Margaret Mulrooney - Race, Place, and Memory

Race, Place, and Memory
Cultural Heritage Studies
University Press of Florida

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
Race, Place,
and Memory
Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina
MARGARET M. MULROONEY
F O R E W O R D BY PAU L A . S H AC K E L

Gainesville / Tallahassee / Tampa / Boca Raton
Pensacola / Orlando / Miami / Jacksonville / Ft. Myers / Sarasota
Copyright 2018 by Margaret M. Mulrooney
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
This book may be available in an electronic edition.
23 22 21 20 19 18 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mulrooney, Margaret M., 1966– author. | Shackel, Paul A., author of foreword.
Title: Race, place, and memory : deep currents in Wilmington, North Carolina
/ Margaret M. Mulrooney ; foreword by Paul A. Shackel.
Other titles: Cultural heritage studies.
Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2018. | Series:
Cultural heritage studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017030450 | ISBN 9780813054926 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—North Carolina—Wilmington—History—19th
century. | Riots—North Carolina—Wilmington—History—19th century. |
Wilmington (N.C.)—Race relations.
Classification: LCC F264.W7 M85 2018 | DDC 305.8009756/27—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030450
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University
System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida
Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College
of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida,
University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

15 Northwest 15th Street
Gainesville, FL 32611–2079
http://upress.ufl.edu
FOR MARK
AND
HENRY AND MARY

CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Rising Tide, 1739–1840 11
2. Port in a Storm, 1840–1880 56
3. Slack Water, 1880–1920 111
4. Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 174
5. Soundings 244
Notes 283
Bibliography 319
Index 343
FIGURES
1.1. C. J. Sauthier’s map of Wilmington, 1769 21

1.2. Omar ibn Said (Moro), ca. 1855 53
2.1. Reproduction of a portrait of Alexander MacRae in his Masonic
regalia 59
3.1. The Sadgwar family 113
3.2. Gathering of Confederate veterans on the steps of the Wilmington
Light Infantry Armory 123
3.3. A gathering at the Confederate Monument, Oakdale Cemetery 124
3.4. Hugh MacRae’s home at 715 Market Street, ca. 1902 130
3.5. Alex Manly, editor of the Daily Record 133
4.1. Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, June 1921 177
4.2. Crowd gathered in front of City Hall to watch the Feast of the Pirates
Festival Parade, ca. 1927 183
4.3. Attorney John Jay Burney Sr. and Feast of the Pirates Festival chairman,
Paul O’Crowley 184
4.4. Float with white “Lady Liberty” 185
4.5. “Tillie in front of Tileston School” 192
4.6. Parade float carrying the 1952 Azalea Queen and her court 208
4.7. The Kiwanis Minstrels 209
4.8. The February 3, 1971, demonstration 234
5.1. Wilmington’s controversial 1898 Memorial, erected in 2008 278
FOREWORD
Heritage, Social Justice, and Peace Building

in Wilmington, North Carolina
The development of heritage and the promotion of heritage sites are essentially
political acts. Heritage connotes authenticity although the way it is developed
and negotiated is often about a group’s relationship to power. Places of heritage
can be centers that heighten dialogue, or they can create great rifts between
groups that may have very different memories of a place or events. Decisions
are made to promote one form of heritage over another, and academics, politi-
cians, or influential community leaders often play a role supporting these deci-
sions. In many instances, minority voices are muted, and one form of heritage
is privileged over another.
Margaret Mulrooney has provided a compelling overview of the contested
heritage related to race and power in Wilmington, North Carolina. While there
is a growing literature about how race is socially constructed, Race, Place, and
Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina provides an extraor-
dinarily detailed overview of the creation and reinforcement of race and race
relations in a southern American city. The conflict between recognizing the
difficult past and the opposing desire to forget or dilute this past is an ongoing
tension in the community today.
From the end of the seventeenth century, and into the beginning of the
eighteenth, with the threat of a growing underclass, racism based on skin color
became legislated throughout much of the new colonies. While we are accus-
tomed to seeing the horrific pictures of enslaved people with scars from beat-
ings, Mulrooney digs a bit deeper and explains that by the mid-nineteenth
century laws were created that allowed for the mutilation of black people. Le-
galized racism allowed the enslaved to be treated as property, and they were
sometimes branded or were punished in extreme cases by the amputation of
xii Foreword
hands or feet, castration, or burning to death, depending on the crime. Mul-

rooney clearly points out the contradiction about the American Revolution
being about freedom, but not freedom for those who were black and enslaved.
The focus of Mulrooney’s scholarship, with attention to the 1898 race riot, is
the way white elites persistently used violence and, importantly, memories of
violence to assert their supremacy in race relations even as blacks used compa-
rable strategies to resist their oppression. While race riots occurred in the city
into the twentieth century, all of these conflicts were a result of those in power
wanting to maintain control and preserve their racial privileges, while the
black community struggled for equal rights and justice. The white community
has controlled the narrative by sometimes portraying the African American
community as the instigators of the racial conflicts. African American writers
have tried to resurrect the history of the 1898 Revolution, writing about how
they were not the wrongdoers, focusing on structural inequalities and social
justice issues. However, this competing narrative has been fiercely challenged.
Focusing on this dual conflict over heritage and race relations in Wilm-
ington, Mulrooney’s scholarship shows the importance of public history and
making connections to the racial inequalities that exist today. While we can
historicize racial conflict, it is important to recognize that there is a lasting
racial tension that exists in contemporary American society, and it continues
to play out in places like Ferguson, Missouri; New York City; and Charleston,
South Carolina, with the shooting of members of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church
by a self-confessed racist in 2015 (to name a few).
Keeping the difficult past in focus can lead to a more pragmatic approach
that recognizes the connection between heritage and structural violence, and
issues related to social justice and stable peace. Heritage practitioners of peace
building can permanently alter relationships and radically empower those who
have suffered. In many ways, by exposing the histories and the contested heri-
tage in Wilmington, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington,
North Carolina is about recognizing the importance of developing a shared
heritage that can lead us on this new path for a more inclusive heritage in a
traditionally racially divided community.
Paul Shackel
Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A project as old as this one inevitably bears the marks of many helping hands.
In Wilmington, North Carolina, my former colleague Kathleen Berkeley de-
serves first mention. She was there at the very beginning in 1996 and has stayed
the course with me for two decades. I just cannot thank her enough. She sup-
ported my projects at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, men-
tored me through my early career, and pushed me more than anyone to think
carefully about what kind of book I was really trying to write. Other former
UNCW colleagues who contributed to and supported parts of this project in
the early years include Peggy Shaffer, now at Miami University of Ohio; Leisa
Meyer; David LaVere; Sue McCaffray; Melton McLaurin; and Phil Gerard.
The process of researching and writing this book proceeded very differently
from that of my earlier community studies. I conducted considerable research
before I left Wilmington, but except for a few conference papers, the work lan-
guished while I completed two other books, started a family, and moved into
administration. By the time I was ready to return to this project in earnest, I
had limited ability to travel to local archives. Fortunately, my hiatus coincided
with the digital revolution; many crucial collections had been made available
online, such as the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina and federal
census schedules for Wilmington. I am enormously grateful to the hundreds
of anonymous persons who, in digitizing the past, have enabled projects like
mine to succeed. When possible, I visited the Wilson Library at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I am grateful to the staff there for their
assistance. I also thank the staff at the New Hanover County Public Library, the
Cape Fear Museum, and the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society for tracking
down illustrations and arranging permissions.
Multiple colleagues at James Madison University contributed their expertise
as scholars and writers. In the early days of this project, Laura Henigman, Mary
Thompson, Maureen Shanahan, and I formed a writing group that enabled us
xiv Acknowledgments
to read and comment on each other’s work. Besides practical help and encour-
agement, they also provided important insights derived from their respective
disciplines of literature, gender studies, and art history. I also want to recognize
another friend and colleague, A. J. Morey, who not only provided thought-
ful comments on the manuscript but whose well-crafted and elegantly written
interdisciplinary study, Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves, inspired me to write
from the first-person point of view.
In the History Department, I have received support of various kinds, from
verbal feedback during brown-bag research presentations to lengthier con-
sultations over lunch or lattes. David Owusu-Ansah generously shared his
knowledge of West African history and cultural traditions and significantly
influenced my interpretations of Kunering in chapter 1 and of Omar ibn Said
in chapter 2. Steve Reich read the first prospectus and helped me decide at
that critical juncture to adopt the book’s chapter structure and periodization.
A scholar of African American history, he has remained an enthusiastic and
sympathetic ally. My American Studies buddy, Sidney Bland, read the entire
manuscript, provided extensive written comments, and counseled me wisely
regarding academic life and work. As department head, Gabrielle Lanier sup-
ported my semester-long release from departmental teaching and service so
that I could focus on my writing; as a fellow public historian, she also encour-
aged my attempts to infuse elements of this project into my classes and vice
versa.
Finding the right publisher took several tries. In 2012, I sent out an early
draft of the manuscript that was way too long and convoluted in places. In
retrospect, I can admit that it was absolutely awful and express my thanks to
the two anonymous readers whose comments helped me sharpen my purpose
and prose. When I emailed Paul Shackel in 2015, the draft was much tighter
and more clearly framed as a contribution to public history. He agreed that it
fit his Cultural Heritage Studies series very well and immediately put me in
contact with Meredith Babb at the University Press of Florida. They have both
provided expert guidance and encouragement. I am obliged to them and to
the press’s readers, who challenged me to keep polishing my argument at key
points and to cut even more words. Any remaining errors or shortcomings are
mine entirely.
Finally, I want to express my appreciation to some close friends and family
who in nurturing me nurtured this book. Among these I must acknowledge
Linda Cabe Halpern, who is my boss, my mentor, and a good friend (though
not necessarily in that order). She has been a stalwart supporter of all my vari-
ous endeavors since I came to James Madison University. Laura Henigman
Acknowledgments xv
and Bill Lawton also deserve special mention; besides writing projects (see
above), we have spent countless hours sharing meals, childrearing strategies,
and commentaries on life-work balance. My in-laws, Mary and Ken Hermes,
have always expressed real interest in my work and cheered me on in my pro-
fessional pursuits; I am blessed to be part of their family. My father, Marty, and
siblings, Jeanne, Eileen, Debbie, Mike, and Nora, encourage me via phone and
email and text messages. Though I do not see them in person very often, they
are close to my heart and remind me of my roots in another Wilmington, the
one on the Delaware River.
Mark Hermes was with me in North Carolina and has been at my side ever
since. He is my calm, safe spot in the hurricane of life, and an anchor for our
bright and beautiful children, Henry and Mary Eleanor. This book is for him
and for them, my past, present, and future.
INTRODUCTION
In July 1996, I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, to fill a visiting profes-

