January 15, 2018 • 31 mins
Resistance to post-Civil War reconstruction efforts, hotly contested elections, political corruption, and open racism all led to a climate of unrest and white supremacist violence in late 19th-century Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. 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
(00:23):
called the Wilmington's Race Riot of eight. 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
(00:44):
are described as race riots usually involved violence against a
racial or ethnic 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
(01:06):
to that, it was a coup. It was the only
known successful coup data 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
(01:28):
related to all of that. Then we are going to
talk about an immediate and pretty dramatic precursor to the
whole coup and riot. Next time we will talk about
the qu 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 US Civil War,
(01:50):
the federal government, 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.
(02:14):
S Bureau 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 succeeded
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
(02:35):
state until it 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
(02:57):
how to carry 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 were readmitted
into the Union, they were generally at least temporarily under
(03:18):
the 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, said men
(03:40):
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
(04:00):
against both new economic policies and the idea 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 policies and
terrorized the black community. As Reconstruction went on, Democrats started
(04:21):
alleging that the Republican governments were corrupt, and while there
certainly were incidents of corruption, that almost goes without saying
some of this criticism really boiled down to the Republican
governments 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
(04:41):
participation of black people was automatically corrupt. 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
(05:02):
to the Democratic Party's control. By eighteen seventy six, the
only Southern states still governed by the Republican Party were
South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This brings us to the
presidential election of eighteen seventy six. This was a highly
disputed and deeply divisive election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
(05:23):
and Democrats Samuel J. Tilden. On 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
(05:45):
vote for president. Meanwhile, the 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 or was also in dispute.
Hayes had clearly won the state of Oregon, but the
Democratic governor had tried to replace one Republican elector with
(06:08):
a Democrat on the ground, 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, the Commission
(06:31):
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 came to be
known as the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven, had included
(06:54):
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 a lot
going on, and a lot of it was happening simultaneously.
(07:18):
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 to in one episode, even if that
one episode was only about reconstruction and nothing else. Up
Slate has been doing an academy on reconstruction, and they
literally have an episode zero that is essentially a basic
(07:40):
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 in a return
to white supremacy that white premissts framed as quote redemption.
(08:03):
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 uninterrupted. But what
happened in North Carolina shows how it wasn't really a
continual linear progression from reconstruction to Jim Crow, which is
(08:23):
how it's often imagined or framed. So historians marked a
number of different spots as the end of reconstruction, and
the Compromise of eight seventy seven is one of them,
and we will talk about how that wound up playing
out in North Carolina after a quick sponsor break. Once
(08:46):
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 and businessmen. It took a
really lace affair approach to the economic needs of US
affluent people, so their party really started to suffer during
an economic downturn in the eighteen eighties. North Carolina was
(09:07):
a very rural state. I mean, there's still big stretches
of North Carolina that are really rural. But this is
even more true. Small farmers felt like the Democrats weren't
doing enough to help them in this 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
(09:30):
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 economic agenda.
When this failed, they turned to another ally, the Republican Party.
The Populists, also known as the People's Party, formed a
(09:50):
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 state legislature,
they're also using a number of tactics to stay in
power throughout the state. These tactics included gerrymandering and laws
(10:11):
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 would
still appoint Democrats to those positions. But together Republicans and
Populists did have enough support to challenge the Democrats. Although
(10:35):
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, and
voting rights. Republicans and populists still maintained their own platforms
on issues that they disagreed on, such as the gold standard.
(10:58):
So I could point out that, um, the race has
been used 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 to talk about later.
So the idea of political 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
(11:20):
movement played out in North Carolina was unique had a
dramatic effect on the political landscape of the state. In
eight nine four, roughly seventeen years 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
(11:41):
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 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
(12:03):
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 rather
than leaving 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
(12:24):
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 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
(12:45):
as favoring big business over working people. They set a
cap on interest rates, which angered banks and their investors.
