Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  A black man named Norman Lindsay tried to calm his neighbors. He told them that their families were in danger of being burned out and shot dead if they continued to antagonize the white men.

  “For the sake of your lives, your families, your children, and your country, go home and stay there. I’m as brave as any of you, but we are powerless,” Lindsay told them in a defeated tone.

  The black men argued with him. They insisted that they had every right, as citizens and residents of their neighborhood, to gather where they pleased, particularly with their families under threat from a mob seemingly bent on murder.

  Aaron Lockamy, a white police officer, decided to offer his services as a mediator. Lockamy did not look or act like a police officer. He was a middle-aged man, deliberative and tentative. Even at age fifty-eight, he was not an experienced cop. He had served only on occasional part-time duty before he was deputized earlier that month as a full-time officer in anticipation of trouble during the week of the election.

  Lockamy wore his police badge prominently on his chest that morning. He had been stationed in Brooklyn to monitor the opening at eight o’clock of two saloons elsewhere on North Fourth Street. He had been instructed by the city’s white police chief not to arrest anyone, black or white. He was simply to keep an eye on the saloons. Negotiation was not part of his job, but Lockamy believed he could appeal to the more reasonable men among the two camps in the showdown near the saloon.

  When Lockamy appeared at the corner of Harnett and North Fourth Streets looking hesitant, he was summoned by several white men gathered there. They asked him—not very politely, considering that he was a fellow white man—to move the black men off the corner. Lockamy sighed. He walked over to the men. They seemed wary and defensive. They did not appear to be carrying weapons, at least not overtly.

  Lockamy persuaded the black men to move a short distance to the opposite corner, by W. A. Walker’s grocery store, a frame structure with a low, tilted roof that shaded a wooden slat walkway. This provided a slightly better opportunity for them to gauge the intentions of the white mob. The whites responded by moving to a more protected position just down the street from Brunjes’ Saloon, near the white steeple of St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.

  The black men’s new position did not satisfy all the white men. Several of them summoned Officer Lockamy again. They dispatched him once more to try to move the black men. Again, the blacks rebuffed him and continued to hold their ground. Lockamy trudged back to the white men. They demanded to know what the blacks had told him. “They told me that I might go to hell, or where I pleased,” Lockamy said evenly. “They were not going anywhere. They did not need me over there, nohow.”

  The white men were through with Lockamy. They told him they would move those Negroes themselves. Lockamy gave up trying to negotiate. He decided to return to his original mission of monitoring the two saloons farther south on North Fourth Street. He had walked about a block from the crowded corner when he heard a sharp volley of gunfire.

  Ten blocks away stood the Wilmington Light Infantry armory, a two-story Greek Revival building of pale white marble and pressed brick that towered over Market Street. Billeted inside were more than a hundred well-drilled soldiers who had recently returned from federal duty in the Spanish-American War. The Light Infantry was part of the state’s militia system. It ostensibly reported to the state adjutant general and thus, ultimately, to North Carolina’s governor in Raleigh. But the infantry effectively served as the private militia of Wilmington’s white supremacists, many of them related by blood or marriage. An appointment to the Light Infantry was a symbol of achievement and social standing. Prospective members had to be approved by current members, ensuring that the Light Infantry remained a closed club for upper-class and middle-class whites wedded to white supremacy.

  Earlier that summer, the city’s white merchants worried that the Light Infantry lacked the firepower to properly intimidate and control Wilmington’s black majority. They raised $1,200 to purchase a Colt rapid-fire gun for the unit. It was a relatively new weapon, developed just nine years earlier. Under optimum conditions , the air-cooled gun could fire up to 420 rounds in extended bursts without overheating the barrel.

  A few blocks away, another militia, the Naval Reserves, was also ready and waiting on the morning of November 10. The Reserves, formally known as the North Carolina Naval Militia, was a more egalitarian unit than the Wilmington Light Infantry. While men from the gentry dominated the Naval Reserves’ upper ranks, middle-class and working-class men were permitted to join. Most were from families active in the white supremacy campaign. 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 Naval Reserves had been supplied with its own rapid-fire gun—a Hotchkiss gun that could fire eighty to one hundred rounds a minute. The gun’s bore was three-quarters of an inch. Its effective range was five miles. At three miles, the steel rounds were said to be able to penetrate a thick steel plate. One of Wilmington’s white newspapers called it “a very destructive piece of ordnance.”

