Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Some Union soldiers shared white Southerners’ contempt for blacks. Among them were soldiers from border states or former Confederate states, including men who had once owned slaves. 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. In Mississippi that same year, federal soldiers who had received a complaint from a plantation owner about his troublesome former slaves responded by flogging the black men. Across the South , Union commanders complained about the casual use of the slur “nigger” by their troops.

  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 Wilmington, blacks seethed over abuse of freedmen by local whites under the noses of Union soldiers. The city’s white authorities complained in a letter to the provisional governor that colored soldiers, motivated by “smothered revenge,” were inciting local blacks to mount an insurrection against white authority. 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 Wilmington Journal, edited by William L. Saunders, the state’s Ku Klux Klan leader, noted an emerging alliance of whites, Northern and Southern.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Good Will of the White People

  E VERYONE CALLED HIM “Colonel,” even his wife, though Alfred Moore Waddell had never quite earned the rank. He had served as a Confederate lieutenant colonel for less than a year during the Civil War, and his brief command of North Carolina’s Third Cavalry ended in shame. After serving “without any record worth mentioning,” Waddell wrote years later, he abruptly resigned his command at the pinnacle of the war, in August 1864. “My health was completely wrecked,” he wrote. He was, he confessed, “an invalid.” He was twenty-nine years old. He went home to Wilmington a broken man.

  Just a few months later, in the spring of 1865, Waddell had recovered his health and his reputation. With Wilmington’s white leadership in disarray under Union occupation, he filled a political vacuum by positioning himself as the city’s leading voice of enduring white supremacy. His mediocre performance as a Confederate officer did not impede his political rise. Waddell took charge of white resistance to the rising tide of freedmen flowing into Wilmington. Even with blacks evicted from plantations and harassed daily by white police officers, Waddell helped lead a campaign to crush any attempts by blacks in the Cape Fear country to assert their newly won rights.

  He was a natural choice, given his upbringing and pedigree. Waddell was born into North Carolina’s white planter aristocracy in 1834 in Hillsboro, a town in the rolling Piedmont landscape of central North Carolina. He was raised on a plantation built by his great-grandfather, Alfred Moore, a US Supreme Court justice. Two other great-grandfathers, General Hugh Waddell and General Francis Nash, had been Revolutionary War officers. Waddell studied law at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, graduating in 1853. Five years later, his family’s political connections helped earn him an appointment as a clerk of court in New Hanover County. He moved to Wilmington, the county seat, and began a long career as a lawyer, essayist, historian, and public speaker.

  Even as a young man freshly admitted to the state bar, Waddell exhibited sharply calibrated political instincts. He sensed the prevailing winds and bent accordingly. In the late 1850s, when Unionist sentiment was strong in Wilmington, Waddell had aligned himself with Unionists opposed to secession. He bought the Wilmington Herald newspaper to promote his Unionist views.

  In January 1861, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, North Carolina secessionists seized two small military forts, Fort Johnston and Fort Caswell, which guarded access to Wilmington at the mouth of the Cape Fear south of the city. In an editorial in the Herald, Waddell objected to the takeovers. He pointed out that North Carolina was still a loyal member of the Union and bound by United States law.

  But the bold attacks on the forts inflamed secessionist sentiment in Wilmington, and soon Unionists were in retreat. Waddell adjusted accordingly. Just eighteen days after writing the editorial, he attended a secessionist rally in Wilmington, where he performed an abrupt about-face. He told the meeting that there was no longer any hope of North Carolina’s remaining in the Union. He was now fully in favor of secession. He declared himself a loyal Confederate.

  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. That month, he wrote an anguished letter to North Carolina’s provisional postwar governor, William Woods Holden. He told the governor that black soldiers posted in Wilmington posed a mortal threat to the white population. He referred to “daily outrages” by colored troops. They “insult and curse the most respectable ladies in Wilmington,” Waddell wrote. Other whites complained in letters to the governor that the city’s black residents “still insist that they are entitled to all the social and political rights of white citizens.”

  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.

  In July 1865, a group of freedmen invited Waddell to speak at the Wilmington Theatre. They acknowledged the colonel as the public face of white supremacy in the city. Through Waddell, they sought to gauge the depth of hostility toward freed slaves and their new place in the postwar era. Both blacks and whites were struggling to define just what it meant to be a freedman at a time when nearly 4 million former slaves were now liberated, among them 360,000 in North Carolina.

  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. For freed slaves, the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery promised not just citizenship and the right of black men to vote but also the right to work for fair pay, and to live on something approaching an equal, if separate, status with the whites who had so recently enslaved them. They sought to be free citizens, not just free Negroes. And now they wanted to measure the gap between their vision and Colonel Waddell’s.

