Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Harriss took advantage of the darkness and confusion. He stuffed Democratic ballots into an unattended ballot box for the state senate race. After the candle was lit, Harriss and the other intruders remained inside as the two white Democratic precinct judges, along with a Populist Democrat, continued counting the vote as if nothing untoward had occurred. When the results were announced, the Democratic candidate, W. J. Davis, had received an astonishing 456 votes—113 more than the total number of registered voters in the precinct.

  That same night, a separate gathering of white men surrounded another gerrymandered black precinct—the Second Precinct of the Fifth Ward—and created another disturbance. Democratic ballots were stuffed into boxes. After the votes were counted, Democrat Davis was awarded 251 votes to just 39 for the Fusionist-Republican candidate. This was in a precinct where registered blacks outnumbered whites 242 to 140.

  Red Shirts and armed sentries continued to patrol the city streets that night, long after the polls had closed. Sentries searched black passersby for guns or kerosene. Many Wilmington whites were certain that every black man in the city was secretly armed. Bellamy, the Democratic candidate for Congress, later recalled that “they constantly carry concealed weapons … the razor, the pistol, the slingshot, and the brass knuckle seem to be their inseparable accompaniments as a class.”

  In white neighborhoods, rumors spread that black men were lying in wait to attack whites under the cover of darkness. Frank Weldon, a correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution who accompanied a Red Shirt patrol through a black section of Wilmington, reported as fact Red Shirts’ claims of fifteen hundred black men “hidden in the weeds,” armed with shotguns and old army muskets in “Darkest North Carolina.” According to Weldon’s dispatch, blacks had shot out electric lights and tossed rocks at trolley cars. “It is dangerous to rustle the weeds or make any noise, lest a rock or bullet comes whizzing uncomfortably near,” he wrote. He claimed to have overheard armed black men shouting at whites: “I want to wash my hands in these tallow-faces’ blood.”

  An even more credulous account was provided by Guy Carleton Lee of the Baltimore Sun. Lee was not a typical correspondent. He described himself as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and an orator, historian, and all-around man of letters. In a dispatch to the Sun, Lee spun an ominous tale studded with purported eyewitness details provided by his trusted white sources. His dispatch reported that several hundred black men had been marching and drilling in secret formations, armed with rifles, as part of a planned uprising against whites.

  “The negroes drilled in their society halls and in unoccupied dwellings,” Lee wrote. “No drums beat. No bugle-calls rang out. In somber silence, with subdued voices, the squads learned the manual of arms and the first lesson in the art of war.” There was more: Rifles and pistols were stored at secret locations. A single black man had collected and stored more than three hundred guns, “and the whites have not yet discovered their hiding place.” Lee wrote that there was a secret plan, called the “poison and the torch,” for black women to poison white children in their care and then set white homes afire.

  Lee’s account was pure fiction. Virtually all the armed men who remained on the streets throughout the night were white, not black. Black men locked their doors and huddled with their families as white gunmen patrolled their neighborhoods. White wives and daughters stayed up, too, supplying their men with biscuits and coffee. The night passed quietly, save for the low voices of the sentries at their posts, talking and stamping their feet against the autumn chill.

  One of the sentries, Michael Cronly, was a reluctant recruit. He had fetched his rifle and set out on patrol late that night, but only because he was obliged as a white man to defend his neighborhood against the anticipated black uprising. His sister, Jane Cronly, who kept a diary of events in Wilmington that fall, thought the patrols were pointless, and she told him so. She wrote in her diary that night:

  After being out in the cold and damp, he came in a moment and four women took hold of him so vigorously that they made him promise to come in before not very long, threatening to go out with him if he did not. He knew what a perfect farce it was to be out there in the damp and cold, watching for poor cowed disarmed negroes frightened to death by the threats that had been made against them and too glad to huddle in their homes and keep quiet. So after a time he came home and went to bed.

