Talk:Red Shirts (South Carolina)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a good start, but it might be useful to organize it a bit with headings. Also, the red shirt was used as a paramilitary uniform in Mississippi in 1875, and it was imported to South Carolina along with the rest of the Mississippi Plan the next year. I'll have to check the sources for this in my entry on the Red Shirts in Richard Zuczek, ed. Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006). Someone told me once, though I've not been able to find documentation of this, that the Red Shirts in Mississippi chose that particular uniform in honor of Jefferson Davis's unit in the Mexican War, who wore red shirts (and white pants, I think). That seems plausible and a lot more likely than the Garibaldi connection, for which I have never seen any contemporary evidence, only very post-hoc comments after the 1930s. In fact, given that there is the Mississippi connection and then the North Carolina adoption of the Red Shirt uniform and tactics in the 1898 election, we might want to change the title of this entry to get rid of "South Carolina," as that is too limiting. Bruce E Baker 23:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

You can add Red Shirt pages for each of the states that have an organzition because the Red Shirt organization in South Carolina was not tied to any other state and the sole focus of the red shirts in South Carolina was the redemption of the state in the 1876 election.

The book Hurrah for Hampton!: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina during Reconstruction says that a connection with Garibaldi could have existed, however remotely. In all the books I listed in the Reference section, they all mention that the red shirts derived their color from mocking Oliver Morton, so that is the most likely origin of the red in the red shirts of South Carolina.Gamecock 01:14, 7 October 2006 (UTC)