A Washington Post reporter who visited Wilmington in October described a white citizenry primed for battle. The newsroom of the Wilmington Messenger, he reported, was “a veritable arsenal, a large closet being stored with revolvers and rifles.” The reporter described armed guards posted at the cotton warehouses and turpentine wharves along the Cape Fear. He noted the careful arrangements made for white men to muster with their guns at the sound of an alarm. “There is, doubtless , not another city in the country where business men, lawyers, doctors and even preachers retire at night with Winchester rifles at their bedsides and loaded revolvers within easy reach,” he wrote.
On a single block in Wilmington, a reporter for the Richmond Times counted thirty-two white men armed with twenty pistols, eighteen rifles, and ten shotguns. “To tell the truth, the whites, or some of them, would welcome a little ‘unpleasantness.’ They are ready for it,” he wrote. Another visiting journalist reported that there were “enough small arms imported in the state in the last sixty days to equip an entire division of the United States army.” The reporter also mentioned, in passing, that the city’s blacks possessed only “old army muskets, shotguns, or pistols.”
To prepare for Election Day, a committee of white merchants led by members of the Secret Nine raised $1,200 to purchase the Colt rapid-fire gun, ostensibly to protect the city’s cotton wharves from riot-prone black men who worked on the riverfront as stevedores and laborers. It was a formidable weapon, ideal for riot control if the intent was to kill or maim large numbers of people within a compressed time frame.
John D. Bellamy, a slaveholder’s son and the scion of one of Wilmington’s leading aristocratic families, later said of the merchants: “They were apprehensive of an uprising of the negroes. They knew how prone they were to have and carry weapons. And even at this late day they have not forgotten the terror and horror of the Nat Turner insurrection.”
The merchants wanted the city’s black community to appreciate the Colt’s lethal capabilities. They rounded up several of Wilmington’s leading black citizens and took them aboard a tugboat, where the rapid-fire Colt had been mounted on the deck. Gunners were recruited from the Wilmington Light Infantry.
The black men were brought aboard the tugboat not only to witness a fusillade from the rapid-fire gun but also to be reminded that well-trained soldiers fueled by white supremacist propaganda were on call to confront any black troublemakers at election time. The contingent of gunners was commanded by Captain William Rand “Buck” Kenan, a Civil War veteran who had left his studies at the University of North Carolina at age eighteen to join the Confederate war effort. Wounded in battle, Kenan returned to Wilmington after the war to work in a brokerage house. He had lost his lucrative appointment as port customs collector to a black man, John C. Dancy.
Now, at age fifty-three, Kenan was presented with an opportunity to intimidate the city’s black leadership. A photo of Kenan later appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Times, above a caption that read, “The man who was in command of the rapid-fire gun stationed in Wilmington, N.C., to overawe Negroes.”
Captain Kenan was in command as the tug pulled up across from a marshy isle between the Cape Fear and Brunswick Rivers called Eagles Island. His Light Infantry soldiers lined up beside the weapon. As the black men looked on, quiet and observant in dark suits and hats, the uniformed gunners took turns lacing the opposite riverbank with bursts of gunfire that ripped through the brush and gouged out holes in the soft earth.
The gun “shot 500 cartridges so quickly and with such visible destruction to the small trees and shrubbery on the river banks that the Negros on the tug were visibly frightened,” one account reported. “When these Negro witnesses returned to Wilmington they told members of their race that the gun had death dealing qualities and that the gunners, including Captain Charles H. White, of the Wilmington Light Infantry, were fine marksmen.”
Later, Captain White strenuously denied that the gun had been fired to intimidate anyone. The sole purpose of the powerful weapon, he said, was “for the protection of life and property.” There was no need to specify that the captain meant white life and white property.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Nation’s Mission
S HOPKEEPERS WERE UP EARLY in downtown Wilmington on the sunny morning of September 20. They strung red-white-and-blue bunting across their storefronts and hung billowing American flags from their awnings. At the Fishblate clothing store, former mayor Silas Fishblate mounted an enormous Stars and Stripes next to a fluttering display of flags from several nations. At the entrance to the Wilmington Light Infantry armory, the Wilmington Gaslight Company erected a panorama of American flags with incandescent lights that spelled out the word “Welcome” in red, white, and blue.
