# Red Shirts The **Red Shirts** were the openly organized paramilitary arm of the Southern [[Democratic Party]] in the last years of Reconstruction and the first years of Jim Crow — the force that "redeemed" South Carolina in 1876 and North Carolina in 1898 by armed intimidation conducted in daylight, in uniform, under the party's own leadership. The contrast with the [[First Ku Klux Klan]] is the point of the page: the Klan was hooded, nocturnal and formally deniable; the Red Shirts wanted to be seen, wanted their members known, and worked only with the Democratic Party. They are the vault's clearest case of political violence as public spectacle rather than secret terror, which is why the [[Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] and [[Proud Boys Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] pages reach back to them. ## Mississippi and South Carolina, 1875–76 The red shirt appeared in Mississippi in 1875 as a badge that made the Democratic "rifle clubs" of the [[Mississippi Plan]] visible and threatening at Republican gatherings. It became a movement in South Carolina in 1876, when Martin Gary's "Edgefield plan" — every Democrat armed and in red at every rally — was adopted for [[Wade Hampton III]]'s gubernatorial campaign. The Hamburg massacre of July 1876, in which a white militia killed Black state-militia members and then executed prisoners, was the campaign's opening act; the accused marched to their arraignment in red shirts on September 5. Through the autumn Red Shirt columns broke up Republican meetings, threatened Black voters, and stuffed or seized ballot boxes; Hampton claimed victory in a disputed count, and the [[Compromise of 1877]] withdrew the federal troops who might have contested it. [[Benjamin Tillman]] rode with them at Hamburg and built his career on boasting of it. ## North Carolina, 1898–1900 Twenty years later the same method was imported to break the Fusion coalition of Republicans and Populists governing North Carolina. [[Furnifold Simmons]] ran the Democratic white-supremacy campaign; [[Josephus Daniels]]'s *News & Observer* supplied the propaganda; Red Shirt units — first seen at a Fayetteville rally on October 21, 1898 — paraded through Black neighborhoods, blockaded roads and rode armed around polling places on election day, November 8. Democrats won the [[1898 Midterm Elections]] by 25,000 votes, and two days later [[Alfred Moore Waddell]] led the [[Wilmington Coup of 1898]], the only successful coup d'état in American history, burning the Black newspaper and expelling the elected government at gunpoint. The 1900 campaign repeated the pattern for the disfranchising suffrage amendment and Charles Aycock's governorship (186,650 to 126,296, the largest majority ever recorded); with Black voters removed from the rolls, the Red Shirts were no longer needed and dissolved. ## Why the vault cares The Red Shirts are the operational answer to a question the vault keeps asking about [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]]: how a multiracial electoral majority was defeated without a formal change in the law. The answer was organized violence *plus* a party willing to own it *plus* a press willing to justify it *plus* a federal government willing to look away — the [[Colfax Massacre (1873)]] and the [[Murder of Emmett Till]] bracket the same mechanism at its beginning and its long afterlife. [[The Lost Cause]] is the story told afterward to make the sequence respectable. The [[Voter Suppression]] page carries the legal instruments that replaced the rifles. ## See Also - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] · [[Compromise of 1877]] · [[Mississippi Plan]] · [[The Lost Cause]] - [[Wade Hampton III]] · [[Benjamin Tillman]] · [[Furnifold Simmons]] · [[Alfred Moore Waddell]] · [[Josephus Daniels]] - [[Wilmington Coup of 1898]] · [[1898 Midterm Elections]] · [[Colfax Massacre (1873)]] · [[First Ku Klux Klan]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Democratic Party]] · [[Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial]]