  In Raleigh, Governor Russell continued to receive death threats. The simple act of leaving the governor’s mansion, even accompanied by his bodyguard, was fraught with risk. But there was also a political risk if Russell failed to travel to Wilmington to vote in his home city. He would be ridiculed as a coward. Ultimately, Russell decided to take a train to Wilmington on Election Day. “I realize that I am liable to be murdered,” he told a reporter.

  As a precaution, Russell arranged for two Wilmington Democrats to accompany him inside the city. Both men were distant relatives of his; one was Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, commander of the Wilmington Light Infantry. But even with Colonel Taylor beside him, Russell was showered with taunts and catcalls when he arrived at the Front Street depot aboard an Atlantic Coast Line train. Amid the din, a cluster of local and out-of-town correspondents shouted questions at the governor about the anticipated “Negro riot.” It was “all rot,” Russell assured them. The Messenger, which referred to the obese governor as “his tubs,” quoted Russell as saying that the city’s blacks were “unarmed, unorganized and helpless in the face of the formidable preparations made by the whites.”

  Russell was escorted to his assigned polling station, in the predominately white Fourth Ward, located inside a small shop at the corner of Dock Street and Front Street along the riverfront. Correspondents trailed behind him. One reported that while the governor was not molested, he was “greeted by silence and cold looks” from white men.

  At the polling station entrance, Russell asked the Democratic ward captain whether Wilmington’s Democrats were inclined to allow him to vote. He seemed to be joking.

  “We certainly are,” the captain replied, and the governor walked inside. As he deposited his ballot, a registrar announced grandly to the handful of people inside: “The governor of North Carolina!” Before Russell left, he asked the correspondents whether blacks were being permitted to vote in the city. The reporters assured him that they were voting without interference.

  The New York Times correspondent described a tense but ultimately uneventful Election Day in Wilmington. His dispatch made no mention of the armed Red Shirts who had turned away blacks at polling stations or the assassination threats against Governor Russell.

  The whites were in force in each polling place in Wilmington but there were no signs of intimidation and no arms were displayed. Very few negroes were seen standing about the corners, and the negro quarter was very quiet. The colored vote was light, showing a marked falling off from previous elections. The citizens received Gov. Russell coldly.

  After a brief stop at his plantation in nearby Brunswick County, Russell boarded an Atlantic Coast Line train back to Raleigh. He had intended to take a direct route, through the town of Goldsboro. But he was warned that several hundred Red Shirts were waiting to intercept him there. Russell decided instead to detour to a much longer route, even though that rail line also passed through Red Shirt redoubts—in the small towns of Maxton, Laurinburg, and Hamlet west of Wilmington.

  At the station in Maxton, more than a hundred Red Shirts met the governor’s train. A small band of gunmen boarded, led by Cameron Morrison, a white supremacist Democrat and a future North Carolina governor. There was no confrontation. In fact, the Red Shirts joked with the governor, who responded by asking them where all his Populist supporters had gone. The Red Shirts “appeared to be in for a good time. The governor took their visit good naturedly,” the Messenger reported.

  Morrison warned Russell that a larger and more hostile brigade of Red Shirts was waiting for his train at an upcoming stop, in Laurinburg. They we
re promising a lynching. Morrison and several train employees convinced Russell to hide in the train’s baggage car. The governor agreed, reluctantly. He looked ridiculous , a frightened fat man sitting on lumpy mailbags in a darkened railcar. He was the governor, after all, with an entire state militia at his disposal. He sat back, glumly, and sank into the mailbags.

  Russell was still in hiding when the train pulled into Laurinburg. A boisterous mob of Red Shirts and other armed white men charged the platform, cursing the governor. Some had been guzzling whiskey while awaiting the train.

  “Where’s the governor?” someone shouted. “Where is the governor?”

  Other men hollered, “Bring him out! Lynch him! Lynch the governor! Lynch the fat son of a bitch!”