Company K, the United States Volunteers of the Wilmington Light Infantry, was due to arrive home from the Spanish-American War on the 5:40 p.m. train. More than a hundred local white men had volunteered for active duty in April, after Congress declared a state of war between the United States and Spain. There had been crushing disappointment in Wilmington when the US military decided not to ship Company K overseas, and the men from Wilmington failed to get anywhere near the fighting. The soldiers had drilled and trained in rural Georgia, where they kept abreast of the action in Cuba—and the white supremacy campaign in North Carolina—by reading free copies of the News and Observer distributed by the Democratic Party. Their only casualty was a soldier felled by typhoid fever.
The war lasted ten weeks. On August 12, the United States and Spain signed a provisional peace treaty, ending hostilities. Now, on September 20, the soldiers of Company K assembled in formation in Raleigh on their way back home to Wilmington. They would be formally mustered out of federal service two months later, on November 18, ten days after the election.
One of their captains was concerned that the men were prone to drunkenness and trouble—especially when they encountered blacks. The captain suggested to a fellow officer “that it would be advisable to ‘water’ any stimulants which may be provided for the boys.”
During the summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War was the only topic sufficiently weighty to push news of the white supremacy campaign from the front pages of Wilmington’s newspapers. It was “difficult for the readers of the News and Observer to tell which was the bloodier, the war against Spain or the war to drive the Fusionists from power,” Josephus Daniels wrote years later. The enlistment of local citizens heightened interest in the war, which was embraced by Wilmington’s white community as an expression of Anglo-Saxon conquest.
More than two thousand people clogged the narrow streets of Wilmington to welcome the infantrymen home on September 20. Young women in summer dresses prepared a feast of chicken, roast beef, and cake on picnic tables spread across the grassy drill grounds behind the armory. There, the Wilmington Street Railway Company had constructed towering arc lights to illuminate festivities planned for that evening. In the harbor nearby, flags and bunting flew from the four-mast American schooner William M. Bird and the British steamship Hawkhurst.
At 4:30 p.m., the formal welcoming procession assembled at the armory. At the front, on horseback, was Colonel Roger Moore, the parade grand marshal, tall and silver haired. He was trailed by the Second Regiment Band. Seven horse carriages followed, decorated with banners as they ferried Wilmington’s leading dignitaries and their wives. Among them was James Sprunt, the cotton compress baron who was born in Glasgow, now acting as honorary British vice consul. There were US Navy officers, gray-whiskered Confederate veterans, and dark-suited businessmen and politicians. Riding in the last carriage, seated between two white ministers, was Colonel Waddell, the parade’s designated orator, who beamed and waved.
At 5:00 p.m., the procession departed for the train depot. The band played stirring military marches as the horses’ hooves clipped the white oyster shells that paved the roadways. The carriages arrived in time to watch the soldiers’ train clatter into the darkened d
epot on schedule. Everyone waved and shouted at the sight of the soldiers crammed into train compartments. On Nutt Street a few blocks away, the Naval Reserves gun detachment fired a sleek howitzer round that splashed into the river. In the calm gray waters of the port, the steam vessels blew their whistles. Another sharp whistle sounded from a tower at the Sprunt Cotton Compress on Front Street.
The soldiers hustled down from the train, hauling their gear. People hugged them and shook their hands and pounded their backs. Some soldiers wore red-and-white White Government Union pins that had been distributed to the unit. They marched in formation to the armory, where the men paraded onto the drill grounds. They halted at a decorated piazza where dignitaries had assembled to address the gathering crowd.
