They marched in a raucous throng, shouting and chanting, making their way inexorably toward the building that housed the seat of their government. Their intentions were clear. Manipulated and roused to action by an inundation of fake news during the recent election year, they were set on overthrowing officials who had been lawfully elected to represent them. They meant to drive them out, by coercion or by violence, if necessary, for they had not shrunk from violence that day. This was a message to the whole of the country, that men such as they, white men who felt keenly that political change had taken from them the power they felt they deserved, the supremacy to which they felt entitled, that they would not be governed by those they despised, even if they had to defy the laws they claimed to love in order to make sure of it. So with the recent election still fresh in their minds, they stormed the hall of government, kicking up a riot as they made their way through its corridors, shouting out insults as they flooded into the main chamber, pouring into the room and heaping abuse on the duly elected representatives for whom they had come searching. Innocent lives were lost in their historic insurrection, yet afterward, when the dust settled, they and the journalists who had helped to incite them would present these insurrectionists as victims, and as patriots. In the end, there would be no real accountability for the orchestrators of this coup, but the date would be long remembered and live in infamy . . . November 10th 1898.

What’s that? Oh you thought I was talking about January 6th, 2020? I suppose they do have some striking similarities, now that you mention it, but I’m referring to a different insurrection, which occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, 123 years ago. They’re quite different, I assure you. The Wilmington coup was deadly… well, yes, so was January 6th, but I mean deadlier, taking far more lives. And it was perpetrated by white supremacists… well, I mean explicitly, like ALL the insurrectionists were white supremacists, as in self-professed and proud, rather than on January 6th when it was just a good portion of the insurrectionists. Well, if nothing else, the insurrectionists of 1898 North Carolina were at least different in that they were staging a coup following an election they actually won, or rather, stole, and perhaps the biggest difference is that, they actually succeeded in their coup that day, and got away with it afterward, too. Surely those who incited the attempted coup of 2020 won’t also get away with such brazen sedition. OK, you’ve convinced me. Maybe the story of the Wilmington insurrection is indeed the perfect historical lesson we need to better understand how we must respond to the insurrection that took place in Washington, D.C., a year ago.

It has now been a full year since Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election encouraged Qanon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and true believer Trumpers to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the election results by coercing then Vice President Mike Pence not to accept the electoral vote tally. In marking a year since the Capitol attack, I want to shed some light on the event by looking to the past. The Capital attack of 2020 was hardly the first insurrection or attempt to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not counting numerous slave rebellions, the most famous of which I will have more to say about later, there remains a laundry list of failed insurrections like the one that occurred a year ago. There is Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and the Dorr Rebellion. There was the State of Muskogee in Florida, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and the Anti-Rent War in Upstate New York. Of course, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would count as one, though that too was a slave revolt, and the secession of the Confederate States can be counted as the most significant. Several insurrections occurred following the end of the Civil War as a response to Reconstruction, and these typically involved white supremacists, like the White League in Louisiana, which tried to rise up against their state government in 1874. The Wilmington Coup that I will be discussing has been called the only successful insurrection or coup in American history, but that’s not quite accurate. One white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction insurrection, the Election Massacre of 1874 in Alabama, was quite successful in driving out the Reconstruction government and suppressing Black voters, and was also, as its name indicates, very deadly. Indeed, it might even have been viewed as an example to follow by the orchestrators of Wilmington’s insurrection decades later. The reason I will focus on the Wilmington insurrection as a precedent and a lesson warning us against letting the leaders of such an insurrection go unpunished is because of some striking similarities. Like the previous insurrection in Alabama and like the Capitol attack of 2020, the Wilmington coup involved a reactionary minority, outnumbered at the polls, who sought to take back power illegitimately. As with every major insurrection in the 21st century, both the Alabama insurrection of 1874 and the one we’ll focus on in 1898 North Carolina were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and much like the Capitol attack, which has seen hundreds of participants prosecuted but none of its orchestraters, including media figures, congressional representatives, and the former president, held accountable, the leaders of these anti-Reconstruction coups were never prosecuted. However, unlike on January 6th, these insurrections succeeded, creating illegitimate, unelected governments, and encouraging similar violence in other Southern states to intimidate and disenfranchise Black voters. In fact, it can be argued that it was in this time, as white supremacists sought to illegally fortify their control of civil government and limit the political influence and economic opportunities of free Blacks that the kind of structural, systemic racism we see today first began to take shape. But what makes the Wilmington insurrection especially relevant today is the way that it was propelled by fake news propaganda, and the way its orchestrators afterward projected guilt onto their opponents. Just as apologists on the Right have claimed a false equivalence between Capitol insurrectionists and racial justice protestors, or attempted to gaslight the country by saying it was actually far-left provocateurs in disguise who stormed the Capitol, after the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, its leaders assured the rest of the nation that their seizure of power was all perfectly lawful and that their violence was actually warranted to quell a race riot initiated by Black residents of the city. The scary part is that most seem to have believed them, and this false narrative of their massacre was accepted as accurate history for more than fifty years.

