Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Not long afterward, McGill and McMillan were captured by Union military authorities and taken before a court-martial in Wilmington, in October 1865. The Home Guards’ supporters hired one of the best-known lawyers in the Cape Fear country—and the only attorney in Wilmington at the time, the former Confederate officer, Alfred Moore Waddell.

  The Colonel called his clients “highly respectable men” and their military trial “an absurdity.” Waddell built his defense on denigrating the character of Matt Sykes and his family and, by extension, the reputation of all residents of the Piney Woods. Outsiders were sometimes taken aback by the rough ways of the Piney Woods people, and Waddell used this prejudice to his advantage. He persuaded one defense witness to say of a Piney Woods woman who had testified on behalf of the Sykes family: “She is a woman of loose virtue, very low.”

  In his summary to the court, Waddell administered what he considered the coup de grâce. Unity Sykes, he announced, was “the mother of a colored child!” He offered no evidence. But he went on to claim that the entire Sykes clan and their neighbors in the Piney Woods lived “together in one foul nest of vice and infamy.”

  Waddell described the defendants, on the other hand, as upstanding citizens and stout defenders of the South. He argued passionately for acquittal.

  “Sykes was arrested by McGill and McMillan in the discharge of their duties as members of the home guard,” Waddell told the court. “He was delivered by them to the cavalry, and was executed by the cavalry.”

  The military panel was not swayed. It pronounced the two Home Guards guilty of murder. They were sentenced to die.

  McGill and McMillan were held in Wilmington’s brick jail, guarded by a single Union sentry. One day the sentry was approached by a distinguished-looking white man who described himself as a supporter of the two condemned men. He offered a bribe. The sentry agreed, in return for a cash payment, to smuggle in a jackknife that would let McGill and McMillan carve a small escape hole and then to stand aside as they fled.

  In the end, the Union sentry delivered more than he had promised. He used his military bayonet to carve a hole in a back wall, near the prison fireplace, where the bricks were only a foot thick. From inside the jail, McGill and McMillan chipped away with the smuggled jackknife. Just after 3:00 a.m. on February 23, 1866, the efforts of the three men hacked out an opening measuring sixteen by nineteen inches, large enough to accommodate a man’s body. All three men disappeared, leaving behind only the Confederates’ jackknife and a worn Union bayonet.

  The man who negotiated the bribe that secured the escape never came forward. But there was little doubt among Wilmington’s leading whites that the conspirator who paid $1,000 to buy the sentry’s cooperation was the condemned men’s lawyer, Alfred Moore Waddell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marching to the Happy Land

  O NE MONTH AFTER Colonel Waddell delivered his lecture to Wilmington’s leading black residents in July 1865, an escaped slave named Abraham Galloway gave a speech of his own to a gathering of freed slaves in New Bern, ninety-five miles up the coast from Wilmington. It was the first time freed slaves had held a mass political meeting in North Carolina—“a great sensation,” the New York Times reported. Galloway, just twenty-eight years old, was clearly in charge that day in New Bern, whose population was swollen by thousands of escaped former slaves. He was described by the Times as “a mulatto … an eloquent orator and a general favorite with those who know him … a leading spirit.” Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper described Galloway as “tall and rather portly, quadroon complexion, dark eyes, and with a handsome suit of jet black hair. His features partook strongly of the Comanche.”

  Though functionally illiterate, Galloway had taught himself to choose words that would resonate with his audiences. His speeches had a rhythmic quality, rising in pitch when he expressed outrage. On this sweltering August day on the damp coastal flats, he chose to open his address with a demand not just for citizenship but also for education: “We want to be an educated people and an intelligent people. We want to read and write and acquire those accomplishments which will enable us to discharge the duties of life as citizens.”

  Galloway also demanded the right to vote—without educational requirements or other restrictions dictated by whites. If all voters were required to read and write, Galloway pointed out, perhaps half the whites in North Carolina would be ineligible. The crowd erupted in applause and knowing laughter. Galloway, energized, referred to colored Union regiments, trained and toughened, fresh from a war that had ended just a few months earlier: “If the Negro knows how to use the cartridge box, he knows how to use the ballot box.”

