Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  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. Whether the murdered black men were even aware of Turner’s Virginia uprising was of little consequence to whites. They killed indiscriminately.

  In Wilmington, whites read newspaper accounts of a slave named Dave, who lived in the farming town of Kenansville, sixty miles north. After he was tortured for hours inside the county jailhouse—“whipped without mercy,” one newspaper reported—Dave confessed to a plot. He said he and several other slaves planned to murder Kenansville’s white families, steal their guns and horses, and then free and arm other slaves. The men would ride in military formation to Wilmington, where two thousand slaves and free blacks were waiting to provide more guns and ammunition, to be seized from their murdered white masters. The conspirators would kill Wilmington’s whites, break into banks, then ride through North Carolina to free more slaves and expand the rebellion across the South. DISTURBANCES AMONG THE SLAVES ! a newspaper headline warned.

  Kenansville’s whites had heard enough. One accused slave was burned at the stake on the courthouse lawn. Dave and a slave named Jim, who had been implicated by Dave’s confession, were dragged from the county jail and shot dead. Their heads were hacked off and mounted on posts.

  As panic spread south and east toward the coast during late August and early September 1831, the white citizens of Wilmington braced for an attack by an army of slaves. Men were instructed to bring out their guns. An artillery piece was rolled into place. Plans were made for white women and children to hide inside homes and churches, protected by sentries armed with muskets.

  On September 12, Moses Ashley Curtis, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Williams College who was tutoring the children of a prominent Wilmington family, stumbled across 120 white women who had fled, “half dead with fear” and carrying jewelry and mattresses, to a makeshift garrison at the edge of a swamp outside town.

  “One was stretched out on a mattress … in hysterics, a number fainted, & one was jabbering nonsense, in a fit of derangement,” Curtis wrote in his dairy. “A few men too I noticed with tremulous voices, & solemn visages, pacing back & forth in fearful anxiety.”

  When Curtis returned to his home in Wilmington, he found the house overrun with frightened women. They handed Curtis a loaded rifle and insisted that he take it to bed with him. The next day, he wrote: “We did not awake this morning & find our throats cut.”

  That evening, September 13, the citizens of Wilmington met to muster a militia to defend the city from the impending slave invasion. Weapons and ammunition were distributed. Curtis was assigned a musket and balls, and then returned home.

  Late that night, several newly minted militiamen towed a field artillery piece into the woods just north of Wilmington. They fired the cannon several times. The booms of the big gun echoed through the forest and swamps and into Wilmington, where citizens were roused from sleep.

  “Here folly shines out,” Curtis wrote later. Mistaking the explosions as gunfire from black invaders, women and children ran from their homes and took refuge at prearranged safe sites. The city’s white militiamen cowered behind them—“quite in the rear of the women,” Curtis wrote.

  There was no invasion of slaves, no uprising, no mass murder of whites. Nonetheless, on September 17, a dozen black men were brought before a white magistrate in Wilmington. After a round of savage beatings and torture, each accused prisoner confessed to his role in “a diabolical plot” to set fire to Methodist and Baptist churches on opposite ends of town, then to murder white men, women, and children while townspeople fought the fires. “The guilt of these monsters in human shape, is established beyond a doubt,” the Cape-Fear Recorder concluded. The men were sentenced to death.

  Wilmington’s whites were relieved. “A deep conviction settled in every bosom—that the measure was indispensable to the safety of the community,” the Cape-Fear Recorder ’s editors wrote. “If ever stern necessity required a prompt and vigorous course, in making public examples, this necessity now exists in our country.”

  Four of the condemned men were accused as ringleaders. They were hauled from the county jail and decapitated. Their severed heads were mounted on poles along a public roadway. From that day on, throughout the 1890s and well into the 1950s, the roadway’s name served as an enduring warning to any rebellious black man in Wilmington who might dare challenge white supremacy: Niggerhead Road.

