More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 2 - August 17, 2020
Wilmington had become the main source of weapons, clothing, food, and supplies for the Confederacy.
As Union forces approached Wilmington that February, General Bragg destroyed several railroad lines leading out of the city and set fire to bridges, wharves, and shipyards.
Before the Confederate soldiers retreated, some looted shops. When Union soldiers arrived, they looted, too. Food shortages broke out.
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.
The white men accustomed to running Wilmington were bitter and resentful after the war. Under General Ames, Northern troops afforded white police officers wide latitude to violently counter any attempts by blacks to assert their limited rights. Most of the new police officers did not wear uniforms; they wore only a small yellow star that served as a police badge. They received no training as policemen, but
they brought to the job their military skills and their contempt for blacks.
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. It was a thankless task, and it frustrated Beadle. 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.
Some Union soldiers shared white Southerners’ contempt for blacks.
By June 1865, Waddell’s days as a Unionist seemed forgotten, and he emerged as an unofficial spokesman for Wilmington’s aggrieved white ruling class after the war.
blacks had ceased to be slaves, but they had not ceased to be black.
Escaped slaves were serving Union troops as scouts and spies, risking their lives. Yet some Union soldiers treated blacks with contempt, ordering
them to perform menial chores and showering them with racial slurs.
Black Code, which restored blacks to near-slave status. In fact, the new law referred to blacks as “lately slaves.”
By 1880, Wilmington would boast the highest proportion of black residents of any large Southern city—60 percent, compared with 44 percent in Atlanta, 27 percent in New Orleans, and 17 percent in Louisville.
During three days of voting in April 1868, black men turned out en masse in Wilmington; one rode an ambulance to the polls a half hour after having a leg amputated. Statewide, the new constitution was approved by a comfortable margin: 93,086 to 74,086. The constitution guaranteed black men’s voting rights with no literacy or property restrictions. New Hanover County also voted in favor of the constitution, 3,568 to 2,235, thanks in large part to a vigorous turnout of new black voters.
White politicians claimed there had been massive voter fraud.
The court pointedly rejected Plessy’s contention that the Louisiana law stamped blacks with “a badge of inferiority.”
White newspapers published sensational stories of slave armies marching south toward Wilmington, butchering white families and recruiting and arming local slaves along the way. Terrified whites in one town telegraphed an urgent request for assistance to the governor, warning of a slave “invasion and slaughter.” In fact, not a single white citizen of North Carolina was killed by a slave that summer and autumn. But alarmed whites, primed to believe any tale that described savagery by black men, rounded up and killed scores of slaves throughout eastern North Carolina.
In 1876, Democrats congratulated themselves on redeeming the state in the name of white supremacy. Well before the close of Reconstruction in 1877, the vengeance of the Redeemers had essentially suspended the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in North Carolina. White supremacy was triumphant. For the next seventeen years, the Redeemers ruled North Carolina.
Populists aligned themselves with Republicans against moneyed interests, even at the risk of aligning themselves with blacks, at least politically. They teamed with Republicans, white and black, in an uneasy political and racial alliance known as Fusion.
It was a bold and virtually unprecedented experiment. Nowhere else in the South during post-Reconstruction did whites and blacks so successfully unite in a multiracial political partnership. Fusionists managed to win the statewide election in 1894 and seize control of the North Carolina legislature.
for permitting ten black men to serve on his twenty-one-man police force.
Others grumbled about being forced to march through neighborhoods on peaceful, balmy summer evenings, fully armed and primed for threats that never seemed to emerge. But many whites seemed convinced that the black menace, so clearly confirmed in each morning’s newspapers, was quite real and alarming, reviving pained memories of Nat Turner’s rebellion six decades earlier.
The sole purpose of the powerful weapon, he said, was “for the protection of life and property.” There was no need to specify that the captain meant white life and white property.
clinging to the past, struggling to retain the status and influence
“We have a Republican Sheriff, a Republican Mayor, the Governor is with us, and we have a Republican President. If we can’t get protection now, we can never get it.”
at least fifteen hundred men by now, Melton thought—that they took nearly an hour to pass him.
“What have we done? What have we done?” Rountree did not respond. “I had no answer,” he wrote later. “They had done nothing.”
Russell’s decision was pivotal: he gave a committed white supremacist unchecked authority to unleash state troops against black citizens—the very men whose votes had put Russell in office.
