Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  A Northern journalist wrote: “For ten miles through pine-forest and cotton plantations these men rode, singling out the Negro hamlets as the special object of their visitation; while in the afternoon they listened to an impassioned address in which they were advised to win the election—peaceably if they could, forcibly if we must.”

  Red Shirts paraded through black neighborhoods and farms, brandishing their Winchesters. Several times, riders broke from the main column and galloped in circles around the cabins of black families, shouting racial slurs and unfurling a banner that read: “White Supremacy .”

  At the Laurinburg rally, Claude Kitchin, a Simmons deputy on the Democratic Executive Committee, told the gathering that any white man who sought the support of black voters was “a negro inside.” A man in the crowd shouted, “White niggers!” Everyone laughed. Courting black votes was pointless, Kitchin told the crowd. “We don’t need the nigger vote. All that we need for victory is election day.”

  Kitchin drew the loudest cheers of the day when he announced that any black constable in his Black Belt home county, Halifax, who attempted to arrest a white man would be lynched. “We cannot outnumber the negroes,” he said. “And so we must either outcheat, outcount or outshoot them!”

  In early October, the Secret Nine met at a private home at Seventh and Market Streets in Wilmington to set a date for the forced removal of the city’s Fusionist government. The group operated on the assumption that Democrats, through intimidation and ballot box stuffing, would win local races for judge, solicitor, US representative, and seats in the state’s house and senate on November 8. And Democrats would, of course, sweep all New Hanover County races because they had forced Governor Russell to withdraw all Republican county candidates. That would leave only the mayor’s office, the police chief, the sheriff, and the board of aldermen in Fusionist hands.

  The Secret Nine did not intend to wait until municipal elections in March 1899 to seize those positions. The group decided to allow two days to pass peacefully after Election Day, in order to solidify Democratic control of the state and county. The revolution, as the Secret Nine called it, was scheduled for November 10, a Thursday—to be confirmed after a day of “watching and waiting” on November 9. The group decided that on the morning of November 10, the full firepower of the Red Shirt brigades, the gunmen of the Vigilance Committee, and, if required, the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves would be unleashed against Negro rule.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Drunkard and a Gambler

  C OLONEL WADDELL was not part of the Secret Nine’s planning. Nor was he a member of Group Six, the other clandestine group of white supremacists. The Colonel had made political enemies in Wilmington with his imperious personality and grating pontification. Not all of the city’s leading Democrats were pleased by his prominent role as a long-winded speaker at Democratic campaign rallies. He called himself a lawyer, but he didn’t have a functioning law office. In fact, he didn’t hold a job of any type. His wife, Gabrielle , taught music lessons to earn cash for the household.

  Waddell’s political enemies joked that his only real accomplishment was marrying well. His first wife, Julia Savage, was the daughter of a wealthy Wilmington family. In 1878, after Julia died, Waddell married her sister, Ellen Savage. A year after Ellen died in 1895, Waddell married Gabrielle DeRosset, a member of a prominent slaveholding rice plantation family in Wilmington, who had been sent to live with her father’s family after her mother died of a self-administered opium overdose. She was thirty-three ; he was sixty-two. DeRosset brought to the marriage an unassailable Confederate pedigree. Her parents were Confederate stalwarts who paid blockade-runners to supply goods to a family company in Wilmington from their base in Bermuda during the war. As an infant, Gabrielle had been aboard a blockade-runner shattered by Union cannonballs and rockets just off the coast. She and her mother were rescued by an ambulance dispatched from the Confederate garrison at Fort Fisher.

  Waddell was a calculating man who carefully weighed his choices. He often waited to act until he determined that circumstances were fully in his favor—as he had just before the war, when he transformed himself from Unionist to Confederate. He knew how to fill a political vacuum—as he had done in Wilmington just after the war, when he wrote to the governor to complain about freed slaves and colored troops, then lectured the city’s blacks in public, even as Union troops controlled the city.

