It required a patriot and a hero like William McKinley to do this.

When he signed the commissions of Joseph Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States, he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.
Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by both parties.
IV That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation.

It merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by partyism.

Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.

In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.
All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to getting into that war.