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April 27 - May 7, 2023
Russell summoned Gizzard French to Raleigh and dumped the ugly deal in his lap, with instructions to sell it to the Republican leadership in Wilmington. The party bowed to the inevitable. Throughout the Black Belt, where Democrats had also threatened white riots, Republicans withdrew local black candidates from the campaign. It was a remarkable demonstration of political thuggery.
Later, in a letter to Wilmington’s Fusionists, Russell conceded that he had been intimidated into trading Republican-controlled county offices for peace—a startling acknowledgement that a free and fair election was negotiable.
One by one, Republican county candidates formally announced their decisions to step aside, reluctantly, in the name of election peace.
He welcomed an opportunity to explain to them how he had helped rid South Carolina of so-called Negro rule and how they could apply the same formula in North Carolina.
Until North Carolina’s revised constitution in 1868, Jews had been banned from public office by the state’s original constitution of 1776. By the 1890s, Jews owned most of Wilmington’s dry goods stores and had built comfortable middle-class lives.
Like his fellow white gun merchants, Jacobi refused to sell weapons to blacks. Nor did he sell a single shotgun or rifle or pistol to a white Republican during the campaign. He restricted his gun sales to white Democrats.
He helped draft a local resolution that compelled white business owners in Wilmington to notify their black employees that they would be fired if the Republicans won the November election.
Alex Manly wrote in the Record that he knew of at least thirty black men who had been fired for registering to vote.
“If a man registered, he would be discharged,” John Melton, the police chief, said later. “Colored people … said they were not going to vote or register—that they thought more of their lives than they did of their votes or politics.”
white night riders fanned out into the countryside. Many wore red shirts or vests, along with distinctive white caps, evocative of the hoods once worn by Klansmen. Scores of black farmers and laborers were roused from their beds and threatened with death if they registered to vote. Many were beaten or whipped—attacks that came to be known as “white-capping.”
“I was whipped out of politics.”
An assault on any voter was an assault on democracy,
In fact, the governor said, “The negroes, as a rule, are peaceable, tractable citizens, and any disturbance that may arise on election day will not be of their inauguration.”
Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, prohibited the armed forces from intervening in law enforcement, with certain exceptions.
In Washington, Pritchard’s letter was discussed during a meeting between President McKinley and his cabinet on October 24. After the session, Attorney General John W. Griggs told reporters that he would approve a request by Governor Russell for federal marshals—if Russell requested them. In the meantime, he said, he was dispatching an assistant attorney general to North Carolina to keep him informed on events there.
Russell’s decree only provoked Democrats and Red Shirts.
Waddell’s best years were the 1870s, when he was elected to Congress for four terms. He rose to prominence in 1871 as a member of a US congressional committee investigating Klan lynchings and murders in the South, known to the committee as “the late insurrectionary states.”
Wilmington might be preparing for a siege instead of an election. The citizens are armed and make no secret of that fact. There is a new Gatling gun in the local armory, and 2,000 Winchester rifles are said, on reliable authority, to be distributed among private residences. In each block of the city is a lieutenant, while every six blocks is in charge of a captain. Each block has its place of refuge already selected, to which the women and children can flee for safety when the race war breaks out. West provided a succinct summary of white intentions: “(1) The Negro must either be frightened
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Irish often complained that the city’s white merchants favored black workers over whites because blacks accepted lower pay and made fewer demands.
Dowling once bragged that he provided his Red Shirts with whiskey prior to parades to “fire them up, and make them fiercer and more terrorizing in their conduct.”
A Republican poll watcher chased out of Wilmington at gunpoint by drunken Red Shirts called it “fighting whiskey.”
No attempt by black men to register to vote or to defy white authority or to exercise rights guaranteed by the Constitution lasted very long—not in Williamston or Edgecombe County or New Bern and certainly not in Wilmington.
The Manlys received no support from the state Republican Party, which denied any connection to the “negro named Manly.”
For the sake of “peace and good order,” he said, blacks should accept the deal imposed on Governor Russell by Democrats—the abject surrender of county Republican elected offices in return for vague promises of electoral peace.
In September, five black Republicans had approached Gizzard French, the chief deputy sheriff, proposing that he fire his four black deputies. By sacrificing a few blacks, they hoped, they might save the jobs of the rest. French had reluctantly fired all four deputies, hoping that would satisfy the city’s white leadership. But his capitulation only encouraged leaders of the white supremacy campaign to pressure Governor Russell to fire even more black officers.
Wright
suspended six black officers and replaced them with five white men chosen by Democrats.
The boldest public challenge to white supremacists came from a group of black women who banded together as “An Organization of Colored Ladies.”
The whites made sure the correspondents did not interview black leaders—not that the white journalists, even the Northerners, were inclined to seek out black viewpoints.
A committee of black ministers was appointed to appeal to McKinley to intervene in “the farce that is about to be enacted in the state of North Carolina.” There was no response from the White House.
President McKinley, the official said, believed any federal intervention would be a “fatal mistake.”