  Waddell’s best years were the 1870s, when he was elected to Congress for four terms. He rose to prominence in 1871 as a member of a US congressional committee investigating Klan lynchings and murders in the South, known to the committee as “the late insurrectionary states.” The committee documented hundreds of abuses by the Klan in Waddell’s home state, North Carolina. Testimony at the committee’s hearings described a ghastly onslaught of hangings, floggings, burnings, clubbings, and throat slittings. Waddell, who had supported the Klan, worked hard to undermine his own committee.

  The committee concluded that the leader of the Klan in North Carolina was Colonel William L. Saunders, the former Confederate officer from Wilmington, where the Klan first appeared in the state. Saunders, called to testify, was confronted by several committee members. But he repeatedly refused to answer when asked about his membership in or leadership of the Ku Klux Klan—or the Invisible Empire or the White Brotherhood or any “secret political organizations” in North Carolina. Saunders told the committee that he was not obliged to answer questions, because, in doing so, “I may criminate myself.” He was excused .

  While in Washington, Saunders stayed at the home of a committee member—Congressman Waddell. Waddell stoutly defended his fellow Confederate cavalry officer and old friend from Wilmington. Waddell called his own committee “a body of relentless prosecutors … trying to extort evidence that would convict prominent citizens of the South.” He complained that Saunders “was badgered and bullied, and threatened with imprisonment … but with perfect self-possession, and calm politeness he continued to say ‘I decline to answer.’” He considered Saunders “as brave and true a man as ever lived.” He informed the committee that its final report on the Klan was “a waste of paper and ink.”

  The two men from Wilmington left the hearings in triumph.

  Waddell was a man who fought back when challenged. In 1876, he had enlisted friends in Wilmington to ambush a Republican newspaper editor who had criticized him. Writing in the Wilmington Post, the editor, Jesse J. Cassidey, had accused Waddell of welshing on a gambling debt, describing him as “a drunkard and a gambler.” Cassidey challenged the colonel to deny “being drunk at a public dinner” or that he “rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with a woman that he knew had a questionable character.” These were startling accusations against a US congressman, even one as abrasive as Waddell. They stung even more sharply after Cassidey mocked Waddell as “the cultivated gentleman , the ripe scholar, the rare statesman.”

  Waddell rushed home to Wilmington from Washington to respond in person. He laid a trap for Cassidey. On the night of May 1, 1876, while a group of Waddell’s friends stood by in the shadows, Waddell attacked Cassidey on a Wilmington street. “Without notice or warning,” Waddell poleaxed the unsuspecting editor with a club, the Post reported the next day. To ensure that no one came to Cassidey’s aid, Waddell’s friends emerged from alleyways—“as if by magic ,” the Post said. Cassidey later complained that he was prevented from “placing a pistol ball in [Waddell’s] carcass” by the congressman’s “ruffians and bullies.” Waddell was hauled into court and fined $10. He paid on the spot, then returned to Washington.

  The feud did not end there. The Post, questioning why the penalty for an assault with intent to kill was a mere $10, condemned Waddell for a “cowardly and scoundrelly attack.” Cassidey tracked down Waddell in Washington on May 13 and, he claimed, thumped him twice with a cane. Waddell’s brother and friends retaliated by breaking Cassidey’s nose and blacking his eye. Cassidey later reported that he gave Wadd
ell a solid kick during the melee.

  Again, Cassidey was not finished with Waddell. Back in Wilmington, he wrote in the Post that he had earlier called Waddell a “gambler, a drunkard and a defaulter.” He went on: “I now make the statement that he is a liar.” The episode added another layer of uncertainty to Waddell’s muddled reputation in Wilmington. For much of his life, he fought to reconcile his stature as a member of the Cape Fear gentry in good standing—a respected lawyer and an admired orator—with the nagging sense among some in town that he was a man who could not be fully trusted and would, literally, club you from behind.

