Wilmington's Lie

by Zucchino, David

  Tillman pointed to the White Government Union men from Wilmington.

  “Why didn’t you kill the nigger editor who wrote that?” he screamed. “Send him to South Carolina and let him publish any such offensive stuff, and he would be killed!”

  The mention of Manly aroused the Wilmington delegation. They clapped and cheered as Tillman closed his speech by reminding the crowd that there were many ways to win an election—guns and bayonets among them. He departed to a standing ovation.

  The men from Wilmington boarded the train home in a festive mood, their bellies swelled with pork barbecue and sweet tea. They felt energized by Tillman’s speech and inspired by the example he had set in South Carolina a generation earlier. They were enthralled by the ranks of mounted Red Shirts they had seen—with their gleaming pistols and shotguns and bands of ammunition.

  Some of the Red Shirts had ridden up from South Carolina. Others were from Cumberland County surrounding Fayetteville and from other counties in southeastern North Carolina. But very few, if any, were from Wilmington. Some mounted Red Shirts had been sighted in or around the city during the 1896 campaign, but the movement had not yet taken visible hold in Wilmington in the 1898 campaign. White men on horseback had shot or intimidated blacks in the Cape Fear country that summer. Other white vigilantes had warned blacks in Wilmington not to attempt to vote in November. And armed men were patrolling the city’s streets, white kerchiefs tied around their arms. But few of Wilmington’s vigilantes had yet begun to wear red shirts or jackets.

  The White Government Union men on the train had just witnessed the intimidating effect of red-shirted gunmen, marching in military formation in Fayetteville. Soon after the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railway train rolled back home into the port city, the wives and sisters of the men aboard began sewing shirts and jackets of red calico and silk.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  White-Capping

  T HE N . JACOBI HARDWARE CO . on Water Street, next to the Cape Fear River, was run by twenty-eight-year-old J. N. Jacobi, a second-generation member of the family that had founded the business in 1868. The Jacobis were part of a small but influential Jewish community that had carved out a niche among Wilmington’s merchant class. Until North Carolina’s revised constitution in 1868, Jews had been banned from public office by the state’s original constitution of 1776. By the 1890s, Jews owned most of Wilmington’s dry goods stores and had built comfortable middle-class lives. In many cases , they sought to emphasize their whiteness by adopting their colleagues’ white supremacist views. Among them was Silas Fishblate, a merchant and former three-term mayor of Wilmington, who boldly announced that summer: “I am with the white man every time.”

  So was J. N. Jacobi. He was a prominent synagogue leader who could be counted on to promote the Democratic ticket. Jacobi profited from a record boom in gun sales in the late summer of 1898 at his hardware store, which normally relied on sales of paint, lumber, and tools. Like his fellow white gun merchants, Jacobi refused to sell weapons to blacks. Nor did he sell a single shotgun or rifle or pistol to a white Republican during the campaign. He restricted his gun sales to white Democrats.

  All summer, Jacobi had been reading race-baiting newspaper reports that inspired him to action. He helped draft a local resolution that compelled white business owners in Wilmington to notify their black employees that they would be fired if the Republicans won the November election. Jacobi began to take a keen interest in the political leanings of his three black employees—two men named John and Stephen, and a teenager, Richard. Jacobi summoned the workers one morning and told them to choose between their jobs and registering to vote.

  “The condition of affairs under the Republican rule were such that it was becoming unbearable, and we could not possibly think of employing people who voted against us and every one of our interests,” Jacobi said later.

  Across Wilmington and throughout the Black Belt, black employees of white-owned businesses were given similar ultimatums as Election Day approached. On October 20 , Alex Manly wrote in the Record that he knew of at least thirty black men who had been fired for registering to vote. It is not known whether Jacobi’s black workers chose to risk their livelihoods by registering, but many other black employees decided to stay away from the polls. Even black workers not directly threatened by their bosses chose to avoid confrontations by announcing that they did not intend to register, much less vote. Some blacks who had already registered asked white voter registration officers to strike their names from the rolls.

