No, those red “Make America Great Again” ballcaps really aren’t the new white hoods.
More precisely: They’re the new red shirts.
Americans recall the terror of the Ku Klux Klan’s white hoods far better than they do the terror of the post-Civil War Red Shirts and the various vigilante “rifle clubs” formed by ex-Confederates determined to block black people from political franchise. In large part, that’s because even though the Klan was the first iteration of this phenomena in the immediate postwar years, it had a revival in 1915 whose effects remain with us even today.
It’s a more potent symbol of racial bigotry in the popular imagination because it is fresher in our memories. However, as historical antecedents go, the Red Shirts were actually much closer in their essential nature to the out-front hatemongers who happily don their red MAGA ballcaps in the age of Donald Trump.
For starters, it’s important to remember that the Klan’s white hoods were about, among other things, hiding the faces of their members from public view. The whole point of the costumes, in the first place, was to frighten superstitious ex-slaves by pretending to be ghosts, a supernatural threat. They call themselves “the Invisible Empire” because they consider it more ominous and dark, not to mention that it conveniently shields the wearer from public consequences.
The Red Shirts, in contrast, were unbothered by such considerations. They boldly wore their eye-catching symbols without any facial coverings, nor any attempt to do so. Their entire modus operandi involved being as public and flagrant as possible, in large part to reinforce the indisputable embrace of their political violence by the larger mainstream body politic of white people in the postwar South.
But today’s MAGA-hatted thugs bear an even more important resemblance to the Red Shirts in the role they play in the cultural currents of American politics. What they are about, even beyond intimidating vulnerable minorities, is inverting reality on its head in the style we’ve all come to expect from modern projection-fueled conservatives: making, as historian Stephen Budiansky puts it, “a victim of the bullies and a bully of the victim.”
The bright blood-red shirts worn by the white Southerners determined to prevent “Negro rule” were, in fact, a specific reference to what is now well-known trope: “Waving the bloody shirt.”
An 1878 cartoon lampoons a Republican congressman for “waving the bloody shirt” of slavery and postwar violence.
It’s a phrase that’s still used today to describe unseemly demagoguery that blames a whole population for the violent acts of a few. Yet, as Budiansky explains in his remarkable history of the failure of Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War (2008), the phrase indeed was a remarkable inversion of reality, one that opened the doors for a century of white-supremacist rule.
The first wave of vigilante violence after the Civil War, of course, came largely at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Though the Klan’s main purpose was the pure terrorization of the black populace into subjugation, it also was intended to silence any whites who might assist the black community in any fashion. The Klan was known for whipping and lynching whites who dared to teach black children, and one such incident involving a Mississippi teacher named John Huggins, who was whipped within an inch of his life.
According to the legend, the noted abolitionist Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts then took to the floor of the Senate and waved Huggins’ bloody shirt about during debate over the ultimately successful legislation to outlaw the KKK. (In fact, he did no such thing.) So after the Ku Klux Klan Act passed in 1871, Southerners remained no less determined to use violence to resist giving their former slaves the right to vote, and adopted the phrase as universal sign of contempt for the North.
Budiansky explains:
Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.
That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.
… A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.
The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.
An example of a postwar “Red Shirt”
Banning the Klan simply did not work. Southerners instead began forming “rifle clubs” whose purpose was in fact to sow political terror. The participants in these clubs began wearing bright blood-red shirts as a way of mocking the “bloody shirts” supposedly waved about by their Northern foes. Thus, the Red Shirts came into being.
Southerners called their strategy—which essentially entailed overthrowing Reconstruction-era Republican rule by means of organized threats of violence and suppression of the black vote—“the Mississippi plan,” whose name came from the violent skirmishes that broke out in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which culminated in the deaths of several hundred black people and the assassination of the black sheriff. Similar strategies emerged when organized whites staged a coup in Louisiana that ultimately overthrew the Republican governor, as well as a “race riot” in Alabama that achieved similar results for Barbour County.
