Southern Palm, Northern Pine

Abstract

This chapter examines how Civil War memories anchored farmer-labor radicalism during the 1870s and 1880s. The Greenback-Labor Party in particular used wartime tropes to submit that the popular commemoration of the war, as either a North-South or Black-white axis, was fatal to class and trade organization. Instead, party members advocated a “class reconciliation” of workingmen across both sections. Although such a reconciliation was thwarted by internal contradictions and external resistance, Greenback politics offered discrete opportunities for interracial remembrance after the decline of Reconstruction, with veterans bridging out of major parties and toward reformist and revolutionary politics.