  Just before midday on November 10, reports of gunshots at North Fourth and Harnett Streets reached the militiamen of the Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves. The men began to muster. They readied their weapons. Their new rapid-fire guns had been mounted on horse-drawn wagons. The orders came to move out. The soldiers and sailors rushed to Brooklyn, the wagon wheels churning, the men holding on to their hats and clutching their rifles, the animals snorting and panting, the two big guns cocked and ready to fire.

  BOOK ONE

  DAYS OF HOPE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cake and Wine

  Wilmington, North Carolina, Winter 1865

  T HE CLOSING WEEKS of the Civil War brought chaos and upheaval to Wilmington. In late February 1865, great fires rose up, belching oily black smoke across the city. Supplies of rosin, turpentine, and cotton bales were set alight—not by invading Union troops, but by fleeing Confederates. General Braxton Bragg and his army had managed to move most of their matériel out of Wilmington to use during their retreat, but Bragg ordered the remaining supplies put to the torch to keep them from the enemy.

  Union troops were bearing down on the city a month after their capture of Fort Fisher, a Confederate fortress of earth-and-sand battlements twenty miles south of Wilmington, where the Cape Fear River flowed into the Atlantic. 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. For much of the war, Wilmington’s sleek blockade-runners had skirted an armada of Union warships strung like beads off the Atlantic coast. 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. Among the Union units that overran Fort Fisher in January 1865 were colored brigades that included black soldiers from Wilmington.

  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. Portions of the main rail line—the Wilmington, Charlotte and Rutherford Railroad—remained intact, though some of the rails on the line would later be ripped up for use as scrap iron by Union troops. Before the Confederate soldiers retreated, some looted shops. When Union soldiers arrived, they looted, too. Food shortages broke out. Whole hams were briefly offered for sale at the preposterous price of $525. Corn sold for $40 a bushel and salt pork for $6 a pound. People begged for food on the streets.

  By the time General Alfred Howe Terry led a
column of Union soldiers on bay chargers to city hall to take command of Wilmington on February 22, the city had become a vast refugee camp. Many Union soldiers released from Confederate prisoner of war camps were afflicted with “jail fever”—typhus—a contagion characterized by rash, chills, and fever that killed two doctors who treated them. Carpenters struggled to build enough caskets for the estimated forty to fifty people who died daily—from jail fever but also battle wounds, sepsis, or other maladies. Every available house or outbuilding was crammed with people seeking shelter. One visitor claimed that rents in Wilmington were higher than in New York City. Thousands of people lived in camps, tents, or shanties, watched over warily by an occupying force of nearly fifteen thousand Union soldiers, among them blue-suited colored troops.

  The Wilmington Herald reported that despite “a large force of darkies … cleaning the streets,” the city was an open sewer. “There is not a private residence, a kitchen, a business house of any kind but has now filth enough about and around its doors to make every person in the city sick … no person can pass without holding their breaths … cows, pigs, cats, dogs and low negroes are together in this pen.”

  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. The full remedies of Reconstruction had not yet taken hold in the city so soon after the end of the war. Just a few months earlier , a black woman; three black children aged one, five, and seven; a black girl; and four mules had been offered for sale in town. The same day, a railroad company offered a $50 reward for the return of a slave named Dick, who had escaped from his owner, the railroad’s superintendent. Dick was considered guilty of insolence as well as escape; his master noted that the missing slave “carries himself with his shoulders considerably thrown back.”

  Even with Wilmington under federal military control, freedmen could expect no special protection. Union troops were spread thin, making it difficult to restore law and order in the face of Southern defiance. Barely six thousand federal troops were still stationed in North Carolina by late 1865, the smallest Union force in any Southern state. And by the fall of 1865, three-quarters of Union troops who had fought in the war had been mustered out nationwide. 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.

  Just after the war ended, President Andrew Johnson sent Carl Schurz, a German immigrant, to tour North Carolina and report on conditions there. Schurz later told the president that whites resisted any attempt to grant equal rights to their former slaves.