sor of public history position. During my first weekend in town, Hurricane
Bertha made landfall at nearby Topsail Island. A much stronger Fran fol-
lowed seven weeks later, just after classes at UNCW commenced. For me, a
raw newcomer, the storms’ impact eventually stripped away the romantic-
yet-modern image I had of the port city, its people, and its communal spirit.
Wilmington’s poorest citizens, like their counterparts in New Orleans dur-
ing Katrina, could not afford to evacuate; black neighborhoods and housing
projects, already aging and in need of repair, experienced irreversible dam-
age; and majority-black areas of the city lacked services longer than the white
ones. The floodwaters left layers of sludge and sand in many places, but for
me, they moved gently, metaphorically across my brain, beginning to wash
away years of muddy thinking about race and history in America. Other
events that year removed additional layers.1
While hurricane cleanup commenced, colleagues in the History Depart-
ment invited me to join a grassroots effort to commemorate the Wilmington
“race riot” of 1898. The phrase “race riot” is in quotations because, as I quickly
learned, white and black Wilmingtonians had constructed competing narra-
tives of this event. To many whites, especially long-time, native-born residents,
the “race riot” was an uprising of armed blacks that white civic leaders sup-
pressed when they redeemed the city government from corruption and mis-
rule. For many blacks, especially long-term, native-born residents, “race riot”
meant the organized massacre of unarmed black civilians by white paramilitary
organizations and state troops while civic leaders affected a municipal coup
d’état. Complicating matters were conflicting memories of two modern “race
riots,” one in 1968 and another in 1971. Furthermore, each population linked
contemporary racial tensions to this heritage of racial violence. Local whites
generally believed the city had a long history of good race relations—except
2 Race, Place, and Memory
for a few instances when outsiders came in and stirred the black community
up. Local blacks, by contrast, generally felt that race relations were deplorable
and had always been so—except for brief periods when outsiders came in and
ensured equality for blacks. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a young
public historian.
The formal remembrance that occurred in November 1998 took two years
to plan and execute. While at UNCW, I served as public historian in residence
to the initial planning body, the 1898 Centennial Foundation, and I taught a
community studies class that produced Wilmington, North Carolina’s African
American Heritage Trail, a walking-tour brochure with several sites related to
the massacre and coup. Although two previous books about the 1898 “race
riot” had been published in the previous decade, neither had extensive reach:
one was an academic monograph, which many residents considered an off-
putting format; the other was a novel that many residents dismissed as fic-
tion. Thus, my particular products, completed in the commemoration’s early
phase, sparked considerable controversy, for they challenged in a new way the
official, white-authored narrative that had been in place for nearly a century.
As the commemoration unfolded, moreover, many of its other, later elements
also caused public disagreements. From economic redevelopment grants for
minority-owned businesses to a history lecture series and a physical memorial
to the massacre’s victims, the myriad projects implemented by the Centen-
nial Foundation and its successor organization surfaced problems that had far
more to do with contemporary inequities than historical events.
I caught another glimpse of these submerged problems when one of my
students, a young man named Hamiyd, delivered a lengthy letter that forcefully
but politely took me to task. A native Wilmingtonian, a resident of a public
housing project, and the only black student enrolled in my community studies
class, he considered the walking tour too celebratory. While it recognized sev-
eral local sites of racist violence and resistance, the narrative arc implied that
blacks had triumphed over adversity. His lived experience proved otherwise,
and he recommended to me a list of black-nationalistic authors to broaden my
perspective. Over the years, as I studied his community, participated in black
public-history projects here in Virginia, and pondered the national culture
wars, I recalled and reconsidered his words, each time understanding more
and more what kind of history he wanted. I hope this book comes close.
Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina is
not a celebratory work, although it does end on an optimistic note. Quite sim-
ply, I wanted to know why the 1998 commemoration ended up reinforcing
the racial status quo even as participants, myself included, sought to do the
Introduction 3
opposite. This interpretation will undoubtedly displease some of my former

