Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  During the 1896 campaign, McKinley focused on reconciliation to heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War. He invited thousands of Confederate veterans to Canton, Ohio. He gave each man a knife engraved with the message: “No East, No West, No North, No South, the Union Forever.” He told them: “Patriotism is not bound by State, or class, or sectional lines … we are a reunited country. We have but one flag.”

  In the second year of McKinley’s presidency, the Spanish-American War blurred distinctions between North and South as young men from all parts of the country volunteered for service. By the autumn of 1898, as Spain challenged the United States in peace talks and American troops served in Cuba and the Philippines, a spirit of nationalism and patriotism—and often jingoism—prevailed over sectional interests. In this climate of reconciliation, McKinley was reluctant to antagonize Southerners by intervening in their affairs, even on behalf of black voters whose interests he had defended in the past. He did not make a single public reference to the killings in Wilmington.

  While McKinley was silent on the killings and coup in Wilmington, he did support black advancement within his administration. In his first seven months in office, he appointed a record number of blacks—179—to federal positions. Blacks served in almost every government agency, including the Treasury and the State Department.

  On New Year’s Eve of 1898, two dozen black leaders from the Afro-American Council, formed three months earlier to promote black advancement, met with McKinley for fifteen minutes at the White House. The group was led by North Carolina congressman George White, who had campaigned tirelessly for McKinley in 1896. White hoped to persuade the president to publicly acknowledge that white supremacist Democrats had violently overthrown an elected Republican government. But White was overruled by the rest of the council, which merely asked McKinley to “use his good offices in presenting to Congress the subject of the recent lynchings of colored men in the Carolinas that the perpetrators may be brought to justice.” McKinley did not comply.

  Attorney General Griggs quietly pursued the matter. Griggs was a handsome, distinguished lawyer from New Jersey with a reputation for rectitude. He had turned down an nomination by President Harrison to the United States Supreme Court, then mounted a successful campaign in 1895 for governor of New Jersey. He resigned in January 1898 to become McKinley’s attorney general.

  That fall, Griggs had received a letter—written November 9, the day before the bloodshed in Wilmington—from the United States commissioner in the Justice Department’s Eastern District of North Carolina. Griggs was told that armed white men had formed White Unions and had raided black homes in around Wilmington, “yelling and shooting in the houses of innocent Negroes.”

  “Are not these people liable for indictment?” the commissioner asked.

  Griggs had taken no action then. But now, several weeks after the bloodshed in Wilmington, the situation commanded his attention. He sent a letter to the US attorney for eastern North Carolina in Raleigh, Claude M. Bernard, ordering him to investigate any “acts of lawlessness and violence.” He told Bernard to consider a grand jury and bills of indictment.

  Bernard was a loyal Republican functionary, a lawyer whose support for McKinley had been rewarded with an appointment as US attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. It was a dramatic reversal for the office. Bernard had replaced Charles Aycock, the white supremacist who had been one of Josephus Daniels’s leading “men who could speak” during the white supremacy campaign.

  Bernard was a political realist. He knew that any prosecution of a Democrat in eastern North Carolina would invite retaliation—political and physical. In the case of the Wilmington killings, he would have to persuade white witnesses to testify against fellow whites; the testimony of black witnesses held little value in a North Carolina courtroom, even a federal one.

  Bernard wrote to Griggs that as a Republican US attorney in a hostile Democratic state capital, he was “powerless without a complaint from somebody, or a witness or witnesses.” He had nothing: “I have no information reliable from any witness except from newspaper reports, and the letters I now have from your department. No one has made complaints to me.”

  Nonetheless, Bernard promised Griggs that he would press ahead, despite the obstacles. But he did not intend to act without help from Washington: “I will thank your department to assist this office in every way possible in bringing every violation of the US laws in the recent high handed revolutionary methods employed in this state in the recent election, to justice.”