This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts anti-Reconstructionist white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League combining forces to restore a “white man’s government” and redeem the “lost cause” by brutally oppressing free Citizens.

In order to grasp the motivations of the insurrectionists in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, we must look further back, at the struggle for political power in this important coastal city beginning during the Civil War. Wilmington, as with all of North Carolina, had always been a contested state, split between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party. The state was among the very last to secede and join the Confederacy, and after the Confederacy’s collapse and the end of the Civil War, Wilmington was something of a Mecca for free Blacks. There had always been a relatively large population of free Black people living in North Carolina even before the war between the states, and from the nation’s independence until 1835, the state actually permitted free Black men to vote. And at Wilmington, a bustling trade hub on Cape Fear, there were many port jobs available to Black workers, loading and hauling shipments of fruits and vegetables, rice and corn, peanuts and cotton, tar and guano. Out in the forests, they worked in the timber industry, or harvesting sap to process into turpentine. In 1868, after more than 30 years denied the vote, free Black men who lived and worked around Wilmington were again given the opportunity to exercise the franchise, and even to campaign as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. With the state under the control of Union forces following the end of the war, and Confederates who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union being denied the right to hold office or vote, it was no surprise that Republicans took the majority of delegate positions in the convention. More surprising and galling to the unreconstructed rebels, though, was that 13 Black men won their races and became delegates. The new state constitution being voted on might guarantee universal male suffrage, which, with the growing population of eligible Black voters around Cape Fear, meant that the party of slavery might never hold power again in cities like Wilmington. This was unacceptable to white supremacists, so unsurprisingly, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, only recently formed in Tennessee, increased in that area and commenced a voter intimidation campaign. A month before the election, the KKK placed placards around the city, warning that “When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike,” and publishing notices in newspapers stating that “THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT.” They even went so far as to parade ominously through the streets in their hoods, hauling a cart full of dry bones behind them. What the KKK did not count on, however, was the leadership of one delegate, a relentless campaigner for Black suffrage named Abraham Galloway, who roused his fellow Black men to patrol the streets with pistols and fence posts in hand, ready to combat any white-clad terrorist attempting to intimidate Black voters. Galloway’s resistance campaign was successful, the Black vote was not suppressed, Black men in North Carolina regained the right to vote under its new constitution, and the Ku Klux Klan, as such, did not come back to Wilmington again for several decades.

