The Day Democracy Died

Wilmington Massacre of 1898

Thursday, November 10, 1898, dawned mild and clear in

Wilmington, North Carolina.

It was the largest city in the state, home to nearly 25,000 people, a majority of them Black.

Wilmington had managed to escape physical destruction after invasion by the U.S. Army and Navy at the end of the Civil War and rebuild its shattered economy with its busy waterfront, its cotton mills and turpentine warehouses—and an energetic workforce of Blacks and Whites.

Nov. 10 should have unfolded as another ordinary autumn day on the Cape Fear River, full of routine social and commercial business, men and women occupied with their usual routines of work, shopping, visiting.

Stevedores labored on the downtown waterfront, crowded with ships flying the flags of distant nations, taking on stores from Benjamin F. Keith’s provision company and cotton from the Alexander Sprunt & Sons compress and warehouse, where Black foremen worked side by side with Whites. Black postal carriers plied their rounds in the

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White and Black neighborhoods around the city center, and domestic workers hurried to their chores at the mansions on Tird Street. Unemployed White and Black laborers congregated in knots, smoking and complaining and trading tips on who might be hiring today. Children mustered for their lessons in schools across the city, and teachers tried, as teachers always have done, to instill knowledge and character in their charges. Steam trains clacketed along the Seaboard Air Line across the river and chuffed into the Atlantic Coast Line terminal sheds on Red Cross Street on the north end. Streetcars crisscrossed the city.

As many as 10,000 African-Americans had been transported to Wilmington after emancipation by William T. Sherman’s troops in 1865. Tey came on mule trains or steamboats from his headquarters at Fayetteville and were processed through the Freedman’s Bureau, established in the confiscated mansion of John D. Bellamy, one of the wealthiest slave-holders in the state, and an ardent, unrepentant secessionist.

OPPOSITE PAGE: The African American population in Wilmington in 1898 outnumbered Caucasians, until the uprising on November 10. ABOVE: The vigilantes who instigated the massacre posed in front of the burned-out ruins of the Daily Record, Wilmington’s Black-owned newspaper.

The writers filled the pages of the Wilmington Messenger and other newspapers with propaganda, bogus reports of atrocities perpetrated by “Black brutes,” often against White women.

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Wilmington Massacre of 1898

Others were the descendants of enslaved forebears or veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops who had stormed Fort Fisher, fought gallantly at the Battle of Forks Road south of Wilmington, then joined the triumphal entry of U.S. Army troops into the city. Others had simply been drawn to this promising place between the river and the sea, a place of hope and opportunity.

By 1898, they constituted a majority of the population. Tey were lawyers and magistrates, aldermen and police officers, postal workers and managers, ministers and politicians, business owners and real estate investors. One, John Dancy, held the office of Collector of Customs, a position that carried a salary of $4,000 per year—$1,000 more than the governor’s.

Another, Alexander Manly, operated a newspaper called the Wilmington Daily Record—an archive of the Black community.

Mostly the White and Black citizens got along, sharing in the prosperity of a city whose boosters predicted even greater prosperity to come: new investment, an influx of ambitious workers, expansion and profit.

But another group of about a thousand white supremacists, led mainly by exConfederate officers, would change that day forever, forge a heavy chain of murder and injustice that would hang around the city’s neck for more than a century. Tey conspired in secret for months, drew up elaborate plans, accumulated weapons, coordinated groups of red-shirted thugs to patrol the polling places on Nov. 8—two days before— to ensure that only White men who supported their cause could cast a ballot.

John Dancy was one of the richest men in the state, earning a salary of $4,000 a year, which was $1,000 more than the governor’s.

John Dancy

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Tey acted in concert with the state Democratic Party’s declared platform of White Supremacy, orchestrated by state Democratic chair Furnifold Simmons. He recruited men who could write, speak and ride.

Te writers filled the pages of the Wilmington Messenger and other newspapers with propaganda, bogus reports of atrocities perpetrated by “Black brutes,” often against White women. Te speakers delivered inflammatory orations, such as Col. Alfred Moore Waddell’s election eve speech at Talian Hall, in which he declared, to thunderous applause, “If you see the Negro out voting, tell him to go home. If he refuses, shoot him down in his tracks!”