colleagues and neighbors, but Wilmington is not unique: its memory proj-
ects reflect an ongoing power struggle that is well known to public histori-
ans yet still needs explication.2 Using Wilmington as a case study, I trace this
power struggle back to the eighteenth century and show how it manifested
itself through time in contests in three different structures of human experi-
ence and consciousness. For ease of analysis, I focused on the three structures
that materialized most clearly during the 1998 commemoration: racial identity
(who is considered white or black); civic identity (how spaces and places shape
residents’ sense of communal belonging or alienation); and collective memory
(who controls a community’s shared heritage). Analyzing each structure neces-
sitated a separate line of inquiry and the concomitant application of different
theories and methods, yet readers will find that race, place, and memory are
often as entangled on the pages that follow as they were for my subjects. In
fact, the chapters proceed chronologically, rather than thematically, in order
to emphasize how seemingly discrete activities, events, and conflicts actually
connect over a long period to reveal patterns of behavior and how these pat-
terns influenced the disputes that accompanied the 1998 commemoration.
Nevertheless, the central aim of this book is to use lessons from Wilmington
to illuminate and mitigate the broader power struggle that affects so many
public-history projects today.
Many scholars are interested in modern-day controversies over public
representations of the past. In the United States, much of this literature ac-
centuates public historians’ difficulties incorporating diverse Americans’ ex-
periences and perspectives into museum exhibits, living history programs, or
national parks. As Cathy Stanton notes in The Lowell Experiment, these efforts
to democratize the past are intended to raise the consciousness of living per-
sons regarding larger forces that shape and perpetuate hierarchies and to pro-
mote change. And as numerous essays, books, websites, and social media posts
show, this goal discomfits many segments of the general public, who prefer
the celebratory stuff of cultural heritage over the “tough stuff ” of professional
history, especially as it concerns groups that have traditionally suffered from
social ranking systems.3
My work both builds on and adds to those studies of cultural heritage
contests that affect an entire town or city, where cultural heritage denotes
the traditions, values, artifacts, or practices that purportedly define life in
that community. Like Cathy Stanton, for example, I am interested in the way
“history-making processes” are often influenced by public historians’ subjec-
tive positions as social actors in a neoliberal, postindustrial society, and I copy
her use of the first person to foreground my own standpoint. Unlike Stanton,
I trace these processes back to my community’s origins and interrogate a wide
range of what I call memory-making activities and heritage artifacts, includ-
ing processions, festivals, monuments, memoirs, photograph collections, pro-
motional publications, place names, local history texts, and commemorative
events. Like Seth Bruggeman’s Here, George Washington Was Born, my work
distinguishes between the motives of ordinary people, including amateur lo-
cal historians, and professional public historians trained after the 1970s. Be-
cause of its emphasis on the intersections between race, place, and memory,
this book has more in common with anthropologist Meika Polanco’s ethnog-
raphy of a historically black National Register district in Virginia; geographer
Michael Crutcher’s treatment of heritage tourism in Faubourg Tremé, a New
Orleans neighborhood; and sociologist Wanda Rushing’s analysis of racial
reconciliation and economic revitalization in Memphis. I have also incorpo-
rated insights from studies of other southern cities’ commemorations of racist
violence, such as Riot and Remembrance, James S. Hirsch’s account of Tulsa,
Oklahoma, and Civil Rights Memorials by Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman,
which includes Birmingham and Selma. In concert with all these individuals,
as well as historians like David Blight who study contests over memory in
earlier eras, I contend that representations of race in heritage projects matter
to the American public because they are always mobilized to serve partisan
purposes in the present.
In the context of cultural heritage, “partisan purposes” are those that serve
the interests of powerful and privileged people in a community. As Renee Ro-
mano and Leigh Raiford explain, these purposes may be economic, as when
tourism disproportionately profits business elites, but they can also be cultural,
as when selective interpretations of the past reinforce elite groups’ social status
and political control.4 Here, we find a bridge between cultural heritage studies
and cultural anthropology, which defines culture in terms of shared knowledge
and reveals how social groups manipulate access to knowledge to acquire and
retain power. This understanding of culture shaped my previous efforts to in-
terpret ethnic and class identity, and it still undergirds my approach to racial
and civic identity. By contrast, historians interrogating race and citizenship
have traditionally focused on access to political rights, especially the franchise.
Newer works, like Hannah Rosen’s study of the 1866 Memphis massacre and
Kevin Mumford’s book on the 1968 Newark riots, expand older notions of po-
litical citizenship to encompass modern theories of the public sphere. How-
ever, I use civic identity to mean an individual’s or group’s sense of belonging
culturally to a spatially bounded community. Unlike citizenship, civic identity
Introduction 5
includes feelings of attachment to (or alienation from) a place, town, state, or

nation independent of civil rights.
Using Wilmington as a case study, I argue that in every era whites and blacks
fashioned conflicting interpretations of the past in order to defend competing
racial and civic identities in their present. That is, the two groups, whom I fur-
ther divide into oldtimers (insiders) and newcomers (outsiders), perennially
constructed and reconstructed existing historical narratives in order to shape
the community they inhabited and the people they considered themselves to
be. This struggle explains why the 1998 commemoration proved as conten-
tious as it did. As archaeologist and public historian Paul Shackel recently
observed, “public memory is more a reflection of present political and social
relations than a true reconstruction of the past.”5 Thanks in part to growing
public awareness of the constructed nature of race, more and more Wilming-
tonians are recognizing and rejecting the structural legacies of slavery and
segregation, including white privilege. Though the community still has a way
to go to achieve equality, its trajectory, like that of other American communi-
ties, is clear.
I attribute this slow but positive transformation, in part, to the “power of
place.” Dolores Hayden, an architectural historian who has done significant
public-history work, used this phrase to explain how the emotional attach-
ments people have to physical spaces act back upon them to shape their sense
of personal identity.6 An example would be the attachment an old man has
to his high school, which functions as a mnemonic device aiding the recol-
lection of his cherished identity as a former track star. Not all attachments,
of course, are rooted in positive memories of past experiences. Individuals
can also attach to structures and landscapes negative memories of hardships
or traumas associated with those sites. What is constant is the way memories
transform spaces into meaningful places and the way places affect our sense
of well-being or distress. Indeed, depending upon the meanings or memories
attached to a location, a person may go out of his or her way to revisit or
avoid it. Historic places have a similar power. Instead of connecting people
to their personal pasts, they connect them to a cultural heritage shared with
others. Instead of shaping a person’s identity as an individual, they affirm an
identity as a member of a particular ethnic group, as a resident of a particular
city, as a citizen of a particular nation. In most cases, the heritage commemo-
rated at historic sites still overwhelmingly reflects the collective memories
of privileged white men and their ilk. To public historians, especially those
interpolating black history, the persistence of this bias in a democratic soci-
ety is a serious problem requiring serious action.7 As Hayden discovered in
Los Angeles, a community that ignores the histories of its nonelite, nonwhite
members effectively says: Only white elites matter here. The good news is
that, while an exclusionary public history helps alienate large numbers of
Americans from the body politic, an inclusive approach to the past can pro-
mote civic engagement and cultural belonging.
The physical landscape gets its civic power from the fact that, whether posi-
tive or negative in their associations, all places known to an individual share
a common origin as the site of specific stimuli, with each site situated among
others in a complex cognitive map.8 While each individual’s mental map is
unique, inscribed with the memories and meanings he or she alone attaches to
it, most sites are shared with other people and so become catalysts for collective
identities as well as personal ones. A version of this process was documented
in Robert Orsi’s 1985 study of Italian immigrants in Harlem, where individuals
paraded through city streets to manifest shared ethnic and religious identities
even as they declared non-Italian members of the neighborhood “Other.”9 A
more contemporary process is described by Alison Landsberg, who argues that
starting around 1900 modern media ruptured traditional methods of memory-
making and allowed people with “no natural claim” to certain memories to
incorporate them into their own experiences and identities.10 Both patterns ex-
isted in Wilmington, where urban spaces sheltered all sorts of structures, public
events, activities, and images that in turn stimulated the behaviors, memories,
and collective identities of its residents. Many historic sites, like the Market, the
courthouse, and the wharf district, have especially contested meanings because
their functions drew crowds that were simultaneously black and white, slave
and free, male and female, native and foreign born. Although attentive to the
ways that class, gender, and nativity influenced Wilmingtonians’ experiences in
and interpretations of urban spaces, in this book I am chiefly interested in race
and violence and their links to memory and place.11 If we are ever to achieve
an inclusive society, we must understand how place-based memories shaped
racial and civic identities in the past and how representations of those identi-
ties in public continue to influence race relations in the present.
Influenced by the field of critical whiteness studies, I also use Wilmingto-
nians’ historical constructions of race, place, and memory as a way to explore
questions about access to resources, opportunities, and power today. Notwith-
standing Barack Obama’s presidency, cited by many Americans as proof of our
post-racial status, the Black Lives Matter movement points to the persistence of
whiteness and some of its historic privileges. That persistence is not surprising.
Numerous scholarly studies document how the civil rights era’s goals of racial
integration and economic equality gave way in the 1970s and 1980s to celebra-
Introduction 7
tions of “diversity” and tolerance for disparity. Some scholars even assert the
emergence of a new Jim Crow, a racially segregated domain shaped by the
mass incarceration, mass disfranchisement, and mass unemployment of Afri-
can Americans. In the following pages, I argue that current problems are influ-
enced by collective memories of people, events, and places that have endured
for hundreds of years. By tracing the production and reproduction of such
memories in a single community, I seek to demystify the people, processes,
and events that contributed to structural racism, to expose the vulnerabilities
of the reified systems we inherited, and, following others of a postmodern bent,
to thereby motivate greater social change.12
It is time for what historian Manning Marable called a “historically-grounded
conversation” about race, one that recognizes as central to our common past
the destructive processes of racialization that occurred in this country.13 In
Wilmington, these destructive processes began in the 1730s, when a group
of elite, white aristocrats came to the lower Cape Fear and set about remak-
ing a “wilderness” according to the “civilized” image of South Carolina’s Low
Country. Their place-making goals not only led the founding generation to
embrace rice and naval stores, commodities that demanded water and exacted
blood, but to create for themselves and their progeny “a very considerable
Town” modeled on memories of Charleston.14 Organized racial violence was
essential to their vision. Never mere punishments, whippings, maimings, and
other forms of public bloodletting were part of a deliberate strategy to force
black acceptance of white elites’ economic, political, and cultural supremacy.
Outwardly, the strategy seemed to work. Wilmington prospered, and town
fathers congratulated themselves on their vibrant economy, cosmopolitan cul-
ture, and “good race relations.” As time passed, they and other white residents
internalized this positive civic identity, felt a sense of obligation to perpetuate
it, and helped pass it down through the generations along with their color, their
names, and their property.
Beneath this calm surface swirled deep currents of discontent. In every pe-
riod, black Wilmingtonians’ anger and resentment eventually surged up—from
organized slave revolts in the colonial period to the establishment of black
political organizations during Reconstruction and the sit-in movement of the
1960s. Significantly, these overt challenges to white authority were not wholly
native; rather, they resulted from complex changes influenced by newcomers,
both black and white, whose own place-making efforts perceptibly altered local
race relations. In each era, the community reached a tipping point, when elite
oldtimers reasserted their self-designated civic authority with a deliberate, di-
dactic application of large-scale racist violence. The most famous example oc-
curred in 1898, when nine prominent, white businessmen, led by descendants

