The image of black corpses floating in the river all the way to the sea brought the white men to their feet at the close of Waddell’s address. They roared and raised their fists. Some of them rushed the stage to shake the Colonel’s hand and slap him on the back.
The men shouted for lawyer George Rountree to deliver a few remarks. Rountree had been sitting among the sixty select white men on the stage. He was tall and slender, with a bald skull and a narrow face adorned with an unruly mustache. He waved away the request to speak. He possessed no words to improve upon what he had just heard. He knew it was foolish to follow an orator like Waddell. Rountree could only say what every white man in Thalian Hall was thinking that night: “The time has come to quit talking. The time has come to act.”
The next morning, the Messenger declared Waddell’s speech “the most remarkable delivery ever heard in a campaign here in the memory of this generation.” Waddell later boasted that the speech had “started the fire” that restored white supremacy in Wilmington. It was reprinted in several North Carolina newspapers. Even white women were inspired. “These blond women are terrible when their fighting blood is up,” Waddell’s cousin, Rebecca Cameron, wrote to the Colonel.
Journalist Henry Litchfield West, dispatched to Wilmington by the Washington Post to report on an anticipated “race war,” described the city that week as an armed camp:
Wilmington might be preparing for a siege instead of an election. The citizens are armed and make no secret of that fact. There is a new Gatling gun in the local armory, and 2,000 Winchester rifles are said, on reliable authority, to be distributed among private residences. In each block of the city is a lieutenant, while every six blocks is in charge of a captain. Each block has its place of refuge already selected, to which the women and children can flee for safety when the race war breaks out.
West provided a succinct summary of white intentions: “(1) The Negro must either be frightened away from the polls or else (2) he must be forcibly resisted when he undertook to deposit his ballot.”
On November 3, just five days before the election, Red Shirts held their first formal rally in Wilmington. Some of their shirts and jackets had been provided by the local Democratic Party, which also supplied food and drink. Rosin and tar were set alight in barrels at dusk in a public square known as Hilton Park, coating the park’s twisted live oak branches with an oily sheen. The fires sent up curls of colored smoke and bathed the gathering of several hundred families in a crimson glow. Women arrived with picnic baskets heaped with chopped pork barbecue. Children, let out of school for the day, ran through the grass.
Directing one of the Red Shirt brigades that evening was Mike Dowling, a hard-drinking, brawling Irishman who found occasional work as a laborer. Dowling lived in Dry Pond, a working-class neighborhood populated by Irish immigrants and a smattering of black workers. Some blacks called poor Irishmen buckra, or bocra, which roughly meant “white nigger.” Men of both races competed for unskilled jobs, and the Irish often complained that the city’s white merchants favored black workers over whites because blacks accepted lower pay and made fewer demands. Dowling and other Red Shirts often pressed leaders of the white supremacy campaign for public guarantees of white preference in hiring.
A parade of nearly one hundred mounted Red Shirts rode from the downtown business district through the predominately black neighborhood of Brooklyn. The commander of the city’s armed white men was Roger Moore, who had adopted the title of chief marshal and rode the streets on horseback. When the procession passed the modest home of the mayor, Silas Wright, some of the Red Shirts pointed their Winchesters and hollered, “Hang Wright!”
Most black residents stayed home, their doors locked, as the Red Shirts whooped and shouted in the dim light. A few black men lined up on the sidewalks, watching sullenly. One Red Shirt rode an oxcart, pistol in hand. “Nearly every man produced a pistol from his hip pocket, pointed it in the air and pulled the trigger. The air was blue with smoke,” a correspondent from the Richmond Times wrote. Shots were fired into the home of at least one black family and, later, into a schoolhouse for black children that was closed for the evening.
The procession ended at Hilton Park, where plates of barbecue were served picnic style. The mood was festive, like a carnival. Democratic politicians delivered sour speeches complaining of the “negro problem.”
Mike Dowling organized a chant: “Three Cheers for White Supremacy!” Some of Dowling’s men were drunk. Dowling once bragged that he provided his Red Shirts with whiskey prior to parades to “fire them up , and make them fiercer and more terrorizing in their conduct.” A Republican poll watcher chased out of Wilmington at gunpoint by drunken Red Shirts called it “fighting whiskey .”
Josephus Daniels was not in Wilmington that day, but he had seen plenty of Red Shirt rallies that summer and fall. He was thrilled by the singularly terrorizing effect on black families of armed white men on horseback:
If you have never seen three hundred red-shirted men towards sunset with the sky red and the red shirts seeming to blend with the sky, you cannot conceive what an impression it makes. It looked like the whole world was carmine. They usually rode horses and had weapons, and their appearance was the signal for the Negroes to get out of the way, so that when the Red Shirt brigade passed through the Negro end of town it was as uninhabited to all appearances as if it had been a graveyard. That was the psychology of the Red Shirt parade … many Negroes either did not vote or made no fight in the affected counties on election day.
