Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Wilmington Coup of 1898

WYTS: Carolina Panthers. Original post here.

This one came requested another Defector commenter. I was going to do it anyway. Today we have a prequel to the Atlanta Race Massacre. Imagine the people in Georgia reading the news of this event and being horrified, but having the comforting thought, “at least it can’t happen here”. ...Not yet, Atlanta. This is The Wilmington Coup of 1898. This is the only successful violent coup in American history... so far.

Wilmington, North Carolina in the 1800s was the great city of the state, the biggest port and an economic center. It had largely been spared by the Civil War, other than a bad Yellow Fever epidemic which a blockade runner brought in. In 1898 it was majority Black, about 55%. The city relied on Africa American labor for its port operations, still exporting tons of cotton as it had Antebellum. The younger generation had never been slaves, living free their whole lives. This was one of the last places in the South that held on to competitive politics between Republicans and Southern Democrats. It felt like an island of freedom surrounded by increasingly ugly repression. In Wilmington there were Black aldermen, Black government clerks, Black postmasters, all supported by dozens of very successful Black businessmen. The custom collector, an ex-slave named John C. Dancy, had a bigger salary than the state governor.

And unfortunately as is very often the case in history, places where social restrictions seem the most free, might also be where the repression can be the most sudden and violent. Many Jews were very proud to be Germans nationalists until they were told one day they were not welcome.

What made North Carolina competitive was an usual party system in the 1890s. Post-Reconstruction, the Democrats had won power, but had used it poorly. In the 1870s they had blown a lot of cash on a ludicrous railroad idea in the Blue Ridge Mountains that only built about 30 miles over extremely difficult terrain and killed over a hundred Black (slave labor) convicts. People still felt a way about their railway bonds being fraudulent. In 1896, the Democrats were the party of rich businessmen who did not care about the common man, white or Black. A coalition of interests could beat them.

There was still the NC Republican Party, the "good guys" of history here, who had a white and Black constituency. Then there was the Populist Party, a brief third party in this era focused on agrarian interests. They had unique politics that only really made sense in the 1890s and confuses historians now trying to find a clear ideology around it. They were enormously focused on ending the Gold Standard (which was a very big deal at the time, even if I personally find that whole issue very boring). They also wanted an income tax, direct election of Senators, they were decidedly not socialists, and also could be shockingly racist. The Progressive Movement a decade later kinda picked up where the Populists left off, to over-simplify. Anyway, Populists didn't give a damn about Black rights, but they did realize they could be quite successful if they caucused with Republicans. This was the Fusionist Movement, two parties against one. The governor at the time was a Fusionist, Daniel L. Russell, an unimpressive and insufficient man for the moment, as we’ll see. Wilmington's whole city government was Fusionist too.

There was a possibility here for something interesting to occur, a union of race, labor, and agrarian concerns that could have been very powerful. Instead, it was stamped out with incredible amounts of naked violence.

The Democrats took huge defeats in 1894 and 1896 and in response, they needed a new message. And that was easy: hardcore racism, become “The Party of the White Man”. Classic ploy to get the poor farmer base to vote against their interests. One of their firebrands was Alfred Waddell, a former Confederate cavalry officer whose rhetoric I will not repeat here, you can imagine what kind of shit he was trading in. Waddell was compared to Robespierre, which probably tells you what kinds of unhinged violence he was capable of. Soon enough the speeches became obsessed with a classic trope: black men violating white women.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the discourse war was Alexander Manly, probably the only African American owner of a daily newspaper in the South, The Wilmington Daily Record. Manly was the grandson of a governor, fair-skinned, college-educated, and part of the growing Black middle class. He dared to yell back at Waddell and his cohort that maybe miscegenation was not the end of the world, and white women could find a Black dude attractive. Also, since he was the grandson of a raped female slave, 'shut the fuck up, white people, if you think you got it bad'. That was politically... poorly timed by about sixty years, even if correct, and Waddell used it to continue to drive the hate machine of furious white Democrat voters.

Those whites were now buying a lot of Winchester rifles. Bad sign of things to come.

As often happens in these riots, it all centered around the elections. Governor Russell chose not to fight very hard against what everybody saw coming. He did not ask President McKinley for assistance (McKinley was also a little busy conquering the last remnants of the Spanish Empire). Russell also left the state militia in the hands of white supremacist officers. And he just withdrew the Fusionist candidates from the election anyway when the heat got too high. He arrived in Wilmington to vote in the November 8th midterm election, then found himself hiding in the mail car of his train home to Raleigh, as many of the passengers were Red Shirts who were ready to murder him. Russell would spend the rest our story cowering in the governor's mansion.

