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April 27 - May 7, 2023
After meeting with Simmons in New Bern in 1898, Daniels concluded that the Democratic campaign to end “Negro domination” would require three types of men—men who could speak, men who could write, and men who could ride. The men who could speak were orators like Colonel Waddell and Charles Aycock, a white supremacist lawyer who was now a polished orator and rising Democratic star. Daniels and other Democratic editors did the writing. And the men who could ride were the armed white men known as Red Shirts, the vigilante militia of the Democratic Party.
Furnifold Simmons.
After meeting with Daniels in New Bern in the spring of 1898, Simmons began to craft the party’s white supremacy message. The effort soon acquired a formal name proudly embraced by Democrats: the White Supremacy Campaign. Its ultimate goal was to evict blacks from office and intimidate black voters from going to the polls. But first, it was necessary not only to terrify black families but also to convince white men everywhere that merely voting in November was not enough. Whites had to be persuaded that free blacks posed an imminent threat to their privileged way of life. And they were told,
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Within its pages, Simmons distilled the Southern white man’s burden: It is no fault of the negro that he is here, and he is not to be punished for being here; but this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it … Under the benign rule of the Democratic Party during the long period it held unbroken power in North Carolina, the negro race enjoyed peace and
quiet, and had the full protection of the laws … But there is one thing the Democrat Party has never done and never will do—and that is to set the negro up TO RULE OVER WHITE MEN … Republican rule in the East means negro rule; and negro rule is a curse to both races … It is useless to tell the people of Wilmington that there is no danger of negro domination, when they see the negro policemen every day parading the streets in uniform and swinging the “billy” … where you see the negro policemen and negro officers as thick as blackbirds.
The handbook was distributed statewide, intended for l...
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POLITICAL MIXING WITH NEGROES MEANS MISCEGENATION; THE AWFUL PRICE PAMLICO’S SHERIFF PAID FOR THE POLITICAL SUPPORT OF THE NEGRO VOTERS; A WARNING THAT WHITE FATHERS SHOULD HEED, a headline in the News and Observer read. Daniels’s reporters underscored the point by reporting, without evidence, that Bessie had attempted to abort her bastard child but died from a “concentrated lye given her by her negro destroyer.”
The Bessie articles were among the early salvos he fired in a political propaganda campaign that gained momentum during the spring and summer of 1898. More than a century before sophisticated fake news attacks targeted social media websites, Daniels’s manipulation of white readers through phony or misleading newspaper stories was perhaps the most daring and effective disinformation campaign of the era.
“We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories or running them down …,” Daniels wrote in a memoir years later. “In fact, the people on every side were at such a key of fighting and hate that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality.” As a result, he noted, “The propaganda was having good effect and winning Populists.”
The most sensational stories focused on what Daniels and other Democrats claimed was the black beast rapist.
Already emasculated by Union troops who had occupied their towns, they risked further shame if black men were elevated to something approaching equality. A black man who could vote or hold public office was a man who might, by their logic, become a rival for the affections of white women.
Daniels escalated trivial incidents into front-page outrages. All that was required was incidental contact between a white woman and a black man. Daniels noticed an item in the Wilmington Star about a fifteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of “an honest and respectable farmer”; she was purportedly approached by two black teenagers on her way home from Sunday school. The boys did not so much as “place their unholy hands on her person,” Daniels reported—but only because the girl screamed. That was the extent of the incident. But Daniels made sure the account dominated the front page of the
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“One of the best known traits of the negro is his tendency to become ‘puffed up with a little, brief authority,’”
The irony in this statement..
He spread fears of an incubus, a winged demon who rapes sleeping women. AN INCUBUS MUST BE REMOVED, a newspaper in Furnifold Simmons’s hometown, New Bern, demanded.
Yes white men had inpunity to rape black women.
crime statistics from 1897 and 1898 show no increase in rapes or sexual assaults in the region.
Years later, Daniels acknowledged that rapes of white women by black men were “few in number.”
In Wilmington, the Messenger reported that an elderly white man was knocked off his feet by two young black men. It was difficult for white victims of these and other outrages to identify the perpetrators, the Wilmington Morning Star complained, because “all coons look alike.”
With each cartoon and with each provocative article, Daniels pitted blacks against whites.
A race war was inevitable. “A clash is surely coming between the races,” Daniels assured his readers. “And in such clashes the white race is always victorious.”
Rebecca Latimer Felton,
She suggested that Georgia’s white men lacked “manhood enough” to protect their women from predatory black men. She suggested that they summon the courage to lynch any black man caught with a white woman. In a letter to the Atlanta Constitution, she wrote, “The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!”
She managed her husband’s campaigns and, it was rumored, wrote many of his speeches.
She blamed black men’s right to vote; it led them to believe they stood on an equal footing with white men—not only politically, but socially.
She spoke of “poor white girls on the secluded farms,” unprotected from predatory black farmhands. Those women, she said, would prefer to die rather than subject themselves to sex with a Negro and the subsequent “suffering of innocence and modesty.”