The next evening, November 4, a gang of Red Shirts from the Fifth Ward encountered a handful of black men on Front Street in downtown Wilmington. The white men were still energized by the rowdy parade the previous night. Two black men were stabbed with swords. Several more were clubbed and pistol-whipped. A white resident named James S. Worth wrote to his wife that the Red Shirts “tackled every nigger that came along regardless and ran several across the street and into nearby alleys.”
The next day, one of the city’s Democratic newspapers complained that the Red Shirts had “ran amuck,” and thus preempted carefully laid plans by the secret committees to forestall violence until after Election Day. The Red Shirts were quietly advised that the opportune time to incite a race riot had not yet arrived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Shepherds Will Have Nowhere to Flee
I N HE WEEKS LEADING up to the November election, some blacks in the Black Belt attempted to fight back against white intimidation. On the night of October 31, for instance, black residents of Williamston, a farm market town on the Roanoke River 143 miles north of Wilmington, marched through the streets and fired guns to protest attacks and intimidation by white supremacists. In response, the town’s white leaders called an emergency meeting to authorize the formation of a white militia, which promptly restored control.
In Edgecombe County, five counties north of Wilmington, a black candidate for statewide office urged a gathering of blacks in early October to confront white supremacists: “Go to the elections well armed, with rocks in your pockets, clubs in your hands, and carry your pistols. And don’t allow any officer to arrest you after you have registered until the day after the election, unless you have stolen something or killed somebody.”
And in New Bern a week before the election, a black-run weekly published an editorial that infuriated the white supremacists who dominated the city: “Every lover of political liberty, every negro who loves his mother and father, his wife and children, and is opposed to Democratic slavery, bury white supremacy next Tuesday face downwards in order that it may never rise again to vilify the negro.”
These and other displays of resistance by black men in the autumn of 1898 were quickly crushed by white men with guns. No attempt by black men to register to vote or to defy white authority or to exercise rights guaranteed by the Constitution lasted very long—not in Williamston or Edgecombe County or New Bern and certainly not in Wilmington.
Simply registering
to vote required supreme courage and sustained fortitude in the face of white intimidation inflamed by newspaper coverage. Whites seemed more menacing every day. On many nights, small bands of Red Shirts rode through black neighborhoods, firing Winchesters into the air. White gunmen intensified their patrols through the city’s predominately black neighborhoods. Black families who normally sat outside on sweltering summer evenings, when sluggish breezes drifted in from the Cape Fear, remained indoors, sweaty and afraid.
Blacks struggled to maintain a veneer of normalcy as they braced for violence. The Daily Record offered little solace. Alex Manly’s newspaper reported the news of the day but did not delve deeply into sensitive matters of race and politics after the August 18 editorial. Manly and his brother Frank continued to receive death threats. At evening meetings of White Government Unions, white citizens spoke openly of lynching both men.
The Manlys received no support from the state Republican Party, which denied any connection to the “negro named Manly.” On November 1 , a party statement denounced Manly’s “impudent and villainous” editorial. It dismissed the Record as “a kicking, disorganizing concern … edited by an irresponsible upstart.”
The black ministers who had previously defended Manly had now abandoned him. In churches, ministers advised their parishioners not to provoke whites. They recited biblical verses about peace and reconciliation.
Manly himself refused to believe that his white neighbors would turn their weapons on blacks. In a front-page commentary titled “What Is There to Fear?” on October 20, he urged Record readers to register to vote despite intimidation by white vigilantes. Manly seemed convinced that the better element among the city’s white men would not condone violence. “Don’t get mad at all the white people … we have friends among them yet and they are not all in the Republican Party,” he wrote. He reprinted sections of the state’s election laws prohibiting violence or intimidation, as if North Carolina’s laws applied equally to whites and blacks.
Manly instructed his readers to put their faith in the city’s white men of honor: “We have here a class of people who delight in law and order, who will not lend aid to any act of violence … Sober, honorable white people in this city, are not at all responsible for these threats and happily they constitute the large majority of our white citizens.”
Nor should blacks be alarmed by the threats issued almost daily in the city’s white newspapers, Manly wrote. He seemed to have persuaded himself that white men who stockpiled guns and promised to clog the Cape Fear with black carcasses were merely spouting inflammatory but ultimately harmless campaign rhetoric.
“They have talked freely of forcing their way to election, and to those who are not familiar with the people of this city they get the impression that there is danger of bloodshed and riot,” Manly wrote on October 20. “We say now as we have said: that there is no danger in this sort of thing.”
Manly’s assurances had little effect. During the first week of November, black leaders organized a public gathering in response to the fears and anxieties coursing through black neighborhoods. They turned to the city’s leading black lawyer, William Henderson, who had built a reputation as a man willing to challenge white authority. Earlier that summer, he had urged blacks to register, telling them: “We have a Republican Sheriff, a Republican Mayor, the Governor is with us, and we have a Republican President. If we can’t get protection now, we can never get it.”
But now, surrounded by his frightened neighbors the week of the election, Henderson counseled caution. He suggested that life might return to normal after the election if whites could somehow be appeased. For the sake of “peace and good order,” he said, blacks should accept the deal imposed on Governor Russell by Democrats—the abject surrender of county Republican elected offices in return for vague promises of electoral peace.