  Waddell accepted the speaking invitation. He was eager to publicly dictate the terms of postwar race relations in Wilmington. And for him, and the white aristocracy he represented, those terms were the same terms that had always circumscribed the daily lives of blacks under white domination: whites would continue to rule; blacks would continue to obey.

  Waddell announced that he intended to speak “upon the proper condition of the freedmen under the present state of affairs.” Though he had limited formal training, Waddell considered himself a learned historian. He had convinced himself that no other white man in Wilmington possessed his ability to draw lessons from the past and prescribe the future. One of Wilmington’s white-owned newspapers called Waddell a “ripe scholar” and a “gentleman of culture and scholarly achievements.”

  Waddell titled his speech “An Address
Delivered to the Colored People by Their Request.” On a still July night, when the Cape Fear oozed humidity, the seats of the Wilmington Theatre were filled by the city’s leading black men, fanning themselves in the oppressive heat. Some wore dark suits with high white collars, as proper in appearance as any white man. Others wore workmen’s clothes. Seated on the stage behind Waddell was the city’s white mayor, flanked by several white dignitaries.

  Waddell strode across the stage like a military officer. The Colonel was not a big man, but he carried himself in a way that suggested command and authority. He stood five foot nine, with a large head, shaggy eyebrows, a long patrician nose, and calm gray eyes. On this evening, he was dressed in his customary dark wool suit, his wavy hair brushed back and his well-groomed beard forming a broad V at his chest.

  As Waddell addressed the black men, he was characteristically condescending. He began with a bold lie, which his audience received in silence: he assured them that whites meant blacks no harm. His vision was of two races, one superior, one servile, but the two sides living in harmony. It would be a mistake, he said, “to suppose that the white people among who you were born and raised, with whom you played when you were children, and served as you grew up, have all at once turned to be your enemies.” He was interrupted by a round of polite applause, for even the black men recognized the thin thread of humanity that had linked children of both races since slavery.

  Waddell mentioned that “some ignorant and misguided colored people … are under the impression that they are not only free, but that the property of their former owners will be taken and given to them. Of course, this is a cruel mistake.”

  Then Waddell laid down the law as he saw it. He told the black men they were not likely to be granted the vote anytime soon. Perhaps some of them might vote someday, with certain provisions, he said. Personally, Waddell said, he favored a test of “intelligence or property, or both” for prospective voters of any race.

  “I believe that there are some colored men in this hall who could vote now with quite as intelligent a conception of what they were doing as many white men. But I believe, also, that a large percentage of the colored people are not yet qualified to exercise this privilege … they would be mere tools in the hands of demagogues.”

  No one in the audience objected, at least not publicly. The black men seemed to obey the Southern rules of civility that obliged both races to extend simple courtesies under certain social conditions. According to a white reporter for the Wilmington Herald, “The most perfect order was maintained by every one.” Nor was there more than a slight stir in the audience when Waddell instructed freedmen to establish their own segregated schools as a way to “do all you can to show the world that you deserve and can maintain the freedom and the privileges which have been bestowed upon you.”

  Waddell reminded the former slaves that they were indeed fortunate to share a city as fine as Wilmington with white men: “The great advantage which your race enjoys here is contact and daily association with the white race. Their influence upon you, as far as civilization is concerned, must be beneficial, and therefore you ought to cultivate the friendship and good will of the white people.”

  Waddell also advised blacks to stop moving to Wilmington in search of work. He and other whites feared they would soon be outnumbered by freed slaves and their families, who sought shelter and work in the state’s largest city, with its busy port, its rice and cotton exports, and its artisan trades. Waddell instructed itinerant blacks to find work on farms, in timber swamps, in the tar and turpentine trade among the towering longleaf pine forests, or along the railroad lines outside town, and to leave Wilmington for the whites who owned it. There was polite applause.

  The speech ended, and the white man and his black audience made their separate ways out of the theater and into the hot night. A few hours later, the body of a soldier from the United States Colored Troops was found floating in the Cape Fear River, his face flayed by buckshot.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lying Out

  I T WAS OFTEN PERMISSIBLE for a white man in Wilmington to side with Union soldiers against blacks, but it was unforgivable for him to join with Northerners in attacks on other Southern white men. Even as the Civil War drew to a close, Confederate Home Guards continued to roam the Cape Fear countryside much as they did during the war, enforcing a brutal form of righteous justice. Home Guard patrols made it their business not only to terrorize blacks but also to hunt down and punish white Southerners who had betrayed the Confederacy by secretly conspiring with invading Union troops. And should the Home Guards be arrested by Union soldiers, Wilmington’s leading lawyer, Colonel Waddell, stood ready to defend them.