Colonel Waddell rose to speak. “All hail! And thrice welcome! Brave sons of brave squires!” he began. Waddell could see that the infantrymen were restless, and he promised to keep his remarks brief. But instead he launched into an interminable speech on politics. The soldiers fidgeted. At last Waddell finished, and the band struck up “Dixie.” Men in the audience tossed their hats into the air as the soldiers were escorted to their picnic dinner.
No one was more pleased to see the infantrymen return home than the leaders of the white supremacy campaign. Unlike the rowdy bands of gunmen recruited through the Vigilance Committee, the Wilmington Light Infantry was a sanctioned, professional fighting force. If the time came after the election to forcibly remove blacks and Fusionists from city positions, the infantry could be called to the streets under the pretext of suppressing the widely predicted black uprising. But first, white vigilantes would assault blacks, precipitating a “riot” by any blacks who resisted. Subsequent attacks on blacks or Fusionists could be attributed to the legitimate efforts of the Light Infantry to restore public order.
The infantry’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, age thirty-four, was the scion of a prominent Wilmington family and a member of the secret Group Six. Tall and lean , with a narrow face and a prominent mustache, Taylor was also a leader of the Democratic campaign committee. His older brother , J. Allan Taylor, was a member of the Secret Nine.
Also back from the war were the uniformed white men of the Naval Reserves in Wilmington. The unit had spent the war at Port Royal, South Carolina, defending the coast while serving on a federal training ship. Like the Light Infantry with its Colt rapid-fire gun, the reserves would, just before Election Day, acquire a rapid-fire weapon of its own—the Hotchkiss gun that could fire eighty to one hundred rounds a minute.
Many black Americans were conflicted by the war in Cuba. They were not motivated to fight for a government that denied them basic rights and opportunities. They felt a kinship with dark-skinned Cubans and Filipinos oppressed by Spanish rule. To fight for the United States for colonial conquest was, for them, to fight to perpetuate the same system of racial segregation and discrimination that had brought misery to millions of blacks. In March, an editorial in the Washington Bee, a black newspaper, referred to white supremacist attacks in the South as it advised blacks to stay out of the impending war:
A government that claims to be unable to protect its own citizens against mob law and political violence will certainly not ask the negroes to take up arms against a foreign government … The Negro has no reason to fight for Cuba’s independence. He is opposed at home. He is as much in need of independence as Cuba is.
But other blacks, particularly the leading preachers and lawyers of Wilmington, considered the war an opportunity. By serving their country in uniform, blacks could demonstrate to whites their courage and patriotism—the building blocks of citizenship. They had fought for the Union during the Civil War. Now they would fight again for their country, no matter how brutally it had treated them.
Because of white opposition, most of the all-black military units established during the Civil War had been disbanded in North Carolina after Reconstruction. But the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in the spring of 1898 presented Governor Russell with an opportunity to muster black units. He turned to James H. Young, the black editor and former Republican state legislator in Raleigh who had helped deliver the black votes that put Russell in office in 1896. Over the vigorous objections of Josephus Daniels, who was still furious that Russell had appointed Young state fertilizer inspector, the governor commissioned Young a colonel and named him commander of the state’s new black volunteer regiment.
The unit was nicknamed Russell’s Black Battalion. Though Daniels conceded that Young was an “intelligent Raleigh mulatto,” he eviscerated the colonel and his battalion in the News and Observer as “Russell’s birds of prey” and the embodiment of “Negro domination.” Daniels had his cartoonist draw Young as a tiny figure on a ladder, whispering in Governor Russell’s outsize ear. Another white editor referred to the colonel as “Jim Young of chocolate hue and resplendent regimentals.” The young black men of the state responded by providing Young with more volunteers than his battalion could accept.
Some black soldiers in the new unit recognized the responsibility placed on their shoulders. One recruit wrote, “Nobody seriously suggests any want of patriotism, courage, intelligence or boldness on the part of the black soldier boys … This war … will not end until any and every color of American man will be gladly welcomed into the trenches alongside of the other boys to fight for Christ’s peace and justice on earth.”
