waving the bloody shirt
{{Short description|Political phrase of the US Reconstruction era}}
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File:BLOODY2.jpg cartoon ridiculing Republican Senator John Sherman for his use of "bloody shirt" memories of the Civil War in 1887, more than two decades after the war ended.]]
"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
Some historians believe the term originated from a supposed incident during the Civil War where future populist presidential candidate James B. Weaver rallied troops in southern Iowa by holding up a bloody shirt of a preacher who had been whipped in Texas for trying to preach to slaves. https://www.historynet.com/the-hairy-nation-goes-to-war-davis-county-iowa-in-the-civil-war/ The 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.{{Cite book |last=Budiansky |first=Stephen |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oMjFEGhF8JMC&pg=PA1 |title=The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox |publisher=Viking |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-670-01840-6 |location=New York |pages=1–5 |oclc=173350931 |author-link=Stephen Budiansky |access-date=2011-11-16}} Although Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan that month, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt.Budiansky, page 4 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.Budiansky, page 5
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."Hannah Richardson, "[https://campaignrhetoric.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/by-hannah-richardson-waving-the-bloody-shirt-1876/ Waving the Bloody Shirt, 1876]", Apr. 25, 2017; accessed 2024.09.14. The technique was effective throughout the decade, but its effectiveness began to fade with memories of the war.
The Red Shirts, a defunct 19th-century white supremacist paramilitary organization, took their name from uniforms worn mocking the phrase.{{Cite web |title=Red Shirts |url=https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/red-shirts/ |access-date=2022-11-05 |website=South Carolina Encyclopedia |language=en-US}}
The "Bloody Shirt" continued to be used in Republican campaigns through the end of the 1880s, with some Republican candidates going so far as to claim that Democrats were planning to secede again and start another Civil War. In 1884, the GOP slogan was Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, which referred to Democrat's role in the Civil War, as well as Democrat's support among Catholics and anti-Prohibitionists. Republicans would generally stop "waving the bloody shirt" in the 1890s as a new generation of GOP leaders like William McKinley and his fundraiser Mark Hanna felt the tactic had lost its effectiveness. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41395664?read-now=1&seq=8#page_scan_tab_contents As a congressman, McKinley would help to defeat the Lodge Bill of 1890, one of the GOP's last attempts at civil rights, by exchanging support for his McKinley Tariff in exchange for the GOP dropping the voting rights bill. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/compromise-1890 As president, McKinley would continue to pursue a lenient policy towards the South and on civil rights; McKinley created a Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and would do nothing when white supremacists overthrew the Wilmington, North Carolina city government in 1898. https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/primary-source-letter-3 https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/confederate-memorial-removal-arlington-national-cemetery/
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.{{Cite web |title=bloody shirt |url=https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloody%20shirt |access-date=2020-04-16 |publisher=Merriam-Webster Inc.}}
References
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External links
{{Wiktionary |wave the bloody shirt }}