SYMHC Classics: The Wilmington Coup of 1898, Part 1

This much-requested 2018 episode covers how open racism and hotly contested elections led to a climate of unrest and white supremacist violence in late 19th-century Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. After the attack on the US Capital on
January six, we started getting requests for an episode on
the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington's Que. So we are requests
for us to cover this topic from folks who had
not heard this episode yet, and we got requests from
other folks for us to reissue this as a Saturday

(00:22):
classic our folks who had heard it before. Either way,
that means that we are going to now re release
our two part on the Wilmington's Que. This is a
two part episode that originally came out on January fifteen,
so almost exactly three years ago, and we are going
to be sharing the second part next Saturday. Welcome to

(00:46):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are talking about
something we're actually going to talk about it for the
next two episodes, and it is sometimes called the Wilmington's

(01:09):
Race Riot of eight. But we've mentioned on the show
before that the term race riot tends to be pretty misleading.
Race riot really suggests an incident in which people of
two or more races are equal aggressors and some kind
of mass violence, but that is not usually what happened.
In the United States. The incidents that are described as
race riots usually involved violence against a racial or ethnic

(01:33):
minority carried out by a white mob. The incident we're
talking about today and this two parter follows that pattern.
It is an appalling example of violence against Wilmington, North
Carolina's black community, and it was carried out by a
mob of armed white men. In addition to that, it
was a coup. It was the only known successful coupdeta

(01:54):
in the in the United States history. This white mob
over through the duly elected government of Wilmington's or replaced
it with one of their own. Choosing This whole incident
is directly tied to the end of reconstruction and how
that affected North Carolina electoral politics. So we're gonna start
with a little bit of scene setting related to all
of that. Then we are going to talk about an

(02:15):
immediate and pretty dramatic precursor to the whole coup and riot.
Next time we will talk about the q itself and
its aftermath and as it heads up. The last section
of today's episode includes a discussion of a rape, so
for background. After the U. S. Civil War, the federal government,

(02:35):
community leaders, religious organizations, and activists all took steps to
try to rebuild the nation and correct the social, economic,
and political problems that had grown out of the institution
of slavery. These efforts came to be known as reconstruction,
and they included things like amendments to the Constitution, civil
rights legislation, and the establishment of the U. S. Bureau

(02:59):
of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the
Freedman's Bureau. As part of reconstruction, the nation had to
figure out how the states that had seceded from the
Union could be readmitted into it, and until that could happen,
the former Confederate states were placed under martial law. The
idea was that troops would occupy each state until it

(03:20):
established a quote loyal Republican government. The occupying troops were
meant to protect the progress of reconstruction, as well as
protecting the freed people and their allies. The federal government
went through a lengthy back and force, interrupted by the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, about exactly what the requirements for
readmission into the Union would be and how to carry

(03:42):
those out. In the end, the states in question had
to ratify the fourteenth Amendment to the U. S Constitution,
as well as hold a new constitutional convention at the
state level. The new state constitutions had to include voting
rights for black men. As states where readmit it into
the Union, they were generally at least temporarily under the

(04:03):
control of the Republican Party, and for a time the
Republican Party was also highly focused on civil rights and
equality for both the freed people and poor white citizens.
Black voters overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, and Republicans proposed sweeping
changes that they believed would reshape the nation into one
in which all men really were created equal. We've said

(04:24):
men on purpose here, because although there were activists for
women's suffrage, the focus was really on men. But this
had started to shift by the eighteen seventies. Southern Democrats
vehemently objected to what the Republicans were doing. Many Democratic
Party leaders were former Confederates and slave owners, and they
pushed back against both new economic policies and the idea

(04:48):
that black people should be equal citizens. The ku Klux
Klan was established in eighteen sixty six and worked both
within and outside the Democratic Party to undermine reconstruction Arab
policy these and terrorized the black community. As a Reconstruction
went on, Democrats started alleging that the Republican governments were corrupt,

(05:08):
and while there certainly were incidents of corruption, that almost
goes without saying. Some of this criticism really boiled down
to the Republican government's spending money on things that the
Democrats didn't agree with, along with a sort of chicken
and egg assumption, which was also racist, that any government
that allowed the full participation of black people was automatically corrupt.