  Another roar emerged from the crowd, this one louder. Galloway responded by mocking whites for their sexual hypocrisy.

  “The white man says he don’t want to be placed on equality with the Negro,” Galloway said. “Why, Sir, if you could only see him slipping around at night, trying to get into Negro women’s houses, you would be astonished.” There was a burst of applause. A voice rang out: “That’s the truth, Galloway!”

  When Galloway’s speech ended, the gathering issued a formal resolution that demanded full citizens’ rights for former slaves, including the vote, in order “to qualify for the higher stations of life.” Copies of the resolution were distributed across southeastern North Carolina—a bold challenge at a time when whites were determined to crush black aspirations and many blacks lived in fear of white night riders.

  The leaders of the New Bern meeting also announced a political convention of freedmen, the first of its kind in the South, to be held in the state capital, Raleigh, the following month, September 1865. On September 8, Galloway placed an ad in a Wilmington newspaper:

  Freedmen of North Carolina, Arouse!! … shake off the bands, drop the chains, and rise up in the dignity of men. The time has arrived when we can strike one blow to secure those rights of Freemen that have been so long withheld from us.

  Over a period of eleven years, beginning in 1863, Abraham Galloway would rise from slave to state senator. He was born just outside Wilmington, came of age as a slave in the city, and fled to freedom in the North. He went behind Confederate lines during the Civil War, working as a spy for the Union army. He returned to Wilmington after the war to help build a dynamic resistance movement against white supremacy.

  The path Galloway took from New Bern to Wilmington helped clear the way for a fertile strain of black defiance in Wilmington and much of southeastern North Carolina. Perhaps more than any other single man, Galloway was responsible for the transformation of many blacks in Wilmington from oppressed slaves to free men who demanded the rights promised them by their government. And it was the boldness and fortitude of the black men of Wilmington who followed Galloway’s example that ultimately provoked the deadly white backlash of 1898.

  Galloway was born into slavery. His mother, Hester Hankins, was an illiterate black woman who was owned by the widow of a Methodist minister. Hankins was seventeen when she gave birth to Abraham in 1837 in the coastal settlement of Smithville, just below Wilmington at the mouth of the Cape Fear. Abraham’s father, John Wesley Galloway, was a twenty-five-year-old descendant of Scottish sailors who made his living as a ship pilot working the Cape Fear River. Abraham later said that his white father “recognized me as his son, and protected me as far as he was allowed to do.”

  John Wesley Galloway did not own his son. Abraham was the property of Marsden Milton Hankins, the son of the widow who owned Abraham’s mother. Galloway considered Hankins “a man of very good disposition … He always said he would sell before he would use a whip.” Galloway never learned to competently read or write, but he was permitted to learn a trade as a brickmason. Because Wilmington’s whites relied on blacks, both free and slave, for labor, many slaves were paid for such skilled artisan work as masons, blacksmiths, wagoners, and wheelwrights. To work his trade, Galloway was permitted to move to Wilmington, where he lived in a small cottage with Hankins
, who was only seven years older. Hankins required Galloway to provide him $15 a month from his mason’s wages, along with a $15-a-year “head tax”—about $280 today.

  By the time he turned twenty, in 1857, Galloway had grown weary of working to pay his master. He also feared being sold at Wilmington’s thriving slave market and sent to perform backbreaking labor in the sugarcane and cotton fields of the deep South—the fate of many North Carolina slaves. “Times were hard ,” he recalled later. “I thought I would try and do better.”

  Galloway and a fellow slave, Richard Eden, a barber, concocted a plan to escape to the North on one of the ships that transported naval stores extracted from the maritime pine forests along the Cape Fear. The two men had learned from friends that a ship captain from Wilmington, Delaware, had docked his schooner at the port in Wilmington, North Carolina. The ship was to be loaded with naval stores to be delivered to Philadelphia. The two slaves were told that the captain was sympathetic to the abolitionist struggle—“the right man in the right place,” they said later. They arranged with the captain to be hidden in a hold belowdecks.