  BOOK TWO

  RECKONING

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Negro Problem

  New Bern, North Carolina, March 1898

  I N MARCH 1898, two of the most powerful white men in North Carolina met at the elegant Chatawka Hotel in New Bern, ninety-five miles up the jutting Carolina coast from Wilmington. Josephus Daniels and Furnifold Simmons wanted to discuss what they called “the Negro problem” and, more significantly, what do to about it.

  Daniels was the editor and publisher of the News and Observer in Raleigh, the state’s most influential daily. The newspaper was the strident mouthpiece of Democratic politicians alarmed by the reemergence of black men as a political force in North Carolina in the 1890s. Simmons was the state chairman of the Democratic Party, the party of white supremacy. With white dominance challenged by blacks at the ballot box, Simmons was the man most directly responsible for leading the white fight to eliminate the threat. “The Negro shall know his place,” he assured his followers.

  The power base for both Simmons and Daniels was in Raleigh, the state capital, but Simmons’s hometown, New Bern, was the logical place to plot strategy. The port city on the Neuse River lay in the heart of what Daniels and Simmons called “the Negroized East” of North Carolina. Blacks were a majority in sixteen eastern counties, including New Hanover County and its biggest city, Wilmington. The Black Belt region was set in the hard clay soil and sandy lowlands of the coastal plain that stretched eastward from Raleigh to the Atlantic. In 1868, universal male suffrage provided under the new state constitution had represented the culmination of generations of struggle for Black Belt blacks led by Abraham Galloway. But for whites, it had unleashed a terrifying new menace in the eastern counties—the majority black vote.

  Blacks in eastern North Carolina voted overwhelmingly for the party of Lincoln, briefly helping Republicans take control of the state legislature from 1868 to 1870. The Conservative Party, dominated by white supremacists, reclaimed the legislature in the 1870 election. In 1876, Democrats (the Conservative Party was renamed that year) refined the race-baiting tactics of the 1868 constitutional convention campaign, rallying white voters by demonizing black men. Democrats returned to power statewide in 1876, taking over the legislature, the governor’s mansion, and county governments. It was a pivotal election, coming just a year before the last federal troops were withdrawn and Reconstruction lurched to an end.

  Once in power, Democrats maneuvered to undermine the newly won black vote by eliminating the popular election of county commissioners. Instead, commissioners were to be chosen by justices of the peace, who were in turn selected by the state legislature. The change guaranteed that for as long as Democrats controlled the legislature, even Black Belt counties were powerless to elect black county officials. Democrats also controlled local election officials, who relied on procedural ruses to disqualify black voters. 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.

  But by the early 1890s, during a punishing economic recession, Democrats had alienated white farmers and laborers of the Populist Party by supporting railroads, banks, and other powerful interests at
the expense of jobs, workers’ wages, and schools. White farmers in the Populist Party, also known as the People’s Party, were driven to ruin during the devastating recession. Cotton prices collapsed—from 25 cents a pound in 1868 to 12 cents by the 1890s. Banks refused to loan money to most farmers, forcing them to borrow at usurious rates from the merchants who bought their crops. They turned against the bankers and railroad men who dominated the state’s white supremacist Democratic Party.

  It was a grassroots rebellion against Democratic plutocrats. Populists demanded electoral and economic reforms and better education opportunities for the children of farmers and laborers. Many poor whites were as virulently racist as any Democrat, but 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. Many black voters did not fully trust their new partners. They had given the Fusionists their votes, but not their hearts.

  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.

  The victory sent shock waves across the South. White men willing to join blacks in voting against white supremacist interests in a leading Redeemer state like North Carolina represented an existential threat to white supremacy everywhere—from Virginia to Louisiana. Daniels was dumbfounded. “Men who a few years before had been the most bitter in denunciation of the Republican party and its Negro cohorts, actually joined hands and defended the nomination of Negroes for office,” he wrote of Populist whites. The next year , the Fusion-dominated legislature restored the popular vote for county officials, reestablishing local black voting majorities in the Black Belt, the sixteen eastern North Carolina counties with black majorities.

