The Wilmington Massacre of 1898 was not an accident of mob violence or a moment of spontaneous fury. It was a plan, a deliberate and coordinated seizure of power, carried out in the clear light of day by men who believed that their race, and their race alone, had the right to rule. On November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, those men took up rifles and machine guns and overthrew a lawful, elected government of their own city. They murdered their fellow citizens, drove thousands from their homes, and installed themselves in power. It was the only successful coup d’état in the history of the United States, and for more than a century, the truth of what happened that day was buried beneath lies, fear, and the polite silence of those who benefited from it.
In the years after the Civil War, Wilmington had stood as a model of what Reconstruction promised and what it might have been. The city was the largest and wealthiest in North Carolina, a port of prosperity and progress. It was also majority Black. By the 1890s, fifty-six percent of its people were African American. Freed from slavery only a generation earlier, they had built schools, churches, businesses, and families. They worked as skilled artisans and tradesmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, teachers, and merchants. Ten of the city’s eleven restaurants were owned by Black citizens. Most of its barbershops, too. There was a Black-owned bank, the Metropolitan Trust Company, and a thriving professional class that included doctors, lawyers, and educators. In the City Market, Black and white vendors sold side by side, a sight that offended the racist sensibilities of the elite but spoke of a different possibility for the South.
Politically, Wilmington reflected the power of an unlikely alliance that had grown out of the frustrations of the 1890s. The Populists, mostly poor white farmers, and the Republicans, supported by Black voters, had joined forces in what was called Fusion politics. Together, they defeated the Democrats who had ruled the state since before the war. Fusionist victories in 1894 and 1896 swept reformers into office. The governor was a Republican, Daniel Russell. The legislature was controlled by the Fusionists. In Wilmington, a biracial city government was in place. The mayor, Silas Wright, was white. The Board of Aldermen was biracial. Ten of the city’s twenty-six police officers were Black. The Collector of Customs, John C. Dancy, a prominent Black leader, held a federal post that paid more than the governor’s salary. For the first time in Southern history, a city of any size functioned under a government in which Black men shared power equally with whites.
To the white Democratic establishment, this was intolerable. They called it “Negro domination” and “Negro rule,” words that filled their speeches and newspapers. Their opposition was not only political; it was personal, social, and violent. The idea that Black men could hold office, wear a badge, or give orders to whites offended everything they believed about race, hierarchy, and their own superiority. Economic resentment deepened the anger. White laborers saw skilled Black craftsmen as competition. Wealthy white businessmen resented paying taxes to fund a government they no longer controlled. Behind every complaint about corruption or misrule was a single conviction: that white men were meant to govern, and everyone else was meant to obey.
In 1898, the Democrats decided to end Fusion rule forever. The campaign they built to do it was one of the most ruthless in American political history. Its architect was Furnifold Simmons, chairman of the state Democratic Party. Simmons built his machine on three kinds of men: those who could write, those who could speak, and those who could ride. The writers included Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, a man who called his paper “the militant voice of white supremacy.” He filled it with racist cartoons, lurid stories of alleged Black crimes, and fabricated scandals. The speakers were men like Charles Aycock and Alfred Moore Waddell, gifted orators who toured the state urging white men to rise up and reclaim their birthright. And the riders were the Red Shirts, paramilitary terrorists who galloped through Black neighborhoods with rifles in their saddles, breaking up meetings, whipping men in front of their families, and warning them not to vote. Their slogan was simple and deadly: “White men’s rule, white men’s government, forever.”
At the local level, Wilmington’s business elite met in secret. They called themselves the “Secret Nine,” and they were not backwoods vigilantes. They were bankers, merchants, and lawyers, men of wealth and influence. Among them was Hugh MacRae, who would later develop some of the region’s most profitable enterprises. These were men who understood organization and planning. They knew that political control in the state would mean little if Wilmington remained a Fusion stronghold. They began to plot the overthrow of the city government. They raised funds to arm militias. They hired the Red Shirts from South Carolina to assist them. They bought machine guns for the Wilmington Light Infantry and the Naval Reserves. The plan was not for a riot. It was for a revolution.