After the passage of the new constitution, the anti-slavery Republican Party, bolstered by the Black vote and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, kept control of the state for only a couple years. In 1870, former Whigs and white supremacists formed the Conservative Party and took back the legislature. Eventually the Conservative Party merged with the dominant Democrats, who by fearmongering and race-baiting were able to muster their white base enough to retake power in North Carolina through the 1870s and 1880s, during which time they rigged the game, making it so that certain county official positions that had been going to Black candidates were appointed by them instead of elected, and finding procedural excuses to suppress the Black vote. However, following a recession, many white farmers left the Democratic Party and joined the Populist Party in the early 1890s. A new alliance between the Republicans and the Populists, called Fusionism, would eventually retake the legislature and restore the election of county officials. By this time, sixteen counties in eastern North Carolina boasted Black majorities, and starting back in 1880, Wilmington had had the highest percentage of Black citizens of any city in the South, with a staggering 60 percent of the city’s population. The result was Fusionist domination in local politics, and Black residents winning election to office and earning appointment to positions typically reserved for white men. Wilmington, North Carolina, between 1894 and 1898, was ahead of its time as a truly racially diverse community. In addition to the majority white Republican and Populist officials, like the mayor, the police chief, and the deputy sheriff, there were several Black officials, including magistrates, aldermen, and police officers. In the end, this is what chafed Wilmington’s white supremacists the most. It wasn’t the loss of their party’s political influence, or even being outnumbered by free Blacks, who mostly kept to their own neighborhoods or to the poor, wooded areas outside town. Certainly the poor, jobless whites resented when employers hired a Black laborer instead of them, but the real impetus for the white supremacy campaign mounted in 1898 was the fact that some Black men had been elevated to positions of authority over white men. The mere thought that a white man might be arrested by a Black police officer and convicted by a Black magistrate led white supremacists to bemoan so-called “negro domination.” Of course, this was classic race-baiting. Black officials were still in the minority among the Republican leaders in Wilmington and across the state, and white Republicans were sensitive to the racial resentments of Democrats, and maintained an informal segregation, such that Black magistrates decided cases for Black residents, and Black police arrested only Black offenders. After all, despite many liberal and even radical Republicans in favor of racial equality before the law, many white Republicans still shared the same notions that Black and white should not be social equals. But these first gestures toward Jim Crow segregation were not enough for white supremacist Democrats, who would not be happy unless the Black residents of the Cape Fear area were stripped of any power and made as subservient and afraid as they once had been under the lashes of harsh overseers and cruel slave patrols.

A North Carolina newspaper cartoon spreading propaganda about “negro domination.”

Here, before I go further and discuss the inception of Wilmington’s White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, I feel I must digress to clarify something about the Civil War–era and postbellum Democratic and Republican parties. You’ll sometimes hear conservative commentators today criticize the modern-day Democratic Party as being the party of slavery and the KKK. Usually, it’s in defense of the modern-day Republican Party, which has become the favored party of white supremacists—a kind of whataboutism or tu quoque fallacy, a hurling of the same charge back at the accuser… y’know: classic “no puppet, you’re the puppet” rhetoric. But those who try to use the history of the Democratic Party against them like this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. First of all, it’s a conspiracy theory at heart, arguing that Democrats have somehow made the world forget that they used to be pro-slavery white supremacists and that they probably still secretly are. And if you accepted this, then you would have to accept that Republicans also must have taken on a kind of secret façade, one that actively promotes voter suppression, denies the existence of systemic racial injustice, rejects the grievances of racial justice protesters, and appears to actively be courting the support of white supremacists. So if Democrats today are secretly the party of racism, this must mean that the GOP secretly supports universal suffrage, stands behind BLM, actually wants schools to teach the history of racism despite all their protests, and only draws the support of white supremacists because those stupid racists have failed to see through the mutual ruse of both parties. It’s absurd, and such gaslighting relies on historical blindness; it only works on someone who doesn’t understand how our dominant political parties changed over the course of the 20th century. Some will try to simplify this change by saying that the two parties are just different parties with the same names, which is inaccurate, or that they merely “switched” or just swapped platforms, but that is not strictly true either. The change was gradual, called a realignment. At the same time as the Populists in North Carolina were giving Republicans the majority they needed, elsewhere, they were allying with Democrats and beginning to change the party. While previously, Republicans had been the party of a strong central government and Democrats campaigned against it, the populist William Jennings Bryan, who would eventually come to control the Democratic Party, argued instead that the federal government should have different priorities, focusing more on social justice. Bryan put Democrats on the path toward Progressivism, and after the Great Depression, the party was nearly unrecognizable. Meanwhile, Republicans were, at the same time, gradually losing Black voter support, and eventually moved away from arguing for a stronger federal government. Surely this was partly rhetorical, to move in opposition to their political rivals, who now advocated for federal programs, but it was also practical. As historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, the Republican Party has always been the party of big business interests. Early on, those business interests profited from the federal programs the Republicans pushed for, like the creation of a national currency and the institution of protective tariffs, but later, their big business supporters favored a less intrusive federal government, and the Republicans adjusted their principles accordingly. The realignment according to racial justice issues can be most clearly observed in the politics of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was Democrats who finally delivered significant civil rights legislation, and when Republicans achieved increased political influence in the South through their Southern Strategy, effectively becoming the new party of Southern white supremacy. So to sum up in a simplistic way, Republicans used to be socially progressive, but now Democrats are, and Democrats used to be the party of racism, but now Republicans are. Through it all, however, Republicans have remained the party of the rich. So when someone suggests that you should decide which party’s candidates to support based on what their parties used to represent, remember that it makes a lot more sense to support a party because of what it stands for now, or better yet, to support candidates based on their personal convictions.

