Wright was ridiculed by white supremacists as foolish and pompous. He lived not in a proper home but as a boarder at the downtown Orton Hotel. He was not known to be particularly wealthy, but he dressed like a duke, often appearing in a black felt hat and white gloves. He sometimes rode his carriage through the city behind a pair of prancing black horses.
Chief Melton, by contrast, was considered common and unsophisticated. Unlike most white officeholders, he did not own a home or property. Melton, then forty-eight , lived with his wife, Augusta, and three daughters in a modest rental home. He worked as a butcher, a lowly trade Democrats cited as evidence that Melton was unqualified for law enforcement work. He had also committed the offense of hiring the ten black officers on his force. Perhaps not coincidentally , Melton’s rented home was set ablaze that summer, forcing the chief to leap from a window to escape.
By October, Melton had received several anonymous letters containing the REMEMBER THE 6 handbills. Friends, including a member of a White Government Union, warned him that he was, as he put it, “liable to be killed.” Melton understood that the Big Six white Fusionists represented “six of us that was to be killed,” he said. He understood, too, that they would be murdered “if there was any trouble with the negroes.” And the Big Six were not the only citizens targeted for murder. As Melton recalled later, “White men had told me that they would carry the election or kill every negro.”
If any white Republican was more reviled by Democrats than Wright or Melton, it was Chief Deputy Sheriff George Z. French, an original carpetbagger who had arrived in Wilmington with the invading Union army. French, a native of Maine, had served as a sutler to Union forces during the Civil War, selling supplies to soldiers from a cart that trailed Union wagon trains.
In the chaos of the Confederacy’s defeat in Wilmington in early 1865, French had appropriated an abandoned storefront on Market Street. With a partner, he began selling clothing, tobacco, liquor, novels, magazines, “West India goods,” and “Yankee Notions.” French took out a newspaper ad that offered goods specifically to Union occupiers: “Everything Required in the Army.”
French was a complicated figure. He could be a ruthless businessman, but he was also capable of grand acts of compassion. In March 1865, he had been deeply moved by the sight of nine hundred ragged Union officers, freshly released from Confederate prison camps, as they arrived in Wilmington with “barely sufficient clothing left to cover their nakedness.” French gave the men food and clothing on credit—four hundred officers during a single two-day period. In all, French advanced officers $4,000 in goods.
Five months later, French had been repaid only $1,500. He threatened to publish the names of the deadbeat officers but never followed through. He was praised by the Wilmington Herald as “magnanimous” and for displaying “honor and honesty.”
As he settled into hardscrabble postwar Wilmington, French expanded into commodities, land speculation, and ship salvage. For a commission , he marketed naval stores and cotton from farmers and Piney Woods residents for resale at Wilmington’s port. He secured a government contract to salvage both Union ships and Confederate blockade-runners that had been sunk in coastal waters outside Wilmington. He also found a way to secure a seat on the city’s board of aldermen, where he was known by the nickname “Gizzard.”
On a stretch of land he had bought at Rocky Point, sixteen miles north of downtown Wilmington in the wet, sandy lowlands west of the Cape Fear, French built a plantation he named Excelsior. French adhered to a simple operating principle: use more fertilizer than anyone else. At night, as residents of Wilmington sat on their porches to enjoy soft breezes blowing off the Cape Fear, French sent a cart rumbling through the streets to collect excrement from night soil buckets and privies in backyards. This was not well received.
The Wilmington Journal complained:
Because Gizzard French is a member of the Board of Aldermen, is this any reason that the cart which supplies him at his “Excelsior” plantation with “night soil” should be permitted to disturb the citizens by dragging its filthy load through our public streets?
French continued to collect night soil, but he soon discovered that his Excelsior property contained limestone deposits that could be quarried for lime, a key ingredient in fertilizer. By 1874, a new quarry produced enough lime for French to package it as French’s Agricultural Lime. He had created a viable new fertilizer industry that soon helped rejuvenate Cape Fear farms and plantations devastated by the Civil War.
Wilmington’s white aristocracy could tolerate a hustling carpetbagger like George French so long as he busied himself with his plantation and lime. But French, an energetic and garrulous sort, was drawn irresistibly to politics—and to the transactional advantages enjoyed by politicians. He lobbied blacks for their votes, and they helped him win a seat in the state legislature in 1870 and 1894. As chief deputy sheriff, French ignored more than a hundred warrants from a White Government Union justice of the peace to arrest or remove black police officers French had helped appoint.
French rose to the chairmanship of the county Republican Party. He was irrepressible, glad-handing blacks and whites alike. He was such a “slick talking man,” one of his black employees said, that if he were ever “away from home and got strapped, he could preach his way back without the slightest trouble.”
By the summer of 1898, French was sixty-six years old, a solidly entrenched politician and businessman. But for all his political skills, he had failed to anticipate the depth of the rage and resentment within the city’s white political leadership. He had charmed them, but he had never won them over. As Democrats plotted a violent coup, French realized that his own political position was untenable. REMEMBER THE 6 handbills were filling his mailbox.