The match that lit the fuse came from a newspaper. On August 18, 1898, Alexander Manley, editor of The Daily Record, published an editorial that answered a white woman from Georgia, Rebecca Felton, who had called for the lynching of Black men to protect the “virtue” of white women. Manley wrote that white men had long debauched Black women without consequence, and that some white women willingly sought relationships with Black men. He wrote with boldness and truth, knowing it would be dangerous. The editorial enraged the white establishment. Josephus Daniels reprinted it across the South, claiming it proved the threat of “Negro rule.” The Secret Nine seized upon it as their pretext for violence. Manley began receiving death threats. His press was moved to a new location for safety, but safety was an illusion. His name was now on their list.
The November elections approached under a cloud of intimidation. Red Shirts rode through the countryside firing into Black homes and parading armed through towns. In Wilmington, white merchants refused to sell guns or ammunition to Black customers. On November 8, the polls opened under armed guard. Voters were driven away at gunpoint. Ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent Democratic votes. When the counting was done, the Democrats had swept the state. But in Wilmington, the Fusionist city government remained in office, its term unexpired. To the conspirators, that was intolerable. They had won the election. Now they would take the city.
On November 9, white leaders gathered at the courthouse. Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate colonel, read aloud a document they called the White Declaration of Independence. It declared that white men would never again be ruled by “men of African origin.” It demanded that The Daily Record be closed and its editor expelled. A Committee of Twenty-Five was formed to enforce the ultimatum. That same day, Black community leaders, organized as the Committee of Colored Citizens, met with Waddell’s men to plead for peace. They promised to use their influence to calm the situation, but it made no difference. Manley had already fled the city, warned that a lynch mob was on its way. He disguised himself and escaped by train.
At dawn on November 10, Waddell led five hundred armed men to the building that housed The Daily Record. The mob broke in, destroyed the printing press, and set fire to the office. As smoke rose above the city, the crowd posed for photographs before the ruins, proud of their work. Then the mob turned outward. White men by the thousands swept into Black neighborhoods. They carried rifles, pistols, and shotguns. The crack of gunfire echoed through the streets. Homes were set ablaze. People were shot as they fled, gunned down in alleys, beaten in their doorways. Witnesses described women and children screaming, the smell of smoke and blood filling the air. Reverend J. Allen Kirk, who survived by hiding, later wrote that it “seemed like a mighty battle in war time.” He saw bodies lying in the streets, and he heard the cries of the wounded echo long into the night. Joshua Halsey, a Black man, was shot fourteen times in the head. His body was left in the street as a warning.
By the afternoon, the coup reached its final stage. Waddell and his men marched to City Hall. They surrounded the building and ordered the mayor, Silas Wright, and the aldermen to resign. They did so at gunpoint. Waddell declared himself mayor. He appointed an entirely new, all-white city government. It was a coup in every sense of the word, carried out not in secrecy but in public, under the protection of armed mobs and the approval of the city’s white elite. That night, the victors celebrated. The defeated were rounded up, paraded through the streets, and marched to the train station. Dozens of prominent Black and white Fusionist leaders were forced to leave the city permanently. Many never returned.
Over the next days, Wilmington’s Black population fled by the thousands. Families hid in swamps and forests, sleeping under trees to escape the gunfire. Businesses and homes were abandoned. The city that had been majority Black became majority white almost overnight. The property left behind was seized or sold for pennies on the dollar. The economic foundation of Wilmington’s Black middle class, built over three decades, was wiped away in three days. The human cost was far worse. The exact number of people killed is still unknown. Some said fourteen. Others said sixty. Later researchers estimated that the number could have reached three hundred. Not one of them was white. Not one of their killers was ever punished.
When the news reached Washington, appeals for help went unanswered. President William McKinley refused to intervene, claiming he could not act without a request from the governor. Governor Daniel Russell, the Republican who owed his position to the Fusionists, was terrified. He made no request. The federal government did nothing. The lesson was clear. The white supremacists had succeeded, and no one would stop them.
The rewards came swiftly. Waddell remained mayor until 1905, remembered by his peers as a civic leader. Furnifold Simmons became a United States Senator and served for thirty years. Charles Aycock was elected governor and celebrated as the “Education Governor,” a reformer who nevertheless defended the violence of 1898 as a necessary act to preserve civilization. Josephus Daniels went on to become Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson and later Ambassador to Mexico under Franklin Roosevelt. The men who had planned and led the massacre were rewarded with power, prestige, and history books that called them heroes.