However, it was in the Carolinas that the Red Shirts became a notable presence that persisted for decades. In the 1876 elections, an organization of Red Shirts from both South Carolina and Georgia converged on the border town of Hamburg (which no longer exists) to provoke a bloody confrontation that culminated in the massacre of a number of black freedmen, many of them executed in cold blood. Even worse violence broke out in Ellenton, South Carolina, resulting in the deaths of dozens of black people:
Trouble began in early September along the Aiken-Barnwell county line, following reports of an assault by African Americans on an elderly white woman. Although the rumors were later proved unfounded, they were perfect grist for the campaign mill in 1876, when South Carolina war hero Wade Hampton III and the Democrats were attempting to unseat Republican carpetbagger Daniel H. Chamberlain. Seemingly trivial incidents proved to conservatives that Republicans and their notions of racial equality only delivered lawlessness and disorder. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the alleged perpetrators, which prompted the local black militia to gather for the protection of the accused. By September 16, white “gun clubs” and “rifle clubs” had mobilized in response, and the area around Ellenton in Aiken County was the setting for a deadly cat-and-mouse game that lasted several days.
White “gun clubs” scoured the region around Ellenton from September 16 through September 19, ostensibly searching for the attackers of the elderly woman. No African Americans were safe, and accounts indicate that field crews, families at home, evening political meetings, and even church gatherings were targets of white assailants. Only the intervention of the U.S. Army ended the killing spree. Fortunately for the hundred-or-so African Americans gathered at Rouse’s Bridge on September 19, Captain Thomas Lloyd and units of the Eighteenth Infantry arrived just before hundreds of armed whites. Lloyd negotiated a compromise with the leader of the gun clubs, A. P. Butler, which called on both of the unorganized armies to retire and disband. The human cost was high: at least two whites were dead, with three wounded, while estimates of the death toll among African Americans ranged from thirty to more than one hundred. Among the dead was state legislator Simon Coker, who was shot in the head while praying for mercy.
A Thomas Nast cartoon from 1876 depicted how black voting rights worked that year.
The 1876 election violence was the final capstone for the Reconstruction era. In 1877, newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes—whose disputed election was only ratified with the Compromise of 1877, which required removal of federal troops from the South—followed the terms laid out in the plan and brought the troops home. Reconstruction was over.
However, the Red Shirts were far from finished. They remained an active voice in Southern politics for another two decades, in every instance serving to threaten and intimidate black voters, passing Jim Crow laws and then enforcing them through both legal and extralegal means.
In the elections of 1898 in North Carolina, the threat of “Negro rule” came bubbling to the surface, in large part because the state government at the time was controlled by Republicans and “Fusionists,” or racially inclusive political activists. Much of the animus was also directed at the local government in Wilmington, which was dominated by blacks. An editorial in the black newspaper The Daily Record disputing that white women were under constant threat of rape by black men—a myth that was the cornerstone of the Lynching Era, and thus foundational for Jim Crow rule—became the source of ginned-up outrage among whites, who claimed that the paper’s “racially inflammatory” positions were a threat to civil order.
Red Shirts outside a North Carolina polling place in 1898.
On Nov. 4, Red Shirts held a horseback parade through the middle of Wilmington that was widely noted and even celebrated in the white press. The Raleigh News and Observer reported: “The first Red Shirt parade on horseback ever witnessed in Wilmington electrified the people today. It created enthusiasm among the whites and consternation among the Negroes. The whole town turned out to see it. It was an enthusiastic body of men. Otherwise it was quiet and orderly.”
A clipping from the New York Herald.
On Nov. 8, the Republican and Fusionist government were swept out of power at the North Carolina statehouse, thanks in no small part to the Red Shirts’ campaign of intimidation, but not in Wilmington. So on Nov. 10, a mob of about 500 white men descended on the offices of the Daily Record and destroyed it. White bands continued to roam the city, hunting down and killing Fusionists and shooting indiscriminately into black neighborhoods. The black population of Wilmington either fled or hunkered down, and white-supremacist rule became the law there.
The Red Shirts’ legacy was widely celebrated and remembered. In 1905, The State newspaper of Columbia, South Carolina, commemorated the Hamburg Massacre: “Wade Hampton and the men who wore red shirts in the broad light of day and the women who blessed them redeemed South Carolina from negro rule.”