of the city’s founders, brutally ended what they called “Negro Domination”
and set about recreating Wilmington’s “good” reputation. This attack was not
a shocking aberration, as recent studies contend, but a conscious reenactment
of past events. Moreover, three modern studies of race relations in contempo-
rary Wilmington agree that violence as a tactic to suppress black demands for
equality persisted through the late twentieth century.15 By probing the origins
and evolution of this long-standing pattern of behavior, especially how dif-
ferent populations of people (black and white, new and old) forget and recall
racial violence and employ it to construct different racial and civic identities,
this work not only sheds new light on race relations in southern cities like
Wilmington, but in a variety of American places.
Chapter 1, “Rising Tide, 1739–1840,” identifies four of this community’s most
salient, self-defined characteristics and shows how white elites developed and
deployed them to create a distinctive sense of place. I argue that violence es-
pecially affected colonial-era residents’ emergent racial and civic identities:
the Market where enslaved persons stood on the block for sale held different
meanings for blacks than it did for whites; so did places like Nigger Head Road,
where whites posted the decapitated skulls of suspected slave rebels. Similarly,
I use anthropological evidence to reinterpret a well-known regional practice
called “Kunering,” which enslaved Papaw men used to remember a cherished
identity as “warriors” even as white planters used it to assert their prerogatives
as “benevolent masters.” The rhetoric of liberty and pivotal local events like the
1765 Wilmington Stamp Act rebellion necessarily altered whites’ and blacks’
sense of identity, as did the violence of the Revolutionary War and its after-
math. Finally, I analyze racial tensions in the early 1800s, especially as revealed
by the lives of three famous black Wilmingtonians: David Walker, author of
An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1831); Louis Sheridan, a wealthy
free black who helped found Liberia; and “Moro,” a Muslim marabout (Omar
ibn Said) who whites lionized as an exemplary “loyal slave.” As we will see,
memories of all three men lingered long after their physical presence ended,
merging into and augmenting communal understandings of race and place.
Chapter 2, “Port in a Storm, 1840–1880,” interprets elite white efforts to
maintain the racial status quo in a period of profound changes. In the 1840s,
Wilmington became the state’s undisputed commercial center and largest slave
market. As its population swelled with newcomers, elite white civic leaders
promoted new commemorative celebrations and defined a distinctive “revo-
lutionary” identity around events, people, and structures associated with the
1760s and 1770s. Paradoxically, they also led a massive rebuilding campaign,
Introduction 9
became more aggressively pro-business, and adapted urban slavery to fit the
emergent industrial order. Although some blacks, such as skilled artisans and
free persons of color, benefited from these changes and crafted new commem-
orative rituals of their own, white supremacy and racist violence continued
to shape daily life. During the Civil War, most white residents supported the
Confederate “revolution” against tyranny and embraced their new identity.
Meanwhile, blacks initiated revolutions of a different sort. I trace the resulting
battles into Reconstruction, paying close attention to the relationship between
everyday violence and new commemorative rites like Klan parades and Deco-
ration Days. Although blacks gained important civil rights, oldtimers gerry-
mandered voter precincts, redeemed local and state governments, and assured
themselves that race relations were back to “normal.”
The title of chapter 3, “Slack Water,” refers to a low tide with lower than usual
water levels and stronger tidal currents. I use it to describe the years spanning
1880 to 1920, when whites in Wilmington embraced lynching as a new form
of organized racist violence, dramatically increased their memory-making
projects, and sharply curtailed black advancement to enhance their own. As
northern capital flowed into the Piedmont region of North Carolina, power
and prestige shifted west, away from the Cape Fear, and Wilmington’s white
civic leaders considered their growing marginalization untenable. They also
resented challenges closer to home: due to an alliance of Republicans and Pop-
ulists in the 1890s, pro-business Democrats lost control of municipal govern-
ment and a small number of black men found their way into public offices. In
response, in 1898 a group of prominent oldtimers orchestrated a violent attack
on black citizens in order to justify a municipal coup d’état, which they termed
the “Wilmington Revolution.” I reveal the social webs that connected the elite,
white revolutionaries, how shared identities and collective memories helped
them achieve their goals, and what black counter-narratives tell us about this
“race riot’s” broader meaning. The chapter concludes with Wilmington’s return
to economic and political prominence during World War I and efforts to sup-
press new assertions of black citizenship, which arose despite segregation.
Chapter 4, “Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990,” explores white civic leaders’ struggle
to maintain the port city’s core characteristics as the twentieth century ad-
vanced and the civil rights movement rose and fell. I emphasize how local
white boosters aggressively marketed the Wilmington area as a perfect vaca-
tion destination and business location. From pageants and festivals to muse-
ums and memoirs, white elites reimagined and repackaged their collective
past, all the while touting their modern, progressive outlook. For example,
in keeping with a broader, statewide embrace of civility, Wilmington’s leaders
began to disavow publicly their heritage of violence and revolution; however,