(05:29):
Many in the Republican Party also started to pull back
for making really sweeping civil rights changes and instead started
proposing more moderate, incremental steps. By the mid eighteen seventies,
radical Republican power was waning and state governments in the
South were returning to the Democratic Party's control. By eighteen

(05:50):
seventy six, the only Southern states still governed by the
Republican Party were South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This brings
us to the press Sidential Election of eighteen seventy six.
This was a highly disputed and deeply divisive election between
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrats Samuel J. Tilden. On

(06:10):
election date, Tilden had a lead of two hundred and
sixty thousand in the popular vote, but he was one
vote shy of an electoral college victory. So, for our
listeners living outside the US who may not be as
familiar with this, every state has a number of electors
that's based on its population, and technically people are voting
for those electors, who then vote for president. Meanwhile, the

(06:32):
electoral votes for South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were all
in dispute due to allegations of fraud and voter intimidation
and vote counts that did not match up. One Oregon
elector was also in dispute. Hayes had clearly won the
state of Oregon, but the Democratic governor had tried to
replace one Republican elector with a Democrat on the ground,

(06:54):
so the Republican was postmaster and therefore not eligible to serve.
After weeks of bitter infighting and increasing fears that the
country was headed for a second Civil war, Congress created
an Electoral Commission to try to sort this whole thing out.
After still more secret negotiations, than political maneuvering. On March second,

(07:15):
the Commission voted seven to eight to award the disputed
electoral votes to Hayes. The Commission's final vote was strictly
along party lines. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people, especially Democrats,
didn't see Hayes as a legitimate president after all of this.
But at the same time, all that political maneuvering, which

(07:35):
came to be known as the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven,
had included several appeasements for Democrats in the South. One
of these was that if Democrats accepted Hayes's president, the
federal government would stop using federal troops to bolster reconstruction
efforts in the South. So this is really the thinnest
of overviews. Reconstruction was a really turbulent time. There was

(07:58):
a lot going on, and a lot of it was
happening simultaneously. We're really just trying to give a general
sense of what the nation had gone through by the
late eighteen seventies. It was even more chaotic and violent
than we can really do justice too in one episode,
even if that one episode was only about reconstruction and
nothing else. Up Slate has been doing an Academy on Reconstruction,

(08:19):
and they literally have a an Episode zero that is
essentially a basic timeline of stuff that happened that was
important during reconstruction, which gives you a sense of those
important things, but not so much of like how that
the flavor of the time. As reconstruction ended, former Confederate
leaders once again rose to power in many Southern states

(08:41):
in a return to white supremacy that white supremacists framed
as quote redemption. Discriminatory legislation known as Jim Crow laws
followed in some places. This shift, which had really been
going on before the end of reconstruction, seemed both immediate
and an inn up did. But what happened in North

(09:01):
Carolina shows how it wasn't really a continual linear progression
from reconstruction to Jim Crow, which is how it's often
imagined or framed. So historians marked a number of different
spots as the end of reconstruction, and the Compromise of
eighteen seventy seven is one of them, and we will
talk about how that wound up playing out in North Carolina.

(09:22):
After a quick sponsor break once reconstruction ended the United States,
the Democratic Party regained control of North Carolina, and at
that time the party was primarily run by wealthy landowners

(09:43):
and businessmen. It took a really lace affair approach to
the economic needs of less affluent people, so their party
really started to suffer during an economic downturn in the
eighteen eighties. North Carolina was a very rural state. I mean,
there's still big stretches of North Carolina that are really rural.
But this was even more true. Small farmers felt like
the Democrats weren't doing enough to help them in this

(10:05):
rocky economy, and instead railroads, banks, and big businesses were
getting lots of perks while small farmers got nothing. At first,
the Democrats tried to adjust their platform to address these concerns,
but nothing really got done, so people started abandoning the
Democrats for a third party, the Populists. At first, the
Populists tried to work with Democrats to advance their own

(10:28):
economic agenda. When this failed, they turned to another ally,
the Republican Party. The Populists, also known as the People's Party,
formed a coalition with Republicans and what came to be
known as fusion politics. On their own, the Populists and
the Republicans didn't have enough power to unseat the Democrats.
Not only did the Democrats have solid control of the

(10:50):
state legislature, they're also using a number of tactics to
stay in power throughout the state. These tactics included gerrymandering
and laws that allowed the state government and Raleigh to
appoint people at the local level regardless of what the
local vot voters actually wanted, so it didn't matter, for example,
if a local population was overwhelmingly Republican, legislators and Raleigh