U.S. Sen. Ben Tillman, who had participated in the violence both in Hamburg and Ellenton, celebrated the violence in a speech at a 1909 reunion of Red Shirts:
The purpose of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror, and the next morning (Sunday) when the negroes who had fled to the swamp returned to the town (some of them never did return, but kept on going) the ghastly sight which met their gaze of seven dead negroes lying stark and stiff, certainly had its effect ... It was now after midnight, and the moon high in the heavens looked down peacefully on the deserted town and dead negroes, whose lives had been offered up as a sacrifice to the fanatical teachings and fiendish hate of those who sought to substitute the rule of the African for that of the Caucasian in South Carolina.
Moreover, one of the reasons Americans don’t recall the Red Shirts is that the history in which they were key players was effectively erased by decades of propaganda from revisionists like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who in addition to erecting literally hundreds of pro-Confederacy monuments around the country after the turn of the century also oversaw the propagation of the “Lost Cause” myth into school textbooks around the nation.
Another key factor, however, was the fact that they succeeded, and wildly so. Not only did the Red Shirts stop Reconstruction dead in its tracks and install Jim Crow laws throughout the South that functionally prevented black citizens from having any kind of political franchise or power, they also became the face of officialdom themselves.
Often built on their bloody deeds during Reconstruction, many Red Shirts leaders were elected to office in the South and embodied, certainly, in the person of that most ardent of segregationists, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the South Carolina senator and governor. Others included another South Carolina governor, Wade Hampton; another South Carolina senator, Matthew C. Butler; as well as North Carolina politicians such as Claude Kitchin, who was elected to the House, and Gov. Cameron Morrison.
The toll on the nation was immense. As Budiansky concludes:
A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.
So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.
Today, Americans have a difficult time imagining, after the long-ago struggles of the civil rights era that overthrew the rule of Jim Crow, that their fellow citizens still want to deprive minorities with long histories of political oppression their access to the political and legal franchise.
Yet they are here. They give themselves a variety of labels—alt-right, “Patriots,” “Three Percenters,” and “Proud Boys” among them—yet what they are about is proclaiming the supremacy of white male rule, and denying political power to anyone who is not one of them.
MAGA hatters at a “Patriot Prayer” rally in Seattle in 2018.
Our difficulty in admitting the return of such forces to the surface of American politics (after all, they have really only been submerged for less than 50 years) is why so many of us were shocked by Charlottesville and the mayhem and murder that occurred there, organized and promoted by racists who make it a point to don the red MAGA hat. It’s why we pay so little attention to the civic disruption and violence wrought by MAGA-hat, right-wing street brawlers like the Proud Boys. It’s why we can see a mob of MAGA-hatted teenage boys harassing a Native American man on the Washington Mall and fail to see the dynamic at play.
And it’s why the American right can get away so easily with it, particularly in claiming that, heaven forfend, the MAGA hat is not a symbol of hate. When Alyssa Milano compared it to a white hood, they went into shrieking overdrive to deny it.
The hat is really just another clothing item, they claimed, harmlessly noting identification with Donald Trump’s politics. “Liberals want to take away your right to wear whatever you want,” warned Laura Ingraham. At Fox News’ website, Lauren Debarris Appell claimed that it was “just another way for [liberals] to silence someone they don’t like,” adding: “If you’re someone who is so easily provoked by a hat on someone else’s head, then there’s really not much that won’t trigger you.”
A guest columnist for the Tennessean named Ryan Moore recently weighed in: “White men are the most hated and discriminated against group of people in the United States now. If you don’t believe that, you simply aren’t paying attention or looking at it objectively.”
This, of course, is the modern version of complaining about “waving the bloody shirt,” inverting reality on its head to justify racial violence. As Robin Givhan noted at the Washington Post: “The hat has become a symbol of us vs. them, of exclusion and suspicion, of garrulous narcissism, of white male privilege, of violence and hate. For minorities and the disenfranchised, it can spark a kind of gut-level disgust that brings ancestral ghosts to the fore. Here, in 2019, their painful past is present. … The MAGA hat speaks to America’s greatness with lies of omission and contortion. To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag.”
Or, more precisely, a Red Shirt.
