Electoral Tactics Quotes
“Waving the bloody shirt” was a term that some Southerners accused Northern post Civil War politicians of inflaming Northern public opinion by relating incidents of Northerners who wanted to help uphold the equal rights of Blacks in the South and were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan and waving a bloodstained shirt belonging to the dead martyr. There never was an incident that could be documented of actually waving a bloody shirt. But many Northern politicians related events of Southern lynchings and other assaults on Blacks and Whites who were guilty of nothing but claiming lawful rights for Negroes. Northerners who remembered the Civil War and the atrocities and war crimes of Andersonville and Quantrill’s Raiders when they heard these speeches were outraged and angry. This created much anti-Southern attitudes in the North and the West some of which exist to this day.
