The Red Flag of Emancipation

Abstract

This chapter considers the production of Civil War memory among Gilded Age socialists and anarchists. These radicals and revolutionaries built on the redistributionist claims of abolitionists and freedpeople, and exceeded those of trade unionists, by challenging not only the legitimacy of slave property or plantations but also the mechanisms of production and property rights. Late nineteenth-century socialists came to see themselves as a postscript to abolitionism, and their “red memory” operated through anarchist networks, militias, and workers’ parties. Most sought an end to partisan debates over loyalty and section, which hindered working-class organization, and used Civil War memory to espouse internationalism, prefiguring the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.