World War II revealed their ambivalence. With thousands of newcomers in
the area, including black soldiers who refused to be cowed, racial clashes oc-
curred regularly. After the war, white Wilmington reasserted civility through
new initiatives like the Azalea Festival, but another generation of black activ-
ists had come of age, and the stage was set for more violence and revolution.
As the civil rights movement proceeded, black youth increasingly embraced
militancy, and white authorities responded with armored tanks and federal
troops. This chapter explores several uprisings as well as the false conviction
of the Wilmington Ten and the impact of the national recession on the city’s
urban poor. With the rise in the 1980s of the New Right and the growth of
white-collar industries like higher education and film production, yet another
dramatic transformation began.
The final chapter, “Soundings,” measures the depth of race, place, and mem-
ory in the years leading up to, including, and immediately following the city’s
signal commemorative event, the 1998 centennial observance of the 1898
Wilmington Revolution. The end of the century was a time of intense national
discord over matters of race. Though many Americans upheld the need for
affirmative-action policies to redress historic wrongs, powerful counterargu-
ments arose that proclaimed the nation’s “post-racial” or “colorblind” status.
In the public-history arena, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives all
clashed regularly over representations of slavery, the Civil War, the Confeder-
ate flag, segregation, and the civil rights movement. The 1998 commemoration
cannot be understood apart from this context. Although I draw on and relate
my own experiences with the 1898 Centennial Foundation, I chiefly rely on of-
ficial minutes, letters, newsletters, and reports.16 Of special note is the tactical
debate that existed between those who felt it necessary to appease old-time,
elite, white Wilmingtonians’ version of the past and those who did not. Most
important are how and why certain elements of the 1998 commemoration sup-
ported the dominant, white-authored narrative while others worked to subtly
subvert it. Though Wilmington still needs an authentic public history, one that
acknowledges the power of place for blacks as well as whites, the streams of
change are flowing toward the future.
CHAPTER ONE
Rising Tide, 1739–1840
Sunlight glints playfully on the water. A modern tourist standing at the foot
of Market Street and gazing out over the Cape Fear River can be forgiven for
thinking Wilmington a peaceful, placid place. Time seems to stand still here.
The black water flows silently, its surface almost unmoving. Yet deep currents
and dangerous eddies lie below, as do snags, sandbars, and other submerged
obstacles. In this respect, the river becomes a visual metaphor for the passing
of centuries and the city’s transformation from colonial seaport to modern me-
tropolis. Filmmaker Ken Burns has made especially good use of such imagery.
In the opening sequence to The Civil War, the camera flies over a shining band
of water, offering a bird’s-eye view of a river’s path through the landscape, a
symbol of the nation’s wartime journey of self-discovery. It is an old trope, one
that recurs through songs like “Oh, Shenandoah” and novels like Huckleberry
Finn. And so I apply it to Wilmington’s public history: on the surface, the city
possesses a tranquil appearance and a timeless quality, but these traits have, in
fact, been carefully constructed to hide deeper truths.
A visitor need not walk far along the river park to find evidence of a recent
urban renaissance. Signs point one way to Chandler’s Wharf and another to the
Cotton Exchange, each an assemblage of high-end shops. One vendor offers
horse-drawn carriage rides, while another sells riverboat tours. A restaurant
called the Pilot House hawks oysters on the half-shell, and Tanyard Parish pro-
vides upscale condominiums. The names of these and other current businesses
deliberately evoke the city’s particular maritime past. You must resist the urge
to sentimentalize this place, however. It was as callous as it was picturesque.
Old Wilmington’s prosperity rested on chattel slavery and the regular use
of brute force. Just a few steps from the modern river walk stood the Market,
where white humans bought and sold their manacled brethren of color. Blacks
who resisted enslavement experienced beatings, brandings, and physical mu-
tilations that left scars both visible and invisible. Racist violence marked the
landscape, too, in place names, physical monuments, representational archi-

