November 10, 1898 is a day that should live in infamy. It marks the only time in our nation's history when an elected body government was successfully deposed by force, with new officials appointed by gunpoint, and blessed by the tacit approval of the state.
In miniature that sounds like the kind of the thing that "doesn't happen here", and indeed it typically doesn't... but the fact that it has happened, and that it was so quickly accepted and erased from history makes it all the more incumbent on us to remember.
This is two diaries in one: a history of the events that led to the Wilmington Massacre, and a stealth entry in my sporadic Literature for Kossacks series, examining a major novel written just a few years after.
Note: I tend to embed a lot of links when I write, but in this case I'm deferring largely to one source, the Wilmington Race Riot Commission's thorough report (link). The first part of this diary summarizes the major findings of that commission.
...
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the city of Wilmington, North Carolina found itself at the center of debates over the future of the South. Jim Crow laws were just beginning to take effect around the country, but the combination of a solid black majority in Wilmington and the support of sympathetic white Republicans (under the banner of a post-racial Fusion party) meant a very real danger for the whites who feared being ruled by the inferior races.
White racial unease was a basic feature of post-Reconstruction Southern life, but in the case of Wilmington this unease was effectively channeled by the newspapers, who whipped up fear and anger in their editorial pages. The sole black-owned paper, the Daily Record, was a target of particular ire for having the audacity to publish, for example, a scathing indictment of lynching. The paper's white editor was a traitor to his race.
Amid bitter polemics in the press and violence from a self-appointed group of thugs who called themselves the "Red Shirts", Alfred Moore Waddell formed his infamous Committee of Twenty-Five, an all-white group that was poised to take control if the election majorities should fall to blacks and Republicans. Waddell, a former U.S. Congressman and newspaperman, had opposed secession but fought for the South during the Civil War, but believed he might need to take control of the duly-elected government for the good and safety of the people.
Sure enough, when the election results came back exactly as Waddell feared, the white newspapers argued in their pages that violence was "inevitable".
What happened next is where the history gets a little foggy:
NOVEMBER 10, 1898
This much we know for certain: on November 10th the office of the Record was burned down, a riot broke out in the city, and Waddell's posse secured the 'resignation' of the mayor, board of aldermen, and chief of police. Waddell was 'appointed' the new mayor by the new aldermen (also 'appointed'), and the United States' only successful coup d'état was established.
The rest has taken some work to piece together, in large part because of the unreliability of the record. In a race riot where the less powerful black population was outgunned and dispersed, the bulk of material that has survived has come from the victors. The commission has tried to piece together a more accurate picture of November 10, through unpublished materials like letters. Even these accounts, in the context of a riot, vary greatly. Adding to the problem is the near non-existence of records related to casualties due to poor record-keeping and the nature of the murders. With few exceptions we know the exact names of white citizens wounded in the fighting, but only approximations of numbers of black casualties. The commission was only able to confirm 22 deaths with certainty, so keep in mind that's the minimum.
Accounts agree that the machine gun, initially brought out to intimidate black voters on election day, was put to brutally effective use. Both the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves took part, as well as locally organized paramilitary units. When the fighting finally ebbed and the new mayor was installed, the next campaign of terror against the black population began: banishment and forced dispersal. Some two dozen citizens, mostly black and professional, were officially banished from the city, with the number of black citizens who were 'allowed' to leave possibly numbering up to the thousands. The pronounced shift in demographics meant that Wilmington no longer had to worry about the black vote: it was eliminated from the town.
In any other context we can imagine some kind of punitive reaction from outside Wilmington, be it county, state, or federal response. In this country we give the assumption of legitimacy to duly elected governments, even when we doubt the results.
The federal government did nothing. Then-president William McKinley ignored the coup (despite keeping a close eye on it, as his personal papers revealed), as did Congress. The state of North Carolina's response went much further: the legislature passed not the first, but the most restrictive in its series of Jim Crow laws, effectively disenfranchising black voters and lending tacit approval to the new government of Wilmington. Waddell served for six years as the unchallenged mayor of Wilmington.
Worse still, the official history had been written... by the same newspapers who promoted the coup in the first place. These 'official' accounts drifted up North as well and became, besides word of mouth, the major source of information about the events in Wilmington. Collier's Weekly even provided the new mayor of Wilmington space to explain that the armed insurrection had been necessary to preserve order and prevent the ill-treatment of the town's black population.
Within a year this debate drifted to fiction, as well. A thinly-veiled novel by David Fulton, Hanover, or: the persecution of the lowly told the story of the massacre from the black perspective; it was soon followed by Charles Wadell Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. Both books were critical and public failures, swamped by the massive success of Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, which retold the coup from the official (read: white) perspective. It's only in the last couple generations, and with substantial research into the era, that Dixon has sunk into obscurity and Chesnutt (in particular) risen to some kind of notoriety. With that, we shift to the second part of this diary:
+++
CHARLES WADDELL CHESNUTT
The car was conspicuously labeled at either end with large cards, similar to those in the other car, except that they bore the word "Colored" in black letters upon a white background. The author of this piece of legislation had contrived, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, that not merely should the passengers be separated by the color line, but that the reason for this division should be kept constantly in mind. Lest a white man should forget that he was white,--not a very likely contingency,--these cards would keep him constantly admonished of the fact; should a colored person endeavor, for a moment, to lose sight of his disability, these staring signs would remind him continually that between him and the rest of mankind not of his own color, there was by law a great gulf fixed.
