Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

by David Zucchino

The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery. —Frederick Douglass

Wilmington, North Carolina, November 10, 1898

They wore red calico shirts or short red jackets over white butterfly collars. They were workingmen, with callused hands and sunburned faces beneath their wide-brimmed hats. Many of them had tucked their trousers into their boot tops and tied cartridge belts around their waists. A few wore neckties. Each one carried a gun.

It was 1898, a tumultuous midterm election year. White planters and business leaders had vowed to remove the city’s multiracial government and black public officials by the ballot or the bullet—or both.

There was concern among whites in Wilmington, where they were outnumbered by blacks,

Owen F. Love, a smaller hardware dealer, sold fifty-nine guns of all types during October and early November. Murchison and Love were proper white men, which meant they sold firearms only to other white men and primarily to those who were supporters of the white supremacist Democratic Party. They did not sell to blacks.

“It is doubtful if there ever was a community in the United States that had as many lethal weapons per capita as in Wilmington at that time.”

White politicians and newspapers warned that if blacks continued to vote and hold office, black men would feel empowered to seize white jobs, dominate the courts, and rape white women.

In 1898, a field representative for the American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington “the freest town for a negro in the country.” Three of the city’s ten aldermen were black, as were ten of twenty-six city policemen. There were black health inspectors, a black superintendent of streets, and far too many—for white sensitivities—black postmasters and magistrates. White men could be arrested by black policemen and, in some cases, were even obliged to appear before a black magistrate in court. Black merchants sold goods from stalls at the city’s public market—a rarity for a Southern town at the time. Black men delivered mail to homes at times of day when white women were unattended. They sorted mail beside white female clerks.

A black barber served as county coroner. The county jailer was black, and the fact that he carried keys to the lockup infuriated whites. The county treasurer was a black man who distributed pay to county employees, forcing whites to accept money from black hands. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison had appointed a black man, John C. Dancy, as federal customs collector for the port of Wilmington. Dancy had replaced a white supremacist Democrat, and he drew an astonishing federal salary—$4,000 a year, or $1,000 more than the governor earned. A white newspaper editor ridiculed Dancy as “Sambo of the Custom House.”

A black alderman from Raleigh, the capital, noted with some surprise that certain black men in Wilmington had built finely appointed homes with lace curtains, plush carpets, pianos, and even, he claimed, servants.

In fact, Wilmington’s blacks had higher literacy rates than virtually any other blacks in North Carolina, a state in which nearly a quarter of whites were illiterate.

In fact, some considered it the most integrated city in the South, with blacks and working-class whites living side by side in each of the city’s five wards.

Sprunt Cotton Compress on the Cape Fear riverfront. They loaded boulder-size bales of cotton onto merchant ships bound for Europe. The compress was the largest cotton export firm in the country, providing jobs to nearly eight hundred black men.

Like the men of the Light Infantry, members of the Naval Reserves had served on federal duty during the Spanish-American War, aboard the USS Nantucket off South Carolina. They, too, returned to Wilmington late that summer. And they, too, were supposed to report to the governor but served instead as a local white supremacist militia.

The US Navy had unleashed upon Fort Fisher the heaviest naval bombardment in history at the time. The fall of the fort in January 1865 had closed all access to the port of Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last functioning seaport.

After New Orleans and Norfolk were captured by Union forces in the spring of 1862 and Vicksburg fell in July 1863—and with Charleston under Union siege for much of the war—Wilmington had become the main source of weapons, clothing, food, and supplies for the Confederacy.

For blacks in Wilmington, the end of the war left their lives only slightly less constrained and miserable than before. Any civil liberties envisioned by the Emancipation Proclamation had not materialized by the summer and fall of 1865.

Union commanders, seeking the most efficient ways to get local government functioning again, turned to the men who knew how to run local affairs. Wilmington’s former mayor, an ardent white supremacist, was restored to his post by the local Union command. The mayor quickly installed a former Confederate general as his chief of police, presiding over a new force composed mainly of former Confederate soldiers.

Some plantations had been seized by the federal Military District of Wilmington and settled with freed slaves in April 1865. But General Joseph Hawley, a dedicated abolitionist who had settled slaves on the plantations, was replaced in June 1865 by General John Worthington Ames, an ardent conservative. In September, Ames evicted the former slaves and returned plantations to their white owners under a national policy instituted by President Johnson. Freedmen who worked on Cape Fear plantations were supposed to be paid for their labor. But the Freedmen’s Bureau in Wilmington was inundated with complaints from black workers that white plantation owners had reneged on promises to pay

Collective farms

former Confederate soldiers banded with white residents to form county militia companies that rampaged through the area, terrorizing black families in their homes.

Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in March 1865 to advance the rights and living conditions of freed slaves—although nearly 40 percent of food rations distributed by the bureau in the summer of 1865 went to white families.

He realized that the whites of Wilmington had not truly been defeated. He watched them return from the war unbowed, full of rage, and more committed than ever to white supremacy.

White civilians often flogged blacks in public, typically unimpeded by police or, on many occasions, by Union soldiers.

Police arrested blacks on trumped-up charges such as vagrancy or trespassing, then forced them, in some cases, to work without pay.