tecture, and community rituals that memorialized traumatic events in a trium-
phant, didactic way. The atmosphere today seems considerably different. But
a closer look reveals important continuities: water and blood, commerce and
violence. Then as now, the river generates a distinctive way of life.
To understand race, place, and memory in modern Wilmington, we must
travel back to the city’s beginning. Four of the community’s defining character-
istics emerged in the colonial period and had coalesced by 1840 to produce a
collectively constructed sense of place. Among them are: a kind of geographi-
cal, river-based boosterism; deference to a group of elite, founding families;
and pride in a localized “Revolutionary” heritage. Flowing beneath, through,
over, and around these three qualities was a repressive system of race rela-
tions. This fourth trait has never been adequately acknowledged. Even now,
the city’s long history of white-directed violence against blacks is still too of-
ten suppressed, considered aberrant, or blamed on deviants and outsiders. In
fact, racist violence was a way of life, a tradition essential to the creation and
maintenance of white supremacy. And whiteness, more than anything else,
determined whether and how a resident belonged to the civic body.
The historic experiences of black Wilmingtonians, like the violence they en-
dured, also deserve fuller treatment. From the moment African-born men and
women arrived here with their white masters, enslaved and free blacks resisted
their oppression and asserted their own place-based claims to be members of
the community. Their collective efforts to weave race, place, and memory into
a positive sense of black civic identity are just as central to the port city’s past as
white efforts. Though challenged at every turn by their white neighbors, people
of color took heart from the river they, too, loved—some called it Pocomoke,
an Algonquian name meaning black water. Dark-colored, silently moving day
in and day out, black bodies glided through the landscape, working and laugh-
ing, fighting and weeping and marking the passage of time.
Establishing “a Province within a Province”
Wilmingtonians have long recognized the centrality of the Cape Fear River
to their collective identity. Schoolchildren learn that it originates in the east
central portion of the state; that the north and south branches flow down
through the piedmont to a juncture called the Forks; and that there is where
colonial entrepreneurs platted the future port city. Yet Wilmington was not
the first settlement in the region. That distinction goes to Charles Town, oc-
cupied from 1664 to 1667 and now an archaeological site. Both communities
Rising Tide, 1739–1840 13
had to be built well upstream from the estuary, which was so shallow and had
so many shifting channels as to preclude development near the ocean until
after the Revolution. In fact, it was the treacherous nature of the headland,
littered with shipwrecks as early as 1611, that prompted the sobriquet “Cape of
Fear” in the first place.
Human behavior also made the region a fearsome place. A farmers’ upris-
ing called Cary’s Rebellion raged from 1708 to 1711, for example, and a bloody
war between settlers and Tuscarora Indians lasted from 1711 to 1713. Along the
coast, Blackbeard’s pirates terrorized passing ships from a base near Ocracoke
Inlet, and they regularly raided nearby communities on land. Even the region’s
“founding fathers” seemed prone to “passion and violence.” Consider planter
Maurice Moore: Acclaimed in period accounts as a bloodthirsty “Indian killer,”
he gained additional notoriety for a vigilante-style attack on Crown officials.
Apparently, Moore suspected Governor Charles Eden and others of collusion
with the outlaw Blackbeard, so he led a party of armed men to the home of the
colony’s secretary, where official records were kept, threatened the secretary’s
family and staff, and seized incriminating evidence. Though Eden escaped
charges, several men were convicted and Moore became an instant hero, one
later valorized as an early defender of local liberties against tyranny. Eden’s suc-
cessor, George Burrington, also had a formidable reputation. In one frequently
cited case, he tried to kill the colony’s chief justice: “[The Governor] broke the
windows & swore he would burn the house; he [said he] would have the dogg
her husband by the throat & threatened to fetch a barrel of gunpowder & blow
up the house.” Widely circulated, such stories not only functioned as caution-
ary tales for would-be challengers to local authorities, but they sanctioned the
everyday use of violence to assert elite rule.1
Power in Cape Fear country adhered to a close circle of planters who came
from Goose Creek, a rice-growing area just north of Charleston, and estab-
lished a “province within a province.” Known as the Family, they revolved
around Maurice Moore and his brothers, Roger, Nathaniel, and John, whose
descent from Sir John Yeamans, one of the original Carolina landgraves, gave
them an aristocratic advantage over their neighbors. Initially, the Moores and
their in-laws, the Drys, Howes, Rices, and Allens, struggled like everyone else
to adapt their slave-based culture to their new environment. The coast was a
harsh, windswept place characterized by salt marshes and grasslands. Moving
upriver, would-be planters found cypress swamps and vast coniferous forests
underlain by sandy, nutrient-poor soils. The semitropical climate also hindered
development. At least twenty major hurricanes occurred in the eighteenth cen-
tury alone. Because of these conditions, most early settlers did not engage in
staple crop agriculture at all. Instead, they directed their enslaved workers to
manufacture forest products and naval stores, commodities that distinguished
this region from the Carolinas’ two other population centers, Albemarle and
the Low Country.2
The production of tar, the area’s chief export, required a concomitant expan-
sion of slavery. Hundreds of hands scavenged dead branches, roots, and billets
cut from fallen trees scattered across miles of terrain. Additional slaves con-
structed and manned the region’s distinctive tar kilns, domed, earthen struc-
tures designed to capture molten resin from lightwood smoldering inside. It
was dangerous work: to regulate the temperature, the tender had to climb onto
the superheated dome to break open and reseal air holes, and he did this mul-
tiple times a day for at least a week. These early tar heels, almost exclusively
enslaved men living in crude, isolated camps, also boxed pines for turpentine,
felled trees for timber, and cut shingles. They comprised the vast majority of
the region’s black population by the 1730s.3
A much smaller but still significant number of enslaved people produced
rice, the region’s second major commodity. Until fairly recently, historians of
the Carolinas considered rice slaves ignorant field hands who contributed little
to colonial prosperity. Yet former tribesmen clearly provided brains as well as
brawn. Often taken purposefully from rice-growing areas in West Africa, they
designed sophisticated systems of dykes and gates, monitored the cycles of
flooding and draining needed to grow the plants, and tended the grains from
paddy to plate.4 We get a good sense of their daily lot from “An Account of the
Cape Fear Country,” published in 1731:
These Rice Swamps are flat, low Grounds, by the Sides of Rivers or Runs,
generally well cloathed with tall Timber and Canes underneath; some
with Trees only, others all Cane; . . . they are hardly ever quite dry, nor
ever so wet as to hurt the Rice, unless it be a very wet Time indeed. In
clearing these Swamps, they first cut down the Cane, and all the small
Underbrush, and gather it in Heaps; then fall the Saplings and great
Trees; the Branches of the Trees they generally lop off and burn with the
Saplings, but let their Bodies lie and rot, the Logs being little minded
because Rice is chiefly managed with the Hoe. They are most of them of
a deep black Mould and are something Boggy.5
This passage is a telling one. Its author was printer Hugh Meredith, Benjamin
Franklin’s former business partner, who had relocated to the Cape Fear in 1730.
Note how Meredith’s use of language shifts: his subject at the outset is clearly
“these rice swamps,” and he properly switches to the plural pronoun when
noting, “they are hardly ever quite dry.” In the next sentence, “they” references
(obliquely) African slaves, those who “cut the Cane,” cleared the swamps, and
“managed” the crop with hoes. In the final instance, however, his subject is
grammatically ambiguous, reflecting his conflation of the dark, wet men and
their black, boggy world. Made by a man for whom words were his stock-in-
trade, this slip of the pen not only reveals the slow destruction of the natural
landscape, but the humanity of those forced to destroy it.
As historians Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary noted, North
Carolina masters’ desire for “legal, political, and military dominance over
their human chattels,” coupled with their aggressive commercial orientation,
led to the regular use of “forceful, coercive, and direct methods of labor man-
agement, both co-optative and terroristic, the emphasis varying with time
and circumstance.” Whether clearing rice paddies or boxing pine trees, en-
slaved people suffered cruel punishments when they failed to perform ad-
equately, and they often received a second task as soon as the first one ended.
After their daily labor ended, they typically hunted, fished, and gardened
in an attempt to raise their meager corn-based diet to subsistence level. A
favored slave might receive a pass to take game and produce to market. Yet
this favor brought personal risk. The slave code of 1715 gave whites complete
authority to “apprehend all such Servants & Slaves as they conceive to be