  “If a man registered, he would be discharged,” John Melton, the police chief, said later. “Colored people … said they were not going to vote or register—that they thought more of their lives than they did of their votes or politics.”

  While many white employers eagerly embraced the practice, some thought it was self-defeating. Robert Mason, a cashier for the North Carolina Cotton Oil Company in Wilmington, called his black workers the “least troublesome labor we can handle … their natural disposition when unmolested by mean white people is to know their places and keep in them.” Threatening them only drove them to mischief, Mason said.

  The men who ran the white supremacy campaign were undeterred. On October 18, the Star reprinted Alex Manly’s August editorial under the headline: A HORRID SLANDER . To refute rumors that the editorial was secretly written by Democrats to arouse white passions, the Star published sworn statements by five white Wilmington men, among them a bat guano merchant and a Confederate veteran. The men confirmed under oath that Manly wrote the editorial, was a Republican, and was, indeed, “a Negro,” despite his Caucasian appearance.

  Many black workers defied threats by their employers. Black men continued to register to vote, quietly urged on by Fusionists who sought to maximize the city’s black majority—11,324 blacks to 8,731 whites. Carter Peamon, a black barber and a Republican activist, defiantly registered to vote in full view of white election officials. He also helped other black men register, confronting whites who attempted to block them.

  On October 1, a white clergyman tried to prevent a black man from registering by claiming the man had been declared legally insane. Peamon objected, using what the next day’s Morning Star described as “insolent language.” A white bystander, S. Hill Terry, brandishing a jackknife, challenged Peamon, who wrestled the weapon away. Peamon told Terry he would like to “slap the jaws of every white man.” The commotion attracted a crowd of nearly one hundred black men, some of whom cursed and threatened a smaller group of white men gathered at the registrar’s office. The whites eventually withdrew. The next day’s Wilmington Messenger noted the “disgraceful and outrageous conduct of the negroes.”

  It was the duty of Red Shirts to crush any such black resistance. Throughout the Black Belt, stretching northwest and northeast from Wilmington across the sun-scorched coastal plain, white night riders fanned out into the countryside. Many wore red shirts or vests, along with distinctive white caps, evocative of the hoods once worn by Klansmen. Scores of black farmers and laborers were roused from their beds and threatened with death if they registered to vote. Many were beaten or whipped—attacks that came to be known as “white-capping.”

  One incident stood out. In rural Stewartsville Township in Scotland County, ninety-five miles northwest of Wilmington, Red Shirts noticed that a forty-year-old black man named T. A. Graham had encouraged other blacks to register—and to vote Republican. Graham worked discreetly, hoping to avoid the Red Shirts who patrolled Scotland County. But one night in mid-October, he drank too much and was spotted ripping down a Democratic election poster. According to one white witness, Graham loudly swore that he would “wade through white man’s blood … to put a negro in the post-office.”

  A few nights later, Graham and his wife were asleep at home when a group of white men with pistols pounded on their door. Graham hid under his bed. The men shouted, “Open the door! If you don’t, we’ll break it open!” Graham’s wife told them her husband wasn’t ho
me. The men smashed through the door and lit a lamp. One intruder thrust his pistol in the woman’s face and told her, “We must have him.” They searched the house, finding Graham crouched behind his bed, still in his nightclothes.

  The men dragged Graham outside. They beat him with pistol butts and whipped him across his back. Graham begged them to let him speak, but the whipping continued. Finally, the men paused to tell Graham that they had seen him rip down the Democratic poster and knew he had advised black men to vote. They asked him whether he would promise to stay away from the polls in November.

  “Yes, sir,” Graham responded.

  Would he tell other blacks to stay away, too?

  “Yes, sir. I swear,” Graham said.

  One of the men gave Graham five more lashes with a whip, shredding his nightclothes and flaying his back. When the man had finished, he pointed his pistol in Graham’s face and told him, “By God, this is white man’s country; we are going to rule it if we have to wade in blood.”

