The Blue-Gray Campaign

This chapter investigates how Civil War memory informed the currents and contradictions of Populist thought. Populists painted themselves as neo-abolitionists fighting economic enslavement and combined antislavery vernacular with conceptions of modernity. Populism largely repudiated the Lost Cause. At the same time, the movement was profoundly shaped by the popular reconciliatory trends. This was especially true of the party’s 1892 blue-gray presidential campaign. While Populists attempted to circumvent North-South issues through class or vocational solidarity, regional and racial divisions proved ruinous. Though an effective and permanent coalition required the complete partnership of fully equal nonwhite laborers, Populist-style reconciliation often reinforced the color line even as it defied the Solid South and created new possibilities for Black political engagement.