Gregory Normal School, the first legal school for blacks in Wilmington.
Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountain head if she wishes to purify the stream. Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman. You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites in that you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.
He upended the core white conviction that any sex act between a black man and a white woman could only be rape. In fact, he wrote—and this was the primal fear that gnawed at white men—some white women lusted for or even loved black men. Manly exposed white men as hypocrites for demanding sex with women of a race they considered servile, stupid, and inferior. And he taunted whites with their own weakness and carelessness, warning them that they, not blacks, would ultimately pay the price for race mixing.
“when that article appeared, it required the best efforts we could put forth that we could prevent the people from lynching him.” According to Taylor, Simmons “told us that the article would make an easy victory for us and urged us to try to prevent any riot until after the election.”
On the evening of August 24, knots of black men began surging toward the Record office on Princess Street. Some carried clubs or broken pieces of lumber. Several men climbed the wooden outdoor stairway that led to the newspaper’s second-floor office. Others took up posts inside the tiny newsroom. Still others surrounded the two-story wooden building, vowing to protect Manly and his press.
With circulation plummeting and death threats in the air, Manly and his brother Frank continued to publish the Record, even after receiving a letter from a man who threatened to burn down their office. Alex stood by his editorial, patiently explaining to anyone who confronted him that he did not intend to insult white women. He published the truth, he said, and for the white men who sought to rule Wilmington, the truth was explosive.
Simmons had begun setting up the unions earlier that year, intending them as counterweights to black voting majorities in his “Negroized east.” But they proved so popular with white supremacists that there were soon eight hundred White Government Unions around the state, most of them in the east. They held regular meetings in homes, businesses, and town halls.
Their aim, according to one member, was “to announce on all occasions that they would succeed if they had to shoot every negro in the city.”
In 1898, the chairman of Wilmington’s Democratic Party was George Rountree,
By late summer, gunmen identified by strips of white cloth tied around their upper arms patrolled the city’s neighborhoods. Just as in a military operation, sentries were posted, and gunmen patrolled on set schedules. Captains kept lists of white women and children in their wards. Many whites believed newspaper reports and local gossip that blacks were plotting to rape white women and burn white homes and shops. Safe houses were established in churches or storefronts.
white citizens’ patrol,
“The negroes here are an excellent race,” Cronly wrote in her dairy. “And under all the abuse which has been vented upon them for months they have gone quietly on and have been almost obsequiously polite
as if to ward off the persecution they seemed involuntarily felt to be in the air. In spite of all the goading and persecuting that has been done all summer the negroes have [been] doing nothing that could call down vengeance on their heads.”
On October 18, the News and Observer published an article headlined: THE WILMINGTON NEGROES ARE TRYING TO BUY GUNS. A subhead read: BUT THE DARK SCHEME HAS BEEN DETECTED. The story included a copy of the gun order, riddled with misspellings that confirmed for many white readers that the authors were indeed ignorant Negroes.
Separately, the Group Six, one of the two secret white committees, hired two black Pinkerton detectives to conduct a similar investigation. The detectives seemed to understand what the white men were seeking. They reported that female servants in white homes intended to burn down their employers’ houses if white supremacists prevailed in the election. And several black men, the detectives claimed, had told them they planned to “burn the town down” if the Democrats won.
filling large orders placed by whites in eastern North Carolina. The Baltimore Sun reported that the guns were stockpiled for “the threatened race war in North Carolina.” In Richmond, gun dealers shipped more than a thousand shotguns, Winchester repeating rifles, and .32-caliber and .38-caliber revolvers to Wilmington and other Black Belt towns.
The newsroom of the Wilmington Messenger, he reported, was “a veritable arsenal, a large closet being stored with revolvers and rifles.”
there were “enough small arms imported in the state in the last sixty days to equip an entire division of the United States army.” The reporter also mentioned, in passing, that the city’s blacks possessed only “old army muskets, shotguns, or pistols.”
To prepare for Election Day, a committee of white merchants led by members of the Secret Nine raised $1,200 to purchase the Colt rapid-fire gun,
they have not forgotten the terror and horror of the Nat Turner insurrection.”
The gun “shot 500 cartridges so quickly and with such visible destruction to the small trees and shrubbery on the river banks that the Negros on the tug were visibly frightened,”
The war lasted ten weeks. On August 12, the United States and Spain signed a provisional peace treaty, ending hostilities.
Spanish-American War in the spring of 1898
black volunteers were drawn into scuffles with white men who objected to the soldiers’ demands for equal treatment on streetcars and in saloons.
Black units from other states encountered similar abuse. On a train in Atlanta, white police officers clubbed a group of black soldiers, inflicting bloody head wounds. In Macon, a black soldier who insisted on being served in a segregated saloon was shot dead by the white barkeeper. Three other volunteers in the black battalion were killed by white men in separate incidents in Georgia. In each case, the white killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
An agreement was reached during the final week of October: the two pro-impeachment Democratic candidates and the entire Republican county slate were to be withdrawn. It was lopsided deal. Russell surrendered the county; Democrats gave up virtually nothing.