  Graham later said he could not identify his attackers, because it was dark, but he was certain they were Democrats. Asked how he knew, Graham replied, “I know a rat when I see his tail.”

  Graham did not vote in the election. He also advised his black friends not to vote—a needless gesture for many because they, too, had been whipped and beaten by white men. Graham spoke for them all: “I was whipped out of politics.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Buckshot at Close Range

  T HE RED SHIRT ATTACKS alarmed Jeter Pritchard, North Carolina’s Republican US senator. An assault on any voter was an assault on democracy, Pritchard believed, and these were assaults against his voters. He owed his seat in Congress, in large part, to the black voters who had helped the Fusion ticket of Republicans and Populists take charge of the state legislature in 1894. He was the only Republican senator from a Southern state; Marion Butler, North Carolina’s other senator, was a Populist aligned with Republicans under Fusion.

  Pritchard was a heavyset man with a walrus mustache and wavy silver hair parted high on his broad forehead. He was a Tennessean, the son of a Confederate veteran. He had once worked as a newspaper editor. He looked like a prosperous Southern planter, but he had been raised in a Unionist county and staked out relatively progressive political positions. Pritchard was deeply worried about the Red Shirt rampages. If enough blacks were kept from the polls, Republicans would lose the legislature as well as local and county governments across the Black Belt, including Wilmington. On October 21, Pritchard sent a two-page typewritten letter to President McKinley, requesting federal marshals to protect black voters threatened by Red Shirts and other night riders.

  Addressing McKinley as “My Dear Mr. President,” Pritchard warned that Democrats were stockpiling guns and threatening and whipping blacks, who were attempting to purchase weapons of their own only to defend themselves. He told the president that there was no truth to Democratic claims of “Negro domination.” He asked that his letter be kept confidential.

  It was immediately leaked, and Josephus Daniels made sure Pritchard’s comments were published widely. Furnifold Simmons went further: he sent Pritchard a list of black public officials in eastern North Carolina in a letter that read like an indictment. It listed thirty questions—each one prefaced with “Do you deny …?” The first question: “Do you deny that there is a negro candidate running for Congress in the Second Congressional District?” Indeed, George Henry White was a US representative for the Black Second and was running for reelection. But White was hardly the vanguard of “Negro domination.” He was the only black member of Congress.

  Simmons’s questions continued for several pages. Question four: Did Pritchard deny that Colonel James H. Young, the black commander of the state’s Third Regiment of Negro soldiers, had served as fertilizer inspector “with a big salary and with white men working under him?” Question twelve mentioned “FORTY negro magistrates” in New Hanover County and “FOURTEEN negro policemen” in Wilmington.

  Governor Russell tried to refute Simmons’s claims of black domination. In an interview with a Washington Post correspondent, he said that of 170 members of the state legislature, just 17—or 10 percent—were black. For every thirty black voters in the state, Russell said, there were seventy white voters.

  The correspondent asked, “What ground is there for fearing negro domination in the state?” Russell replied, “Absolutely none, and the Democrats know it.” In fact, the governor said, “The negroes, as a rule, are peaceable, tractable citizens, and any disturbance that may arise on election day will not be of their inauguration.”

  Daniels had played Pritchard’s leaked letter across the front page of the News and Observer under the headline: TO INVOKE BAYONET RULE . Daniels wrote, falsely, that Pritchard had requested federal troops, rather than US marshals, “to control the election in North Carolina.” The article pointed out that the president could not send federal troops unless Russell requested them. And in any case, the Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, prohibited the armed forces from intervening in law enforcement, with certain exceptions.

  Daniels considered the governor weak and compromised. “Russell was in terror for his life,” he wrote later. “He feared he might be assassinated.” Even within the relative security of the capitol and the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, Russell carried a loaded pistol and was accompanied everywhere by a personal bodyguard.

  In Washington, Pritchard’s letter was discussed during a meeting between President McKinley and his cabinet on October 24. After the session, Attorney General John W. Griggs told reporters that he would approve a request by Governor Russell for federal marshals—if Russell requested them. In the meantime , he said, he was dispatching an assistant attorney general to North Carolina to keep him informed on events there.