“Go to the polls and cast ballots quietly and go home,” Henderson told the crowd. Some in the gathering accepted his advice, though reluctantly. Others grumbled and made plans to collect as many old revolvers and shotguns as they could find in the very likely event that they had to defend their homes.
Henderson’s pleas caught the attention of the Reverend Peyton Hoge, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, where many members of Wilmington’s planter aristocracy worshipped. Hoge was an ardent white supremacist who often carried a gun. At the request of Democratic politicians, he and other white ministers preached white supremacy to their congregations. Hoge cited two Bible chapters recommended by the politicians:
In the evening—sudden terror! Before morning—it is gone! This is the fate of those who plunder us and the lot of those who ravage us.
—Isaiah 17:14
The shepherds will have nowhere to flee, the leaders of the flock no place to escape.
—Jeremiah 25:35
On November 5, Hoge mentioned Henderson’s speech in a letter to Governor Russell. He assured the governor that the election would pass peacefully “if negroes do as Henderson advised them: go to the polls and cast their ballots quietly and go home; I have no idea that there will be any disturbance.”
Black citizens assaulted by Red Shirts had nowhere to turn for help. Ten black men served on the city police force, and four more were deputy sheriffs, but they were in no position to confront white authority. The city’s newspapers accused black officers of harassing law-abiding white men while permitting blacks to flout the law. “The Sambos do not wait to be threatened or assaulted but they take the initiative and assault to kill from the start,” the Messenger wrote.
In September, five black Republicans had approached Gizzard French, the chief deputy sheriff, proposing that he fire his four black deputies. By sacrificing a few blacks, they hoped, they might save the jobs of the rest. French had reluctantly fired all four deputies, hoping that would satisfy the city’s white leadership. But his capitulation only encouraged leaders of the white supremacy campaign to pressure Governor Russell to fire even more black officers. Russell succumbed. He gambled that removing more black officers would help blunt Democratic charges of “Negro rule.” He ordered Mayor Wright to fire “incompetent” black police officers. Wright suspended six black officers and replaced them with five white men chosen by Democrats.
Fusionists tried to fight back. They distributed circulars urging black men to defy Red Shirt threats and register to vote. Democrats responded by threatening to revoke their county election deal with Governor Russell if the circulars continued. Russell decided to keep the circulars, but he softened their message. New circulars dictated by the governor ordered blacks to honor an election deal that had betrayed them:
Listen to us! Do not encourage any attempt to depart from the agreement made with the merchants and business men … These merchants and business men have given their word that there shall be a free and fair and peaceful election … Do not hang around the polls on Election Day, vote and go to your homes.
The boldest public challenge to white supremacists came from a group of black women who banded together as “An Organization of Colored Ladies.” They were workingwomen—maids, nannies, laundrywomen—exasperated by black men who were too cowed by whites to register to vote. Some of the same women had organized an earlier campaign to compel white streetcar conductors to extend their arms to assist black women on and off the cars. White conductors typically stood aside as black women carrying packages struggled on the streetcars’ high steps. Their campaign had no effect; white conductors continued to assist white women only.
On October 21, the women turned their attention to black men and the vote. They delivered an indignant letter to Alex Manly at the Record office, venting their anger not on white supremacists but on their own menfolk. They recognized that their husbands and brothers had been emasculated by the white power structure—at home, in the workplace, in politics. The women challenged them to reassert their manhood.
Whereas, since it has become apparent that there is a disposition to intimidate the voting element of our ra
ce by discharging them from various places of employment in the event that they register to vote, and whereas it has come to the notice of us, the colored ladies—the laboring class … we have therefore resolved that every negro who refuses to register his name next Saturday that he may vote, we shall make it our business to deal with him in a way that will not be pleasant. He shall be branded a white livered coward who would sell his liberty and the liberty of our whole race to the demons who are even now seeking to take the most sacred rights vouchsafed to any people.
We are further resolved that we teach our daughters to recognize only those young men who have the courage and manhood to stand up for the liberty which under God he now has … Be it resolved further that we have these resolutions published in our Daily Record, the one medium that has stood up for our rights when others have forsaken us.
On the afternoon of November 5, the Saturday before the Tuesday election, Mayor Wright called a special meeting of the city board of aldermen. He announced that temporary measures would be required to maintain order on Election Day. Liquor was one issue; the mayor wanted to make it difficult for Red Shirt brigades to obtain alcohol. The board unanimously passed an ordinance closing all saloons and taverns from Saturday at 6:00 p.m. until the following Thursday at 6:00 a.m.
The city’s small police force was another concern. To bolster the force, the ordinance authorized Mayor Wright to appoint one hundred special police officers for the five-day period. How the officers were to be selected—or their race or political party—was not specified.
The city’s white newspapers continued to warn of a black riot on Election Day. They reported that black preachers were exhorting their congregations to stockpile weapons and attack whites in their homes. Some articles claimed that black servants planned to burn down their masters’ homes, as the black Pinkerton detectives had reported. The Messenger predicted a “bloody conflict between the races” and the specter of “terrified women and children flying from burning houses.”
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