Wilmington, as the state’s biggest city, was asked to provide two companies for the black battalion. On April 27 , John Dancy, the black customs collector, received a telegram from the state adjutant general in Raleigh authorizing him to recruit volunteers. Dancy announced the news that evening to a large gathering of blacks at Love and Charity Hall. Two days later , the first thirty black recruits signed up. Two black lawyers, William Henderson and Armond Scott, delivered stirring recruitment speeches. By May, the two black companies were at full strength, and all other volunteers were turned away.
On May 30, four months before white soldiers returned to Wilmington in September, hundreds of black residents had filled its city hall to cheer a company of eighty black volunteers before they reported for combat training at Fort Macon, a hundred miles up the coast. A fife and drum corps accompanied the soldiers as they marched to the train depot, trailed by supporters waving flags. The men climbed aboard an Atlantic Coast Line train to a chorus of cheers, sent on their way to Raleigh after a black preacher led a prayer for their safe return.
In Raleigh, Wilmington’s other black company linked up with black units from across the state, all bound for Fort Macon. Several thousand black residents of the capital surrounded the train depot to say good-bye. Black church choirs sang spirituals and patriotic anthems. “Old colored mothers cried aloud and without reserve, younger women, whose brothers or husbands were departing, screamed at the top of their voices,” the News and Observer reported.
A black minister told the volunteers that they need not prove their manhood or patriotism, for that was a given: “The reason negroes have enlisted, are enlisting and want to enlist and are willing to go and fight wherever the country sends them is because they are Americans, and the nation’s mission is a Christian mission.”
Like the Wilmington Light Infantry, Jim Young’s black battalion never made it to Cuba. His soldiers spent the war and the months that followed in training camps in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. When allowed to visit local towns on weekend furloughs, the black volunteers were drawn into scuffles with white men who objected to the soldiers’ demands for equal treatment on streetcars and in saloons. Black units from other states encountered similar abuse. On a train in Atlanta, white police officers clubbed a group of black soldiers, inflicting bloody head wounds. In Macon, a black soldier who insisted on being served in a segregated saloon was shot dead by the white barkeeper. Three other volunteers in the black battalion were killed by white men in separate incidents in Georgia. In each case , the white killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
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sp; When white soldiers were sent home to Wilmington shortly before the election, the black units were kept far away. On November 10, when the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves took to the streets with their rapid-fire guns, the young black men who had left Wilmington to serve their country were still confined to a desolate training camp in the red clay country of rural Georgia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Degenerate Sons of the White Race
S MALL HANDBILLS BEGAN APPEARING on the streets of Wilmington that autumn, bearing the message: REMEMBER THE 6. The notices featured a hand-drawn skull and crossbones, flanked by a drawing of a pistol. They were printed by the Democratic Party to alert white voters to the six most prominent Republicans in city government branded as race traitors. It was part of the party’s two-pronged approach—terrorizing blacks to prevent them from voting, and intimidating white Republicans to undermine their hold on local government. The flyers read:
These degenerate sons of the white race who control the republican machine in this county, or those whose positions made them influential in putting negro rule on the whites, will suffer the penalty of their responsibility for any disturbance consequent on the determination of the white men of this county to carry the election at any cost.
The handbills did not list the six white offenders, but the Wilmington Messenger soon did: Mayor Silas Wright, Police Chief John Melton, Deputy Sheriff George Z. French, businessmen William H. Chadbourn, Flavel W. Foster, and a lawyer, Caleb B. Lockey. The three public officials were advised to resign. The others were instructed to pledge support to white supremacy.
The prime target was Mayor Wright. The mayor had committed two grave offenses. First, he was a Northerner from Massachusetts and thus a carpetbagger. Second, he had helped put black men in office. Wright had moved to Wilmington after the Civil War, in 1870, to take a job as revenue collector. Along with Chief Melton, Wright owed his position to changes in the city charter made by Republicans after 1894. That year, the party won control of the state legislature with the help of black votes. State Republicans awarded themselves control of the board of aldermen in Wilmington, which elected Wright as mayor and appointed Melton police chief.
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