Talk:Red Shirts (United States)

message: 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)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Adding more contemporary historians would be useful for attaining NPOV, as this is not supposed to be an apologia for the Red Shirts. Needs citations throughout and more balanced references.  James K. Hogue at UNC is one of contemporary historians who have seen the insurgent paramilitary organizations as integral to the continuation of the Civil War (by other means) and ending of Reconstruction.--Parkwells (talk) 13:36, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: References Dated and POV

message: The meme of referring to the Red Shirts or White League as "rifle clubs" appears to have started with a cite to 
1898 Wilmington Race Riot: Debunking the Myths, Red Shirts: A History. Compared the version of history there with Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. Red Shirts were a private militia, not a "rifle club". Naaman Brown (talk) 21:04, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  back to "private militia" from "rifle club" 

message: The sentence "African-American Red Shirts were placed in a prominent position for the procession."  Seems to imply there were African American members of the Red Shirts.  That does not seem to be correct. Geo8rge (talk) 18:28, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It may not fit with expectations, but it seems an unlikely thing for anybody to make up.  Race relations in the South (as elsewhere) have always been more complex than many people are comfortable with, and easy categories are usually invalid.  Does Geo8rge have direct evidence to cast doubt on the account?  Jdcrutch (talk) 19:08, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  African-American Red Shirts were placed in a prominent position for the procession. 

message: The article incorrectly states that the Red Shirts repressed Republican and Black voters when in fact they stopped the corruption of the Reconstructionist in that they were voting in both Republican and Democratic polls. I cite Edgefield, S.C. when the Red Shirts stopped the Black Republicans from over running the Democratic polls by a military show of force in the streets of Edgefield during the Gubanotorial elections. This lead to the S.C. constitutional crisis that caused S.C. to actually have two sitting Governors at the same time. President Grant refused to get involved and the issue was put before the S.C. Supreme court to settle. The Supreme court, with the Chief Justice being a former slave of Wade Hampton's, voted in a split vote to uphold Wade Hampton as the rightful Governor of S.C. thereby effectively ending the carpetbaggers reconstructionism in S.C.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.83.222.50 (talk) 00:08, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like the usual anti-Reconstruction POV. Got any sources, anonymous one? --Orange Mike  |  Talk 20:02, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  corruption of the Reconstructionist 

message: I'm not qualified to do more than proof-read the article, but it's so full of linguistic errors and sloppy construction that I suspect more substantive errors as well.  For example, the text had "raft" for "wrath", and asserted that Southern women wove shirts and other garments, which I changed to "sewed" (you weave cloth, not garments, and it's rather unlikely that post-bellum Southern women were equipped to weave red flannel on the scale necessary to supply hundreds or thousands of garments to the Red Shirt campaigners).  
The article needs to be reviewed for balance as well.  Inflammatory characterizations ("the gang of lawless men") and uncritical reliance on partisan sources (the New York Times in that period was a Republican paper, dedicated to supporting Republican-party hegemony, not a "newspaper of record"--see New_York_Times#History) raises doubts as to the article's impartiality.
The history of Reconstruction is extremely complex, and has long been subject to distortion by competing partisan mythologies.  An encyclopedia needs to cut a careful path through a minefield of passions and prejudices on all sides, not provide a platform for one or another set of partisan interpretations.  Jdcrutch (talk) 19:29, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Needs Careful Revision, Review for Balance 

message: Reading the article as it currently stands, the section attached to the 10th citation needs to either remove the pro-Red Shirt bias, which is particularly jarring in a section about the unlawful revolt against the Republican-Populist coalition and intimidation of African-American officeholders, or to rewrite it as quotations from the cited source. As it is, non-quoted material, presumably drawn from the source and then rewritten in the author of the section's own words, smacks of bias and detracts from the article. The bit about the Red Shirts just wanting to make everyone remember their identities, when contrasted to using intimidation to win an election and to remove elected officeholders, is particularly jarring and takes the reader out of the article; it doesn't read like a page in an encyclopedia.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.136.242.129 (talk) 19:53, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias: Red Shirt apologism 

message: An RfC: Which descriptor, if any, can be added in front of Southern Poverty Law Center when referenced in other articles? has been posted at the Southern Poverty Law Center talk page. Your participation is welcomed. – MrX 17:14, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  RfC 

message: A sentence in the 3rd paragraph of the lead says, "They had one goal: the restoration of the Democrats to power by getting rid of Republicans, which usually meant repressing civil rights and voting by freedmen." It is sourced to pp. 74-80 in Lehmann,s book redemption.  However what the source actually says is, "Well-financed terrorists ... were engaged in what seemed to be a planned campaign to unseat the Republican Party, and undo Negroes' civil rights and voting rights, by means of violence against its officeholders and voters."  I'm going to change the language to be more in keeping with the original source. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 02:27, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: One Goal

message: Although the IP is wrong, the Red Shirts did have black members and we should mention it.
"Wade Hampton had long called on South Carolinians to view their southern world as both biracial and white supremacist. Speaking in 1866 to one of the earliest organizations of Confederate veterans, Hampton encouraged his former comrades to remember their duty to the freed-man: “As a slave, he was faithful to us; as a freedman, let us treat him as a friend.” Refusing to recognize that Afro-Carolinians could exhibit agency of their own, Hampton viewed them as either loyal friends or Republican pawns. He maintained a tight web of paternalism and control over the former slaves of the Hampton family and believed that other southern whites should do the same. Within this context black voting became acceptable. White supremacist paternalism, Hampton believed, could control these votes just as it could control other aspects of blacks’ lives. He told a biracial audience in Abbeville, “We want your votes, we don’t want you to be deprived of them.”Never Surrender
Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry. Doug Weller talk 15:14, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Black membership