Twitchell, a battle-scarred former Union soldier from Vermont. Right after the war, he'd come up the Red River and settled in the northwest part of the state. It was a wide-open frontier.

MARSTON
My ancestor, Henry Marston, in the 1840s bought land up here. It was land speculation. And it was rich fertile land to be cleared into cotton land. And so I imagine Mr. Twitchell was very excited about what he was going to do.

NARRATOR
The thrifty Twitchell had saved enough to buy 420 acres of cotton land. He married Adele Coleman, the daughter of a local planter, and got to know his neighbors, both black and white.

BLIGHT
The vast majority of northerners who moved south moved there because the South was now, uh, the new pioneer society.

FONER
They came as business people. They came to buy land. They came to set up businesses. They came to invest. At first they were welcomed.

NARRATOR
In the summer of 1867 Twitchell made a fateful decision. He agreed to represent his district at the state convention. He'd commanded black troops in the war, but this was a new world.

TUNNELL
For the next few months, Twitchell is going to have to work with black men as equals in a way that he has never done before.

NARRATOR
Twitchell supported most of the provisions in the new constitution, including a controversial one that would take voting rights away from white men associated with the old Confederate government. He had crossed a line: many white southerners resented watching northerners like Twitchell making crucial political decisions.

TUNNELL
Midway through the conventions, you can see the conservative newspapers covering the conventions sort of searching for some new language to describe these people. And then they hit upon the word "carpetbagger." It conjures up the image of a lowlife Yankee. He packs his scanty belongings in a carpetbag and takes the first steamship south, to profit upon the misery of a defeated people

NARRATOR
Twitchell came to be viewed with suspicion by some of his white neighbors.

MARSTON
He's a villain. The carpetbaggers are always thought of as a danger. You had the boll weevils; they were a danger. Of course low prices, and the carpetbagger.

NARRATOR
The Yankee from Vermont was starting to make powerful enemies in Louisiana.