Like French, Republican postmaster William H. Chadbourn also recognized that his political stance threatened his livelihood, if not his life. As a postmaster appointed by the Republican Party, he had awarded letter carrier and postal clerk jobs to black men—an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the city’s leading white men.
Chadbourn made matters worse for himself by openly denying any “Negro domination” in Wilmington. George Rountree threatened Chadbourn, who backed down and published an apology in the Messenger under the headline: HIS EYES OPENED . Chadbourn conceded that there was, in fact, Negro domination in Wilmington. He warned that the city’s black men were planning a race riot “of arson and bloodshed.”
With Chadbourn’s defection, and with the mayor, police chief, and deputy sheriff thoroughly intimidated, the Republican Party in Wilmington was in disarray a month before the election. In Raleigh, Governor Russell was inundated by calls from panicked Republicans in his hometown. They warned him that Democrats were hijacking the election. The governor felt powerless to intervene. His only influence in the city was through Republicans who nominally ran Wilmington but who were now surrendering to Democratic bullying.
After Russell announced that he would give a campaign speech in Wilmington in October, Democrats claimed the visit would trigger a race war. After threats by George Rountree and other Democrats, Russell announced three days later that he was canceling the visit.
But Rountree was not through with Russell. Wilmington’s Democrats next demanded that Republicans remove all candidates, black and white, who were seeking New Hanover County offices. Again, Democrats threatened a race war. Russell knew he was being strong-armed, and he resented it. But he could not afford, politically, to be blamed for failing to stop a race war, even one instigated by his political enemies. His reply was noncommittal. He pointed out, to little effect, that all Republicans running for county office were white, except for a black candidate for registrar of deeds.
Democrats in Wilmington responded by dispatching Sprunt, the cotton compress owner, and two other Democrats to Raleigh to confront Russell face-to-face. They took with them a sweetener: if Russell would withdraw local Republican candidates, the Democrats would remove two virulently anti-Russell De
mocratic candidates who were demanding his impeachment.
An agreement was reached during the final week of October: the two pro-impeachment Democratic candidates and the entire Republican county slate were to be withdrawn. It was lopsided deal. Russell surrendered the county; Democrats gave up virtually nothing. All Russell got were two slightly less hostile Democratic candidates and an empty promise by Wilmington’s white supremacists not to interfere with the “rights of lawful voters.”
Russell summoned Gizzard French to Raleigh and dumped the ugly deal in his lap, with instructions to sell it to the Republican leadership in Wilmington. The party bowed to the inevitable. Throughout the Black Belt, where Democrats had also threatened white riots, Republicans withdrew local black candidates from the campaign. It was a remarkable demonstration of political thuggery.
Later that week, Wilmington’s Democrats again humiliated Russell. They kept their promise to remove the two Wilmington candidates for the state legislature who had been clamoring for his impeachment. But they replaced one of them with a politician even more bitterly opposed to the governor—George Rountree.
Later, in a letter to Wilmington’s Fusionists, Russell conceded that he had been intimidated into trading Republican-controlled county offices for peace—a startling acknowledgement that a free and fair election was negotiable. Russell assured his allies that white supremacists in Wilmington “have given their word that there shall be a free and fair and peaceful election.”
One by one, Republican county candidates formally announced their decisions to step aside, reluctantly, in the name of election peace. The last Republican to drop out was the county registrar of deeds, Charles Norwood, a black man. Norwood said he had concluded that “a race war was being stirred up.” He wanted “no part in any such proceedings.” With that, the Democrats’ threat of a white riot seemed to be in abeyance, for the moment.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Great White Man’s Rally and Basket Picnic
E ARLY ON the damp, gray morning of October 20, the foot soldiers of Wilmington’s white supremacy campaign trooped across the worn floorboards of the loading platform at the train depot near the downtown waterfront. Men from the White Government Unions were there, dressed in dark suits and carrying banners representing their wards. A detachment of the Cape Fear militia arrived in formation, led through its paces by a uniformed captain. The militiamen were trailed by musicians of the Fifth Ward Cornet Band. Among the high-spirited people on the platform were several women, elegantly dressed and squired by their husbands.
The travelers were bound for Fayetteville, ninety miles up the Cape Fear, to attend the Great White Man’s Rally and Basket Picnic. It was to be the state’s largest white supremacy campaign event of the year, and white leaders from the state’s largest city were eager to add their voices to the white revolution against Negro rule.
By 8:30 a.m., some eighty-two men and women were aboard the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railway train as it chugged out of the Wilmington station, bound for Fayetteville. At each station stop across the coastal plain, more whites boarded. The band played as passengers shouted out hearty welcomes. Food was shared.
By the time the train reached Fayetteville, sloshing through a heavy downpour, every car was full. Even in the cool morning rain outside the train windows, white men and women lined the streets and shouted from office doorways. The men doffed their hats and the women waved handkerchiefs as the Wilmington train pulled into the station. The cornet band played a stirring tune as Wilmington’s White Government Union men unfurled their ward banners from the train windows.