  Two years later, Waddell’s political career was derailed. He lost his 1878 reelection campaign to his Republican rival in Wilmington, Daniel Russell, the future governor. Waddell had been slowed by illness, and he was outmaneuvered by Russell, who elicited the support of black voters while also attracting the votes of poor white farmers frustrated by their lot under Democratic politicians. Waddell recovered his health and rebounded from his defeat by editing a newspaper in Charlotte for two years, until 1882, but then fell on hard times.

  By the summer of 1898, Waddell was desperate for political relevance in Wilmington. John Melton, the police chief, thought Waddell was clinging to the past, struggling to retain the status and influence he had enjoyed in the years after the Civil War.

  “I think the biggest object Colonel Waddell had was to get a position and office,” Melton said. “He had been out of public life for a long time, and that was his opportunity to put himself before the people and pose as a patriot, thereby getting to the feed trough.” Waddell seemed to be forever reaching for that moment, that singular event that would restore him to a position of respect and even reverence. With the white supremacy campaign of 1898, he had found it.

  Waddell had begun to earn his way back to prominence by volunteering to deliver white supremacist campaign speeches in the Cape Fear countryside. In October, he offered to give a rousing speech downtown denouncing Negro rule, but he was rebuffed by the city’s Democratic leadership. The party did not want to provide Waddell with a prominent public platform inside the city; several leading whites seemed threatened by Waddell’s oratory skills.

  One day in mid-October, the Colonel encountered George Rountree on the street. Waddell complained that the white men in charge of the campaign didn’t seem to want or need his help. They didn’t think he had any value to them, he said. Rountree was wary of Waddell, but he also believed Waddell could be useful in rousing white men to action with Election Day approaching.

  Later that week, Rountree suggested to the city’s Democratic leadership that the time had come for Waddell to deliver a “red hot speech.” There was some resistance, but Rountree ultimately prevailed. Most Democrats acknowledged that if anyone could fire up the city’s white men, it was Waddell. The Colonel would be permitted to deliver a speech.

  Rountree took the offer to Waddell, who eagerly accepted. But he was still stung by earlier rejections by the city’s white leadership. He insisted—and Rountree agreed—that the Democratic campaign committee make a formal written request. The committee grudgingly complied. Waddell later bragged to friends that he had been begged to make a speech by the men who ruled Wilmington.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Choke the Cape Fear with Carcasses

  O N HE MILD AUTUMN EVENING of October 24, 1898, Colonel Waddell stood on a worn wooden stage inside Wilmington’s antebellum Thalian Hall, basking in applause beneath an ornately carved ceiling and bathed in the silver glow of a chandelier. In front of the stage, a throng of white men raised their arms in celebration and implored the Colonel to speak. Waddell was pleased to hear them chanting his name: “Colonel! Colonel Waddell!”

  Nearly a thousand men and a few women had squeezed into Thalian Hall. Clusters of grimy young men swarmed onto the parquet and across the galleries, packed alongside fellow citizens dressed in dark suits. Large audiences weren’t unusual at this majestic New Revival–style hall on Chestnut Street, built by slaves and free blacks. “Buffalo Bill” Cody , Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, the dwarf Tom Thumb, and other late-nineteenth-century luminaries had performed to full houses there; for a while it was the largest theater south of Richmond. But this gathering was different. Its members had a common cause. They had assembled to plot a white revolution. And Colonel Waddell, scion of slave owners, ineffectual army officer, struggling lawyer, aspiring newspaperman, and former Democratic congressman, was to show the way.

  This was the night when all the rage and resentment simmering in white men in Wilmington since Reconstruction would be stoked by the words of a former Confederate officer. Waddell, more than any other member of the city’s white leadership, believed he was the man best suited to articulate the fears and grievances of his race. And now, thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War and twenty-one years after the close of Reconstruction, Waddell urged the white men of Wilmington to take back the privileges of race that they believed, deep in their hearts, were rightfully theirs.

