Category: Aftermath: Racial Conundrums

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)

An Important Sectional Irritant

One of American history’s greatest ironies is that the Southern colonies, and later States were populated with Africans who were transported in the holds of English and New England ships, both growing prosperous and wealthy through this iniquitous maritime trade. The result was a million American dead by mid-1865.

An Important Sectional Irritant

Antebellum anti-slavery Republicans, in criticizing Southern anti-abolitionist literature policies, linked the laws making the education of Negroes a crime with other violations of freedom of speech. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the egalitarian radical, early in his career attacked the Southern States for rifling the mails to destroy anti-slavery publications emanating from the North. A Republican colleague of Sumner criticized the restrictions “as being uncivilized.” In 1860, Sen. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi responded in the United States Congress:

“When men employ their time in writing tracts, in publishing newspapers, to indoctrinate crime into the Negroes – to teach them to commit arson, theft and murder – then there is reason growing out of the crimes of our neighbors which it imposes it upon us, as a duty of self-protection, to prevent the Negroes from reading, as the means of shutting out your unholy work . . . that, I imagine, is the foundation of all the objection which has existed to their being taught to read.” (Congressional Globe, 1687, 1860).

“In Georgia the circulation of any newspaper, pamphlet, or circular inciting insurrection, revolt, conspiracy or resistance by slaves, free Negroes or colored persons, was made punishable by death. Louisiana punished any writings designed to produce discontent or insubordination among Negroes, slave or free, with death or life imprisonment.

Not only did Virginia punish the making of abolitionist speeches or writings, but the State required every postmaster to notify a local justice of any mail with abolitionist literature and then burn this mail. And, if the addressee of the abolitionist material had subscribed to it, knowing its character, he was guilty of a crime.

These laws were constantly the subject of discussion in Congress and constituted an important sectional irritant. Northern members of Congress attacked them as violating freedom of speech, while the South defended them as essential to forestall slave revolts and bloody massacre of white Southerners. The specter of the early 1790’s massacre of Haiti’s white population was an ever-present fear in the American South.”

(School Segregation and History Revisited. Alfred Avins, PhD, Cambridge University. The Catholic Lawyer, Vol. 15, No. 4, Autumn 1969, pp. 311-312)

 

Why Annihilate State Rights?

Marylander Montgomery Blair’s loyalty to the President and ambition for another post beyond Postmaster General remained undimmed. He unsuccessfully sought Mr. Lincoln’s nomination as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. On December 6, 1864, Blair wrote Lincoln his views on the progress of reconstruction and Radical Republican policies.

Why Annihilate State Rights?

“In compliance with your request I commit to writing the views to which I referred in a recent conversation. The gradual suppression of the rebellion renders necessary now a persistence in the policy announced in your amnesty proclamation, with such additional provisions as experiment may have suggested – or its repudiation and the adoption of some other policy. For my part I recognize the plan already initiated by you as consonant with the constitution – well calculated to accomplish the end proposed, and as tending to win over the affections of a portion of the disaffected citizens to unite with all the loyal to aid the work of the military power wielded by you. You have repeatedly driven out the rebel power, enabling the loyal people of the State to restore and reinvigorate their constitutional authority without the intervention of Congress.

The military force of the United States has expelled rebel armies and their allies within the South. Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana are embracing the amnesty proclamation, stepping into the Union under its provisions. They come recognizing the validity of your proclamation – slavery being discarded and so it is manifest, that just as soon as the military power of the Rebellion is driven out, the reign of the US Constitution will resume. The whole country hails your fundamental proclamation of freedom made universal by the vote of three-fourths of the States confirming it by constitutional amendment to secure forever the freedom of the slaves.

What then is the motive for annihilating State rights? It is certainly unnecessary to maintain Mr. Sumner’s “doctrine of State suicide” “State forfeiture State abdication” – the doctrine “that the whole rebel region is tabula rasa, or a clean slate, where Congress under the Constitution may write laws” in order to secure the extirpation of slavery.

Yet Mr. Sumner seems to confine his purpose of reducing States to territories to the object of bringing slavery within the grasp of Congress, and argues, “Slavery is impossible within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government.” For many years I’ve had this conviction and have constantly maintained it. I am glad to believe that it is implied in the Chicago platform. Mr. Chase is known to accept it sincerely. Then if slavery in the Territories is unconstitutional and under the exclusive jurisdiction of the national government, then slavery would be impossible there.