runaways or travel without a Tickett” and offered a reward for each runaway
caught. Thus, enslaved people who labored under the task system not only
worked in their “free” time, but often ended up captured, tried, and flogged
for the privilege.6
Water and blood, violence and commerce: from these regional traits emerged
yet another important category of black labor, the watermen. Because free-
holds were widely dispersed along the creeks and inlets and rivers of the lower
Cape Fear region, white settlers relied on these highly skilled slaves to move
commodities to and from Brunswick, the port established and controlled by
the Moores. Sent downstream with instructions to transact business on their
master’s behalf, the black men disposed of whatever they transported and then
acquired manufactured goods and supplies in exchange. Such persons greatly
facilitated the region’s prosperity, but many black watermen deployed their
specialized skills to their own ends. A few managed to become free, wage-
earning fishermen or sailors or pilots. Others escaped into the swamps, estab-
lished hidden “maroon” communities, aided runaways, and consorted with
pirates and other maritime outcasts. By the 1730s, white society both revered
and feared black watermen, any one of whom might become the instrument of
a slave insurrection.7
“A Very Considerable Town”
Wilmington came into being as colonial settlement expanded west and the
volume of exports increased. In 1733, Governor Gabriel Johnston awarded large
land grants situated close to the forks of the Cape Fear to himself and several
close supporters. One of these men, John Watson, immediately platted his 640-
acre portion for a riverside port called New Liverpool. Watson sold half-acre
lots on condition that each purchaser build “a tenementable house” within two
years after date of sale. Other early promoters used similar procedures, includ-
ing merchant Joshua Grainger, who amassed a fortune and established another
influential, multigenerational Wilmington family. By 1737, the rapidly growing
community, which locals simply called Newton (New Town), included a vari-
ety of homes and businesses all laid out according to a formal, grid plan much
like Philadelphia’s.8
An intense competition soon developed between Newton and Brunswick,
the port controlled by the Moores. Beyond their economic rivalry, leaders of
the two communities took opposing sides on the legality of the blank land pat-
ents issued by previous governors and the collection of quit-rents, the property
taxes that landowners paid to the crown. The latter issue became particularly
divisive. Governor Johnston required that planters travel to specially desig-
nated locations and pay their taxes in gold or high-quality silver. Members
of the Family, citing an archaic law, insisted that tax collectors come to their
places of residence and accept payment in commodities. Relations among the
region’s old and new gentry deteriorated further in 1739, when Johnston an-
nounced his plan to relocate to Newton his council meetings, the court of oyer
and terminer, and the customs house.9 Newton was still at this point merely
a private development. Its boosters, Johnston included, knew that it needed
official sanction from the colony’s General Assembly to prosper. The Family,
however, used their control of the upper house or Council to kill any proposed
legislation.
The fight to make Newton an incorporated town reveals several tactics that
locals would resurrect at pivotal episodes in Wilmington’s future: an organized
effort to boost the physical location as good for commerce; the use of political
chicanery to achieve private, economic ends; and a power struggle between
new and old elites. Newton’s leaders began by arguing to the General Assembly
that incorporation would benefit the entire colony, and they cannily proposed
to name the new town for Governor Johnston’s influential patron, the Earl
of Wilmington, who would likely cast his favor on it. As evidence of popular
support, their petition bore an astonishing 105 signatures, all from prominent
landholders. The resulting bill, brought forth in the lower house, further ar-
gued that, “Whereas several merchants, tradesmen, artificiers, and other per-
sons of good substance have settled themselves at a village called Newton . . .
and whereas the said village by reason of its convenient situation . . . is capable
of receiving vessels of considerable burthen, safely in its roads beyond any
other part of the river, it is upon these and many other accounts more proper
for being erected into a Town or Township, than any other part of the river.”10
Note how the sentence twice extols the new location over “any other part of
the river.” Obviously, a thriving port town already existed, so to persuade the
assembly to erect a second one, the bill’s authors portrayed Newton’s natural
features (a deeper, freshwater harbor) as better for trade than Brunswick’s. The
burgesses promptly passed the act and awaited action from the seven-man up-
per house, the Council.
There, four members of the Family—Nathaniel Rice, Eleazar Allen, Edward
Moseley, and “King” Roger Moore—reveled in anticipation of another bloc
vote against the bill, which threatened their personal interests. The wily John-
ston outfoxed them. He had secretly written to London, asking approval to
appoint an eighth councilor, merchant James Murray, a recent Scottish immi-
grant intent on making Newton his home. Johnston had also privately awarded
senior councilor William Smith the right to cast a second vote in the event of
a tie. When the bill came forward, Rice, Allen, Moseley, and Moore voted nay;
Murray, Smith and the two others voted aye; and Smith immediately exercised
his new prerogative. Council minutes do not record the reaction in the cham-
ber, but judging from language in petitions filed afterwards, Family members
were apoplectic.11
As the dispute continued into the summer months, accusations became
more personal and more acrimonious. Suddenly, local elites disparaged the
Family’s “violent, restless and arbitrary spirit” and accused them of “insolent
behavior” toward their “superior,” the governor. In response, Family mem-
bers denied any wrongdoing and, significantly, asserted to the Board of Trade
in London their claim to be the Cape Fear’s rightful leaders: “[W]e are by no
means the sort of men they would insinuate us to be. . . . [W]e are none of us
natives of the province or except one have lived in it any considerable time.
[O]ur fortunes brought us into it [the province] and what we now possess
much superior to those of the gentlemen who have been pleased to take such
liberties with us.”12 Such language worked on two levels, to communicate
their identification with nobility in London and their superiority to Newton’s
promoters, whom they considered common upstarts. It was the first of many
instances when the Cape Fear’s founding families would ground their power
in heredity. Their argument apparently carried some weight, for the dispute
lasted until 1740. Ultimately, though, both houses finally affirmed the Wilm-
ington bill.
Once legally defined, the little hamlet became “a very considerable Town to
the great advantage of the whole Province.” By 1754, it boasted seventy resident
families to Brunswick’s twenty, and business on the town wharf was brisk. As
important as its favorable location and diversified economy was an unusual
level of autonomy. The assembly had granted Wilmington’s residents the right
to meet annually and elect five men from whom the governor would appoint
three commissioners. It was the first North Carolina town to have this privilege
and one of only three in the colonial period to act on it. Then, the situation
improved further when a new law in 1745 authorized Wilmingtonians to elect
all five commissioners themselves.13 Self-government thus became an early and
distinctive prerogative, one that later generations of the city’s elites would fight
to maintain.
Once elected, commissioners acted as patres familias to the larger com-
munity; that is, they promoted what they considered to be the common good,
prohibited whatever endangered it, and presumed deference as the just reward
for their stewardship. Not every man wanted or accepted such responsibility,
but most embraced it and fashioned from it a distinctive, patriarchal kind
of civic identity, one rooted in their attachment to the people and places of
Wilmington. Of course, this municipal appointment was not the sole source
of each man’s identity. As anthropologists and ethnohistorians now recognize,
self-consciousness sits at the nexus of an individual’s multiple, intersecting
(and often contradictory) cultural positions. In materialist terms, fully 60 per-
cent of the commissioners elected between 1743 and 1775 identified themselves
as “merchants,” even though they typically owned several large, rural proper-
ties and in other situations identified as “planters.” Artisans and craftsmen
made up another 25 percent, and about 10 percent listed a profession, such
as physician or lawyer. Nearly all of the commissioners thus had a personal
stake in promoting the economic prosperity of the community. Yet despite
the benefits that accrued to them upon election, the commissioners gener-
ally took their role seriously. They also inculcated a strong sense of civic duty
in their progeny. On the prerevolutionary rosters of commissioners, we find
many names that will recur throughout Wilmington history, such as Grainger,
Toomer, Harnett, De Rosset, Burgwin, and Wright. For these elite founding
families, civic leadership passed from generation to generation along with
wealth, social status, and skin color.14
Leadership mattered as Wilmington’s white population became more eth-
nically and socioeconomically stratified. In the 1730s and 1740s, hundreds of

