Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  On August 24, Russell arranged for the Raleigh Morning Post to publish a statement on his behalf: “The negro who edits the Wilmington paper, and who wrote the vile calumny upon the wives of poor white farmers and young white ladies of culture, is not his friend and supporter, but has been his enemy throughout, and that the Governor denounces the scoundrel as severely as any can.”

  White merchants began pulling their ads from the Record. As Manly had feared, the white owner of the building housing the Record responded to his editorial by ordering him to vacate the premises. Manly and his staff gathered up everything in the office and hauled it several blocks to a two-story frame building on South Seventh Street, between Nun and Church Streets. The structure, called Love and Charity Hall, was owned by a black fraternal organization.

  The Record ’s future was decidedly uncertain, even as it continued to publish from the new location. Because of Manly’s editorial, the paper had suddenly become one of the best-known publications in the state. For a brief interval, the Record attracted a level of reader interest it had never enjoyed when Manly was writing about street improvements and the colored hospital ward. Both blacks and whites clamored for copies of the Record ’s August 18 issue. A bidding war erupted. The issue was sold and resold for up to five times the 2-cent cover price. The Wilmington Star offered to pay 25 cents a copy. The Wilmington Messenger received so many requests for the Record issue that it reprinted the editorial in full.

  Desperate to keep the Record afloat, Manly appealed for support from the most respected cadre of blacks in the city—the clergy. He asked the Ministerial Union, composed of Wilmington’s leading black ministers, for a public statement of support. After considerable debate, the ministers published a formal resolution that tepidly backed Manly:

  Resolved, That the Ministerial Union is in hearty sympathy with the efforts of the Daily Record in defending the rights of the race, and that each minister inform his congregation of the present situation and endeavor to sustain the paper by swelling its subscription list and urging prompt payment.

  Another black religious group, the Wilmington District Conference and Sunday School Convention of Methodists, vowed to stand with Manly “in the protection of the ladies of our race,” even at the risk of “hazarding our lives.” But fearing white repercussions, the group tried to hedge. It stipulated that its support of the Record came “without any thoughts of endorsing the much talked about article.”

  Other black leaders preached accommodation. John C. Dancy, the Republican customs collector, gathered several prominent black men and demanded a meeting with Manly. Dancy was resented by some blacks as a “trimmer,” a man with elastic convictions who sought expediency at the cost of fortitude. But Dancy considered himself a practical man with a long-term view of race relations. He enjoyed support among the city’s more prosperous blacks, and he feared that Manly had jeopardized his lucrative customs posting as well as the livelihoods of other black officeholders and appointees. Moreover, Dancy warned that Manly had upset the “most cordial and amicable” relations between Wilmington’s whites and blacks. “The white men of the South will not tolerate any reflection upon their women,” he warned.

  With what Dancy called “the leading colored men of Wilmington” in tow, he confronted Manly. At first, Dancy adopted a fatherly tone, trying to soothe the editor and persuade him that he had acted rashly, like some hotheaded schoolboy. He suggested that Manly suspend the Record until white tempers cooled. Manly refused. Dancy then asked Manly to at least retract the editorial to atone for the “folly of his course.” Manly again refused, saying he had intended not to insult white women but only to defend the integrity of his race.

  Finally, Dancy presented Manly with what he considered a reasoned apology, written by Dancy himself. Would Manly publish it? Manly, insulted, brusquely declined the offer. Dancy and his entourage walked out of the meeting. “Manly is responsible for the whole unfortunate condition of things,” Dancy said later.

  But he was not through with the stubborn young editor. Dancy began agitating for Wilmington’s black leadership to publicly disavow Manly’s editorial and to recommend his removal as the Record ’s editor. “The intelligent colored people of the State did not indorse the utterances of Manly,” Dancy wrote in a church newsletter.

  With circulation plummeting and death threats in the air, Manly and his brother Frank continued to publish the Record, even after receiving a letter from a man who threatened to burn down their office. Alex stood by his editorial, patiently explaining to anyone who confronted him that he did not intend to insult white women. He published the truth, he said, and for the white men who sought to rule Wilmington, the truth was explosive.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  An Excellent Race

  F URNIFOLD SIMMONS was a creature of organization. His Democratic Party was systematized down to the ward and block level across the state, including—and especially—in Wilmington. He had established a chain of command that allowed him to direct political maneuvers in hundreds of cities and towns.

  By the summer of 1898, among Simmons’s most useful tools to suppress black voting under the white supremacy campaign were White Government Unions, also known as white supremacy clubs. Simmons had begun setting up the unions earlier that year, intending them as counterweights to black voting majorities in his “Negroized east.” But they proved so popular with white supremacists that there were soon eight hundred White Government Unions around the state, most of them in the east. They held regular meetings in homes, businesses, and town halls.

  In Wilmington, home to the largest and most aggressive White Government Unions, the groups served as the intelligence and tactical arms of the local Democratic Party. Their aim, according to one member, was “to announce on all occasions that they would succeed if they had to shoot every negro in the city.”