Kirk had come to Wilmington from Boston and had always assumed that Southern whites would tolerate small measures of black success and achievement so long as blacks ultimately bowed to white authority. But now, it seemed to Kirk, black appeasement had only stoked a more malevolent strain of white ferocity:
Buck Burkhimer, a Light Infantry militiaman, was upset that soldiers were shooting at unarmed civilians. He rode on horseback among his fellow militiamen, screaming at them, “Shame, men! Stop this! Stop this!” He pointed to several black corpses. “Don’t you see these dead men?” The soldiers responded by pointing their weapons at Burkhimer.
Parmele would soon be tasked with restraining the white mobs that had been unleashed by his party.
Waddell’s first act as mayor was to swear in 250 “special policemen” to restore order. He chose them from among the armed men who had spent the day chasing and killing black men—men who were described by the New York Times the next day as “reputable white citizens.
Henderson hid inside his law office downtown most of the day, awaiting a reply that never came. Late in the afternoon, as the shooting seemed to die down, he ventured outside to gauge the degree of danger. On the street, he encountered a white wholesale merchant he knew. “What does all this mean?” Henderson asked him. The merchant seemed oddly calm, as if it were just another weekday afternoon downtown. “Oh, it will be all right, Henderson,” he replied. “We have a new form of government now and the new mayor will see to it that order is restored. Tonight the streets will be patrolled by armed
...more
The couple prospered in Wilmington. They befriended several white neighbors. They convinced themselves that if race troubles arose, their new white friends would protect them. They were devoutly religious, with an abiding belief in the essential goodness of all people, black and white.
“You are not the sort of man we want here,” the man said.
A multiracial city government had been overthrown. The city’s black middle class, built and nurtured for decades, was collapsing. Hundreds of black families were homeless. Those who remained were by now thoroughly intimidated, accepting of white authority, and thus welcomed by whites to remain in Wilmington. DESERVING NEGROES WILL BE PROTECTED, the Evening Dispatch promised.
Dancy was worried that blacks in Wilmington would meet violence with more violence. The next morning, November 11, he wrote a letter to the Wilmington Messenger. Every good citizen of this city regrets the difficulties of the past two days. Every good citizen is also anxious that perfect peace be restored at once. I therefore appeal to my own race to do nothing that will in the slightest degree inflame new passions or revive old ones. Let us be quiet, orderly, submissive
to authority and refrain from any utterance or conduct that will excite passion in others. Let us abstain from loud talking or undue excitement and go to and fro from our homes, where the Mayor and city authorities pledge us every protection … The whites, led by the Mayor, pledge us their aid in such a direction. Let us keep the peace at all hazards.
old authority. Waddell turned for help to his Civil War adversary,
Like Waddell, the editors of the Messenger suggested that the city’s blacks had benefited from the white riot. It was the beginning of a myth that would last a century. “We must hope that by far the greater part of negroes in this city are anxious for the restoration of order and quiet and ‘the old order’—the rule of the white people,” the editors wrote.
With the killings completed and their enemies banished, Wilmington’s whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces.
Northern newspapermen seemed torn between their scorn for Southerners and their widely held contempt for black capabilities. Most deplored the violence in Wilmington but not the outcome. Many Northern editors wrote that they did not consider blacks, in the North or the South, capable of holding public office. They welcomed the return of what they regarded as the natural order in America—whites ruling blacks. They seemed aggrieved only by the way Wilmington’s whites went about it.
“mobocracy” in Wilmington
The Democratic legislature created a special joint committee to devise ways to legally strip blacks of the vote.
“There are three ways in which we may rule—by force, by fraud or by law,”
The white supremacy campaign demonstrated that determined whites could whittle down the black vote and black officeholders, first through terror and violence and then by legislation.
In 1902, Miller wrote to Colonel John D. Taylor, clerk of the superior court in Wilmington, pleading for help with a stalled real estate transaction. I have been treated not like [a] human but worse than a dog and someday the Lord will punish them that punished me without a Cause. I am Well and doing Well the only thing that worries me is just to think that I were not allowed to come to my Mothers funeral she being 95 years of age and the oldest Citizen on Wrightsville sound [outside Wilmington] just to think of it will last me to my grave if I were guilty of any Crime or was a Criminal it
...more
The white supremacy campaign had demonstrated to the nation that the federal government would reproach whites for attacking and killing black citizens, but it would not punish them or even condemn them.
The number of registered black voters in North Carolina quickly plummeted—from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902. The state’s black citizens did not vote in significant numbers for at least six decades, until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and, ultimately, after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
