"Waving the bloody shirt" and "bloody shirt campaign" were pejorative phrases, used during American election campaigns during the Reconstruction era, to deride opposing politicians who made emotional calls to avenge the blood of soldiers who died in the Civil War. The phrases were most often used against Radical Republicans, who were accused of using the memory of the war to their political advantage. Democrats were not above using memories of the Civil War in such a manner as well, especially while campaigning in the South.
Origin
editThe phrases gained popularity with a fictitious incident of April 1871 in which U.S. Representative and former Union general Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, while making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, supposedly held up a shirt stained with the blood of a Reconstruction Era carpetbagger who had been whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.[1] Although Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan that month, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt.[2] White Southerners mocked Butler, using the fiction of his having "waved the bloody shirt", to dismiss widespread Klan thuggery and other atrocities, including murder, committed against freed slaves and Republicans.[3]
In the 1870s, Republicans would sometimes cast Democrats as traitors who would undo the results of the Civil War. One of these was Robert G. Ingersoll, a noted orator and Radical Republican, who blamed Democrats for all the horrors of the war and slavery: "Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat. Every enemy this great Republic has had for twenty years has been a Democrat. Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat."[4] The technique was effective throughout the decade, but its effectiveness began to fade with memories of the war.[4]
The Red Shirts, a defunct 19th-century white supremacist paramilitary organization, took their name from uniforms worn mocking the phrase.[5]
In current usage, the terms are often shortened to bloody shirt and used more broadly to refer to any effort to stir up partisan animosity.[6]
References
edit- ^ Budiansky, Stephen (2008). The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. New York: Viking. pp. 1–5. ISBN 978-0-670-01840-6. OCLC 173350931. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
- ^ Budiansky, page 4
- ^ Budiansky, page 5
- ^ a b Hannah Richardson, "Waving the Bloody Shirt, 1876", Apr. 25, 2017; accessed 2024.09.14.
- ^ "Red Shirts". South Carolina Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
- ^ "bloody shirt". Merriam-Webster Inc. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
External links
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