Back to Wilmington in 1898, we have Democrats looking for a path to reclaim power from the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans, and we have white residents resenting the social and political equality awarded to the city’s Black majority. Having learned from the actions of anti-Reconstructionists elsewhere in recent decades, some Democrats planned out a White Supremacy Campaign ahead of the election that would deliver them everything they had lately lost to the Fusionists. And I’m not just calling it a “white supremacy campaign” because it was white men wanting to take free Blacks and their allies down a few pegs. No, that’s what its orchestrators called it, proudly, in capital letters. Devised by North Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, and Raleigh newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels, the plan was first and foremost to inflame resentment among white residents throughout what they called the “Negroized East” of North Carolina, with especial focus on the Black Belt counties, including Wilmington. This meant a focused propaganda campaign in his and other white supremacist newspapers, lamenting the suffering of poor Southern whites under so-called “Negro domination,” and arranging for public speakers to whip up the white populace to a fever pitch. If their propaganda campaign was successful, they correctly surmised that they would be able to command their own private army of enraged white supremacists come election day and would be able not only to carry the day through intimidation and fraud, but could even go further than that in the days after the election. As they commenced with their plan, using the printed word as well as political cartoons, what Simmons and Daniels found was that they needed to stir up more than just resentment over Black residents voting and holding positions of authority. They needed to spread fear throughout Cape Fear country, make it live up to its name. Following Daniels’s lead, white supremacist newspapers fell back on the age-old specter of the Black man as a beastly rapist. They printed story after lurid story about affairs between Black men and white women, which they presented as rapes, for the prevailing sentiment was that intercourse between the races cannot possibly be consensual. It got so ridiculous that he would report on complete non-events, like a white woman noticing a Black man cross her yard or a teen girl who felt uncomfortable in passing two Black teen boys in the street, and he would report them as narrow escapes from rape with headlines like “No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro.” He focused his reporting on Wilmington in order to demonstrate what he called “the result of Negro control in the city.” And make no mistake: he was not in earnest. Josephus Daniels knew what he was doing. In a later memoir, he admitted “that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” remarking that, “The propaganda was having good effect.” It succeeded in winning white Populists and even some Republicans to their cause because of deeply ingrained racial tensions, but also because the manipulative and false reporting was not robustly challenged. In one case, a Black newspaper editor did have the courage to challenge the propaganda, and it cost him everything.

White supremacist newspaper propagandist and orchestrator of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898, Josephus Daniels.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly was the publisher of a respected weekly Black newspaper in Wilmington, the Record, and he had long tried to follow in the tradition of Abraham Galloway before him, advocating for equality and justice for the Black citizens around Cape Fear. When he stirred the pot, he even made some enemies with certain ministers and upstanding figures in the Black community who preached accommodation, urging the Black residents of Wilmington to keep their heads down and avoid confrontation with whites at all costs. And none of Manly’s editorials upset them and enraged white supremacists as much as his challenges to the notion of Black men as insatiable, beastly rapists. Manly had the courage and honesty to point out the double standard, remarking on how frequently white men raped Black women without consequence. He suggested that if they were to condemn all rape, and seek to prosecute rapists whether they were Black or white, they would find the Black residents of Wilmington their greatest allies in such a crusade against this heinous crime. And he further challenged claims about the frequency with which Black men raped white women, rejecting the doctrine that white women could not possibly be consensual paramours of the Black men who may be caught with them. While Manly may have believed his editorials could do some good, speaking truth to power as good journalists should, in the hands of Josephus Daniels’s and Furnifold Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign, it became little more than fuel for the white hot fire they were stoking. They reprinted his most damning editorial over and over, suggesting that it was a provocation and an admission that Black men openly intended to ravage their white women. White supremacists threatened to haul Manly out of his newspaper office and lynch him, but Josephus Daniels discouraged such mob action. After all, it was only August. He much preferred to keep stoking resentments until Election Day, so he pressured the Republican Governor, Daniel Russell, to condemn Manly’s editorial. With white advertisers ceasing to do business with him, this was the beginning of the end for Alexander Manly in Wilmington.