Te riders, such as the infamous Red Shirts, infiltrated Wilmington and acted as the enforcers of White Supremacy, using threats and intimidation and, when those failed, violence.

Ten they armored themselves with documents justifying their actions. Tey passed the “White Declaration of Independence,” signed by hundreds of the leading White citizens, which begins: “We, the undersigned citizens of the City of Wilmington and County of New Hanover, do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.” Its seven articles stipulated all the ways in which White Supremacy would govern the city from now on—from the forced “banishment” of so-called rabblerousers to the awarding of jobs and political offices.

Father Christopher Dennen

Alexander Manly

They drove [Alexander Manly] and his brother Frank from the city

on pain of execution

— purportedly for

an editorial he wrote insulting the White community. But that was

just a pretext, a convenient trigger to justify their

actions.

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Wilmington Massacre of 1898

Tey strong-armed voters and carried the election by a crooked landslide, But that accounted only for state and national offices—such as that of U.S. Congressman John D. Bellamy, Jr., son of the prominent secessionist. City elections were still a year off, but they wanted those offices too. Tey drafted an ultimatum to the Black community to accept the terms of the Declaration, demanding a reply by early the next morning.

Te reply from the “Committee of Colored Citizens,” giving in to all their demands, did not reach them by the appointed hour. So on Tursday, Nov. 10, the white supremacist mob went into action. First, they marched on Alex Manly’s newspaper office and burned it to the ground. Tey drove him and his brother Frank from the city on pain of execution—purportedly for an editorial he wrote insulting the White community. But that was just a pretext, a convenient trigger to justify their actions.

Tey wielded brickbats, Winchester repeating rifles, shotguns, and rapid-fire machine guns. Some of them wore the uniforms of local military units—the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Wilmington Naval Reserves prominent among them. From early morning and on into darkness, they went on a killing spree. Te fired into homes, shot unarmed men on their way to work, conducted firing squads in the Black neighborhood called Brooklyn.

By day’s end, an uncounted number of Black citizens lay dead in the streets, in their homes and gathering places, in cellars or back yards where they had crawled seeking refuge. All of the dead were Black. All of the dead were legal citizens of North Carolina. All of the dead were Americans.

Te city’s legally elected Board of Aldermen and mayor—a mixture of Black and White men— were forced at gunpoint to resign. A list of citizens—the Black political leadership of the city and a few White Republicans like Keith who had supported them—were run out of town on pain of death. Republicans were still the party of Lincoln, and Democrats the party of avowed White Supremacy—roles that have been flipped in contemporary times.

Nearly a thousand other residents, mostly Black, joined them in a mass exodus before an onslaught of a white supremacist mob operating under color of law, led by the upper class Whites of a city that

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George Rountree

George Rountree, a lawyer who had

conspired in the Coup, ended up in the state legislature and

became one of the chief

authors of a new law

requiring voters pass a literacy test and pay a poll tax. This law, widely copied around the South, effectively disenfranchised a large number of Black voters until the 1960s.

had once seemed to offer such opportunity to hardworking African-American men and women.

All this is the stuff of the story I told more than 25 years ago in a novel called “Cape Fear Rising”—long before there was an 1898 Commission convened by the legislature to look into the matter. Its report didn’t come out until 2006—and it wasn’t until this past year that the state officially declared on a highway marker on Market Street that the events of November 1898 indeed constituted a bloody coup d’etat.

When I wrote the novel, it was hard to find anyone in White Wilmington who would even admit that the Coup had happened. Ten in 1998 came the Centennial and a concerted effort by many brave people in the Black and White communities to come together and at last begin to seek a reckoning for a crime—the mass murder of Black citizens and the forceful takeover of a democratic government—that had never been seriously investigated, let alone prosecuted.

Still, there are too many apologists who claim that those violent White men were only acting according to the benighted racial standards of their time. But I don’t believe that—never believed that. Plenty of people in 1898 Wilmington understood the Coup for what it was: a violent power grab that would reestablish the racial caste system of the pre-Civil War era.