Thanks in part to this increased access to voting, the
Fusion Alliance had an even greater success two years later,
in a teen Fusion candidates won every statewide election, and
they completely supplanted the Democrats. After this election, the State
(13:08):
House included thirty nine populists, fifty four Republicans, and twenty
four Democrats. The state Senate included twenty five populists for
eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats. So this gave Democrats, who
previously had had total control of the entire state government,
about twenty percent of the State House and less than
fifteen percent of the state Senate. Republican Daniel L. Russell
(13:30):
became North Carolina as governor following this election. North Carolina's
black population also had more representation in the government. 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
(13:53):
Fusion coalition. And these two elections also had a huge
impact on the city of Wilmington's Specifically, Wilmington is 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 eighteen sixty five, it had become home to an
(14:14):
increasing number of black refugees. By eighteen seventy, the city
was majority black. That meant that after the end 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
(14:36):
about before, there was also a lot of voter intimidation
and a habit of just not holding elections 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
(14:58):
they wanted. A new city charter also allowed the governor
to appoint five people to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman,
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
(15:19):
in the Wilmington's government. The Fusion Coalition's justification for this
was a fear that if Wilmington's elected a majority Blackboard
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
(15:41):
it did nothing to prevent violence. Like that their their
rationale for doing this did not prevent the violence that
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
twenty if the eight nine seven, the City of Wilmington's
(16:02):
held its first municipal election in four years. The result
was a majority Republican Board of Aldermen that included three
black men. This 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
(16:24):
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 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,
(16:48):
each claiming to be the legitimate one. This sounds a
little bit like, uh, you know, European royalty dispute 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
(17:10):
the revised Wilmington's city charter. The Democratic Party was outraged
at the 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
(17:30):
of black people holding office at all. Infuriated by their
losses in North Carolina and Wilmington's uh, Democrats embarked on
a campaign to take back political power in the state,
and we're going to talk about how they did that.
After we first paused for a little sponsor break. After
(17:52):
the widespread success of the Republican and populist fusion cooperation
in North Carolina's statewide election in eighteen nine, Democrats in
North Carolina started preparing for a bitter election in eighteen
Democratic Party leader Daniel Schnect said quote, it will be
the meanest, vileist, dirtiest campaign since eighteen seventy six. That
(18:14):
was in reference to the presidential election that we talked
about in part one of this episode. As part of
this campaign, Democrats started 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
(18:35):
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 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
(18:57):
must be inherently corrupt. But his claims of corruption and
overspending were really a small part of the Democrat strategy
to undermine the Fusionist government and to take back political power.
A much bigger piece of the strategy was an explicit
statewide white supremacy campaign. Democrats actively stoked racism and racial resentment,
(19:17):
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 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
(19:40):
as race traders and unscrupulous devils. Again and again, white
democrats brought up the idea of home protection against the
widespread quote 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 folk
us and these two episodes as on black men. Black
(20:02):
women were targets of this as well. They were portrayed
in the white media and in propaganda as shrieking, disrespectful
herodans who were lewed 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
(20:25):
propaganda portrayed this effort as a belligerent tantrum and quote
trying to rise above their station. North Carolina Democrats got
some fuel for their 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 Harold Felton. She
(20:47):
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 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,
(21:09):
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
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
(21:29):
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
criticized white men for failing to protect their women, and
she explicitly advocated lynching black men in order to prevent rape.
(21:51):
In this speech, she said, quote, if it needs lynching
to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,
then I a lynch a thousand times a week if
necessary for some context on this statement. Lynching was one
of the primary ways that white supremacists tried to incite
terror and submission among the black community following the end
(22:13):
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 and in Rosewood, Florida in nine
Those are two massacres that we have talked about on
previous episodes. Exact numbers are really hard to PenPoint, but
(22:39):
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
were overwhelmingly false. The idea of a threat to white women,
particularly a white woman's virtue, was basically being used as
(23:00):
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
rapists who were inactive and ongoing threat to white women
was widespread. It was actively used by white supremacists as
(23:22):
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 round newspaper in the United States at the time,
published a response. That response was most likely written by
its editor and co owner Alex Manley. This editorial framed
(23:43):
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
some time until the woman's in actuation or the man's
boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched
(24:04):
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 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
(24:29):
teach your men purity, and it concluded, you set yourselves
down as a lot of carping hypocrites in fact, you
cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you
seek to 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.
(24:50):
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
from former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly and a woman
who was enslaved in the governor's household. But it's not
accurate to suggest that relationships between white men and black
(25:12):
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,
there were still substantial innate power differences to consider, especially
between white men and black women's. Regardless of all that,
(25:32):
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.
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
(25:55):
Observer and the Wilmington's Messenger, reported on the Daily Records
editor real under headlines that focused on the pieces purported
slander 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.
(26:15):
This Daily Record editorial then became a huge part of
the Democratic party line on quote home protection. According to propaganda,
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
(26:37):
white supremacy, Democrats started using the Daily Record editorial as
a talking point in their political pamphlets and speeches. They
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
(26:59):
surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we
have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses,
and with that threat, we are going to pause this
story and leave the rest of it for next time.
Do you have some listener mail that is not full
of so many yucky things to say? Um, it is
(27:22):
full of correction for my embarrassing error. Uh. This is
from Joe. It's about our Unearthed in seventeen part one.
Joe says, Hi, I'm a loyal listener and love the podcast.