  “Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat—I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all,” Schurz wrote. “The people boast that when they get freedmen’s affairs in their own hands, to use their own expression, ‘the niggers will catch hell.’”

  Cape Fear rice and cotton plantation owners, though under Union occupation and stripped of their slaves, still wielded considerable influence. 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 them to bring in the harvests in the summer and fall of 1865.

  General Ames made a show of imposing Union authority. A general order issued on July 10, 1865, for instance, prohibited former Confederates from wearing Confederate rank, “as required by good taste and a respect for the government of their country.” But Ames was willing to be courted by the white supremacists who seethed under his command. One leading black man in the city attributed the tendency of Union officers to accommodate their former enemies to the “cake and wine” influence—the extravagant Cape Fear hospitality resurrected from antebellum society.

  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. They preyed on freed slaves, whipping the men in public and beating the women with boards. In the countryside , former Confederate soldiers banded with white residents to form county militia companies that rampaged through the area, terrorizing black families in their homes.

  W. H. H. Beadle, a Union lieutenant colonel stationed in Wilmington, was appalled by the attacks. Colonel Beadle had been installed as a local officer of the 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. He was convinced that whites would have reclaimed blacks as slaves if not for the Freedmen’s Bureau. “They would endeavor to return them to a system of peonage immediately,” Colonel Beadle reported.

  Colonel Beadle once saw a frail black woman clubbed unconscious by a white officer because she had been drinking in public. In another incident, Beale watched a dog bite a white policeman as the officer was beating a black boy on the street; the boy’s entire family, which owned the dog, was thrown into jail. “The policemen are the hardest and most brutal looking and acting set of civil or municipal officers I ever saw. All look bad and vicious,” Beale reported.

  The police whippings inspired other white men in the city, and physical abuse of blacks was perhaps more rampant than ever. White civilians often flogged blacks in public, typically unimpeded by police or, on many occasions, by Union soldiers. “A colored man sometimes does not know who attacks him, or why,” Colonel Beadle reported. One day, he recalled, a white man pointed a revolver at a young black man, then “choked him, whipped him with a club, tied his hands, whipped him with a half a hoop, kept him tied six or seven hours, whipping him every few minutes with a doubled leather strap, hurting him so bad as to disable him for two days.”

  Police arrested blacks on trumped-up charges such as vagrancy or trespassing, then forced them, in some cases, to work without pay. During a visit to Wilmington in the summer of 1865, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer took note of tense race relations in a city where blacks were nominally free and where whites had been defeated and occupied by their Northern enemy. The reporter wrote of whites: “They perceive insolence in a tone, a glance, a gesture, or failure to yield enough by two or three inches in meeting on the sidewalk.”

  Physical abuse of freed blacks by white police officers and citizens was rampant, on and off the plantations. Plantation squatters were evicted by force. Police seized guns owned by black men. They searched their homes and seized their belongings. In the summer of 1865, an officer in a Freedmen’s Bureau office in Wilmington maintained a ledger of complaints of whippings and beatings filed by former slaves:


  By colored man , Dick: that J. W. whipped him severely, striking him seventy-two blows.

  By colored woman, Martha: That J. F. Parker overtook her while on her way to the Office of the Superintendent of Freedmen, put one end of rope around her neck, tied the other round the neck of his mule, and so dragged her more than two miles.

  By colored woman, Louisa: That J. T. is whipping her children continually, and when she asked him not to do it, ordered her off his place and told her not to come back.

  By colored man, Elias: That some citizens took his gun away from him and told him no nigger had the right to carry a gun.

  By colored man, Levi: That W. F. L. has whipped him severely with a buggy-trace. Shows his back all raw.

  Wilmington’s new police officers were not the only white men given free rein by some Union troops. County militias, formed to protect white interests, roamed the Cape Fear countryside. 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. Militiamen descended on black dwellings, confiscating cash, personal items, and farm equipment. The militias were especially proficient at appropriating horses and mules, many of them awarded to former slaves by the Union army.

  Sometimes the militiamen brought their friends along on raids of black homes so that they might share in the spoils. “A tour of pretended duty is then turned into a spree. Houses of colored men have been broken open, beds torn apart and thrown about the floor, and even trunks opened and money taken,” Colonel Beadle, the Union officer, reported.