Waving the bloody shirt

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"Waving the bloody shirt", in U.S. history, refers to the demagogic practice of politicians using sectionalist animosities of the American Civil War to gain election in the postbellum North from the 1860s to 1880s. The phrase implied members of the Democratic Party (which garnered much of their support from the "Solid South") were responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the bloodshed of the war.

The term "bloody shirt" can be traced back to the aftermath of the murder of the third Caliph, Uthman in 656 CE, when a bloody shirt and some hair alleged to be from his beard were used in what is widely regarded as a cynical ploy to gain support for revenge against opponents. It also appears in a scene in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Mark Antony waves Julius Caesar's toga to stir up the emotions of his fellow Romans. In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan[1].

A current adapted usage is conflation of "waving the bloody shirt" with "flag waving" into "waving the bloody flag." When used this phrase usually is intended to convey the same meaning and is often used mistakenly in place of "waving the bloody shirt." (Examples: [2], [3], [4]) See flag waver.