  Black politicians began to demand and receive a share of the political spoils from the Fusionist takeover. Scores of black men were appointed to political posts across the Black Belt. Black men were also elected to the state legislature, reclaiming positions they had held during Reconstruction. A black politician represented New Hanover County, which included Wilmington, in the state house of representatives. Another black man , George Henry White, was elected to the United States House of Representatives—the only black man in Congress. White served North Carolina’s heavily black Second District in the eastern part of the state, known as the Black Second. He was ridiculed by a white Wilmington newspaper as “a saucy, bitter nigger with the strange name of White, as if a nigger was ever white.”

  It was only a matter of time before Democrats in the state’s largest city were deposed by ascendant Fusionists and Wilmington emerged as the leading majority-black city in the South. By 1897, Wilmington had a Fusionist mayor and police chief, and Fusionists dominated city and county government. Wilmington was now 56 percent black. In a city of some twenty thousand people, there were three thousand more blacks than whites.

  Democratic leaders like Daniels and Simmons were appalled when black men took over positions previously held by whites in Wilmington—as aldermen, magistrates, deputy sheriffs, police officers, and registers of deeds. Blacks were still a distinct minority among Republican politicians in Wilmington and in the Black Belt, but a single black face in public office was more than either Daniels or Simmons could bear. The two men believed that careful planning and execution by the Democratic Party and its capital city newspaper could end what they called Negro rule and restore Democrats in the November 1898 elections. They knew, too, that violence might be required.

  But first Daniels and Simmons focused on the well-refined strategy of racist demagoguery perfected by white supremacists of previous generations. For years, those white men had used a crude phrase for the time-tested tactic of frightening white voters by warning of the twin menace of black suffrage and black beast rapists: “Crying nigger.” And that was precisely what Daniels and Simmons intended to do.

  A close friend called Daniels “the most cock-sure” man he had ever met, a pragmatist who set clear goals and “flashed like an arrow to the mark.” Just under six feet tall and solidly built, Daniels could dominate a room. His straight hairline sprouted a shock of dark brown hair that flopped over his right eye, and his forehead bore a scar from an accidental blow from an ax wielded by a childhood playmate. He had deep-set eyes, a prominent nose, and pursed lips.

  Daniels studied to be a lawyer and briefly practiced law. But he was at heart a newspaperman. He recognized that publishing was politics. He loved power and influence and knew how to apply both to great effect. With friends and family, Daniels was “a very gentle man,” his son Jonathan once said, but “he was also a very violent man … editorially.”

  Daniels was born during the second year of the Civil War, in May 1862, in the tiny town of Washington, North Carolina, often called Little Washington, a shipbuilding center on the north bank of the Pamlico River. Daniels’s mother, Mary Cleaves, was the daughter of slave owners. His father, Josephus, nicknamed Jody, was a shipwright.

  Before the war, Jody Daniels was among many North Carolinian Unionists who opposed secession. Even as he served the Confederacy by helping to build and maintain expensive blockade-runners in Wilmington—at a cost of $150,000 each—he secretly approached Union officers during one home visit to Little Washington. He received written permission from Union commanders to transport food and other supplies from Union-held territory to besieged Little Washington, then still in Confederate hands. In return, he was to provide badly needed cotton to Union troops. But there was a steep cost: Jody had to swear allegiance to the Union.

  In early 1865, as Union troops attacked Fort Fisher before seizing Wilmington, Jody left his shipwright post in Wilmington for Union-held New Bern. Residents of Little Washington, thirty-eight miles north, petitioned the Union commander in New Bern for supplies. The general permitted a steamer carrying food and other goods to leave New Bern for Washington in exchange for cotton to be supplied by Washington’s farmers. On January 21, 1864, Jody Daniels boarded the ship. On the return trip, Confederate troops on the banks of the Pamlico River opened fire on the steamer. Daniels was grievously wounded and died a week later.