It follows that if slavery is no longer in question, why are the States to be disfranchised and denied their municipal right? What then is the purpose of Mr. Chase’s idea of disfranchising the States, turning them into territories and giving to Congress the power of making their local laws. This would be depriving States of their former unquestioned right of regulating suffrage. The States have heretofore made laws denying the suffrage to underage citizens, females, Negroes, Indians, unnaturalized aliens and others incapacitated by moral or physical defects.

If the States resume their places in the Union under your proclamation and the loyal votes of the people accepted, certainly they may assert the political sovereignty as it stood before the war.

The plan of throwing those States out of the Union grows out of the ambition of a class of usurpers to seize the occasion of depriving the States of their indubitable municipal rights . . . The object is undoubtedly to disfranchise the white race who had created the State governments of the South, and who contributed their full share in asserting national independence and creating the government of the United States. This is to be accomplished by the imposition of conditions by Congress on the readmission of those States into the Union which forfeits those municipal rights heretofore exerted by all States in their internal government.

An object now avowed is to enable Congress to constitute a State government by exacting conditions on admission which shall put blacks and whites on equality in the political control of a government originally created by the white race for themselves.

This is not merely manumission from masters, but it may turn out that those who have been held in servitude may become themselves the masters of the government created by another race. This revolutionary scheme looks to the establishment of a new control over the municipal rights of the State governments in the South, which has you well know been a favorite one of the late Secretary. You will remember that Mr. Chase suggested the modification of your amnesty and reconstruction proclamation, so as to allow all loyal citizens to vote, which included all the freedmen while excluding all the whites who had been engaged in the Rebellion. This would probably have thrown the governments of those states into the hands of the African race, as constituting the majority who had not borne arms against the government.”

(Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. (Letter from Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, December 6, 1864).

The Negro Must Be Enfranchised

In the immediate postwar the North’s Radical Republicans consolidated their victory over both the Constitution and the South and set their eyes on victory in the 1868 presidential election. They saw their path as disenfranchising those in the South who fought for independence, and giving the vote to the former slave. Some 500,000 of the latter voted for Republican U.S. Grant in 1868, which provided the thin 300,000 vote margin of victory over New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour.

The Negro Must Be Enfranchised

“Many Northerners were perfectly frank about the matter. The Negro must be enfranchised, they said, to counteract Southern white votes which would most certainly be given to Democrat party candidates. If this were not done, wrote a friend of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, it would produce evils “fearful to contemplate’ – ‘a great reduction of the Tariff doing away with its protective features [for Northern industry] – perhaps Free Trade to culminate with Repudiation, – for neither Southerners nor Northern Democrats have any bonds or many Greenbacks.”

The abolitionist-founded Nation opposed “the speedy re-admission of the Southern States” because of the effect it would have on government securities, and the New York Tribune was equally uncertain that “the cotton-planters,” educated by Calhoun “to the policy of keeping the Yankees from manufacturing,” would “vote solid to destroy the wealth-producing industry of the Loyal States.”

No wonder Governor Horatio Seymour of New York insisted that the radical talk of making the South over into the likeness of New England simply meant an acceptance of its “ideas of business, industry, money-making, spindles and looms.”

(The Price of Union, Avery Craven. The Pursuit of Southern History, George Brown Tindall, ed., LSU Press, pg. 272)

 

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

Well before the Dred Scott case of 1857 was the question brought before Connecticut Judge David Daggett, chief justice of the court of errors, in October 1833 raising the validity of a State law which “forbid any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State.” The law was in place as the State’s colored schools tended to “greatly increase the colored population of the State and thereby to the injury of the people.” The defendant, a free Negro, insisted that the law was unconstitutional as it was in violation of the United States Constitution regarding the equal rights of citizens of all States.”

Regarding “citizens,” only the 1789 Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2 states: “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”  The Dred Scott case of 1857 rested upon this, and the question before the Court was simply whether Scott was a citizen of a State, as argued below.

To underscore the validity of the Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2, the victorious Republican party was forced to follow the amendment route as it sought manipulation of the South’s black vote.

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

“Are slaves citizens? At the adoption of the Constitution of the United States [in 1789], every State was a slave State . . . We all know that slavery is recognized in that Constitution; it is the duty of this court to take that Constitution as it is, for we have sworn to support it . . . Then slaves were not considered citizens by the framers of the Constitution.