(11:12):
would still appoint Democrats to those positions. But together Republicans
and populists did have enough support to challenge the Democrats.
Although race had long been used as a political wedge
in the South, white populists set aside their racial differences
with the Republican party to try to advance the issues
that both parties agreed on. These issues included education, jobs,

(11:36):
and voting rights. Republicans and populists still maintained their own
platforms on issues that they disagreed on, such as the
gold standard. So I should point out that um the
race has been used it as a political wedge everywhere,
It was just most explicitly used as a wedge in
the South, which is one of the things we're going

(11:57):
to talk about later. So the idea of plitical parties
working together to achieve a common goal was not unique
to North Carolina. Wasn't unique to these particular parties, but
the way the Fusion movement played out in North Carolina
was unique had a dramatic effect on the political landscape
of the state. In eighteen ninety four, roughly seventeen years

(12:17):
after the end of Reconstruction, the People's Party and the
Republican Party in North Carolina agreed on a slate of
candidates that included members of both parties. They endorsed these
common candidates rather than running against one another. This strategy
was extremely successful. The Fusion alliance of populists and Republicans
won races all over the state. They took control of

(12:40):
the state legislature and several statewide offices, and several Fusion
politicians were elected to Congress. This new Fusion government started
making changes as soon as they were sworn in. They
repealed the County Government Act of eighteen seventy seven, which
was one of the laws that had allowed state lawmakers
to appoint people to local offices. Is Rather than leaving

(13:01):
those offices in control of the local voters. The Fusion
Coalition increased funding for schools, prisons, and charitable institutions by
raising taxes, and they required that political parties used standard
colors and symbols so that people who were not literate
could still exercise the right to vote in future elections.
Some of the Fusion government's efforts also targeted the economic

(13:24):
issues that had led white voters to leave the Democratic
Party in the first place. They cut back on the
privileges offered to railroads, which had been seen as favoring
big business over working people. They set a cap on
interest rates, which anchered banks and their investors. Thanks in
part to this increased access to voting, the Fusion Alliance

(13:45):
had an even greater success two years later. In eight
Fusion candidates won every statewide election, and they completely supplanted
the Democrats. After this election, the State House included thirty
nine populists, fifty four Republicans twenty four Democrats. The state
Senate included twenty five populists for eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats.

(14:07):
So this gave Democrats, who previously had had total control
of the entire state government about of the State House
and less than fifteen percent of the state Senate. Republican
Daniel L. Russell became North Carolina as governor. Following this election,
North Carolina's black population also had more representation in the government.

(14:27):
More than one thousand black citizens held elected and appointed
offices across the state. This still wasn't even close to
proportional to how many black citizens lived in the state,
but it was a lot more than it had been
the Fusion Coalition. And these two elections also had a
huge impact on the city of Wilmington's Specifically, Wilmington is

(14:48):
on the coast of North Carolina along the Cape Beer
River and separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the by
a chain of barrier islands. It was also an important
port during the Civil War, and after the Union took
Wilmington in eight sixty five, it had become home to
an increasing number of black refugees. By eighteen seventy, the
city was majority black. That meant that after the end

(15:10):
of reconstruction, the state government had to pull a lot
of tricks to keep white Democrats in power in Wilmington's
in defiance of the city's majority black Republican voters. In
addition to the gerrymandering and the County Government Act that
we talked about before. There was also a lot of
voter intimidation and a habit of just not holding elections

(15:31):
once a Democrat was in office. In addition to the
other reforms that we already discussed, the Fusion government revised
the Wilmington's City Charter to require municipal elections every two years,
so that people could actually vote candidates out of office
if they wanted. The new city charter also allowed the
governor to appoint five people to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman,

(15:53):
with Wilmington's voters electing one Alderman per ward to fill
the rest of the positions. In this case, the Fusion
government was doing something similar to what Democrats had been
doing before. They were trying to limit black voters power
in the Wilmington's government. The Fusion coalition's justification for this
was a fear that if Wilmington's elected a majority Blackboard

(16:15):
of Alderman, the Democrats would then use that as fuel
for their campaigns. And while I mean this this might
have been a justified fear, was definitely justified based on
what happened next. Uh, that rationale was still discriminatory and
it did nothing to prevent violence like that their their
rationale for doing this did not prevent the violence that

(16:36):
they said they were trying to prevent. Governor Russell's five
appointments to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman were all Republicans,
for white men and one black man. Then, on March seven,
the City of Wilmington's held its first municipal election in
four years. The result was a majority Republican Board of