  In 1898, the chairman of Wilmington’s Democratic Party was George Rountree, a Harvard-educated lawyer. Unlike most members of Wilmington’s white leadership, Rountree was not a native of the city. He was from Kinston, a Black Belt town ninety miles north of Wilmington. He had married a woman from a prominent Wilmington family and, after practicing law in New York City and Richmond, moved to Wilmington in 1890. Ambitious and cunning, Rountree soon vaulted to the top of the city’s Democratic machine, challenging Simmons’s attempts to control the local party from Raleigh. With his bald pate, droopy mustache, and tall frame, Rountree was a ubiquitous figure on Wilmington’s dirt streets, buttonholing townsfolk on the sidewalks and stopping at shops and offices to troll for the latest political gossip.

  Rountree had concluded that Wilmington’s Democratic Party committeemen, and even some White Government Union members, were complacent and poorly motivated. “It soon became apparent to me that we did not have a ghost of a chance to win the election with the organization constituted as it was,” he wrote.

  Rountree and three other white men appointed themselves as the new directors of the white supremacy campaign in the city. They took charge of a committee of twenty prominent Democratic businessmen and political figures.

  Colonel Waddell was conspicuously left off the committee. Although Waddell had been recruited to deliver searing speeches on behalf of Democratic candidates, he was considered a has-been by Rountree and several other white power brokers. With his imperious ways and posture of moral superiority, Waddell had offended and alienated several members of the city’s white political elite. He carried on running feuds with politicians over slights and insults that were by now decades old. He quietly nursed a sense of grievance. Lonely and adrift, he brooded about being blackballed from the leadership of the supremacy campaign. To friends and family, he vowed to find a way in. His moment would come, he assured them.

  But Rountree, no friend of Waddell, took over the effort to raise money to finance the twenty-man committee. He and several other Democrats visited every white businessman in the city and assessed each one a required cash contribution. Only five men ref
used to pay up. Two later gave Rountree money; one “sneaked up to my office and gave me $50,” Rountree wrote. In all, the committee collected $3,000, a significant sum.

  Even with the money in hand, Rountree still feared that the white establishment was not sufficiently alarmed or energized. He delivered a fiery speech at a White Government Union meeting. The reaction startled him; he had badly underestimated white rage. “I started to endeavor to inflame the white men’s sentiment, and discovered that they were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes,” he wrote. He now began to worry that whites were too energized.

  Word of Rountree’s speech reached Raleigh, where Simmons feared that Wilmington’s White Government Unions would provoke violence too soon. He dispatched an acolyte to the city to order Rountree to consult with Simmons before taking any further action. Rountree agreed that prudence was required. But he was pleased that his machinations in Wilmington had managed to “astonish and annoy” the state party chairman. He later wrote that he told Simmons’s emissary: “Simmons might go to H----, as we were going to run the campaign to suit ourselves down here.”

  But Rountree could not control every white man in Wilmington. The campaign was fracturing into secret cells with grandiloquent titles, each composed of prominent white business and political leaders from the same social stratum. One group of nine white men called the Secret Nine held clandestine meetings at the home of Hugh MacRae, an M.I.T.-educated mining engineer and president of the Wilmington Cotton Mills Co. Some Democrats were not even aware the group existed. At the same time, six other white men met independently at another home, calling themselves the Group Six.

  Whatever their titles, the white cabals had a goal in common: to prevent blacks from voting, while also ensuring that every eligible white man went to the polls on Election Day. But their efforts could not stop there: even if white supremacists prevailed on November 8, black men and their white Republican patrons would remain in municipal positions. The November election included only federal, state, and county offices. Posts such as mayor and city alderman were not up for reelection in Wilmington until March 1899. Thus, it was tacitly understood among white supremacists, at both the state and the local level, that violence might well be required to overthrow city government regardless of the election outcome in November.

  Thomas Clawson, the white editor who earlier bragged that he had “unloaded” his used Hoe press on the Manly brothers, fanned white rage in his Wilmington Messenger while also observing firsthand the plans being laid for violence.

  “For a period of six to twelve months prior to November 10,” Clawson wrote later, “the white citizens of Wilmington prepared quietly but effectively for the day when action would be necessary.”

  The Secret Nine, with the wealthy Hugh MacRae in charge, decided to set up armed “vigilance committees” and “citizens’ patrols,” organized block by block. The city was divided into five sections, carved up along ward boundaries. Each section was commanded by a captain assisted by a lieutenant. The military designations were intentional, for the patrols were well stocked with pistols, rifles, and shotguns. By late summer , gunmen identified by strips of white cloth tied around their upper arms patrolled the city’s neighborhoods. Just as in a military operation, sentries were posted, and gunmen patrolled on set schedules.

  Captains kept lists of white women and children in their wards. Many whites believed newspaper reports and local gossip that blacks were plotting to rape white women and burn white homes and shops. Safe houses were established in churches or storefronts. Some white men made plans to ship their families out of town for safety. 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.

  Whites sought a man of military experience to confront the anticipated black rebellion. Rountree and other leaders turned to an obvious candidate to direct what was now formally known as the Vigilance Committee: Colonel Roger Moore, the Wilmington Ku Klux Klan commander whose white-robed men had been routed by Abraham Galloway and his fence rail–toting followers thirty years earlier.