George Rountree, a lawyer who had conspired in the Coup, ended up in the state legislature and became one of the chief authors of new law requiring voters pass a literacy test and pay a poll tax. It included a “grandfather clause” that guaranteed the franchise to illiterate Whites who had been eligible to vote prior to Jan. 1, 1867, and their descendants. Tis law, widely copied around the South, effectively disenfranchised a large number of Black voters until the 1960s.

In a sense, my audience was the ghosts of the 8,000 or so White people who did not take part in the violence but also did nothing to stop it. And their descendants

Col. Alfred Moore Waddell’s election eve speech at Thalian Hall, in which he declared, to thunderous applause, “If you see the Negro out

voting, tell him to go home. If he refuses, shoot him down in his tracks!”

Col. Alfred Moore Waddell

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Wilmington Massacre of 1898

By day’s end, an uncounted number of Black citizens lay dead in the streets, in their homes and gathering places, in cellars or back yards where they had crawled seeking refuge.

—which is to say, most of us. We are not likely to be in the fray, but how we stand up for what we believe, how we then tell the story of it, matters.

My aim in writing the novel was to bring the people and events to life, to put them before the reader’s mind’s eye as vividly as possible so that denial was impossible. My ethic was to do my utmost to make the public scenes accurate. But I also gave my historical figures dialogue—some of it from what they were recorded to have said, other dialogue from words they wrote in speeches, tracts, or letters. So, for example, I have a scene that features Fr. Christopher Dennen—a young social activist Catholic priest who placed himself between the mob and prisoners at the courthouse, preventing the mob from lynching them. In the scene, he is arguing with Col. Alfred Moore Waddell—the ex-Confederate officer who led the violence against Manly’s newspaper— about the immortality of the human soul after death. It was an argument they indeed carried on—in the pages of the local newspaper, the Messenger. During that extended conversation, Fr. Dennen reminds Col. Waddell of a lynching that took place in 1831, when six Black strangers entered the city during the height of the hysteria over the Nat Turner slave uprising. Te men were summarily shot and beheaded, their heads mounted on poles on the roads leading into the city as a warning to slaves contemplating rebellion. Col. Waddell maintains, “A lesson was required.” “Te lesson is,” Father Dennen replies, “if you don’t tell the story in its truth, you relive it over and over again. Can’t you see that?” His answer lies the heart of the book, and his question to Waddell is my own question to readers: Can’t you see that?

In some important way, the Novelist of History becomes a surrogate conscience for the community. So I needed to grapple with the moral problem they all faced, the moral problem that lies at the center of the story, the choice I laid squarely in the lap of my proxy viewpoint character, a newspaperman named Sam Jenks: when everyone around you is doing wrong, at what point must you, the individual, take responsibility? At what point must you act to stop it? And how can you act when those people all around you are the people you most respect, who most matter to you, with whom you will have to go on living for a lifetime in a small place? And how can you then not act?

Tus my fondest wish is that the reader who finishes reading “Cape Fear Rising” will then seek out David Cecelski and Tim Tyson’s excellent compendium of essays on the White Supremacist violence: “Democracy Betrayed: Te Wilmington Race Riot of 1898.” And read what some of our best historians have to say about the event. Ten check out the report of the 1898 Race Riot Commission established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2000 (https://www.ncdcr.gov/learn/ resources-topic/1898-wilmingtonrace-riot-commission). And read perhaps as well Charles Chesnutt’s “Te Marrow of Tradition” or the pseudonymous Jack Torne’s “Hanover: Or the Persecution of the Lowly”, both fictions written from an African-American point of view shortly after the events occurred.

And maybe then that reader will also seek out Cecelski’s “Te Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War” or “Te Waterman’s Song”—and enlarge his or her knowledge of the complex slave culture that existed before the Civil War and how that culture—with all its heartbreak, violence, and economical benefits to slave owners— shaped the Civil War. And more importantly, how many blacks, both free and enslaved, fought to win their own freedom.

And how so many of them ended up in my hometown, lured by a promise of opportunity and equality that has yet to be fulfilled—darkened for more than a century by the long shadow cast by the day democracy died on the bloody streets of Wilmington.

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Philip Gerard is the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction. In 2019 he received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the highest civilian honor conferred by the state.

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