Waving The Bloody Shirt

In the history of the United States, "waving the bloody shirt" refers to the practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to criticize opponents. In American history, the phrase gained popularity with a fictitious incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up a shirt stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan. (While Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt.)

The idea may be traced back to Julius Caesar's funeral in 44 B.C. when Mark Antony showed the toga to the crowd during his funeral oration, a scene which appears in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but the speech mostly occasioned bathos.

Southerners mocked Butler, using the fiction of his having "waved the bloody shirt" to dismiss KKK and other atrocities committed against freed slaves and Republicans. It also inspired the Southern Red Shirts.

Waving the bloody shirt also has been used to define someone who brings up a past injustice or mistreatment in history to justify or cover up an injustice being committed in the present.

Famous quotes containing the words waving, bloody and/or shirt:

    Flushed with new life, the crowd flows back again:
    And all is tangled talk and mazy motion—
    Much like a waving field of golden grain,
    Or a tempestuous ocean.
    And thus they give the time, that Nature meant
    For peaceful sleep and meditative snores,
    To ceaseless din and mindless merriment
    And waste of shoes and floors.
    Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)

    If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Sir Eglamour, that worthy knight,
    He took his sword and went to fight;
    And as he rode both hill and dale,
    Armed upon his shirt of mail,
    A dragon came out of his den,
    Had slain, God knows how many men!
    Samuel Rowlands (1570?–1630?)