Their political victory was not confined to Wilmington. Across North Carolina, the Democrats consolidated control. Within two years they passed laws imposing poll taxes and literacy tests. A “grandfather clause” exempted illiterate white voters from these requirements while excluding virtually all Black voters. The disenfranchisement was almost total. In 1896, there were more than one hundred twenty thousand registered Black voters in North Carolina. By 1902, there were barely six thousand. The promise of Reconstruction was gone. The Jim Crow era had begun.
For nearly a century, the Wilmington massacre was erased from polite history. Newspapers described it as a “race riot,” as if both sides had risen in equal fury. The victors wrote their own version, portraying themselves as men who restored order to a city supposedly on the brink of chaos. Waddell himself published an account in Collier’s Weekly, claiming the mob had acted in self-defense. Textbooks repeated the lie. Generations of children grew up hearing that Wilmington had suffered a disturbance, not a coup. White historians avoided the subject. Black survivors were silenced by fear. The city prospered again, but its memory was poisoned by omission.
It was not until the twenty-first century that the truth was publicly acknowledged. In 2000, the North Carolina legislature created the Wilmington Race Riot Commission to investigate the events of 1898. Six years later, the commission issued its final report. It concluded that what had happened was not a riot but a planned conspiracy, a coup carried out to install white supremacist rule. The report called the event by its proper names: massacre and insurrection. It traced the long economic and political damage that followed, showing how the loss of property and opportunity crippled Wilmington’s Black community for generations. In 2007, the North Carolina Democratic Party formally apologized for its role. Newspapers, including the News & Observer, did the same. The truth, long buried, began to surface.
Today, Wilmington has monuments that tell the story honestly. Historical markers stand near the sites of the burned newspaper office and the coup’s street battles. The park once named for Hugh MacRae has been renamed. Descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators have come together in dialogue, sharing their histories and their grief. A grave was finally marked for Joshua Halsey, one hundred twenty-three years after his murder. Documentaries, plays, and books have reclaimed the story from silence. The city now teaches the massacre in its schools. For the first time in more than a century, the ghosts have names.
Yet the lesson of Wilmington is not confined to history. It is a warning about what happens when lies replace truth, when fear replaces law, and when those who lose at the ballot box choose to rule by force instead of consent. The men who burned The Daily Record did not believe they were destroying democracy. They believed they were saving it, that they were defending civilization from imagined threats. That is how tyranny always begins, with men convinced that they are the guardians of order and that their cause excuses anything.
Wilmington was not just a Southern tragedy. It was an American one. It proved that democracy, even after the Civil War, was fragile. It showed that racial hatred, when organized and respectable, could undo the work of a generation. It revealed how propaganda and power can twist truth until murderers are called heroes and victims are forgotten. And it reminds us still that history does not stay buried. The flames that consumed The Daily Record burned more than a building. They consumed the belief that truth alone could protect liberty.
When we talk about Wilmington today, we are not only talking about 1898. We are talking about how nations remember. We are talking about whether the right to vote means anything when fear governs the polls. We are talking about whether history will be written by those who seek truth or those who torch it. The people who fled that city on November 10 carried little with them but faith that their story would one day be told.
Now, more than a century later, it finally is.
Sources Used
- The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898: A Briefing on the Coup and Massacre. (Primary source document, historical summary and analysis, covering events, participants, and aftermath of November 10, 1898.)
- The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 Outline. (Detailed event structure and chronology, including political background, actions of the Red Shirts, the White Declaration of Independence, and modern reckoning.)
- North Carolina Commission on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. Final Report. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2006.
- Josephus Daniels, The News & Observer archives (1898). Contemporary propaganda materials and political editorials used in the white supremacy campaign.
- Alfred Moore Waddell, “The Story of The Wilmington, N.C., Race Riots.” Collier’s Weekly, January 20, 1901.
- J. Allen Kirk, An Account of the Wilmington Race Riot. Wilmington: Wilmington Messenger Press, 1898.
- David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds. Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
- LeRae Umfleet, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot. Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2009.
- PBS Documentary: American Coup: Wilmington 1898. (Public Broadcasting Service, 2021.)
- North Carolina Democratic Party, Official Apology for the Wilmington Coup of 1898. (Raleigh, NC, 2007.)
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