“Are free blacks citizens? . . . to my mind it would be a perversion of terms, and the well-known rules of construction, to say that slaves, free blacks or Indians were citizens, within the meaning of that term as used in the Constitution. God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound, by my duty, to say that they are not citizens.”

In the case of Hobbs vs Fogg the State of Pennsylvania furnished another strong precedent for the decision of the [Dred] Scott case. At the election of 1835 a negro offered to vote. Solely on account of his color, the judges of election refused the privilege. The Negro insisted that “as a freeman and citizen of the State” the provisions contained in the State constitution and laws entitled him to the right of suffrage. The judges justified themselves on the ground “that a free Negro or mulatto is not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution and law of the United States, and of the State of Pennsylvania, and, therefore, is not entitled to the right of suffrage . . .” The chief justice delivered the opinion, to which there was unanimous assent [to declare] “that no colored race was party to our social compact. Our ancestors settled the province as a community of white men; that the blacks were introduced into it as a race of slaves; whence an unconquerable prejudice of caste, which has come down to our day . . .” This is followed by “Yet it is proper to say that [Article 2, section 4] of the Federal Constitution, presents an obstacle to the political freedom of the Negro, which seems to be insuperable.”

Now then, in addition to the presumption that [those] of pure African blood whose ancestors had been American slaves, was presumed to have been born and to have continued a slave, these laws show that all the States had given to the Federal Constitution, from the days of its ratification down to the Dred Scott decision, a practical interpretation agreeing unanimously that a Negro, though free and a native of a State, was not a person as the word ‘citizen’ defines as that word was used by the framers of the Constitution.”

(The Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision. Elbert William R. Ewing. Cobden Publishing Company, 1909, pp. 67-69)

 

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

Gov. Orval Faubus’ Message to Arkansas:

“On Tuesday, September 24, 1957 . . . the cleverly conceived plans of the US Justice Department under Republican Herbert Brownell, were placed in execution. One thousand two hundred troops of the 101st Airborne Division were flown in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to occupy Little Rock’s Central High School.

At the same time, the entire Arkansas National Guard and Air guard were federalized and are now a part of the US Army and Air Force. We are now an occupied territory.

Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in the unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls – in the backs of students – and in the bloody face of a railroad worker, who was bayoneted and then felled by the butt of a rifle in the hands of a sergeant of the 101st Airborne Division. This man, on private property, as a guest in a home two blocks from the school, has been hospitalized. Others have suffered bayonet wounds from the hands of the US Army soldiers. Your New York newspapers also show the scenes.

Up until the time the injunction was issued against me by the imported federal judge, the peace had been kept in Little Rock by as few as 30 National Guardsmen. Not a blow was struck, no injury inflicted on any person, and no property damage sustained. I wish to point out that no violence broke out in the city until after the injunction was issued by the imported federal judge, and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn. And I might add here, all we have ever asked for is a little time, patience and understanding, as so often expressed by President Eisenhower himself, in solving this problem.

In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish – what is happening in America? Is every right in the United States Constitution now lost? Does the will of the people, that basic precept of our republic, no longer matter? Must the will of the majority now yield, under federal force, to the will of the minority, regardless of the consequences?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative . . . we no longer have a union of States under a republican form of government. If this be true, then the States are mere subdivisions of an all-powerful federal government, these subdivisions being nothing more than districts for the operation of federal agents and federal military forces – forces which operate without any regard for the rights of a sovereign State or its elected officials, and without due regard for personal and property rights.

The imported federal comes from a State a thousand miles away with no understanding whatsoever of the difficulties of our problems in the field of race relations.”

(Another Tragic Era: Gov. Faubus Gives His Side of the Arkansas Story. US News & World Report, October 4, 1957, pp. 66-67)

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)

The Key to a Successful Post-Civil War Peace

Colonel Benjamin Harrison’s “boys in blue” were the 70th Indiana Regiment and part of Sherman’s army which waged war upon defenseless women, children and old men in Georgia. Sent to Tennessee to temporarily command a brigade of northerners in 1864, he found them “quite unfit for duty in the field” – some hardly recovered from wounds, others just back from sick leave, and a large number of raw recruits, including many European immigrants unable to speak English.”

