 The Civil War and Reconstruction issues polarized the parties until the Compromise of 1877 finally ended the political warfare.War issues resonated for a quarter century, as Republicans waved the "bloody shirt" (of dead union soldiers), and Democrats warned against Black supremacy in the South and plutocracy in the North.The modernizing Republicans who had founded the party in 1854 looked askance at the undisguised corruption of Ulysses S. Grant and his war veterans, bolstered by the solid vote of freedmen.