  Several Red Shirts boarded the train, searching for Russell. The conductor and a few other men stood guard outside the baggage car. They denied that Russell was aboard. One drunken man tried to force his way inside the baggage car but was turned away by the conductor’s men. Finally, the Red Shirts gave up and the train moved on, with Russell still inside the stuffy baggage car. The next day , several Democratic newspapers reported, falsely, that the Red Shirts in Laurinburg had punched him in the stomach and pulled his ears.

  The last stop through Red Shirt territory was Hamlet, where more Red Shirts greeted the train with insults and curses. But again, the gunmen were unable to find the governor. He remained in the darkened baggage car, listening to the cries of the Red Shirts as the train pulled safely out of the station.

  The train eased into the Raleigh station at 2:16 the following morning. Russell was taken to the governor’s mansion, where he was escorted past a mob that had surrounded the home and grounds, screaming and cursing Russell and his wife. The governor stormed inside, furious but helpless.

  Later that morning, Russell was ridiculed in newspapers across the state. The early edition of the Messenger taunted the governor with the opening words of his inauguration address two years earlier: “There is retribution in history.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Forbearance of All White Men

  OUR STATE REDEEMED —NEGROISM DEFUNCT , Wilmington Messenger OLD NORTH STATE REDEEMED FROM NEGRO RULE AT LAST , Atlanta Constitution WHITE SUPREMACY RECEIVES A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE , News and Observer

  When Josephus Daniels and Furnifold Simmons awoke on the morning of November 9, newspaper headlines confirmed what the two men had begun to realize the night before. Democrats had swept the state. The white supremacy campaign had proved more successful than Daniels and Simmons could possibly have hoped when they first met in New Bern in March to plot a new era of white redemption. In a matter of months , their campaign had intimidated and terrified thousands of black men into staying home from the polls; of the state’s roughly one hundred thousand eligible black voters, fewer than half had voted.

  White supremacists had stuffed ballot boxes with Democratic votes and destroyed Republican ballots. And the campaign’s contrived message of the black beast rapist and corrupt Negro rule had persuaded thousands of whites to abandon the Republican Party. The state’s Republican attorney general conceded that up to twenty-five thousand registered white Populists had voted “the white man’s ticket.” Junius Fortune, a Republican clerk of court, embraced the shift to white supremacy. “This election ends the negro in politics,” he said. “And I am glad of it.”

  After the election, Daniels published a front-page cartoon depicting Furnifold Simmons wearing a white planter’s suit and twirling his mustache, as the victor over a diminutive black figure in a game of checkers. The caption: “The Game Is Over. The White Men Win.” The North Carolina writer and essayist W. J. Cash later described Simmons as “the Little Giant of New Bern who, single-handed, had slain the dragon of Nigger Rule.”

  The campaign had decisively snatched control of the state legislature from Republicans and Populists, who had won a two-thirds majority in 1896. Democrats now held ninety-four seats in the state’s house to just twenty-three for Republicans and three for Populists. In the state senate, there were now forty Democrats to only seven Republicans and three Populists.

  The results were disastrous for Republicans in Wilmington. The Democratic legislature would soon restore legislative control over local appointed offices, ending the Fusionist experiment with elected local rule that had helped put black men in office. In New Hanover County, Democrats were now in complete control. The county flipped from a 960-vote Fusionist majority in 1896 to a 500-vote margin for Democrats in 1898. With no opposition for county offices, Democrats replaced Fusionists in the positions of sheriff, solicitor, coroner, surveyor, and judge. If Alex Manly had not fled Wilmington, he would have suffered the indignity of surrendering his appointed position as deputy registrar of deeds to a white supremacist. George Rountree was elected to the state house. Roger Moore, the former Klan leader, won a seat on the county Board of Commissioners, now run by fellow Democrats.