The mortal fear of New Yorker Horatio Seymour as president in 1868 and Democrat opposition to generous Union soldier benefits and pensions, Republicans quickly enfranchised 500,000 black men. This would give Grant his slim 300,000 margin of victory and thus assured “truly loyal governments in the South.”

Key to a Successful Post-Civil War Peace

“Harrison and . . . other northerners were determined that at the war’s such carnage had bought not merely a surcease from fighting but a true and lasting peace. Southern rebels, they believed, should willingly accept the new political and social order that emancipation and defeat had wrought.

White Southerners were determined to salvage as much of their old order as possible. As early as August 1865, Harrison warned an audience of returning soldiers in Indianapolis that their Southern foes were “just as wily, mean, impudent and devilish as they ever were . . . Beaten by the sword, they will now fall back on ‘the resources of statesmanship,’”

Politics would now be the new battleground where ex-rebels and their sympathizers in the northern Democratic party would strive to undo what Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, as well as Harrison and the Hoosier boys in blue, had accomplished.

Harrison did not advocate the immediate enfranchisement of the former slaves, but if white Southerners remained recalcitrant, he thought that the adoption of black suffrage offered the only way to produce truly loyal governments in the South. The key to a successful peace was to keep the rebels and “their northern allies out of power. If you don’t,” Harrison warned, “they will steal away, in the halls of Congress, the fruits won from them at the point of a glistening bayonet.”

To prevent that loss of the peace became the cardinal purpose of Harrison and most other Republicans in the immediate postwar years.”

(Benjamin Harrison. Charles W. Calhoun. Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 26-27)

Antebellum Race Relations

Antebellum Race Relations

Clifton Rodes Breckinridge (1846-1932) was the son of former US Congressman, Vice President and Major-General John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875). Clifton served in the war under his father and in the CS Navy; was elected to the House of Representatives from Arkansas and served as US Minister to Russia.

The following is excerpted from his early May 1900 address to the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South,” held in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Take the period of slavery. For generations, and under conditions generally considered the most trying, the races lived together in peace. If we had reason to believe that, with the great and permanent racial differences which exist, the nature of the races, or the nature of either of them, were truculent, then, indeed, would the future be dark.

But during all that period the relations of the races were not only peaceful, but, in the main, they were most kindly. Side by side with the assured power of the law, there were the associations of childhood, the sports and domestic service of later life, the care of sickness and old age, uniform consideration for good character of old age, and the respect and fidelity which were fit reflections of the manly honor, womanly care and refined and elevated rule which generally marked the domestic authority of the times.

All had their influence. All were developed under and enlightened construction of the Christian religion, and the aggravated crimes of later days were absolutely unknown.”

(Published in the Negro Universities Press, 1969, pp. 171-172)

Looking Back at Wilmington’s “1898”

Largely, if not totally ignored in today’s discussion regarding November 1898’s unfortunate “newspaper editorial confrontation turned-violent” is the lack of perspective regarding the long lead-up to it. The local government, media and university are all complicit in beating the drums of racial animosity which will lead to less racial harmony, not more. The most detailed and informed book regarding this sad event is not a book, but a hard-to-find 800-page doctoral dissertation found at the end. Unfortunately, there are only several poorly researched and outright fictional books which do nothing to enlighten the reader.

Looking Back at Wilmington’s “1898”

First, it is probable that had the war of 1861-1865 not occurred and the South was left on its own to solve the riddle of racial coexistence, no November 1898 violence would have occurred. This racial conundrum was imposed on the American South by African tribes enslaving their own people and selling them to English, and later New England traders. After the Civil War the Republican party, anxious to maintain political hegemony over the country, enfranchised black men. These, along with Union veterans bought with pension money, kept Republicans in power.

The Democratic party finally rid North Carolina of Republican/Carpetbag rule by 1872, but Wilmington remained a holdout of Republican power due to its majority black population. The Democratic party dominated State politics through the early 1890s.

After the Republican-Populist victory in State politics in 1896, the Republicans began a program common to political parties – they dismantle and rearrange legislation the opposition party had erected to establish their own barriers to their opponents ever returning to power. This political strategy continues today.

In the run-up to the 1896 elections, Populists realized their plight as described by Hal W. Ayer, chair of the New Hanover County Populist party: “If the Democrats won, they would continue to ignore the farmers; if Republicans won, independently of Populists, they would be forced by the large black constituency which constitutes the great body of the party into some of the [Reconstruction] recklessness of 1868; and this is something to be feared as much as Democratic rule.”