  Griggs responded by traveling to Raleigh to help guide Bernard. Griggs was accompanied by his deputy, Assistant Attorney General James E. Boyd of North Carolina, whose arrival reassured Wilmington’s white supremacists. Boyd was a former Confederate soldier and had secured a footnote in Civil War history as the courier at Appomattox who had delivered a message from Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant requesting a meeting to arrange a surrender. A few years later, federal marshals arrested Boyd in North Carolina and charged him with membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

  Griggs seemed inclined to let Boyd take charge of the Wilmington investigation, perhaps because of his North Carolina roots. Boyd was also supervising the federal investigation into the South Carolina Election Day killings of black voters. His involvement ensured that whites who had killed blacks in either state would not be prosecuted.

  Boyd and Griggs did not spend enough time in Raleigh to help Bernard accomplish anything. They departed for Washington on December 12 without locating a single witness, much less convening a grand jury.

  Left on his own, Bernard gamely pursued his investigation. He was unable to locate Melton, though he could have read in the newspapers that the former police chief was holed up in Washington. Nor was Bernard able to locate former mayor Wright, who had disappeared but was rumored to be in Knoxville, Tennessee.

  Bernard wasn’t sure where the former deputy sheriff, Gizzard French, had fled after escaping the lynch mob but issued a subpoena for him nonetheless. French was not eager to return to Wilmington. He had sent a check to the Orton Hotel to settle his bill and to pay for his belongings to be forwarded to him in Pender County, north of Wilmington. Meanwhile, Wilmington’s white “citizens’ committee” issued a statement to North Carolina newspapers warning French and other banished Republicans to stay away: “French can never return to this city. If he comes secretly he will not be allowed to stay twelve hours … We did not send these fellows away for fun, but because they are a menace to the peace and prosperity of our community and we don’t intend that they shall ever come back.”

  Bernard managed to persuade French to venture to Raleigh for an interview. Reporters cornered Bernard afterward and pressed him for details, but Bernard was circumspect, saying only: “He was able to give me some valuable information.” But after speaking to French, Bernard had realized that he was too terrified to testify candidly. He dismissed French , and the former sheriff quickly left Raleigh.

  Bernard then issued a subpoena for Bunting, the banished US commissioner. As a federal official, Bunting was crucial to Bernard’s investigation. But Bunting feared for his life if he returned to North Carolina. He ignored the subpoena.

  Bernard also issued a subpoena for Flavel W. Foster, a white businessman and former Union soldier who was still living in Wilmington. Foster was one of the “Big Six” Fusionists targeted by the skull-and-crossbones handbills. He had helped engineer the Republican surrender in the county, sparing himself from attack by Red Shirts. They allowed him to remain in Wilmington, even as other Big Six politicians were banished.

  Reluctantly, Foster agreed to meet Bernard at the US attorney’s office in Raleigh. Bernard wanted to interview Foster before putting him in front of a grand jury. He hoped to elicit crucial details of the attacks on Republican officeholders and the killings of black men. But Foster stunned Bernard by denying that there had been any violence on November 10. Bernard pressed him for nearly an hour but got nowhere. It was obvious th
at Foster had been thoroughly intimidated. Bernard was not about to let him testify before the grand jury. He sent the frightened businessman home.

  After the session with Bernard, Foster granted an interview to a reporter from the Morning Post of Raleigh, a white supremacist newspaper. He said he had been “interrogated” by Bernard, who demanded that he provide the names of whites who had intimidated Republicans.

  “I told him that I did not know of any intimidation during the election,” Foster said. “I informed him that I never heard of an insult offered or an unpleasant word spoken during the day of the election. The day the killings occurred, I was frequently to and from my home and to my factory, which is centrally located in the city. I heard the firing of guns, but never saw any disorder or anything of the riot. I never witnessed any disturbance whatever during the day and I moved about freely.”

  Foster said Bernard had asked him whether any Republicans had been banished from Wilmington. Foster replied that he had not seen any such thing. “I informed him that the first I heard of it, I read in the newspapers,” he said.