You made a mistake in the recent Unearthed part one
about the sphinx head found buried on the old movie
(27:45):
set in California. You got the wrong film, the wrong decade,
and you were about three hundred miles off. You got
the right director though. It is Cecil B. De Mill's
original silent version of the Ten Commandments from nineteen twenty three,
not the nineteen fifty six Strolton Heston epic, and it's
buried on the beach in the coastal town of Guadalupe
(28:08):
in central California, which is nowhere near the desert. Thanks
show from California. Thank you, Joe. Not only is this
my mistake, I mean I could not really speak for
why the articles that I was reading described it as
having been buried in the desert. Maybe they said sand
and I auto filled desert. Uh. This is the second
(28:33):
time in recent memory when something was right in my notes,
and then when I was, uh, you know, reading through
my notes to make sure everything was correct, I went,
is that right? And then when I looked it up,
I confused myself and made the thing that had correctly
said nineteen three instead say nineteen Uh sorry about that.
(29:00):
Uh uh. We all make mistakes, and that one was
just particularly embarrassing, especially since I had so many layers. Well,
to be fair, um, you know, those episodes were ones
that we were working on and that you were writing
right as we were trying to put a bunch of
(29:20):
work into the can so that we would have a
backlog because we were not going to be recording for
several weeks in a row over the holidays and then
some travel that produce Gol and I had together, So
like that's part of it. There's just a volume issue
going on. That is, it's very easy when you have
researched seventy kijillion different things, and if you look at
our show notes for those episodes, there are more than
(29:42):
a hundred sources Like that's still a high success rate
if you go by percentages in my book, so I
wouldn't get fret too much over it. I still apologize
for the error, especially since I introduced it myself. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where he Street podcast at how Stuffworks
dot com. We're also on social media all over, as
(30:04):
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all of that. Uh, speaking of Unearthed, I need to
start the new Unearthed and eighteen board on Pinterest because
I haven't done that yet, So look forward to that
on our Pinterest soon, probably already done by the time
this episode comes out. You can also come to our
(30:25):
website which is missed in history dot com, where you
will find the comprehensive archive of every episode we have
ever done, and you will find the show notes the
episodes that Holly and I have done together. Um, you
will have the show notes for this episode, which includes
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do that in a whole lot more at our website
(30:46):
which is missed in history dot com, and you can
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dot com, m
Welcome to steph you missed in history Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. 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
(00:23):
called the Wilmington's Race Riot of eight. 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
(00:44):
are described as race riots usually involved violence against a
racial or ethnic 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
(01:06):
to that, it was a coup. It was the only
known successful coup data 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
(01:28):
related to all of that. Then we are going to
talk about an immediate and pretty dramatic precursor to the
whole coup and riot. Next time we will talk about
the qu 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 US Civil War,
(01:50):
the federal government, 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.
(02:14):
S Bureau 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 succeeded
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
(02:35):
state until it 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
(02:57):
how to carry 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 were readmitted
into the Union, they were generally at least temporarily under
(03:18):
the 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, said men
(03:40):
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
(04:00):
against both new economic policies and the idea 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 policies and
terrorized the black community. As Reconstruction went on, Democrats started
(04:21):
alleging that the Republican governments were corrupt, and while there
certainly were incidents of corruption, that almost goes without saying
some of this criticism really boiled down to the Republican
governments 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
(04:41):
participation of black people was automatically corrupt. 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
(05:02):
to the Democratic Party's control. By eighteen seventy six, the
only Southern states still governed by the Republican Party were
South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This brings us to the
presidential election of eighteen seventy six. This was a highly
disputed and deeply divisive election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
(05:23):
and Democrats Samuel J. Tilden. On 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
(05:45):
vote for president. Meanwhile, the 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 or was also in dispute.
Hayes had clearly won the state of Oregon, but the
Democratic governor had tried to replace one Republican elector with
(06:08):
a Democrat on the ground, 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, the Commission
(06:31):
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 came to be
known as the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven, had included
(06:54):
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 a lot
going on, and a lot of it was happening simultaneously.
(07:18):
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 to in one episode, even if that
one episode was only about reconstruction and nothing else. Up
Slate has been doing an academy on reconstruction, and they
literally have an episode zero that is essentially a basic
(07:40):
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 in a return
to white supremacy that white premissts framed as quote redemption.