  North Carolina’s slave owners had passed a law requiring vessels bound for the North to be fumigated by burning turpentine dregs to smoke out stowaway slaves, while also killing mosquitoes. Typically, pots of burning turpentine were set belowdecks and the hatches shut tight. Galloway and Eden devised a defense. They cut oilcloth into shrouds and tied them at the waist with drawstrings, then pulled them tightly over their heads and shoulders as a sort of primitive gas mask. They also devised a makeshift bladder wrapped in wet towels to be held against their noses and mouths to ward off smoke.

  The ship set sail with the two fugitives in the hold, wrapped in their shrouds. To their surprise and relief, no turpentine fires were lit. But Galloway and Eden were sickened and weakened during the journey by turpentine fumes. They were ill and exhausted by the time the ship docked in Philadelphia. But they were free.

  They made their way through Philadelphia’s narrow streets to the office of the Vigilance Committee, a stop on the Underground Railroad. There, they were nursed back to health. “The invigorating northern air and the kind treatment of the Vigilance Committee acted like a charm upon them,” one of the committee members reported. The committee asked Galloway for one of the oilcloth shrouds and for a photograph of himself that he carried with him. The photo showed a handsome, full-faced young man dressed in a dark suit coat and white collar fastened by a patterned ascot.

  Even in Philadelphia, Galloway and Eden were at risk of capture by bounty hunters, who had the legal right to capture escaped slaves and return them South for a reward. The committee sent the two men farther north by train in late June. On July 20, 1857, Eden wrote to the Vigilance Committee from Kingston, Ontario, to report that he and Galloway had arrived safely in Canada; slavery across the British Empire had been abolished in 1833. Eden said he intended to open a shop. Galloway had found unspecified work paying $1.75 a day.

  Galloway ultimately returned to the South, where he was recruited to spy on Confederates and report back to Union officers. Posing as a slave, he traveled from Maryland to Mississippi and collected intelligence. In Union territory , he moved among captured Confederates, persuading some to sign oaths of loyalty to the Union.

  By 1863, Galloway had made his way to New Bern, headquarters for Union forces in the state. The city, once a Confederate coastal outpost, had fallen to Union troops the previous spring. Federal soldiers now lived in former Confederate homes and bivouacked in grimy camps illuminated by cooking fires. There were other camps nearby, these more squalid. Thousands of fugitive slaves had escaped plantations to seek refuge among the Union forces, settling in sprawling tent cities and shantytowns along the sluggish Trent River. Union officers called them contrabands and put them to work as laborers.

  In New Bern, Galloway was drawn to Mary Ann Starkey, one of the most prominent freed slaves in the city. Starkey ran a boardinghouse and helped organize a relief society that provided money and supplies to fugitive slave families. She held regular Bible study and evening educational classes for black adults. Raised as the slave of a prosperous New Bern merchant, Starkey had a refined eye for home furnishings and often prepared gourmet meals for Union officers.

  One of her table guests was Edward Kinsley, a flinty Massachusetts abolitionist. Kinsley was thirty-three years old, stout, with a broad face, a wide-set mouth, a high forehead, and untamed sideburns. He had helped raise money to form volunteer military units of free blacks in the North. But because there were only enough free blacks there to form two small regiments, Massachusetts governor John Albion Andrew had enlisted Kinsley, a lifelong friend, to travel to North Carolina to raise a larger black regiment composed of fugitive slaves. Both men sought to answer a question that would help shape the course of the war: how many former slaves in North Carolina would fight and die for the Union?

  In May 1863, Kinsley arrived in New Bern aboard a Union steamship. He carried a military pass he had secured from President Lincoln during a White House meeting to discuss his journey to raise a colored regiment. The pass, addressed to officers of the Army of the Potomac and signed by Lincoln, read: “You will allow the bearer, Mr. Edward W. Kinsley, to pass inside our lines at whatever time he may choose and at any point he may desire, and officers will see that he has proper escort.”