  The Morning Post mocked Bernard over his failure to squeeze the truth out of Foster: “Little Bernard is frightened near unto death, less Griggs bounce him from his failure to have indictments returned … The opinion prevails in court circles that Mr. Foster gave the contemplated indictments a knock out blow.”

  Without French or Foster or Bunting, Bernard had no eyewitnesses. And with no eyewitnesses, he had no grand jury testimony and no case. On December 17, just hours after he questioned Foster, Bernard discharged the grand jury. From Washington, Attorney General Griggs continued to urge Bernard to press ahead. But after a few months, Bernard reported that he did not have enough evidence for an indictment, much less a conviction.

  On April 1, 1899, Bernard made one final attempt to collect evidence for the grand jury. He asked Griggs for two Secret Service agents or private detectives to operate undercover in Wilmington and ferret out eyewitness testimony. Bernard suggested the men “go into and associate with the roughs and toughs in certain wards of the city, who were incited and led and directed, by other men of higher official and social standing, and who have profited by this work, and who should be made examples of.”

  Griggs did not respond. After waiting more than two weeks for a reply, Bernard wrote to Griggs once more, begging for guidance. Again, Griggs did not reply; he never explained why he had suddenly lost interest in the investigation. Bernard was left adrift. The investigation withered.

  More than a year later, on August 30, 1900, Bernard finally received an artfully bureaucratic reply, not from Griggs but from a midlevel official with the Justice Department in Washington. It hit Bernard like a hammer blow:

  This Department is in receipt of your letter of April 1st, 1899 … In reply I have to say that the Department deems it inexpedient at this time to grant… [Bernard’s] request. You are, however, at liberty if, in your judgment, the facts at the present time still justify the application, to renew it, in which event you will please state in detail and fully the circumstances upon which the application is based, so that the Department may judge of its necessity.

  It was clear to Bernard that Washington wanted nothing to do with any credible investigation into the Wilmington killings. He was all alone in Raleigh, 280 miles from the capital. Attorney General Griggs, who had once seemed so eager to hold someone accountable for the violence in Wilmington, had been silent for months. As it turned out, Griggs’s tenure as attorney general was coming to an end. He would resign six months later.

  Abandoned and adrift, Bernard was a beaten man. He realized that his investigation had been stillborn. He closed his files and shut down the investigation for good.

  For Alex Manly, the collapse of the investigation was hardly a surprise. He had no faith in Russell, McKinley, Griggs, or any other Republican to pursue the killings and coup. He had watched Republicans, cowed by the Democrats’ intimidation tactics, abandon blacks in Wilmington. He had predicted that Republicans in Raleigh and Washington would turn their backs on them as well.

  After escaping Wilmington, Manly first went to Washington, DC. He spoke to federal officials—he never said who—and pleaded with them to prosecute the white supremacists responsible for the killings of November 10. According to his son, Milo Manly, Alex managed to secure an interview with McKinley, who assumed from Manly’s light complexion that he was a white man. After Manly asked the president for federal intervention, it dawned on McKinley that he was speaking to the black editor who had caused all the trouble in Wilmington.

  “When he realized that Manly was a Negro—and worse, the alleged instigator of the riot—the President ordered him out of the White House,” Milo Manly told a historian in 1977.

  Alex Manly never mentioned a meeting with McKinley, but for the rest of his life he spoke bitterly of his interactions with white Republican officials in Washington. In January 1899, at the same time that Bernard’s investigation was floundering, Manly abandoned all hope of federal assistance. In a speech to a black audience organized by a black minister in Providence, Rhode Island, he spoke caustically of the McKinley administration and told black men that they were now on their own.