  In the gallery directly below the Colonel’s gaze stood several dozen young men crammed into the front rows. They were in a festive mood. Many of them wore red shirts or vests of calico or silk. Earlier that evening, the Red Shirts had marched to Thalian Hall in military formation. They could not help being seen by the firemen of the all-black Company Three of the Cape Fear Steam Fire Engine station along the way. The black men watched in silence. Then the Red Shirts paraded loudly up Front Street, past the swirling brown Cape Fear River amid the sharp stench of turpentine and the sour smell of rotting vegetation and sewage.

  Inside Thalian Hall, the men’s rough faces were slick with sweat. They wanted inspiration—not a routine campaign speech but an impassioned tribute to white supremacy. They wanted to hear it from the man the local newspapers were now calling the “silver-tongued orator of the East.” The next day’s Wilmington Messenger described Waddell’s address as “a sizzling talk … that will ring for all time in the ears of those who heard it.” The Colonel was sixty-five and slightly stooped, but he could still deliver a mesmerizing speech.

  Waddell stood upon the Thalian Hall stage, absorbing the cheers as the county Democratic Party chairman offered a florid introduction. Seated around the Colonel were sixty men who considered themselves the leading white citizens of Wilmington, dressed in suits and sober neckties. Some had brought their wives, who dressed as if for a formal occasion. Waddell spoke for them all.

  The Colonel typically delivered orations without copious notes, for he considered himself an accomplished orator who spoke from conviction, not rote. He could go on without pause for an hour or more, rarely tiring, his voice perfectly modulated and rising when he described the nobility and purity of the white race.

  On the stage, Waddell waited for the men below him to stop shouting and whistling. And then he spoke:

  “It is just, and right, and absolutely best and wisest for both races that the white people who settled this country, and civilized it … and who have done more for the Negro race than all the other peoples who have ever lived upon the earth, should alone govern it … It is their country and they have a right to rule it. It will be absolutely suicidal for the Negroes to continue to resist this inevitable result …

  “The Negro was a slave and was brought here as such,” Waddell went on. “Is this his country? For 3,000 years the Negro has had a whole continent to himself, and it is in the same condition now as it was at the beginning, except where white settlements have been made. He has never, during all these 30 centuries, exhibited any capacity for self-government … Whenever he has been civilized by white men and then left to himself, he has invariably reverted to a condition of savagery.”

  His voice was drowned out by a torrent of shouts and applause.

  After speaking for nearly an hour, Waddell still held the audience’s attention. Most of the Red Shirts and the white patricians and their wives knew what he intended to say next; they had read newspaper accounts
of his speeches in the countryside. Waddell had carefully honed his own white supremacist message to dovetail with their vision of an imaginary white utopia, and it thrilled them to hear their deepest convictions expressed so elegantly, and with such passion.

  “Here, in the most quiet and conservative of the original 13 states and at the end of the 19th century,” he said, “we are reduced to the pitiful necessity of choosing whether we will live under the domination of Negroes led by a few unprincipled white men, and see the ruin of all that we hold dear—or prove ourselves worthy of the respect of mankind by restoring good government at all hazards or any cost.”

  If violence was required, he said, “I trust that it will be rigidly and fearlessly performed.”

  Waddell’s voice strained to reach a higher pitch. “If a race conflict occurs in North Carolina, the very first men that ought to be held to account are the white leaders of the Negroes!” he shouted. And the leader of those white men, Waddell said, was Governor Russell—“the engineer of all the deviltry and meanness!” There were more shouts.

  For several more minutes, the colonel railed against black voters and black domination. He complained that blacks throughout the South now looked to the black men of North Carolina for leadership and inspiration. Regrettably, Wilmington now stood before the nation as a shameful “Negro paradise.”

  The colonel’s voice was like an engine that had reached top cruising speed. His words flowed effortlessly, powered by the certainty of his beliefs and fanned by the passions of those who shared them. The men in the crowd begged for more.

  “The people are aroused!” Waddell said, shouting now. “Shall we surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes, led by a handful of white cowards … No! A thousand times no! … We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear with carcasses!”