(08:03):
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 uninterrupted. But what
happened in North Carolina shows how it wasn't really a
continual linear progression from reconstruction to Jim Crow, which is
(08:23):
how it's often imagined or framed. So historians marked a
number of different spots as the end of reconstruction, and
the Compromise of eight seventy seven is one of them,
and we will talk about how that wound up playing
out in North Carolina after a quick sponsor break. Once
(08:46):
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 and businessmen. It took a
really lace affair approach to the economic needs of US
affluent people, so their party really started to suffer during
an economic downturn in the eighteen eighties. North Carolina was
(09:07):
a very rural state. I mean, there's still big stretches
of North Carolina that are really rural. But this is
even more true. Small farmers felt like the Democrats weren't
doing enough to help them in this 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
(09:30):
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 economic agenda.
When this failed, they turned to another ally, the Republican Party.
The Populists, also known as the People's Party, formed a
(09:50):
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 state legislature,
they're also using a number of tactics to stay in
power throughout the state. These tactics included gerrymandering and laws
(10:11):
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 would
still appoint Democrats to those positions. But together Republicans and
Populists did have enough support to challenge the Democrats. Although
(10:35):
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, and
voting rights. Republicans and populists still maintained their own platforms
on issues that they disagreed on, such as the gold standard.
(10:58):
So I could point out that, um, the race has
been used 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 to talk about later.
So the idea of political 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
(11:20):
movement played out in North Carolina was unique had a
dramatic effect on the political landscape of the state. In
eight nine four, roughly seventeen years 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
(11:41):
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 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
(12:03):
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 rather
than leaving 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
(12:24):
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 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
(12:45):
as favoring big business over working people. They set a
cap on interest rates, which angered banks and their investors.
Thanks in part to this increased access to voting, the
Fusion Alliance had an even greater success two years later,
in a teen Fusion candidates won every statewide election, and
they completely supplanted the Democrats. After this election, the State
(13:08):
House included thirty nine populists, fifty four Republicans, and twenty
four Democrats. The state Senate included twenty five populists for
eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats. So this gave Democrats, who
previously had had total control of the entire state government,
about twenty percent of the State House and less than
fifteen percent of the state Senate. Republican Daniel L. Russell
(13:30):
became North Carolina as governor following this election. North Carolina's
black population also had more representation in the government. 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
(13:53):
Fusion coalition. And these two elections also had a huge
impact on the city of Wilmington's Specifically, Wilmington is 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 eighteen sixty five, it had become home to an
(14:14):
increasing number of black refugees. By eighteen seventy, the city
was majority black. That meant that after the end 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
(14:36):
about before, there was also a lot of voter intimidation
and a habit of just not holding elections 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
(14:58):
they wanted. A new city charter also allowed the governor
to appoint five people to the Wilmington's Board of Alderman,
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
(15:19):
in the Wilmington's government. The Fusion Coalition's justification for this
was a fear that if Wilmington's elected a majority Blackboard
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
(15:41):
it did nothing to prevent violence. Like that their their
rationale for doing this did not prevent the violence that
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
twenty if the eight nine seven, the City of Wilmington's
(16:02):
held its first municipal election in four years. The result
was a majority Republican Board of Aldermen that included three
black men. This 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
(16:24):
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 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,
(16:48):
each claiming to be the legitimate one. This sounds a
little bit like, uh, you know, European royalty dispute 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
(17:10):
the revised Wilmington's city charter. The Democratic Party was outraged
at the 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
(17:30):
of black people holding office at all. Infuriated by their
losses in North Carolina and Wilmington's uh, Democrats embarked on
a campaign to take back political power in the state,
and we're going to talk about how they did that.
After we first paused for a little sponsor break. After
(17:52):
the widespread success of the Republican and populist fusion cooperation
in North Carolina's statewide election in eighteen nine, Democrats in
North Carolina started preparing for a bitter election in eighteen
Democratic Party leader Daniel Schnect said quote, it will be
the meanest, vileist, dirtiest campaign since eighteen seventy six. That
(18:14):
was in reference to the presidential election that we talked
about in part one of this episode. As part of
this campaign, Democrats started 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
(18:35):
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 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
(18:57):
must be inherently corrupt. But his claims of corruption and
overspending were really a small part of the Democrat strategy
to undermine the Fusionist government and to take back political power.
A much bigger piece of the strategy was an explicit
statewide white supremacy campaign. Democrats actively stoked racism and racial resentment,
(19:17):
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 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
(19:40):
as race traders and unscrupulous devils. Again and again, white
democrats brought up the idea of home protection against the
widespread quote 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 folk
us and these two episodes as on black men. Black
(20:02):
women were targets of this as well. They were portrayed
in the white media and in propaganda as shrieking, disrespectful
herodans who were lewed 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
(20:25):
propaganda portrayed this effort as a belligerent tantrum and quote
trying to rise above their station. North Carolina Democrats got
some fuel for their 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 Harold Felton. She
(20:47):
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 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,
(21:09):
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
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
(21:29):
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
criticized white men for failing to protect their women, and
she explicitly advocated lynching black men in order to prevent rape.
