White Men and White Metal

This is excerpted from They Stole A City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy and published with permission of Penguin Press.

The campaign to reinstate white supremacy in North Carolina kicked off with a cannon blast on May 12, 1898. It was just after Confederate Memorial Day, the highest holy day on the Democrats’ calendar. Staging any other political rally in conjunction with this sacred commemoration would have been considered blasphemy, but this one, in Laurinburg, represented an explicit continuation of the Confederate cause. 

The 1890s had been tough, with the economy sinking into a serious depression that hit small-time farmers especially hard. At the same time, the Populist movement had put hundreds of Black men into political office, providing the perfect scapegoat. As a band played, the state’s top Democratic politicians assured the white people of North Carolina that “Negro domination” was responsible for their woes, and that it was only natural to feel “they were engaged in a righteous struggle, something far above politics, a sort of protection of home.”

The Democrats’ platform revolved around “white men and white metal.” (The latter plank represented Free Silver, a political movement that advocated for money backed by silver, while handily conjuring up the image of a gun.) Furnifold Simmons, the party’s state chairman, had begun calling for all-out assault on the multiracial, working-class coalition the Populists and the Republican Party—together known as the Fusionists—had built.

The white supremacy movement, he declared, needed “men who could write, men who could speak, and men who could ride.” Nothing less than the virility of American democracy, he implied, was on the line.

Chief among the men who could write was Josephus Daniels. He had been the editor and proprietor of the Raleigh News & Observer since 1894. Mocked by locals as “The Nuisance Disturber,” the paper had been hemorrhaging readers, but Daniels entreated a hundred of North Carolina’s most influential white men to help him buy it. He worked to make the sleepy broadsheet a political must-read, transforming it into “an aggressive exponent of Democracy.” His primary backer was the Durham tobacco magnate Julian Carr, an ardent white supremacist who later publicly bragged of having “horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirt hung in shreds.”

Daniels had two complementary objectives: increasing his paper’s circulation and delivering a Democratic victory. In its new incarnation as “a country paper, racy of the soil,” his News & Observer instrumentalized white supremacy to achieve both goals. No headline was too sensational, no cartoon too crude, no story too far-fetched. Daniels later acknowledged that “whenever there was any gross crime on the part of the Negroes, the News & Observer printed it in a lurid way, sometimes too lurid.” Black men assaulting white women “were few in number,” he confessed, but made for unsurpassable propaganda. “Burned to Ashes, the Black Devil, Riddled with Bullets First, a Righteous Judgment, Ravished and Then Killed a White Lady, Paid the Penalty for His Crime, an Outraged People Chased the Fiend for Two Days and When They Caught Him Made Short Work of Him,” one headline read.

Daniels came up with innovative ways of getting his product in front of as many white voters as possible. In concert with White Government Unions—local political clubs for white supremacist Democrats—he blanketed the state with newspapers, even sending them, spam-style, to people who had never subscribed. 

As the white supremacy campaign picked up speed, out-of-state newspapers joined in. The October 2, 1898, issue of The Atlanta Constitution carried a pages-long story claiming that Black people were plotting to colonize North Carolina, setting up a “sovereign Negro state.” In Wilmington, even the “Negro children are impudent and aggravating,” the paper claimed, warning that the situation was growing dire. “A little more than a month ago, Winchesters [rifles] began to be shipped in here and there is no telling how many citizens have taken the precaution to arm themselves so that they may be prepared if a riot breaks out.”

The Conspirators Join Forces

As North Carolina’s white elite worked to turn back the clock on racial equality, the world was barreling toward modernity. In 1898, the telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the elevator, the motion picture projector, and the Kodak camera were already in use. Wilmington braced for conflict; in New York, the Brooklyn Bridge was celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, while in Paris, Pierre and Marie Curie were weeks away from announcing their discovery of polonium. Just up the road, in New Bern, North Carolina, a pharmacist settled on the perfect name for a refreshing concoction of sugar, water, caramel, lemon oil, kola nuts, and nutmeg, calling it Pepsi-Cola.

On a nippy evening in early spring, Hugh MacRae’s castle glowed from within. The businessman and developer was expecting people. Eight men, to be exact, all neighbors: J. Allan Taylor (wholesale grocer), Hardy L. Fennell (a dealer in horses and saddlery), W. A. Johnson (dry goods merchant), L. B. Sasser (druggist), William Gilchrist (fertilizer company owner), P. B. Manning (attorney), E. S. Lathrop (bookkeeper), and his businessman brother-in-law, Walter L. Parsley, who walked over from next door.

The men weren’t social equals, or necessarily close friends. But they were all fervent Democrats, united in their determination to secure victory in the November elections. As Furnifold Simmons kicked off the statewide white supremacy campaign, they huddled in Hugh MacRae’s parlor, hatching a brash plan to deliver a winning result in Wilmington.