  Kinsley was confident that fugitive slaves were eager to serve the Union. But as he approached them, they seemed to be awaiting permission. Kinsley soon discovered that they deferred to a separate authority, a fugitive slave who seemed to wield enormous influence among fellow contrabands in New Bern. “Among the blacks was a man of more than ordinary ability, a coal black negro, named Abraham Galloway,” a military historian wrote later.

  The day after he arrived in New Bern, Kinsley called on Mary Ann Starkey at her boardinghouse. He believed that his path to Galloway lay through Starkey, whom he called “a very intelligent colored woman.” The next day, Starkey said something that raised Kinsley’s hopes: she was expecting “a couple of friends from rebel lines” that evening. She told him to meet her at her boardinghouse at midnight.

  Kinsley appeared as instructed, and he soon heard footsteps. A black man appeared in the kitchen doorway just after midnight. Starkey introduced him as “Uncle Issac”—the Reverend Isaac K. Felton, a well-known black minister. A second black man appeared, addressed by Starkey as “Mr. Randolph”—John Randolph Jr., a freed slave and Methodist preacher.

  Soon a third man emerged from the darkness. “Mr. Galloway,” Starkey announced.

  Starkey led the group to a cramped upstairs room. Kinsley took a seat at a small table that held a Bible and a candle which gave off a sickly yellow light. “It was dark and close,” he wrote later. Galloway and Randolph told Kinsley that they had heard rumors of an attempt to raise a colored regiment in New Bern. Kinsley described his mission.

  Galloway assured Kinsley that he could raise a full regiment in a matter of days. But he insisted that Kinsley first agree to several conditions. First, any colored regiment formed in New Bern would receive the same pay, uniforms, and rations as white troops. Second, the Union army must provide shelter, supplies, and jobs for the families of black soldiers. Third, colored schools must be reopened and education for blacks guaranteed. Kinsley had no authority to agree to any of the demands. And the final demand was impossible for him, or even Lincoln, to satisfy: Galloway wanted an assurance that any captured black soldier would be treated by the Confederacy as a prisoner of war, not as an escaped slave.

  Galloway and other escaped slaves in New Bern had little faith in the Union’s commitment to unfettered freedom for former slaves; the treatment of contrabands in New Bern hardly presaged a promising future. For instance, the Union army provided small relief packages of flour, beef, bacon, and bread to seventy-five hundred fugitive slaves and their families. But white citizens received sixteen times more rations. And while white military workers earned $12 a month, black wo
rkers, who helped build military fortifications, were paid $8. 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. Some Union soldiers robbed blacks of cash, tools, and horses.

  Two incidents in New Bern had especially incensed the fugitive slaves there. First, Edward Stanly, the military governor of Union-controlled areas of North Carolina, had closed several colored schools operated by a Northern missionary. Under existing North Carolina law, it was a crime to teach blacks to read and write.

  The second incident involved a fugitive slave, “a young Miss of sixteen summers, nearly white and of very attractive appearance,” who had escaped her master, reportedly with the help of Union soldiers. The young woman took refuge in Union-occupied New Bern but was tracked down by her owner, Nicholas Bray, who maintained that he had received permission from Governor Stanly “to hunt his darkies.” Stanly, after first compelling Bray to swear allegiance to the Union, had granted him permission to retrieve his human property. Bray and his wife rode a horse-drawn cart from their farm two miles to New Bern, where Bray found the young woman and carted her triumphantly off to his farm.

  It was little solace to blacks that a detachment of Union soldiers later rode to Bray’s farm, put a gun to his head, burned one of his outbuildings, and returned the young woman to New Bern. For fugitive slaves seeking freedom in Union-occupied areas, the episode convinced them that their civil rights would not be given to them. They would have to demand them.

  Inside Mary Ann Starkey’s boardinghouse, the men in the attic talked until nearly 5:00 a.m. At last, Kinsley, determined to raise the regiment, agreed to Galloway’s demands and promised to report details of their agreement to President Lincoln.