During the Reconstruction era (1863–1877), the Republican Party built up its base across the South and for a while had control in each state except Virginia, but from a national perspective, the Republican Party always gave priority to its much better established Northern state operations. Southerners distrusted the scalawags, found the carpetbaggers distasteful and lacked respect for the black component of their Republican Party in the South. Richard Abbott says that national Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost".Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855–1877: The First Southern Strategy (1986) p. 231 In 1868, the GOP spent only 5% of its war chest in the South. Ulysses S. Grant was reelected and the New York Tribune advised it was now time for Southern Republicans to "root, hog, or die!" (that is, to take care of themselves).