  In the spring of 1865, Matthew Sykes, a notorious Yankee sympathizer, lived in the flat, humid, Piney Woods along the Cape Fear River, about forty miles northwest of Wilmington. Sykes and his family had been Unionists before the war, but he was pressured to join the Confederate army after hostilities began. To avoid a long conscription, Sykes reluctantly enlisted for a limited tour of duty. He completed his service in June 1864. Several months later, he began secretly serving the invading Union army as a spy and guide. He participated in the rapid advance of Union troops from Fort Fisher through Wilmington and into the Piney Woods in early 1865.

  Worried about the safety of his wife, Catherine, Sykes requested a week’s leave to return home in the spring of 1865. But by the end of his leave, Union forces had already swept past his home region in the Piney Woods, clearing the way for surviving Home Guard squads to operate freely. The leader of the local Home Guard was Neill McGill, a Confederate officer whose family homestead was among the properties looted by Union troops in the nearby farming village of Elizabethtown, about fifty miles upriver from Wilmington. A fellow Confederate had told McGill that the “damn son of a bitch” Matt Sykes was a secret scout with the Yankee marauders. McGill vowed to hunt down and punish the white traitor.

  There was a tactic among Unionists in North Carolina known as “lying out”—sleeping in the forest to avoid being attacked at home late at night by Home Guards and county militias. Matt and Catherine Sykes had been lying out for most of the week. But on April 10, 1865, Palm Sunday, a cool rainy day, they decided to spend the night at the double frame house of Catherine’s father, Elias Edwards. Matt went to sleep, but Catherine stayed up late, sitting by the fire. Two hours before dawn, she heard noises outside. She looked out and saw that Neill McGill and two Home Guard companions had crept up to the house. Catherine ran to wake her husband. She hid Matt, still in his nightclothes, beneath a dense pile of raw cotton inside a storeroom.

  McGill and his men, armed with pistols, knocked at the front door. Elias Edwards answered, and the men announced that they had come for Sykes. Edwards tried to stall them. He asked: “Which Sykes?” But McGill and the others pushed roughly past Edwards and searched the house by torchlight. One of the men kicked at the cotton pile and discovered Sykes.

  “Don’t kill him!” Catherine shouted.

  McGill bound Sykes’s hands with a strand of rope. The Home Guards began to haul Sykes toward the door and into the damp night in his nightgown. Catherine begged them to let her fetch her husband’s clothes.

  As the men waited, they accused Sykes of having “piloted” Yankees, leading Union soldiers to their homes. One of the Home Guards, John McMillan, said he wanted to kill Sykes as badly as he wanted to kill “any goddamn Negro.” He told Sykes he intended to hang him “without judge or jury.”

  Sykes, now fully dressed and with his hands still bound, was ordered to sit between McMillan and Elias Edwards. Edwards asked McMillan what they intended to do with his son-in-law. They would certainly do something with him, McMillan replied, but they would not need a jail.

  McGill gestured toward Sykes and said, “He lives between two fires. The North, or the Yankees, ought to kill him for deserting their army—and the South will kill him.” Then the men led Sykes away. McMillan told him to say good-bye to his family bec
ause he would never see them again.

  McGill and his men, hauling their captive, made their way from the Edwards home to a spot known as the eight-mile post. They paused there to drink whiskey. The three Home Guards were on foot; Sykes, his hands bound, sat astride the men’s horse. They offered him a drink. Sykes did not respond. His face was buried in his hands, and he was weeping. McMillan eyed Sykes and felt a stab of pity. He told the others: “Boys, he has not done enough to us—don’t let us kill him.”

  McGill was unmoved. Suddenly he yanked Sykes from the horse and threw him to the ground. McGill and the others stomped, kicked, and beat Sykes until they thought he was dead. They then stabbed him in the ribs and hanged his body from a sapling.

  It did not take the Edwards and Sykes clans long to mount a search party. Nearly three dozen relatives and neighbors assembled on horseback at Edwards’s home after first light to begin the search for Matt. Catherine Sykes and Unity Sykes, Matt’s mother, were among them. Progress was slow. The woods and fields were thick with wire grass and longleaf pines and scrub oaks. The ground was carpeted with damp pine needles. Rain had washed out some tracks.

  But soon the search party came across faint tracks of men and a horse. The depressions in the soft soil led down past the eight-mile post to Shady Grove, a corduroy track made of sand-covered logs. The group followed the track through a swampy bog known as Juniper Bay and on to spot called Piney Island. They crossed a field and came upon a sapling with a rope attached. At the end of the rope hung the body of Matt Sykes.

  Matt’s mother went over to him. She saw that her son’s legs were splayed and did not touch the ground. There was enough space for Unity to place her foot between her son’s foot and the damp soil. Someone cut Matt down. His chest and stomach bore wounds, and there were deep cuts on his chin, neck, and torso. One side of his face looked as though it had been skinned.