In 2000, North Carolina lawmakers Luther Jordan and Thomas Wright introduced Senate Bill 787 to the state legislature. After its passage, the new law established a fact-finding commission that examined the 1898 events occurring in the city of Wilmington. The commission concluded its study in 2005, and published the results in 2006. They ultimately found that what had taken place had nothing to do with re-establishing the rule of law, as the contemporary press reported, but a conspiracy.
A massive conspiracy; specifically a successful coup d'état; a perfect example of the concept imperium in imperio.
This is a story I’ve been meaning to write about for years on The-X-Spot. I didn’t because it is such a massive tale that I would have to spend a lot of time to do it justice. And I don’t pretend I’ll do it here, but it’s something that has once again become relevant because of recent events, with historical overviews occurring in mainstream media. And although they’ve stolen my thunder a bit, I feel remiss not commenting on its context within longstanding unresolved issues in US politics and society.
Wilmington is a modestly sized port city toward the southeastern corner of North Carolina. It’s current population is about 106,000, which demographically breaks down to 73.5% white, 19.9% African American, 6.1% Latino American, 1.2% Asian American and .5% native American. But in 1898, African Americans outnumbered whites by a simple majority. Because of its importance as a port city, this resulted in a level of affluence not experienced by most African Americans living in the US. For example, ten out of the eleven restaurants in the city were owned by African American individuals or firms, as was twenty of the city’s twenty-two barber shops. Blacks accounted for approximately 30% of the skilled labor force, and were actively involved in city governance with three aldermen, three magistrates, and ten officers on the town’s small police force.
No, that isn’t a typo. The year we’re talking about is 1898. Now, if you’re curious as to how this kind of multiculturalism flourished in a thriving southern town of the Nineteenth Century, it’s important to understand Wilmington's history. Note that even though a majority of the town’s citizens were black, the mayor, most of city government and the police force were comprised of white citizens, who interacted with their black colleagues as something a little more resembling peers than an antagonistic faction that they had to contend with.
The city governance came about due to shared concerns of black residents, and a good number of working class, lower-paid white residents, who realized that they had a common enemy in what used to be known as “city bosses.” After the end of the US Civil War in 1865, the pressure on President Andrew Johnson to help “reconstruct” the South were enormous to the future stability of the recently reunited nation. On the one hand, the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed 9 July 1868, recognized African American citizenship, which meant equal protection under the law. This included all rights, including the right to vote (for black men).* On the other hand, Johnson, himself a southerner sympathetic to ex-Confederates, pretty much scuttled the hopes the formerly enslaved might have of gaining any compensation for years of forced free labor capital. As noted on Houston University’s Digital History website, Johnson pardoned all Southerners after the war (and would eventually pardon ex-Confederate and wealthy plantation owners), returned all confiscated properties to their prewar owners, declined to send in military, logistical or economic support to incorporate ex-slaves into a fair market and legal system, and allowed for the passage of black codes, which in effect drove African Americans back into a de facto form of slavery.**
After the war, many of the planter and professional classes aligned with the Confederacy, simply took control of the state and local governments of North Carolina, free of the anxieties that might have arisen had Johnson (with the help of many other powerful players) not done everything in his power to defang Reconstruction. For a place like Wilmington, that meant the old ruling class felt free to take over city government. The problem for them was that they weren’t particularly adept at handling the reins of power, and were mired in corruption and scandal.
One of the key issues was the passage of an earlier bit of legislation. The 1873 Fourth Coinage Act, demonetized silver. If one had gold, during this era, they could convert it into currency (gold coins) by turning it over to the nearest mint, and paying a fee called “seigniorage.” But after 1873, you could no longer do the same with silver. Poorer whites and African Americans would have had more access to silver than they would to gold, but because of its devalued status, they could really only trade it amongst themselves. If they attempted to use silver to pay off debts to the ruling class, then the wealthy could (a) not accept it, or (b) accepted it at an exorbitant price, one greatly beyond the actual worth of the silver. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) there were both blacks and whites who found that their money simply wasn’t good enough, that their dollars were literally worth less than rich folks’ dollars. These same rich folks also supported the continued demonetization of silver, thus ensuring that those on the lower end of the social/political spectrum would stay there.