Chesnutt (1858-1932) is one of U.S. history's unsung heroes. He was a lawyer, lifetime member and supporter of the NAACP, biographer of Frederick Douglass, and indefatigable social critic. As an author he was writing as a person of color in an age when there was little market for it. Despite limited critical acclaim, his lack of financial success effectively shut him down, especially after the publication of his most controversial work, The Marrow of Tradition, written and published just two years after the coup. Skeptical of the official record, Chesnutt had traveled to Wilmington to research the events for himself, and transforming his personal acquaintance with the victims and perpetrators into social fiction.
I don't understand why Chesnutt isn't a more well-known figure in American literature. His prose is occasionally clunky in a very late 19th-century way, especially when writing in dialect, but the breadth of his social vision is impressive even today. His books don't merely position great events as a battle between right and wrong (although there's plenty of moral anger at their core) but at the intersection of a complicated web of race, class, education, religion, and power. You got to Chesnutt's novels not to receive a history education, but to walk around in that history. The Marrow of Tradition is an epic in miniature, less directly polemical than other novels in its tradition.
Chesnutt practically tells us this in his choice of title and epigraph: rather than parade history in front of us, he wants us to cut through the extraneous surface to experience the very marrow of it. His main antagonist here is the newspapers who printed strongly ideological (read: racist) accounts of the massacre in a pointed campaign for the kinds of policies eventually codified into Jim Crow. Doomed to failure during his lifetime, Chesnutt was fighting an uphill battle against a history being rewritten around him.
It helps that Chesnutt has a deft hand with dialogue, and recognizes the way Southerners speak through conventions of exaggerated politeness. Note how this plays out in the following conversation over the wisdom of discussing money in front of the black servant, Sandy. Major Carteret owns one of the papers that is editorializing for white supremacy and worries about the safety of wealthy Mrs. Ochiltree:
"Is it quite prudent, Mrs. Ochiltree," suggested the major at a moment when Sandy, having set down the tray, had left the room for a little while, "to mention, in the presence of the servants, that you keep money in the house?"
"I beg your pardon, major," observed old Mr. Delamere, with a touch of stiffness. "The only servant in hearing of the conversation has been my own; and Sandy is as honest as any man in Wellington."
"You mean, sir," replied Carteret, with a smile, "as honest as any negro in Wellington."
"I make no exceptions, major," returned the old gentleman, with emphasis. "I would trust Sandy with my life,--he saved it once at the risk of his own."
"No doubt," mused the major, "the negro is capable of a certain doglike fidelity,--I make the comparison in a kindly sense,--a certain personal devotion which is admirable in itself, and fits him eminently for a servile career. I should imagine, however, that one could more safely trust his life with a negro than his portable property."
"In a kindly sense", of course: Carteret knows better than to unleash the full venom of his newspaper editorials on the kindly old man defending his servant. Instead he wraps his disagreement in the friendly poison of southern hospitality. In private, and among people more sympatico, he is capable of violent rhetoric against the race he perceives as inferior in every respect.
The elder Delamere knows Carteret's history with the newspapers, and challenges the major's "kindly" objections:
"Very clever, major! I read your paper, and know that your feeling is hostile toward the negro, but"--
The major made a gesture of dissent, but remained courteously silent until Mr. Delamere had finished.
"For my part," the old gentleman went on, "I think they have done very well, considering what they started from, and their limited opportunities. There was Adam Miller, for instance, who left a comfortable estate. His son George carries on the business, and the younger boy, William, is a good doctor and stands well with his profession. His hospital is a good thing, and if my estate were clear, I should like to do something for it."
"You are mistaken, sir, in imagining me hostile to the negro," explained Carteret. "On the contrary, I am friendly to his best interests. I give him employment; I pay taxes for schools to educate him, and for court-houses and jails to keep him in order. I merely object to being governed by an inferior and servile race."
Certainly the major considers himself a philantrophist in this respect, but the novel is astute about measuring the difference between public and private behavior, and the fact that the major is reframing his own racism in terms he hopes the elder Delamere will find acceptable, if not agree with (Delamere's attitudes are no less patronizing, if well-meaning.)
Chesnutt understands that the personal is political, and a great deal of the novel focuses on the way that various characters' theories about race align or misalign in their personal relationships. Nor is this analysis one-sided: he finds the black population of Wilmington torn between an older generation long bent into servility versus a younger generation experiencing a new range of freedom and possibility, between the financially successful and the struggling poor, between the educated and the superstitious, the religious and the secular.