The militias were an outgrowth of the Confederate Home Guard, formed during the war to track down and punish Confederate deserters, among other duties. After the war, many Home Guards joined county militias, which raided black homes on the pretexts first of confiscating illegal firearms and later of recovering “stolen” property.

In Charleston in July 1865, a squad of Union soldiers attacked blacks and destroyed their stalls at a city market, then bayoneted to death a black man who protested.

And the discrimination extended to black soldiers’ pay, which was supposed to be the same as for whites—$13 a month. But blacks were paid $10 a month, with $3 deducted for clothing.

In February 1866, black soldiers marched to Wilmington’s city jail to protest the whipping of black prisoners by white jailers. They stormed the lockup and freed the captives. Such incidents unnerved both local whites and white Union occupiers. Ultimately, federal military commanders replaced black troops with white soldiers along the Lower Cape Fear.

The true soldiers, whether they wore the gray or the blue, are now united in their opposition—call it conspiracy and resistance if you will—to negro government and NEGRO EQUALITY. Blood is thicker than water.

Though Governor Holden was a Republican who would later instigate a war against the Ku Klux Klan, he had issued a proclamation in June 1865 advising blacks not to expect to be granted suffrage or other civil rights immediately. Those sentiments were consistent with Presidential Reconstruction, then in effect under President Johnson, a white supremacist Southerner born in Raleigh and raised in Tennessee. Johnson sought to bring the Southern states back into the Union, with slavery technically outlawed but with white supremacy largely unchallenged

and blacks granted limited rights, which did not necessarily include the right to vote.

For whites in Wilmington, blacks had ceased to be slaves, but they had not ceased to be black. They were still considered unworthy, unequal, and inferior, still subservient to whites by any measure—social, political, or economic.

The military panel was not swayed. It pronounced the two Home Guards guilty of murder. They were sentenced to die.

“The white man says he don’t want to be placed on equality with the Negro,” Galloway said. “Why, Sir, if you could only see him slipping around at night, trying to get into Negro women’s houses, you would be astonished.”

The leaders of the New Bern meeting also announced a political convention of freedmen, the first of its kind in the South, to be held in the state capital, Raleigh, the following month, September 1865.

Over a period of eleven years, beginning in 1863, Abraham Galloway would rise from slave to state senator.

And it was the boldness and fortitude of the black men of Wilmington who followed Galloway’s example that ultimately provoked the deadly white backlash of 1898.

Abraham’s father, John Wesley Galloway, was a twenty-five-year-old descendant of Scottish sailors

John Wesley Galloway did not own his son. Abraham was the property of Marsden Milton Hankins, the son of the widow

who owned Abraham’s mother.

North Carolina’s slave owners had passed a law requiring vessels bound for the North to be fumigated by burning turpentine dregs to smoke out stowaway slaves, while also killing mosquitoes. Typically, pots of burning turpentine were set belowdecks and the hatches shut tight.

slavery across the British Empire had been abolished in 1833.

Thousands of fugitive slaves had escaped plantations to seek refuge among the Union forces, settling in sprawling tent cities and shantytowns along the sluggish Trent River. Union officers called them contrabands and put them to work as laborers.

Edward Kinsley, a flinty Massachusetts abolitionist. Kinsley was thirty-three years old, stout, with a broad face, a wide-set mouth, a high forehead, and untamed sideburns. He had helped raise money to form volunteer military units of free blacks in the North. But because there were only enough free blacks there to form two small regiments, Massachusetts governor John Albion Andrew had enlisted Kinsley, a lifelong friend, to travel to North Carolina to raise a larger black regiment composed of fugitive slaves. Both men sought to answer a question that would help shape the course of the war: how many former slaves in North Carolina would fight and die for the Union?

The pass, addressed to officers of the Army of the Potomac and signed by Lincoln, read: “You will allow the bearer, Mr. Edward W. Kinsley, to pass inside our lines at whatever time he may choose and at any point he may desire, and officers will see that he has proper escort.”

But he insisted that Kinsley first agree to several conditions. First, any colored regiment formed in New Bern would receive the same pay, uniforms, and rations as white troops. Second, the Union army must provide shelter, supplies, and jobs for the families of black soldiers. Third, colored schools must be reopened and education for blacks guaranteed. Kinsley had no authority to agree to any of the demands. And the final demand was impossible for him, or even Lincoln, to satisfy: Galloway wanted an assurance that any captured black soldier would be treated by the Confederacy as a prisoner of war, not as an escaped slave.

had little faith in the Union’s commitment to unfettered freedom for former slaves; the treatment of contrabands in New Bern hardly presaged a promising future. For instance, the Union army provided small relief packages of flour, beef, bacon, and bread to seventy-five hundred fugitive slaves and their families. But white citizens received sixteen times more rations. And while white military workers earned $12 a month, black workers, who helped build military fortifications, were paid $8.

It seemed to me the entire population of the South, from ‘Old Uncle Ned’ to the baby just born, to all the Aunt Dinahs, and with all the colored minstrel shows were marching to the happy land.” In

nearly five thousand black men from the New Bern camps signed up for the Union army. They enlisted in the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers also known as the African Brigade.