At the county fairgrounds outside Fayetteville, crowds had begun to form just after dawn for the largest campaign event ever held by the Democratic Party in North Carolina. People plowed through mud-slick streets in buggies, carriages, and wagons, lashed by rain. By noon, as the downpour eased, nearly eight thousand people had taken seats in the grandstands around a racetrack. They cheered the arrival of a formal procession that had left the Hotel Lafayette late that morning and was now in full view of the eager crowd.
Leading the way was the cornet band, followed by more than two hundred men on horseback, each dressed in a red shirt or jacket. Behind them came a float, mounted on a wagon and decorated with fresh flowers. Aboard were sixteen young white women with names like Pearl and Bessie and Maggie May, each representing a different Fayetteville township. The procession eased to a halt along the grandstand, where the judge’s stand had been converted to a speaker’s lectern. A cannon boomed out a welcome. A preacher blessed the gathering. Everyone rose to sing the state song, “The Old North State.”
The day’s featured speaker was a US senator—fifty-one-year-old “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of neighboring South Carolina, a tall, spade-faced man with a perpetual scowl and a black patch over his left eye. (He had worn the patch since his left eye was destroyed by an inept surgeon who tried to carve a tumor from his face.) Tillman had earned the nickname Pitchfork four years earlier for calling President Grover Cleveland a “bag of beef” and threatening to thrust a pitchfork through his ribs. Tillman had served as South Carolina’s governor for one term and had been considered a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 1896 until a national audience began absorbing his race-baiting speeches.
Tillman was a proud white supremacist. He had once told a colleague that black women were “little better than animals.” He said they did not resist the sexual advances of white men, because bearing a half-white child improved their social status. He once declared that he would prefer that one of his daughters be killed by tigers or bears “than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her womanhood by a black fiend.”
Tillman was born into violence. His father, Benjamin, was a liquor-swilling cotton plantation owner in South Carolina’s Edgefield District who was once convicted of riot and assault for his part in a brawl. Young Benjamin’s brother, George, shot a man dead during a card game following a dispute over a $10 bet. The Tillman family owned more than thirty slaves and treated them with contempt. Ben referred to his human property as “the most miserable lot of human beings—the nearest to the missing link with the monkeys.”
Tillman rose to fame as a leader of a rifle club—a band of armed white supremacists who embarked on a violent campaign against South Carolina’s black citizens in the 1870s. His proudest moment came in 1876, a pivotal election year, when he was part of an assault force of rifle clubs that descended on the black hamlet of Hamburg, South Carolina. Tillman later said that the rifle clubs had decided to “seize the first opportunity that the negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson … having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”
The white gunmen provoked a shoot-out with local black militiamen in July 1876, ultimately prevailing with the help of a cannon fired into the militiamen’s drill room. Several black men were captured. The white riflemen lined them up and, one by one, shot five of them dead with bullets to the head.
Tillman often bragged about his role in what came to be known as the Hamburg massacre. “I have nothing to conceal,” he said later, adding that whites “had to shoot negroes to get relief from the galling tyranny to which we had been subjected.” In 1900, Tillman boasted on the Senate floor of his role in committing election fraud and assaulting black men who attempted to vote in 1876: “We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”
It was quite a coup for Cumberland County’s Democratic leadership to secure a prominent, if notorious, national figure like Tillman. The senator was eager to speak in North Carolina. He was convinced that the state’s whites were too timid and too accepting of black men in office. He welcomed an opportunity to explain to them how he had helped rid South Carolina of so-called Negro rule and how they could apply the same formula in North Carolina.
From the speaker’s stand on that wet October afternoon, Ti
llman turned his fury on the white men of North Carolina. What sort of “idiocy,” he asked the men in the crowd, would permit Negroes to rule a Southern state? Tillman pointed out that the whites of South Carolina had rid themselves of “Negro domination” two decades earlier. He reminded the North Carolinians that whites outnumbered blacks in their state. Why had they succumbed to black rule?
The men and women in the audience were not offended; they seemed chastened, almost thankful for Tillman’s challenge. Tillman was interrupted by applause so frequently that the short address he had planned lasted for an hour and a half. Even with the ground soggy and a soft mist settling over the crowd, no one left. Tillman brought several men in the crowd to their feet as he launched into a passionate narrative of the white supremacy campaign of 1876.
“South Carolina had Negro rule fastened on her by bayonets,” he told the crowd. “The people stood it for eight years but they grew desperate and donned red shirts and got out their shotguns and took the state!”
More than three hundred Red Shirts were in the audience. They listened raptly, some of them still on horseback and others milling among the onlookers. They hooted and whistled each time Tillman mentioned white supremacy and black capitulation.
Tillman, shouting to be heard over the tumult of the crowd, pointed in the audience to the “very beautiful girls” of Cumberland County in their flowing dresses. He said they represented the purity and chastity of all white women in the state. But they had been defamed, he said, by an editorial published in Wilmington by the black editor Alex Manly.
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