These Populists, many of them farmers who believe the Democrats should have been more politically-attentive to them in the past, and “who distrusted the large black element of the Republican party,” decided to cooperate with the Republicans in order to “defeat the arrogant and hypocritical Democrats, and at the same time secure by such cooperation a balance of power in the State Legislature that would effectually check any wild or reckless plan that might be advocated by the Republican party.” As with many partnerships, the Republicans would forget their Populist associates once in power.

Both the Wilmington Messenger and Wilmington Morning Star newspapers wrote of the specter of corrupt Reconstruction politics returning to bedevil white residents. The black-owned Wilmington Sentinel endorsed Daniel Russell for governor – who was nominally a Republican and ignored by party leadership – to ensure black unity within Republican ranks. To the dismay of white Democratic voters, Russell, who promised patronage positions to those lieutenants delivering the vote, was elected thanks to strong turnout in sixteen black-dominated counties, with 87 percent of eligible blacks voting. It is noteworthy that 20 percent of eligible black voters cast ballots for the Democratic candidate, and 8 percent voted for the Populist candidate.

An irony within white Republican ranks was though they preached racial equality publicly, “they resented black officeholding and activity in Republican party affairs.” While earlier a superior court judge, Russell himself stated that “Negroes are natural-born thieves. They will steal six days in the week and go to church on Sunday to shout and pray it off.” However, by the mid-1890s white Republicans were a minority in their party and only constituted those hungry for political employment.

Prior to the elections of 1898, black newspaper editor Alex Manly penned an unfortunate editorial which insulted white women and predictably incurred the wrath of the area’s white menfolk. Many prominent men in Wilmington demanded that the city’s Republican mayor and aldermen close down the paper and force the editor to leave town. The Republicans did little or nothing which eventually led to a violent confrontation.

But lost in today’s rhetoric is the very basis of Manly’s editorial and what prompted it. Why is this ignored and not identified as the primary cause? Manly was commenting on an earlier speech of Rebecca Felton of Georgia, wife of a legislator, who addressed a group of Savannah women earlier and denounced the rape of white farm women by black men while their husbands were far off in the fields working. Mrs. Felton demanded that the Republican party, the political home of most black voters and which preached hatred toward Democrats, do something to end the heinous crimes of their constituents.

Manly’s later editorial claimed that the white women had somehow encouraged the advances of the black men attacking them in their homes. This predictably led an enraged group of white residents to march to Manly’s establishment to escort him to the rail station. Not finding Manly, on the march back to their homes these men were fired upon by black men concealed in houses being passed, and they returned fire. This entire episode was preventable.

The black New Hanover County Coroner, David Jacobs, summoned a Coroner’s Jury the following day to investigate the deaths of five black men from gunshot wounds. Three white men were wounded in the affair, one seriously. Though there are numerous unsubstantiated estimates of those killed or wounded, we have only the coroner’s investigation as an official source. On November 15th, black resident Thomas Lane was tried for firing a pistol into the group of men marching to Manly’s news office. Lane quickly ran out the back, but the return fire unfortunately caused the death of an occupant, Josh Halsey.

An important but marginalized voice in this 1898 affair is Collector of Customs John C. Dancy, a black Edgecombe County native appointed by Republican presidential patronage to his position, and the highest-paid person in North Carolina at the time. In this influential position he was considered the head of the Republican party and expected to foster and deliver the vote, and he surrounded himself with black employees at the Custom house who were expected to promote party interests. After the violence of November 1898, Dancy concluded that all blame be placed upon Manly’s editorial, which lit the flame.

A question to be put to rest is the often-heard claim that the conflict ended democratically elected government in Wilmington. The Republican-Populist legislature, once in power in 1895, altered municipal charters to benefit themselves. They amended Wilmington’s charter “so as to establish a partly elected and partly appointed Board of Aldermen.

The amended charter did not alter ward lines but allowed “qualified voters of each ward to elect one alderman and empowered the Governor to appoint one alderman from each of the five wards.” (McDuffie, pg. 460-461).  Under the guise of “preventing misrule by the propertyless and ignorant elements,” the Republicans strictly controlled Wilmington’s municipal government.

(Politics in Wilmington and New Hanover County, NC: 1865-1900. Jerome A. McDuffie, PhD dissertation, 1979, Kent State University, pp. 442-453; 738)