  Moore was now fifty-nine, but he still maintained a military bearing. He was tall, with wavy hair brushed back from his forehead and a well-trimmed silver beard. He was regarded by fellow whites as a born leader, despite his uneven performance as commander of the city’s Klan. He was considered an honorable Confederate who had demonstrated courage and loyalty as commander of the Forty-First North Carolina Regiment during the Civil War. He was also a prominent politician—a former city alderman, and, in the summer of 1898, a New Hanover County commissioner.

  Despite Moore’s efforts, not all whites were convinced that blacks were plotting an uprising. Jane Cronly, whose brother had been compelled to patrol the family’s neighborhood as a member of the local white citizens’ patrol, spent the summer closely observing the behavior of her black neighbors in the face of white provocations. She found no sign of militancy or violent intent, only the slow, prosaic rhythms of constrained black life in a small Southern city amid the stifling heat of a coastal summer.

  “The negroes here are an excellent race,” Cronly wrote in her dairy. “And under all the abuse which has been vented upon them for months they have gone quietly on and have been almost obsequiously polite as if to ward off the persecution they seemed involuntarily felt to be in the air. In spite of all the goading and persecuting that has been done all summer the negroes have [been] doing nothing that could call down vengeance on their heads.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Dark Scheme

  I N MID -SEPTEMBER 1898, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Jersey received a handwritten request from two men in Wilmington who sought to purchase two dozen Winchester rifles and 16-shot pistols. The Winchester agent referred the request to the company’s North Carolina agent, the Odell Hardware Company in Greensboro, seventy-five miles west of Raleigh.

  Charles H. Ireland, the Odell company manager, received a follow-up request from the Wilmington men, also handwritten, for twelve .38-caliber, 16-shot pistols and several Winchester rifles. “You need not bee oneasy [uneasy] … we will send you a check for the amount charged,” the letter concluded. It was signed by Wm. Lee and M. H. McAllister of 504 South Church Street in Wilmington.

  Ireland, like most white North Carolinians, had read newspaper accounts predicting a race war in Wilmington. A request for guns from Wilmington aroused his suspicions. He decided to check with two white merchants he knew in Wilmington. The merchants responded almost immediately: the men who sent the letter were Negroes.

  Ireland refused to supply the guns. But the matter didn’t end there. Ireland took the unusual step of forwarding the weapons request to the News and Observer in Raleigh. Josephus Daniels was delighted by the fortuitous development. All that summer, he had fed his readers a steady diet of conspiracy theories about blacks in Wilmington secretly planning an armed uprising. Now, it seemed, he possessed documented evidence of black men seeking guns.

  Daniels sent a telegram to Iredell Meares, a Wilmington lawyer and Democratic Party operative, seeking details. Meares responded with a telegram informing Daniels that M. H. McAllister was “a negro living at the address named” and that Wm. Lee was John William Lee, the black chairman of the Republican Executive Committee in New Hanover County. In fact, the chairman was John Wesley Lee, who denied any involvement with the gun order, but that did not deter Daniels.

  On October 18, the News and Observer published an article headlined: THE WILMINGTON NEGROES ARE TRYING TO BUY GUNS . A subhead read: BUT THE DARK SCHEME HAS BEEN DETECTED . The story included a copy of the gun order, riddled with misspellings that confirmed for many white readers that the authors were indeed ignorant Negroes.

>   “So, it seems that the Negroes of Wilmington, and perhaps at other places in Eastern North Carolina are determined to retain control of affairs if it takes Winchester 38 caliber sixteen shooters to do it,” the article concluded.

  The Wilmington papers picked up the story, offering it as confirmation of a black plot to retain political control at gunpoint. “Sambo is seeking to furnish an armory here,” the Messenger reported. The newspaper warned the city’s blacks that if it was violence they wanted, Wilmington’s whites would provide it.

  The attempted purchase prompted George Rountree to hire a black detective to investigate what sort of mayhem blacks were planning for Election Day. The detective canvassed black neighborhoods and reported his assessment of black intentions. “We ascertained, I believe, that they were doing practically nothing,” Rountree wrote.

  Separately, the Group Six, one of the two secret white committees, hired two black Pinkerton detectives to conduct a similar investigation. The detectives seemed to understand what the white men were seeking. They reported that female servants in white homes intended to burn down their employers’ houses if white supremacists prevailed in the election. And several black men, the detectives claimed, had told them they planned to “burn the town down” if the Democrats won.

  The detectives’ report, spread by newspaper coverage, spurred more gun purchases among whites. As far away as Baltimore, gun merchants reported shortages of Winchester and Colt rifles and revolvers after filling large orders placed by whites in eastern North Carolina. The Baltimore Sun reported that the guns were stockpiled for “the threatened race war in North Carolina.” In Richmond, gun dealers shipped more than a thousand shotguns, Winchester repeating rifles, and .32-caliber and .38-caliber revolvers to Wilmington and other Black Belt towns.