(16:57):
Aldermen that included three black men. The new Board of
Alderman then elected Silas P. Wright, a white Republican, as mayor.
The incumbent Democrats didn't take this well at all. They
refused to vacate their seats on the Board of Aldermen.
The three Democrats who were newly elected to the Board
of Aldermen also teamed up with the Democrats who had

(17:19):
been defeated, and together they claimed that the new election
rules were unconstitutional and that they would have been elected
under the old rules, meaning that they were therefore they
were the real board of Aldermen. So for a time
Wilmington's had three competing boards of Aldermen, each claiming to
be the legitimate one. This sounds a little bit like uh,

(17:42):
you know European royalty disputes over who actually is running
any given country at any time. Uh. This dispute went
all the way to the state Supreme Court. Months later,
the court ruled in favor of the Fusion Board of
Aldermen that had been appointed and elected under the revised
Wilmington's city charter. The Democratic Party was outraged at the

(18:03):
success of the Fusion coalition, both in North Carolina in
general and in Wilmington's specifically. Not only had Democrats essentially
lost all political power in North Carolina, as we talked
about before, a lot of people in the party were
white supremacists. They objected to the very idea of black
people holding office at all. Infuriated by their losses in
North Carolina and Wilmington's, Democrats embarked on a campaign to

(18:27):
take back political power of the state. And we're going
to talk about how they did that. After we first
paused for a little sponsor break. After the widespread success
of the Republican and populist Fusion cooperation in North Carolina's
statewide election in eighteen, Democrats in North Carolina started preparing

(18:52):
for a bitter election in eight, Democratic Party leader Daniel
Schneck said quote, it will be the meanest, vileist, dirtiest
campaign since eighteen seventy six. That was in reference to
the presidential election that we talked about in part one
of this episode. As part of this campaign, Democrats started

(19:12):
accusing the fusion government of corruption and mismanagement. But as
had been the case during Reconstruction, many of these charges
of corruption boiled down to the fact that the Fusionist
government was spending tax money on things the Democratic Party
didn't want it to be spent on, like the school
and prison funding that we mentioned before the break. As

(19:33):
was the case with some of the criticism of Republican
governments during Reconstruction, Democrats also made the racist assertion that
black people were inherently untrustworthy, so a government that had
the participation and support of black people must be inherently corrupt.
But these claims of corruption and overspending were really a
small part of the Democrat strategy to undermine the Fusionist

(19:55):
government and to take back political power. A much bigger
piece of this strategy was an explicit statewide white supremacy campaign.
Democrats actively stoked racism and racial resentment, hyping up terrors
of the so called quote negro rule, and framing black
citizens and leaders as an active threat to white virtue
and the white way of life. They spread horror stories

(20:19):
of brutality at the hands of black police officers and
painted black civic leaders as threatening white womanhood, and they
condemned white men who allied with black Republicans as race
traders and unscrupulous devils. Again and again, white democrats brought
up the idea of home protection against the widespread quote

(20:39):
threat of black people and the need to return to
the safety and security that had supposedly existed under white
democratic rule. Although a lot of our focus and these
two episodes as on black men, black women were targets
of this as well. They were portrayed in the white
media and in propaganda as shrieking, disrespectful herodance who rellewd

(21:00):
and promiscuous. For example, there was a group of black
women who started a campaign to get the same courteous
treatment that white women received on public transportation, like the
street car driver offering them a hand as they got
on and off the car. Democrats propaganda portrayed this effort
as a belligerent tantrum and quote trying to rise above
their station. North Carolina Democrats got some fuel for their

(21:24):
white supremacy campaign from outside the state, thanks in part
to a speech given by Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia.
Felton had played a big part in the political career
of her husband, William Harrold Felton. She was such an
influence on his work that an editorial about them ran
under the headline quote which Felton is the congressman and
which the wife. She also had a political life of

(21:47):
her own as a suffragist, prohibitionist, and reformer, and she
would eventually become the first female U. S Senator. She
was appointed following the death of Senator Thomas E. Watson.
If you've ever walked through that tunnel in Hartsfield Jackson
International Airport with this section on Atlanta history, there is
a picture of Rebecca Latimer Felton. In August of she

(22:10):
gave a speech called Woman on the Farm before the
Georgia Agricultural Society, which was later reprinted in the Wilmington's
Morning Star. This was a speech she had given in
various forms before, outlining the issues that were facing farm wives.
She argued that the biggest threat to a white farmer's
wife was the risk of being raped by a black
man while her husband was away in the fields. She