  Such an ignominious war record might have ruined the career prospects of Jody Daniels’s son. For any young man raised in North Carolina during the Civil War, a father who conspired with Yankee troops was a source of deep shame. But the episode seems to have been buried by the time young Josephus reached manhood. He was able to win the confidence of former Confederate officers as he slowly worked his way into the inner circles of Democratic politics.

  In 1885, Daniels learned of the death of a former Confederate soldier who had published a pair of ailing weekly newspapers in Raleigh. Most stock in the State Chronicle Company, which published the State Chronicle and another weekly, was held by another former Confederate soldier, Julian Shakespeare Carr, known as “General Carr.” He was a wealthy industrialist and tobacco baron in Durham, North Carolina, and a partner in a company that sold the popular Bull Durham tobacco. The State Chronicle Company published a merged edition of the two weeklies. Daniels visited Carr and asked about his plans for the newspaper.

  “What paper?” Carr replied. “I am not in the newspaper business.”

  Carr had forgotten that the late publisher had repaid a debt to him by granting him stock in the State Chronicle Company. Carr was intrigued by Daniels’s earnest description of his lifelong dream—publishing a paper in the state capital. He gave young Daniels the Chronicle stock, saying that Daniels could later repay what he thought it was worth.

  In October 1885, on the same day that he earned his law license, Daniels spent his first evening as a publisher of the State Chronicle. It was published the next morning on rag paper. Daniels later claimed he had only $20 in his pocket at the
time. (He often joked that after all his years in publishing, he wished he had his $20 back.) Five years later, in 1890, Daniels converted the Chronicle into a daily to compete with the larger capital daily, the News and Observer.

  Even as he published his newspaper, Daniels plunged into state politics. He had married into a prominent family, which provided an entrée into Democratic society. With his genial personality and easy charm, he was well received.

  By 1887, with Democrats in control of the state legislature, Daniels used his political contacts to secure the lucrative patronage position of public printer. That earned him $2,500 to $3,000 a year, far more than the $1,200 he cleared from the Chronicle. The arrangement drew the ire of the rival News and Observer, which accused Daniels of “persistent, cold-blooded , calculating defamation.”

  Daniels quickly devised a plan to silence the News and Observer : he would buy it. For advice, he turned to Colonel William Saunders, the former state Klan leader and now North Carolina’s secretary of state. Saunders urged Daniels to buy the paper no matter the cost. When the News and Observer came up for public sale in 1894, Daniels bought it, relying on another generous loan from General Carr.

  Daniels brought a deeply partisan tone to the capital’s dominant daily, burnishing the reputations of his political allies and attacking his enemies. He made no pretense of journalistic impartiality. He met almost daily with Democratic politicians in his newspaper office or at party headquarters and served on the party’s executive committee. In time, Daniels became one of the most powerful men in North Carolina—a politician who published his own newspaper. Daniels owned the loudest megaphone in the eastern half of the state. And his most venomous attacks were launched against what Daniels considered mortal threats to Anglo-Saxon domination: Negroes, Republicans, and Fusionists.

  After meeting with Simmons in New Bern in 1898, Daniels concluded that the Democratic campaign to end “Negro domination” would require three types of men—men who could speak, men who could write, and men who could ride. The men who could speak were orators like Colonel Waddell and Charles Aycock, a white supremacist lawyer who was now a polished orator and rising Democratic star. Daniels and other Democratic editors did the writing. And the men who could ride were the armed white men known as Red Shirts, the vigilante militia of the Democratic Party. According to local legend, their red shirts and jackets represented the bloody shirts waved by widows of Scottish Highlanders killed in battle. Many of the early settlers of the Cape Fear countryside were Scottish and Irish immigrants. The Red Shirts were most active in southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border in the summer of 1898. Only later, in the weeks before the November election, would Red Shirt brigades begin forming in Wilmington.