(21:51):
In this speech, she said, quote, if it needs lynching
to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,
then I a lynch a thousand times a week if
necessary for some context on this statement. Lynching was one
of the primary ways that white supremacists tried to incite
terror and submission among the black community following the end
(22:13):
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 and in Rosewood, Florida in nine
Those are two massacres that we have talked about on
previous episodes. Exact numbers are really hard to PenPoint, but
(22:39):
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
were overwhelmingly false. The idea of a threat to white women,
particularly a white woman's virtue, was basically being used as
(23:00):
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
rapists who were inactive and ongoing threat to white women
was widespread. It was actively used by white supremacists as
(23:22):
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 round newspaper in the United States at the time,
published a response. That response was most likely written by
its editor and co owner Alex Manley. This editorial framed
(23:43):
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
some time until the woman's in actuation or the man's
boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched
(24:04):
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 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
(24:29):
teach your men purity, and it concluded, you set yourselves
down as a lot of carping hypocrites in fact, you
cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you
seek to 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.
(24:50):
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
from former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly and a woman
who was enslaved in the governor's household. But it's not
accurate to suggest that relationships between white men and black
(25:12):
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,
there were still substantial innate power differences to consider, especially
between white men and black women's. Regardless of all that,
(25:32):
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.
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
(25:55):
Observer and the Wilmington's Messenger, reported on the Daily Records
editor real under headlines that focused on the pieces purported
slander 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.
(26:15):
This Daily Record editorial then became a huge part of
the Democratic party line on quote home protection. According to propaganda,
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
(26:37):
white supremacy, Democrats started using the Daily Record editorial as
a talking point in their political pamphlets and speeches. They
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
(26:59):
surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we
have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses,
and with that threat, we are going to pause this
story and leave the rest of it for next time.
Do you have some listener mail that is not full
of so many yucky things to say? Um, it is
(27:22):
full of correction for my embarrassing error. Uh. This is
from Joe. It's about our Unearthed in seventeen part one.
Joe says, Hi, I'm a loyal listener and love the podcast.
You made a mistake in the recent Unearthed part one
about the sphinx head found buried on the old movie
(27:45):
set in California. You got the wrong film, the wrong decade,
and you were about three hundred miles off. You got
the right director though. It is Cecil B. De Mill's
original silent version of the Ten Commandments from nineteen twenty three,
not the nineteen fifty six Strolton Heston epic, and it's
buried on the beach in the coastal town of Guadalupe
(28:08):
in central California, which is nowhere near the desert. Thanks
show from California. Thank you, Joe. Not only is this
my mistake, I mean I could not really speak for
why the articles that I was reading described it as
having been buried in the desert. Maybe they said sand
and I auto filled desert. Uh. This is the second
(28:33):
time in recent memory when something was right in my notes,
and then when I was, uh, you know, reading through
my notes to make sure everything was correct, I went,
is that right? And then when I looked it up,
I confused myself and made the thing that had correctly
said nineteen three instead say nineteen Uh sorry about that.
(29:00):
Uh uh. We all make mistakes, and that one was
just particularly embarrassing, especially since I had so many layers. Well,
to be fair, um, you know, those episodes were ones
that we were working on and that you were writing
right as we were trying to put a bunch of
(29:20):
work into the can so that we would have a
backlog because we were not going to be recording for
several weeks in a row over the holidays and then
some travel that produce Gol and I had together, So
like that's part of it. There's just a volume issue
going on. That is, it's very easy when you have
researched seventy kijillion different things, and if you look at
our show notes for those episodes, there are more than
(29:42):
a hundred sources Like that's still a high success rate
if you go by percentages in my book, so I
wouldn't get fret too much over it. I still apologize
for the error, especially since I introduced it myself. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where he Street podcast at how Stuffworks
dot com. We're also on social media all over, as
(30:04):
missed in History. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram,
all of that. Uh, speaking of Unearthed, I need to
start the new Unearthed and eighteen board on Pinterest because
I haven't done that yet, So look forward to that
on our Pinterest soon, probably already done by the time
this episode comes out. You can also come to our
(30:25):
website which is missed in history dot com, where you
will find the comprehensive archive of every episode we have
ever done, and you will find the show notes the
episodes that Holly and I have done together. Um, you
will have the show notes for this episode, which includes
lots of primary sources on this whole incident. You can
do that in a whole lot more at our website
(30:46):
which is missed in history dot com, and you can
subscribe to our show wherever you can podcasts. For more
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't housetop works
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