  “I bought a ticket and went to Washington, there putting my case before the administration. I was told that the country was powerless,” Manly told the gathering. “Besides, it was too busy settling questions in the Philippines, and could not stop such pastimes as shooting down ‘niggers,’ or words to that effect. I said I was sorry that the nation had such a wide spirit of humanity that it could fight for the Cubans, but let the negroes be massacred at home.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Grandfather Clause

  W ELL BEFORE US Attorney Bernard shut down his investigation in Raleigh, Josephus Daniels and Furnifold Simmons had concluded that the federal government had no interest in punishing election violence in North Carolina. They knew that no white man in the state would be prosecuted for killing blacks. No Red Shirt would face justice for threatening blacks or whipping them in their homes. No Democratic poll worker would be held accountable for stuffing ballot boxes. Murder, fraud, and voter intimidation had been effectively legalized, so long as the targets were black.

  The success of the 1898 campaign energized the careers of the white supremacist politicians who helped direct it. George Rountree was elected to the state legislature. Simmons won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate. Aycock became the Democratic candidate for governor.

  North Carolina’s black vote seemed nearly vanquished. Thousands of blacks were afraid to register, much less vote. But the black population of the Black Belt was still large enough to sway elections if they could somehow manage to vote in significant numbers. Daniels and Simmons sought a legislative tool to snuff out that vote without infringing on white voting rights. To provide a veneer of legality, they turned to the new, Democratic-led legislature of 1899, which Daniels predicted would “garner the fruits of the white supremacy victory.”

  One of the legislature’s first acts was to grant broad discretion to the state’s voting registrars—now all white Democrats—to decide who was eligible to vote. A new voter registration law gave registrars authority to ask a potential voter any “material” question regarding identity and qualifications. To help identify blacks for disqualification, the law required registrars to write down applicants’ race. The law enhanced opportunities for fraud and intimidation, but it did not eliminate the black vote altogether. The next challenge was to find a legal framework to suppress the black vote.

  The Democratic legislature created a special joint committee to devise ways to legally strip blacks of the vote. The committee was in experienced hands. Its chairman was George Rountree, whose role in the Wilmington coup had brought him statewide notoriety. He told his fellow legislators—among them three black politicians who had survived the Democratic election wave—that “the ignorant, debased negro, in power, is the same arrogant and insolent a
nimal he was in the Reconstruction period.” He received a thundering ovation.

  Rountree’s committee seized on two schemes to help disenfranchise black voters: the poll tax and the literacy test. Both had been imposed in other Southern states. The US Supreme Court had upheld Mississippi’s literacy test and poll tax in 1898; it ruled that both satisfied the Fifteenth Amendment because they applied to all voters, not just black men. But white politicians in North Carolina realized a poll tax would create financial hardships for poor whites, and a literacy test would disenfranchise illiterate whites at a time when nearly a quarter of the state’s whites could not read or write. Rountree began exploring creative ways to exempt whites from both provisions, thus freeing Democrats to bring the full weight of the poll tax and literacy test down on black men.

  The committee looked south to Louisiana, where in 1898, the state legislature had passed a constitutional amendment that carved out an ingenious loophole for white voters. Men who had voted before 1867—the year Reconstruction laws instituted universal suffrage—or whose fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867 were exempted from the state’s poll tax and literacy test. White Louisiana legislators argued that their grandfather clause did not explicitly discriminate against blacks, because it applied to both races. But it punished only black men, of course, because the black vote did not exist before 1867.

  Rountree and his committee added a virtually identical grandfather clause to the North Carolina suffrage amendment. Rountree explained that the clause was designed to deny the vote to “those negroes who are unfit for citizenship.” A few Republicans and Populists objected, but it hardly mattered. Republicans held only thirty seats, the Populists just six. Democrats had 134.

  Black leaders scrambled to defeat the amendment. In desperation, John Crosby, a black educator, offered to sacrifice the rights of some black men but not all. “You want to disenfranchise enough Negroes to make it certain good government will prevail,” he told white politicians. “Do that and stop . Do not go to the extent of persecution.”