Separately, twenty-five club members were assigned to spend Election Day as “observers” at each polling place in the city. For white wards, they were told to round up every white man they could find and escort him to the polls with instructions to vote Democratic. They were told to “never look a man square in the face, even if they knew that John Smith was voting as Willie James and the latter was dead and buried in Oakdale cemetery for lo many years.”
Finally, club members were assigned to go to each ward in the evening, when ballot boxes were to be opened and votes counted by election officials of both parties. They were drilled on the most efficient ways to remove Republican ballots and replace them with phony Democratic ballots.
“You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty,” he continued. “Be ready at a moment’s notice. Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!”
“Pistols were held in the faces of Negro poll holders who had to leave to save their lives … and they knew not what moment they would be killed,” the Reverend J. Allen Kirk, a black minister, wrote later.
But other black men gambled, hoping to avoid white gunmen by voting early and then quickly retreating—as the lawyer William Henderson had advised. All morning, black figures hustled down side roads and ducked through alleys to reach voting sites. Many managed to vote, especially in predominately black wards, where white sentries were less eager to patrol.
By the Washington Evening Star reporter’s count, 1,419 black men had registered in the gerrymandered black First Ward, with 820 casting votes. In the other black ward, the Fifth, 538 black men voted out of 763 who had registered.
Dowling had wanted to lynch Alex Manly the day his editorial appeared in August, but he had been dissuaded by Furnifold Simmons’s order to postpone violence until after the Democrats had carried the election. But now Dowling believed he had waited long enough. At midday on Election Day, he ordered his Red Shirts to mount up and ride to the Record office to lynch the editor.
a “White Declaration of Independence.” MacRae said the declaration was to be read the next day, November 9, at a mass meeting of whites to be held at the county courthouse. Whites would formally demand that Manly shut down his newspaper and leave the city, and that the Fusionist mayor and police chief surrender their posts to Democrats.
If the Red Shirts had made their way to the Record office that afternoon, they would not have found Alex Manly. He had disappeared. His mother and other family members, alarmed by death threats against Manly, begged him to flee the city. Earlier that week, a white friend had warned Manly that he was about to be lynched. The friend gave Manly $25 in gold coins and the password needed to cross checkpoints set up by Vigilance Committee sentinels. “May God be with you, my boy. You are too fine to be swung up a tree,” the man said.
One of the white gunmen asked Manly where he was headed. Manly mentioned a small town north of Wilmington and said he was on his way to buy horses at a farm auction. He recited the password. The white men told him they were planning “a necktie party” in Wilmington for Alex Manly, the black editor. Manly had a ready reply. He told the men that he, too, was “going after that scoundrel Manly.”
One of the men told him: “If you see that nigger Manly up there, shoot him.” Noticing that Manly was unarmed, he handed him a rifle. Alex Manly nodded and snapped the reins. The wagon lurched forward across the bridge, headed north.
Shortly before 9:00 p.m., nearly 150 white men, some with white handkerchiefs tied around their arms, surrounded the stable. They arrived in darkness, having turned off electric streetlights in the neighborhood. After some low murmuring and whispering, about three dozen of the men suddenly stormed into the little room and confronted the vote counters. The first man to step inside was former Wilmington mayor William Harriss, a politician with a grudge. Harriss had been replaced as mayor by Wright after the disputed municipal election the previous March. Harriss barged into the stable, shoving a
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When the results were announced, the Democratic candidate, W. J. Davis, had received an astonishing 456 votes—113 more than the total number of registered voters in the precinct.
That same night, a separate gathering of white men surrounded another gerrymandered black precinct—the Second Precinct of the Fifth Ward—and created another disturbance. Democratic ballots were stuffed into boxes. After the votes were counted, Democrat Davis was awarded 251 votes to just 39 for the Fusionist-Republican candidate. This was in a precinct where registered blacks outnumbered whites 242 to 140.
The New York Times correspondent described a tense but ultimately uneventful Election Day in Wilmington. His dispatch made no mention of the armed Red Shirts who had turned away blacks at polling stations or the assassination threats against Governor Russell.
The whites were in force in each polling place in Wilmington but there were no signs of intimidation and no arms were displayed. Very few negroes were seen standing about the corners, and the negro quarter was very quiet. The colored vote was light, showing a marked falling off from previous elections. The citizens received Gov. Russell coldly.
of the state’s roughly one hundred thousand eligible black voters, fewer than half had voted.
White supremacists had stuffed ballot boxes with Democratic votes and destroyed Republican ballots. And the campaign’s contrived message of the black beast rapist and corrupt Negro rule had persuaded thousands of whites to abandon the Republican Party. The state’s Republican attorney general conceded that up to twenty-five thousand registered white Populists had voted “the white man’s ticket.” Junius Fortune, a Republican clerk of court, embraced the shift to white supremacy. “This election ends the negro in politics,” he said. “And I am glad of it.”
The campaign had decisively snatched control of the state legislature from Republicans and Populists, who had won a two-thirds majority in 1896. Democrats now held ninety-four seats in the state’s house to just twenty-three for Republicans and three for Populists. In the state senate, there were now forty Democrats to only seven Republicans and three Populists.