Nor are these dichotomies simplistic. Take this scene, in which Miller, the educated black doctor recently returned from Europe, confronts Josh, his patient bent on revenge against white supremacist violence in his past.
"It was considerate of you to spare his life," said Miller dryly, "but you'll hit the wrong man some day. These are bad times for bad negroes. You'll get into a quarrel with a white man, and at the end of it there'll be a lynching, or a funeral. You'd better be peaceable and endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death."
"I expec's ter die a vi'lent death in a quarrel wid a w'ite man," replied Josh, in a matter-of-fact tone, "an' fu'thermo', he's gwine ter die at the same time, er a little befo'. I be'n takin' my own time 'bout killin' 'im; I ain' be'n crowdin' de man, but I'll be ready after a w'ile, an' den he kin look out!" [...]
Here was a negro who could remember an injury, who could shape his life to a definite purpose, if not a high or holy one. When his race reached the point where they would resent a wrong, there was hope that they might soon attain the stage where they would try, and, if need be, die, to defend a right. This man, too, had a purpose in life, and was willing to die that he might accomplish it. Miller was willing to give up his life to a cause. Would he be equally willing, he asked himself, to die for it?
In other words, Chesnutt avoids a facile confrontation between educated and ignorant, active and passive. This characters recognize each other in context and wonder about their place in the larger picture: Miller can appreciate how anger leads to action without patronizing Josh's lack of education. He appeals to Josh's belief in God to prevent an ill-advised act of violence, but he also understands that the desire for revenge is legitimate and, in some respects, inevitable.
Even the white supremacists are carefully drawn. On one hand we have the cultivated old South of major Cartaret, and on the other the new-money but low-class McBane. Considered a social embarrassment by the major, McBane resents the patronizing attitude of the landed but struggling aristocracy and their pretensions of superiority. And when McBane shouts insults at Cartaret's servant,
A momentary cloud of annoyance darkened Carteret's brow. McBane had always grated upon his aristocratic susceptibilities. The captain was an upstart, a product of the democratic idea operating upon the poor white man, the descendant of the indentured bondservant and the socially unfit. He had wealth and energy, however, and it was necessary to make use of him; but the example of such men was a strong incentive to Carteret in his campaign against the negro. It was distasteful enough to rub elbows with an illiterate and vulgar white man of no ancestry,--the risk of similar contact with negroes was to be avoided at any cost. He could hardly expect McBane to be a gentleman, but when among men of that class he might at least try to imitate their manners. A gentleman did not order his own servants around offensively, to say nothing of another's.
Otherwise separated by the mutual hostility of class hatred, they are united in a common cause: the expression of racial superiority over the new majority in their county, and the fear that the normal processes of democracy will find them governed by the very people they despise. The fear of a black leadership makes for strange bedfellows, each using the other out of distasteful convenience.
Chesnutt approaches each of these social dynamics with the scalpel of a surgeon, separating out the different groups, analyzing the ways they come together or break apart, gaining momentum until the inevitable happens: the massacre and coup d'etat. It's a powerful book, still thought-provoking and contentious, and despite its relative obscurity today it's long outlasted the newspaper editorials that threatened to rewrite the history entirely.
I won't go too far into the book because there's a great deal of pleasure in discovering how well Chesnutt constructs and reveals the relationships between his characters. Not all of it is successful (it has elements of a creaky, old-fashioned potboiler) but it's well rediscovering and reestablishing Chesnutt's place in American literary history. If I've convinced you to give it a chance, The Marrow of Tradition is available for free on GoogleBooks. A perfect way to remember the events of November 10, 1898.
+++
Further reading:
Frankly, the entire report by the Wilmington Race Riot Commission is worth reading. It covers a lot of material, from historical context to aftermath, and it's piled high with photographs, scans of telegrams and letters, and the kinds of material that make history junkies do cartwheels. (You'll be happy to note that the internet also has revisionist history sites, like 1898wilmington.com, taking up the cause of white supremacy. Seriously, they have a whole section defending the Klan as a response to black violence. Caveat lector.)
The Wilmington Massacre has been covered sporadically on this site over the years. I especially recommend Black Max's diary on the then-campaign for a Wilmington memorial, still relevant in its links and discussions of the history, as well as quaoar's sardonic take on the Charlotte Observer's 108-year old apology. Back in 2007 DrFrankLives discussed a vote in North Carolina to acknowledge the events and their impact, which - true to form - was opposed by the state's Republicans. Though it doesn't cover the events at Wilmington per se, Unitary Moonbat's (as usual) excellent essay on 19th century progressivism includes an entire section on the North Carolina voting issues during the events at Wilmington: scroll down to "A Racism So Noxious..." for more.
It's easy to see Chesnutt's novels the germs of a contemporary artist like John Sayles... So it's no big surprise that Sayles has also written about the Wilmington massacre in his latest novel, A Moment in the Sun (as well as a sadly-abandoned film project). Sayles' primary area of interest is the Philippine-American War, but in his typically sprawling way he brings the events of Wilmington into the picture, as well: see here for his interview with Amy Goodman, in which he discusses both events.