The group, who would become known as the Secret Nine, divided the city into five sections, following the contours of its electoral wards. In each one, they appointed an armed “citizens’ patrol,” led by a block captain and ready to mobilize upon command. Lieutenants compiled daily rosters of each man, woman, and child in their sectors for their block captains, as well as lists of armed men.

Ostensibly, each unit was charged with protecting the residents of its jurisdiction, but the detailed lists were also helpful for herding votes. “Vigilance committees” whipped white Democratic voters in each neighborhood into line, while ensuring, through harassment and intimidation, that Republicans of both races dared not vote.

The Secret Nine effectively created a citywide paramilitary. Another shadowy organization called Group Six was also planning for a white supremacist takeover, aided by the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce and the New Hanover County Democratic Party Campaign Committee. As Election Day neared, the groups overlapped and merged, stockpiling weapons and transforming the city into what one Democratic official described as “an armed camp.”

The Rise of a New Paramilitary 

The Wilmington Light Infantry was a social club as much as a military organization. The company had produced 65 commissioned Confederate officers, and its members cultivated a gallant, antebellum-style insouciance. Its headquarters were located on Market Street, in the same marble-clad building in which Colonel John Taylor, in the years before the Civil War, had hosted the prominent, well-connected Bellamy family for lavish Christmas feasts. There, Wilmington’s white sons of privilege drilled, networked, and preened, as well-born girls “walk[ed] by to silently flirt with boys on the porch.”

Aspirants applied in writing. Five black balls placed in the voting box meant rejection. “To become a member one had to rate high in his profession; he had to act like a gentleman, and be acceptable into the best society of the town,” a memoirist recalled.

In the spring of 1898, the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of these prominent white men were building a shrine to the Lost Cause. A new Confederate museum, housed in “two choice rooms” on the building’s second floor, intended, the Wilmington Messenger wrote, to tell “the true history of the heroic struggles of the valiant soldiers and willingly imposed self-sacrifices and privations of the noble women of the South.” 

Under the leadership of Mrs. William M. Parsley, volunteers from the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy gathered more than a thousand items: portraits, letters, photographs, uniforms, weapons, a piece of the smokestack of the Merrimac, “a minnie ball which passed through a portion of Colonel William L. DeRosset’s body and he found it in his pants pocket.” They were displayed in glass cases like religious relics rather than the detritus of defeat. As such, they invited veneration and communicated martyrdom, with a concomitant injunction to keep the faith.

All over the South, white women poured enormous amounts of energy into such memory-keeping ventures, understanding that they could shape the future by promoting their version of the past. Men grappled over the legacies of the war in the political arena; their female relations sought to shape the discourse through family, community, culture, and media such as Confederate Veteran, a magazine for which one of the Bellamy women posed in her antebellum skirts. “They built moats around their white tribe’s castles to save children from false history and impure knowledge,” the historian David Blight writes.

White Southerners’ tenacious promotion of the narrative of noble victimhood was highly effective in encouraging a nationwide amnesia about the issues—slavery, particularly—over which the war had actually been fought. Privileging national reunion over racial justice, white Northerners effectively let go of the war, ceding public remembrance to the Lost Cause juggernaut. In the 1890s, as populist movements began to endanger the political hegemony of the white elite, this opportunistic forgetting was reaching its height. Drained of contentiousness, Confederate memories, Blight writes, “offered a set of conservative traditions by which the entire country could gird itself against racial, political and industrial disorder.”

The Confederate museum at the WLI became the city’s most active site of dismemory, with a library stocking “a number of schoolbooks printed for the Dixie children,” promising “thrilling experiences of those stirring times.” Attitudes that were often only implied in the public square found full expression in the domestic sphere, where mothers passed racial prejudice and caste pride on to their offspring. 

Imbibed on a mother’s lap, this reverence could feel like a form of love. “They regarded their efforts to educate children as their most important work as they sought, in their words, to build ‘living monuments’ who would grow up to defend states’ rights and white supremacy,” the historian Karen L. Cox writes. Texts such as A Confederate Catechism inculcated in children ironclad confidence in the righteousness of the Southern cause:

Q: What causes led to the war between the States, from 1861 to 1865?

A: The disregard, on the part of States of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slave-holding States.

Q: How were the slaves treated?

A: With great kindness and care in nearly all cases, a cruel master being rare, and lost the respect of his neighbors if he treated his slaves badly. Self-interest would have prompted good treatment if a higher feeling of humanity had not.

In 1898, the white supremacists’ springtime celebrations of Confederate glory were really all about the fall election season. As the leaves turned from green to gold, the Democratic propaganda operation kicked into high gear. White men with typewriters pecked and pounded the white community into high umbrage, setting the stage for white men with white metal to realize their ultimate goal: forcing Black people out of politics, whether by the ballot box or at the barrel of a gun.