  Among the celebratory articles in Wilmington’s white newspapers was a small notice printed on the back page of the Wilmington Messenger. Headlined ATTENTION WHITE MEN , the item announced a meeting of the “White Men of Wilmington” at the courthouse at eleven o’clock that morning, Wednesday, November 9: “A full attendance is desired, as business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.” This was the notice that Hugh MacRae had dictated as he attempted to persuade Mike Dowling to delay the Red Shirt attack on Alex Manly. The mild language only hinted at the meeting’s true purpose—to set in motion the long-standing plan to overthrow city government.

  George Rountree did not know the meeting had been scheduled. He had stayed up at the Cape Fear Club until 3:00 a.m., receiving congratulatory telegrams from white supremacists across the state. He was “sleeping the sleep of the just” that morning, he wrote later, when his wife woke him at nine o’clock to tell him of an important meeting at the courthouse. Rountree threw on his clothes and ran through the streets.

  “I had never seen more people in the courthouse,” he wrote later. Nearly a thousand white men—“Wilmington’s very best citizens,” the Messenger said—had squeezed into the white-columned building. Men jostled for space in the lobby and in the corridors, straining to see what was happening inside. Latecomers clustered on the courthouse steps.

  Colonel Waddell, too, claimed to know nothing of the meeting. He was often kept in the dark by members of the secret groups, who resented what they considered Waddell’s political opportunism and grandstanding. As soon as Waddell heard about the meeting, he rushed to the courthouse. Inside, he encountered Hugh MacRae, who handed him the printed statement that had been composed by MacRae and the Secret Nine. It was labeled “Wilmington Declaration of Independence.”

  Waddell saw Silas Fishblate, the former mayor, standing on a rostrum, motioning for Waddell to join him. Waddell mounted the rostrum, where he was instructed to read the declaration. He protested that he had no idea what the meeting was all about. But he told the gathering that he was always willing to answer any call from the white men of his city. There was a ripple of applause.

  Waddell began reading from the lengthy document. Below the rostrum, several men transcribed his words. They were newspaper correspondents, appointed as secretaries by the Secret Nine to document what the next day’s Messenger described as “the most remarkable mass meeting in the history of Wilmington.” Thomas Clawson, of the Messenger, wrote furiously. Beside him, their heads bent over their notes as they scribbled, were correspondents for the Washington Star, the Chicago Record, the Charleston News and Courier, and the Wilmington Morning Star.

  The preamble of the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence” said the United States Constitution envisioned a government of enlightened men and “did not contemplate for their descendants a subjection to an inferior race.” After reading the preamble aloud, Waddell recited a list of seven resolutions:

  One—Because whites in Wilmington paid 95 percent of taxes, they would no longer be ruled by Negroes.<
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  Two—Whites would no longer tolerate “the actions of unscrupulous white men in affiliating with the negroes.”

  Three—“[T]he negro has demonstrated by antagonizing our interests in every way, and especially by his ballot, that he is incapable of realizing that his interests are and should be identical with those of the community.”

  Four—“[T]he giving of nearly all the employment to Negro laborers has been against the best interests of this County” and had retarded Wilmington’s economic growth.

  Five—Most jobs held by blacks were to be handed over to white men.

  Six—Blacks were to be treated “with justice and consideration” so long as they obeyed “the intelligent and progressive portion of the community.”

  Seven—The Daily Record would cease publication and its printing press would be shipped out of the city. Alex Manly would be banished from Wilmington as punishment for “publishing an article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communities have resulted in the lynching of the editor.” If Manly obeyed within twelve hours, he would be guaranteed “forbearance on the part of all white men.” But if the editor did not leave Wilmington within twenty-four hours, he would “be expelled by force.”

  The mention of Manly prompted a roar from the assembled crowd, now packed shoulder to shoulder in the cramped hall. Every man was standing and cheering. There were cries of “Right! Right! Right!” and shouts of “Lynch Manly!” and “Fumigate the city with the Record !” Moments later, newly elected US representative John D. Bellamy Jr. told the crowd that Manly would be dealt with firmly.

  “Why didn’t you lynch him?” a man shouted.