(22:33):
criticized white men for failing to protect their women, and
she explicitly advocated lynching black men in order to prevent rape.
In this speech, she said, quote, if it needs lynching
to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,
then I say lynch a thousand times a week if
necessary for some context on this statement. Lynching was one

(22:57):
of the primary ways that white supremacists tried to incite
terror and submission among the black community following the end
of slavery. Victims of lynching were frequently accused of having raped, groped,
or otherwise assaulted a white woman. These kinds of allegations
could also lead to mass violence, which is what happened
in Tulsa, Oklahoma in nine and in Rosewood, Florida in nine.

(23:20):
Those are two massacres that we have talked about on
previous episodes. Exact numbers are really hard to pinpoint, but
today it is estimated that only two to ten percent
of rape allegations in the United States are false. But
during the period that we are talking about here, the
rape allegations that were used to justify lynchings and massacres

(23:41):
were overwhelmingly false. The idea of a threat to white women,
particularly a white woman's virtue, was basically being used as
an excuse to torture and murder black men. The murders
themselves also tended to be horrifying, gruesome, and carried out
in public, with the victims bodies desecrated after their deaths.
On top of that, the idea that black men were

(24:04):
rapists who were inactive and ongoing threat to white women
was widespread. It was actively used by white supremacists as
part of their efforts to retake control of the government.
So a week after Felton's address, Wilmington's black newspaper, The
Wilmington's Daily Record, which may actually have been the only
daily black run newspaper in the United States at the time,

(24:25):
published a response. That response was most likely written by
its editor and co owner Alex Manley. This editorial framed
these rape allegations as starting with consensual relationships between black
men and white women, and it compared these relationships to
those between white men and black women. The editorial went
on to say, meetings of this kind go on for

(24:48):
some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness
bring attention to them, and the man is lynched for rape.
Every Negro lynched is called a big, burly black brute,
when in fact, many of those who have thus been
dealt with had white men for their fathers. And we're
not only not black and burly, but we're sufficiently attractive

(25:09):
for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in
love with them. As is very well known to all,
this Peace recommended that the white community quote, teach your
men purity, and it concluded, you set yourselves down as
a lot of carping hypocrites. In fact, you cry allowed
for the virtue of your women while you seek to

(25:30):
destroy the morality of ours. Don't ever think that your
women will remain pure while you are debauching ours. You
sow the seed, the harvest will come in due time.
There is a lot to unpack with this editorial. In
white society, relationships between white men and black women were
sort of an open secret. Alex Manly himself was descended

(25:51):
from former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly and a woman
who was enslaved in the governor's household. But it's not
accurate to suggests that relationships between white men and black
women were all consensual, especially those that had taken place
during slavery, And we're between between a free white man
and an enslaved black woman. Even after the end of slavery,

(26:13):
there were still substantial innate power differences to consider, especially
between white men and black women's. Regardless of all that,
this editorial spread well beyond the Daily Records readership. It's
suggestion that a white woman would have a consensual relationship
with a black man sparked outrage among the white community.

(26:34):
The newspaper was evicted from its downtown Wilmington's offices and
had to relocate to the black owned Love and Charity Hall.
Democratic newspapers across the state, including their Raleigh News and
Observer and the Wilmington's Messenger, reported on the Daily Records
editorial under headlines that focused on the pieces purported slander

(26:54):
and defamation of white women. The coverage also suggested that
Manly himself must have been involved with some poor white
man's wife and was writing from his own experience. This
Daily Record editorial then became a huge part of the
Democratic Party line on quote home protection. According to propaganda,

(27:14):
here in print was evidence of just how depraved and
dangerous black men were and how great a threat to
white womanhood. As they focused their campaign efforts on the
urgent need to return North Carolina to a state of
white supremacy, Democrats started using the Daily Record editorial as
a talking point in their political pamphlets and speeches. They

(27:35):
made explicit efforts to encourage racist violence. In the words
of Alfred Moore Waddell, who would be a major part
of the coup we're talking about next time, quote, we
will not live under these intolerable conditions. We will never
surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we
have to choke the current of the Cape fear with carcasses.

(27:57):
And with that threat, we are going to pause the
story and leave the rest of it for next time.
Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be

(28:19):
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
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(28:40):
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