Another scandal had to deal with investment, railroad construction and debt relief. In short, an 1868 proposal to link North Carolina via railroad to the national grid would seem to be a boon to the entire state, including Wilmington. And people of many stripes invested in it through the purchase of bonds. But because of the corruption and ineptitude of Democratic Party leadership, the railroad never got made, and the bond holders couldn’t get their money back, let alone accrue interest. The state eventually settled the bonds for fifteen cents on the dollar.
In short, there were poorer and middle-income whites who were becoming more and more disenchanted with the ruling Democratic Party, and the social, political and economic lordship of its sponsors. Not only did they get shafted when investing through this government, but now their money had become increasingly worthless, their personal and collective autonomy shakier and shakier. And worse yet, they objected to growing gerrymandering of malcontent neighborhoods to maintain political dominance in the face of increased criticism.
So, they did something that might strike you as like “duh” commonsense, but would turn out to be revolutionary. The first hint of this came in 1892 when Leonidas Polk and other growers founded the Farmers’ Alliance, which within two years had morphed into a Populist Party. In 1896, the Republican party and the Populists joined forces to form a North Carlina Fusionist Party, Although they failed to deliver the state of North Carolina to the Republican nominee and ultimate winner William McKinley, they did win enough votes to get a Fusionist sympathist, Daniel Russel, into the governor's mansion.
In large part, the Fusionists could do this because of the edge given to them by African-American voters enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment. Up to that time, most blacks had voted Republican since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The Populists tapped into this political advantage because of the merger, thus aligning the interests of lower- and middle-income white voters with black voters.
While they were met with defeat and resistance in most of North Carolina, the majority black population could guarantee victory in the city elections of Wilmington. Four Fusionist leaders – Dr. Silas Wright, George French, WH Chadbourn and Flaviel Fosters formed an alliance with 2,000 prominent black citizens and 150 liberal to left white citizens (20 of them derisively called “carpetbaggers” because they had relocated from the North), to form a new coalition that they called “The Ring.”
Although not exactly resulting a quid pro quo political alliance, or for that matter equal representation, the local government of Wilmington, NC, who needed solid black support, conceded the need for open African American participation, hence the number of African Americans freely and openly engaged in municipal politics.
The result: in one city, located near the southeastern corner of North Carolina, the ruling class had been effectively and legally kicked out of political power. Furthermore, the movement might not just take over Wilmington, but gain momentum in the rest of the state, maybe in the entirety of the former CSA.
Of course, if one cannot legally regain power, one could, in the words of Niccolò Machiavelli, take control of the state through crime.
Especially with the help of mythical sex monsters.
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*Female suffrage came pursuant to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution on 18 August 1920, shortly before the national elections of that year. A number of people would point out that because of active voter suppression that occurred before, during and after the events of Wilmington, the bulk of African Americans, regardless of gender, were prevented from participating in North Carolina elections until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some sixty-seven years after the events chronicled here and forty-five years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
**The sharecropping system has not been only identified as a form of slavery, but as a more efficient form of slavery. Both poor whites and many southern blacks found few job prospects after the war. And since they didn't own land, and had few skills other than farming, their only real chance of short-term survival consisted of renting out overpriced lots from plantation owners, paying for overpriced goods at the plantation-owned “general store” on credit, and receiving relatively little for the crops they produced, thus ensuring an ever-increasing debt to the landlord. Just like in official slavery times, a person trying to escape her or his debt by running away to a northern state might be hunted down and forced to pay it off – either on the spot, or by future enforced labor. Although it would mellow out considerably during the 1930s and 1940s, sharecropping and its aftermath would continue, as chronicled in the 1960 CBS News special Harvest of Shame, hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
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