  On October 26, Russell warned the state’s voters that “certain North Carolina counties lying along the southern borders have been actually invaded by certain armed and lawless men.” These men on horseback had so terrified certain “peaceful citizens”—Russell did not raise the issue of race—that they were afraid to register to vote. He ordered “all ill-disposed persons … to immediately desist from all unlawful practices and all turbulent conduct.”

  Russell’s decree only provoked Democrats and Red Shirts. Night riders stepped up their attacks on black homes. Democratic political rallies grew more aggressive and confrontational. Civic leaders in Laurinburg set aside a day on which every male citizen was advised to wear a red shirt “until old North Carolina has been redeemed.” In a front-page interview with the News and Observer, Democratic Party chairman Simmons promised an end to “corruption, fraud and Negroism.”

  In Raleigh, Daniels published a front-page cartoon by Norman Jennett depicting a Red Shirt riding a racing stallion labeled “White Rule.” He crossed the finish line well ahead of a thick-lipped black man riding a wheezing nag. The caption read: “Pick the Winner .”

  Later that week, a group of white men confronted a distributor who transported fresh milk into Wilmington for a dairy farm operated by Russell’s wife, Sarah. The deliveryman was given an ultimatum: join the white supremacy campaign or be prohibited from selling milk in Wilmington. The man complied, and deliveries of Russell’s milk resumed. But the city’s white newspapers quickly organized a consumer boycott that sent Sarah Russell’s dairy sales plummeting.

  On October 28, just two days after the governor’s decree, Democrats and Red Shirts held a White Man’s Convention at the county courthouse in Goldsboro, a market town on the Neuse River ninety-five miles north of Wilmington. The announced crowd of up to eight thousand was nearly as large as the Democratic gathering in Fayetteville eight days earlier. Special trains ferried white families from every county in eastern North Carolina. Three bands, including Wilmington’s Second Regiment Band, greeted arrivals at the Goldsboro train station. The roads leading into the city were clogged with wagons, buggies, and carriages. Mounted Red Shirt brigades rode in processi
on, Winchesters held high.

  The leading Democratic politicians of eastern North Carolina assembled on a grandstand erected on the courthouse lawn. At the front was Simmons, who raised a hand to quiet the music from the Second Regiment Band. He announced that the purpose of the rally was to “consider and devise plans for averting and overthrowing Negro domination.” He delivered his familiar accounting of blacks in office in the state—more than a thousand, he said.

  “The white people of North Carolina, irrespective of party, have determined that this Negro business has got to be stopped!” Simmons shouted. A man in the audience hollered, “We will stop it!” as others in the crowd hooted and applauded.

  Simmons mentioned that Alex Manly, in his August 18 editorial, had “insulted and assailed the purity of the white women of North Carolina.” There were cries of: “Lynch him! Lynch him!” Simmons went on, “We say we will protect our women with our ballots, but if we can’t protect them from insults and slander, and aggression and lust, we will protect them with our strong arms.” There were more cheers and shouts of: “We will rule it!”

  Democrats held similar rallies almost every day across the Black Belt in the two weeks before Election Day on November 8. In Tarboro, on the Tar River 150 miles north of Wilmington, several thousand whites sat through a downpour to hear Simmons speak on October 29. In Charlotte, nearly a thousand armed Red Shirts on horseback rode in a parade that ended with a speech by Pitchfork Tillman, who proclaimed once again that Alex Manly should be food for catfish at the bottom of the Cape Fear. An overwhelmed Republican reported that “not a single colored man slept in their houses at night … they were afraid that they would be white-capped by the Red Shirts.”

  On November 1, a procession of four hundred mounted Red Shirts a mile long rode to a rally attended by several thousand whites in Laurinburg. Other Red Shirts arrived riding mules or bicycles. They wore homemade red flannel shirts sewn by their wives and daughters, with collars trimmed in blue or white.