 While many enslaved people were illiterate, educated Blacks (including fugitive slaves) moved down from the North to aid them, and natural leaders also stepped forward.They elected white and black men to represent them in constitutional conventions.A Republican coalition of freedmen, Southerners supportive of the Union (derisively called "scalawags" by white Democrats), and Northerners who had migrated to the South (derisively called "carpetbaggers")—some of whom were returning natives, but were mostly Union veterans—organized to create constitutional conventions.