Ah yes, I should introduce the Red Shirts, who are not Star Trek characters or Garibaldi’s men or communists. They were instead one of the many terrorist organizations in the Reconstruction South, most famous being the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK had the cooler costumes but they were theater, a pose compared to the Red Shirts. These guys did not hide their faces, they were proud of their violence, would take postcard photos of their lynchings, and had already overthrown South Carolina to white supremacy. Benjamin Tillman was a Red Shirt, one of the Really Bad Guys from last year's WYTS. For the elections, both Carolinas’ Red Shirts were joining together, with very hot blood to kill people.

The actual coup part of the coup happened with remarkable ease. With blatant voter intimidation, Fusionist voters stayed home. Manly wrote an essay begging the Black voters to use their 14th amendment rights, saying Wilmington was too civilized to descend into madness. He was wrong. Even if they did vote, the Friedkorps men would just storm the ballot rooms and literally stuff the boxes with phony votes. Democrats would rule North Carolina for seventy years, unquestioned.

In Wilmington, on November 9th, Waddell and his other operatives wrote ‘A White Declaration of Independence’, an Originalist read of the US Constitution that simply rejected all of Reconstruction outright. 457 men signed it. Then they sent threats out to the city's prominent Black men, demanding they meet with them – to surrender.

Alexander Manly meanwhile was invited to a "necktie party". He understood the grisly joke and slipped out of the city early. A friend had given him $25 and the password to get through the blockade around Wilmington. Manly, who looked white-enough, managed to bluff his way past the guards who handed him a rifle just in case he spotted himself on his way out. He'd never return home.

On the 10th, about 2,000 white vigilantes marched on Manly's newspaper building. They burnt it and then proudly took a photo of themselves outside the ruins (seen above). From here the violence continued, but in disturbingly good order. Men marched through neighborhoods in ordered lines, killing anybody unlucky enough to be on the street, but not turning the city into chaos. Most prominent Black citizens fled into exile, usually tossed onto train cars with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Many others hid in the swamps until the violence ended.

Meanwhile, Waddell gathered the government of Wilmington, and at gunpoint told them that he was mayor now. He would stay in office until 1904. Nobody faced any justice for this white power revolution.

In one story, a one-legged ex-Confederate white businessman, James Sprunt, had to stand on a giant pile of cotton as the Red Shirts and other crowds wheeled a gatling gun (we should make a drinking game every time you see a Gatling gun appear) towards his 800 Black employees. Sprunt made a big show to cool the situation from being a bigger massacre. He saved his worker’s lives, but also had to feel some irony here, knowing his business friends had paid for the Gatling gun that nearly killed him. Beyond all the race tempers, the cotton still needed to get loaded onto those ships by somebody. The workers were safe, but their friends and family in the city might not survive the day. It does not sound like a fun shift.

The exact numbers of deaths are seemingly impossible to verify. It's either as low as twelve or in the hundreds. More study would be required of the Wilmington Coup. I was a history major in 2011 and I only heard about it thanks to reading John Sayles' epic novel, A Moment in the Sun. My high school history textbook that I read cover to cover wanted to complain about Carpetbaggers instead. (And have you seen a carpet bag? They're awesome! I think Southerners just hated the swag.)

North Carolina's new government introduced the usual suite of repression: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses. In the 1890s, over 100,000 thousand Black voters were registered in the state. By 1904, that was down to mere thousands. Alexander Manly fled to Washington DC and stayed with Congressman George Henry White, the last Black man to serve from a Confederate state until 1972. North Carolina would not elect an African American again to Congress until Eva Clayton in 1992. Congressman White also chose not to go home after his term was up.

Manly lived in peace as a painter, rarely talking about his days in the newspaper game. Waddell and the other signers of the White Declaration of Independence went on to have wonderfully successful careers in politics. They jumped ahead of the story and told the world that Wilmington had a "race riot", and the white troops had restored order. But slowly North Carolina became less and less proud of this tale, and it became a footnote. An ugly thing that you shouldn't worry about, and definitely do not consider to be part of any sequence of power centers in America. Nothing that happened in 1898, when we had dinosaurs and stuff, could matter now.

Wilmington by 1900 was a white majority city. It fell behind Charlotte around 1910 and was a secondary city forever after. I'd like to theorize the race riot arrested Wilmington's growth, as a kind of delayed economic justice, but it was relatively small and underdeveloped even in 1898.