The partisan rhetoric of the post-Civil War period was unique to its historical moment, yet not unique as a political tactic. Instead, while the terminology has changed, similar types of political “horse blinders” continue to shape how Americans view their past and present. By attributing the country’s ills solely to the opposing party, the underlying economic, social, and political problems are often misdiagnosed or left unaddressed. This tactic also allows those truly responsible for such problems to redirect public anger toward a convenient enemy. This inclination to score emotive victories at the expense of real reform was as prevalent in the late-nineteenth century as it is today.
A particularly instructive example of this “football team” mentality appears in the rhetorical battles of the 1876 presidential election. While stumping for Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, the famed orator Robert Ingersoll repeatedly invoked the “bloody shirt” of the war to demonize Democrats. Speaking at a Union veteran gathering in Indianapolis, Ingersoll thundered, “Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat. Every enemy this great Republic has had for twenty years has been a Democrat. Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.” Ingersoll’s caricature was clear: the Democrats were responsible for everything then wrong in America, regardless of the economic depression and numerous scandals which had occurred under Republican leadership, or the simple fact that the GOP had won every presidential race since 1860.
Ingersoll’s approach was both provocative and strategic. He treated Union veterans as a captive audience for his oversimplified bluster at a gathering ostensibly meant to honor their service, not to stage a Republican rally. The Indiana State Sentinel, a Democratic newspaper, predictably ridiculed the event as “a bitter partisan gathering under a false name” noting that many of the speeches, “with but few exceptions, were of a violent and denunciatory nature.” Yet, aside from some of the sentimental words he had for his fellow veterans, Ingersoll’s speech was in fact “violent and denunciatory.” He framed the upcoming election in deliberately warlike terms:
We are right back where we were in 1861. This is simply a prolongation of the war. This is the war of the idea, the other was the war of the musket. The other was the war of cannon, this is the war of thought; and we have beat them in this war of thought, recollect that.
For Ingersoll and other bloody shirt orators the silencing of the guns in 1865 did not signify an end to the war, only a shift in its methods.
One of the most glaring problems with Ingersoll’s approach was the crusading language he imposed on contemporary politics. By depicting Democrats as enemies in an ongoing “war of the idea,” and by insisting that the political questions of 1876 were merely a continuation of the sectional struggle, he inflated ordinary policy disputes into existential conflict. In doing so, he unintentionally affirmed Clausewitz’s famous statement that war is “merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This framing was further reinforced by Ingersoll’s praise for the government’s wartime power to “go to your fireside and take you by force and put you into the army” to “make you fight for your flag.” His attempts to honor the Union veterans in the audience were therefore awkward because they were shoehorned into such an overtly partisan tirade. While Ingersoll’s speech later became noted for its “sentiment for soldiers living and dead,” it also indicated his statist zeal for militarism that sat uneasily beside the tragedies of war.
Additionally, Ingersoll’s rhetoric was not only overwrought but often flatly wrong. Contrary to his claims, it was often the Republicans, not Democrats, who bore responsibility for many of the era’s most destructive policies. As both Murray Rothbard and Clyde Wilson ably explained, nineteenth-century Democrats—as the inheritors of the Jefferson-Jacksonian tradition—generally favored more restrained government and sounder economics than their Republican opponents. It was largely the GOP that had driven the wartime and postwar transformations of federal power. Seen in this light, Ingersoll’s sweeping demonization of Democrats functioned primarily as partisan deflection, an attempt to shield his own party from accountability amid its self-inflicted issues.
Perhaps the greatest lesson to be taken from Ingersoll’s bloody shirt rhetoric is that the real issues go unaddressed when public debate reduces all problems to the failings of the other party. Certainly, political parties often deserve broad blame for their misdeeds, especially when specific factions and their cronies are the ones raiding the treasury. But blanket partisan condemnation will not promote substantive change when needed and may instead separate the blame from where it really belongs. As in 1876, scapegoating the “other side” can obscure responsibility rather than illuminate it.
The same dynamic persists today. Both major parties frequently brand each other as the sole villains in American politics, even though the modern managerial state is a bipartisan monstrosity that grew over multiple decades. As the Indiana State Sentinel observed of Ingersoll’s speech, “The firing of the cannon, the rattle of the drum, and the old story of the war will not bring the relief asked.” We might similarly consider the partisan finger-pointing of today a sideshow from some of the real changes that the country needs.