During the next leg of his White Supremacist Campaign, Josephus Daniels kicked his fake news propaganda machine into high gear. He began to report on supposed rumors that the Black residents of Wilmington were planning an uprising. Never mind the fact that he and Furnifold Simmons and certain secret societies in Wilmington were planning their own uprising, which of course he did not report on. No, he reported unconfirmed rumors about Black women intending to burn down the white homes in which they were servants, of the entire Black populace intending to embark on a murder campaign house to house if the Democrats won the day. It was all part of the white supremacists’ plan to gaslight, to obfuscate, to project. Such that, when they finally chose their moment to enact violence, they could say they were defending themselves. And it worked. The white citizens of Wilmington began to stockpile an arsenal of revolvers and Winchester rifles. They even acquired a rapid-fire gun that they placed on a tugboat just off shore, and they invited certain Black leaders to a demonstration of their artillery piece just to intimidate them. Unsurprisingly, some Black citizens, fearing for their safety, also attempted to acquire guns, and the white gun sellers refused to fulfill their orders and informed Josephus Daniels, who reported on it as proof of the Black conspiracy to rise up in armed revolt, writing, “The Dark Scheme Has Been Detected.” In October, at a white supremacist rally called the Great White Man’s Basket Picnic, Red Shirt brigades from other regions travelled to put on a show. These mounted terrorists in red shirts showed how a terrifying brigade of armed white supremacists could intimidate Black and Republican voters. And the keynote speaker, Pitchfork Tillman, former governor of South Carolina and rabid white supremacist, spoke of his successful campaign to intimidate Black residents in his home state. He wore a scowl and an eyepatch as he recounted his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, in which he and his Red Shirts oversaw the murder of six Black men, an event that set off a series of similar attacks and an estimated 100 further murders leading up to the election of 1876, in which the Democrats took power, or “redeemed” the state. Following the Great White Man’s Rally and Picnic, the white supremacists of Cape Fear began wearing red and forming brigades of their own, and the lynchings of Black men steadily increased.

Amexander Manly, editor of the Black newspaper the *Daily Record*, and a courageous voice against white supremacist propaganda in late 19th-century North Carolina.

This was not the first time that false rumors of a forthcoming Black rebellion resulted in indiscriminate violence in North Carolina. Back in 1831, just north of North Carolina’s border with Virginia, Nat Turner initiated his bloody rebellion, killing more than fifty white residents of Southampton County, including women and children. While he and his followers remained at large, similar rumors began to spread south of the border, in North Carolina, that slaves were planning a large scale uprising. As in Wilmington more than 60 years later, the newspapers fanned the flames of this panic, falsely reporting that armies of fugitive slaves were marching into North Carolina, murdering white families and freeing their slaves to add to their numbers. It was the most horrific nightmare of slaveholders throughout the South, every Southern white man and woman’s secret terror, and whites in North Carolina, including Wilmington, reacted to their worst fear coming true without questioning its veracity. They rounded up Black people who had the misfortune of being out on the street or away from their plantations, many of whom had not even heard about Nat’s Fray, as it was called, and they whipped them, tortured them, burned them at the stake, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts as warnings to the other rebel slaves, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, there was not a single instance of a slave killing a white person in North Carolina at the time, or for some time afterward. The newspapers, in warning about a massacre of white residents, had incited the massacre of Black men and women instead. In 1898, when Josephus Daniels ratcheted up his White Supremacy Campaign to lie to the public about Black plans for an armed uprising, he was tapping into that same fear. And he certainly was knowingly misreporting, for accomplices in his campaign had hired Black detectives to infiltrate the community and report back on what the Black residents of Wilmington were up to, and these detectives had reported that the Black residents were not up to anything besides fearing for their lives. By this time, Daniels’s and Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign had determined to foment real violence after Election Day, so we can assume that when he began to spread rumors of this so-called Dark Scheme on Cape Fear, he was counting on his white readers having the very same reaction as they’d had in 1831. He would not be disappointed. Join me for Part Two to hear more about how this disinformation campaign led to voter intimidation, election fraud, armed insurrection, and massacre.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part One: The Dark Scheme

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