immigrants from Northern Europe arrived. A small number of Palatine Ger-
mans, for example, came as redemptioners, who contracted to labor for those
who paid their fare, usually for a period of five to seven years. Most numerous
were the Highlanders: due to shifts in patterns of land use and the dismantling
of the traditional clan system after the English victory at Culloden in 1745,
more Scotsmen came to North Carolina than to any other American colony.
Some, like Roderick MacRae, whose direct descendants dramatically shaped
Wilmington’s development, moved inland, acquired large plantations, and par-
ticipated actively in colonial governance.15
Highlanders are worth noting because the ones living in and around Wilm-
ington constructed a specific, place-based identity that distinguished them
from English-born or -descended settlers. Local Scots prized traits ostensibly
transplanted from the harsh terrain they left behind: intense family loyalty, a
kind of stubborn autonomy, support for vigilantism, pride in austerity, and
a militant Christian faith. After Flora McDonald and three hundred Jacobite
families landed at Wilmington in 1774, a new narrative element emerged: ex-
ile. These defeated revolutionaries and their descendants soon claimed that all
Highlanders were political refugees who only came to North Carolina because
they had to. Although this memory still shapes local history to this day, most
Scots actually came in search of economic mobility, a goal very difficult to
achieve in a slave-based society.
Another notable stratum also characterized colonial Wilmington’s social hi-
erarchy: free persons of African or mulatto descent. Most of these free blacks
were former slaves manumitted by their owners, but a surprising number had
bought themselves out of bondage. They did so by hiring their own time, a
practice that arose when masters realized they could make money renting their
enslaved laborers to neighbors who could not afford to buy their own. Tech-
nically speaking, the law required the two white parties to sign a contract;
however, masters frequently allowed highly skilled slaves, such as carpenters
and masons, to make their own arrangements, live wherever they worked, and
retain part of their wages. Enslaved men and women readily manipulated the
oral nature of the system to their advantage; they agreed to work for one price,
reported a lower one to the master, and then pocketed the difference.16 Addi-
tionally, because skilled slaves who hired their own time usually set their own
pace and worked unsupervised, some made multiple contracts—with multiple
fees—at once. As a result, a small number of enslaved persons managed while
still in bondage to accumulate money and goods of their own, to become liter-
ate, and to exercise a modicum of freedom. Those who actually succeeded in
becoming free necessarily comprised a special elect. Still, there were among
free blacks subtle divisions that reflected an individual’s trade, level of educa-
tion, or relationship to a white patron.
Enslaved people occupied the lowest level of Wilmington society, but here,
too, were various strata. Domestic slaves like cooks, nurses, body servants,
butlers, and maids had a high status that stemmed partly from specialized
skills and partly from intimate proximity to their white owners. Almost con-
stantly on duty, they often shared their masters’ living quarters and had access
to better-quality food and clothing, literacy, and special privileges like travel
passes. Slaves with valuable commercial skills, such as turpentine distillers,
shipwrights, and coopers, or seamstresses and midwives, also had high status.
The bulk of Wilmington’s slaves were common laborers: stevedores, fishermen,
draymen, peddlers, laundresses, and the like. They were a constant, visible
presence as they moved through the sandy streets.
A 1769 map of Wilmington shows a small, but fairly typical “walking city,”
where blacks and whites, rich and poor lived and worked in close proxim-
ity to one another. (See figure 1.1.) On a hill several blocks east of the busy
waterfront a large church (A) looked down on homes and businesses below.
By this date, Wilmington boasted elegant residences, two coffeehouses, and a
Masonic lodge. The Courthouse (B) and Gaol (C) stand out, as well. They are
reminders that, for all its pretensions to gentility, Wilmington was as disorderly
as any other seaport. When the county militia mustered out, as it did four
times a year, the influx of adult, white men resulted in even more drinking,
gaming, and brawling than usual. At these times, an especially nasty form of
public fighting occurred: called “boxing,” it entailed deliberate facial maiming,
like slitting mouths and gouging eyeballs out, and reflected prevailing notions
of white masculinity. Wilmington also had a ducking stool, a gallows, and a
whipping post, where residents gathered in droves to witness violent spectacles
cloaked as legal punishments.17
More routinely, Wilmingtonians mingled at the Market, a powerful symbol
of the port’s commercial orientation and a place of contested memories. The
right to hold a regular public market came with Wilmington’s writ of incor-
poration and was enabled in the 1740s by the construction, at public expense,
of a structure dedicated exclusively to this purpose. Previously, vendors sold
their wares from stalls in the lower portion of the New Hanover County Court
House (B). Significantly, the new Market had a slave pen attached to one end.
Numerous civic leaders actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade for
profit.18 The existence of dedicated storage for their human “cargo” speaks to
Wilmington’s emerging role as a slave center.
Figure 1.1. C. J. Sauthier’s map of Wilmington, commissioned by the Board of Trade in 1769. He highlighted
five public or commercial buildings: A. Church, B. Court House, C. Gaol, D. Tann [sic] Yard, and E.
Still House. Occupied buildings and important roads and creeks are also indicated. Courtesy of New
Hanover County Public Library.
A Black Majority
Between 1755 and 1767, approximately eleven thousand enslaved Africans en-
tered the colony. Perhaps as many as 70 percent of these men, women, and
children, arrived after having marched in coffles from Virginia or South Caro-
lina. Slave ships could not cross the shoals off Cape Fear, but since Norfolk
and Charleston both welcomed these vessels on a regular basis, the number
of North Carolina slaves in the colonial period who were born in West Af-
rica was very high. Digitized port records suggest that at least three thousand
individuals were brought directly from West Africa to North Carolina ports.
At Wilmington, they stood on a block outside the Market, where prospective
buyers probed and prodded them before purchase. Most Africans ended up
on plantations with more than twenty other slaves; a significant number found
themselves living with fifty or even a hundred other bondsmen of many differ-
ent tribal affiliations. By 1763, the Lower Cape Fear region had a higher density
of slaves than any other part of North Carolina.19
As the slave population grew, white elites devised special laws to define and
control it. In 1715, three years after North Carolina’s authorized separation from
South Carolina, the General Assembly passed its first distinct slave code. Part
of a much larger set of ordinances designed to promote “peace and welfare” in
the region, “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” consisted of twenty-one
laws that identified blacks as a separate caste. Among other things, it prohib-
ited slaves from traveling without a “ticket” or an accompanying white servant.
It also restricted their ability to trade, barter, or sell goods. Yet most of the
code’s provisions actually targeted free whites: it barred them from harboring
runaways, marrying persons of color, allowing the erection of a black church
on their private property, or manumitting a slave for any reason except “meri-
torious service,” which had to be adjudged by a court. These and other policies
encouraged even the poorest whites to believe they were superior. The code
recognized white indentured servants’ need for “competent Dyet, clothing, and
lodging,” for example, but said nothing about the needs of slaves. It stated that
masters must not “exceed the bounds of moderation” in correcting servants
and allowed any white servant with “just cause for complaint” to petition a
magistrate, but left slaves entirely open to abuse.20
Moreover, the code established a new court system solely for slave crimi-
nals. In theory, a master was judge and jury in his own household. The as-
sembly recognized that in some cases, however, as when a slave committed
a felony against a white person, a public interest in slave justice prevailed. At
such times, the code called for a special tribunal of three justices and three
slave-owning freeholders. They were expected to reach a verdict swiftly so the
community could make a public example of the slave’s punishment and the
master would not be overly deprived of the accused slave’s labor. By allow-
ing for judgment without the application of pesky legal rules and fact-finding
procedures, such courts loudly proclaimed that community values about race
would govern slave justice, not the formal rationality of English common law.
In this way most of all, the code declared blacks inferior to white subjects of
the Crown.21
A second “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” appeared in 1741. Enacted
in response to the 1739 Stono Rebellion near Charleston, South Carolina, it had
more than twice the number of provisions as the earlier act and so provides
much greater detail about changing attitudes toward race. The first group of
provisions enhanced the elevated status of white indentured servants with lan-
guage that had not been used previously. For example, the code forbade the
indenturing of any “Christian” without his or her consent and signature on the
contract. It enjoined masters from whipping any Christian servant “naked” and
limited the number of lashes a servant could receive to twenty-one. It upheld
the servant’s legal right to seek redress from an abusive master in the courts,
to receive adequate food, shelter, and clothing, and to get freedom dues at the
end of service. It also added several new requirements that masters maintain
servants who fell ill, contracted a disease, or were severely injured. The 1741
code allowed that such circumstances must necessarily extend the servant’s
term upon recovery, but it denied masters’ ability to “remit” an ailing servant’s
remaining time to him or her and thereby evade responsibility.22 Enforcing
these ordinances was another matter, yet their enactment alone indicated that
elite North Carolinians recognized the common humanity of other whites. The
same cannot be inferred from the provisions concerning slaves.
A large number of the provisions (eleven out of fifty-eight) specifically con-
cerned the treatment of runaway African slaves. This section of the code en-
couraged common whites to find black fugitives through a new and generous
reward structure. Upon capture, the local constable had the power to authorize
a whipping of not more than thirty-nine lashes “well-laid on” and to incarcer-
ate the runaway in the public jail or “gaol.” If the slave could not or would not
name his or her master, the gaol keeper had to post a description of the captive
in a public location and place an advertisement in the nearest community’s
newspaper. While waiting for the master to turn up, the keeper could hire out
the slave as a way to recoup expenses, but if he did so, he had to have an iron
collar stamped “P.G.” for “public gaol” welded around the slave’s neck. If, after
two months, no one claimed the slave, the keeper had to remand him or her
back to the constable, who delivered the unfortunate person to the next juris-
diction, where the process of whipping, advertising, hiring out, and waiting
repeated itself, and so on and so on “until the said runaway shall be carried
home.”23
Even more telling, the language of the 1741 act indicated that slaves had
finally lost all remaining protections of English common law. The special tri-
bunal remained for slave criminals, but there was no presumption of black
innocence, no ability to testify against a white accuser, no jury, and no appeal.
Should the court sentence a slave to death, the code retained an earlier provi-
sion that the master receive compensation, an act designed to reinforce the
slave’s status as chattel. The expanded code further stipulated that a master
receive compensation if his slave were killed during an uprising, “destroyed”
while being apprehended or corrected by the court, or executed by the govern-
ment for conspiracy. The code deliberately declined to criminalize the act of
killing a slave. The omission is remarkable. Other British colonies, including
Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, had modified their codes to distinguish
between “homicide by misadventure,” as when a master or his agent inadver-
tently killed a slave during correction, and “casuall killing,” which occurred
when a master “willfully, maliciously, or designedly” killed a slave without
“provocation.” In 1730, in an effort to bring North Carolina into line with the
other southern colonies, King George himself directed Governor George Burr-
ington “to get a Law passed (if not already done) for the restraining of inhu-
man severity” exhibited by “ill” masters and to provide that “the wilful killing”
of enslaved “Indians & Negroes may be punished with death.” Instead, when
North Carolina had the opportunity to revise completely its legal system, it
purposefully upheld a master’s fundamental right to destroy his own property,
if he felt inclined to do so.24
Scholars have persuasively shown that laws both reflect and shape ideas
about race. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, most elite, white colo-
nists believed that physical differences like skin color and hair texture stemmed
from environmental or cultural factors in the country of origin. As the de-
cades passed, scientific theories associated with Linnaeus, Hume, and others
persuaded them that race inhered in the body and that different races had
vastly different capabilities. Supporting this shift in thought were specific
laws that focused on interracial marriage and procreation. Especially notable
was the 1715 statute that said, “no White man or woman shall intermarry with
any Negro, Mulatto, or Indyan man or woman.” By 1741, the North Carolina
assembly felt the need to criminalize marriage between whites and mixed-
race persons “to the Third Generation,” and stated plainly its intent to pre-
vent the “abominable mixture and spurious issue” that resulted from such
unions. Linked to prohibitions against bestiality, which had biblical roots,
anti-miscegenation laws reflected the growing conviction—despite obvious
evidence to the contrary—that whites differed so much in their physical es-
sence from nonwhites as to make interracial sex “unnatural.” The real anxiety
stemmed from the awareness that North Carolinian society, like the Carib-
bean’s, had become “too fluid, too given to racial and sexual intermixture.”
Whereas there had been in the colony in 1705 a mere one thousand slaves,
nearly all of whom were native-born Africans, there were by 1755 nearly
nineteen thousand slaves, of whom many were “mulatto.” There were also
by mid-century about four thousand free blacks, whose color ranged widely,
and thousands of indentured servants of varying hues.25 The complexion of
the colony was clearly changing. With too many shades of pale to know who
was free and who was not, North Carolinians used anti-miscegenation laws
to define whiteness and the privileges that went with it.
Physical violence played a critical role in the construction of race. Physician
John Brickell visited the Cape Fear in 1737 and dispassionately noted, “I have
frequently seen them [slaves] whipt to that degree that large pieces of their Skin
have been hanging down their Backs; yet I never have observed them to shed
a Tear, which plainly shows them to be a People of very harsh and stubborn
dispositions.” Such characterizations clearly worked to justify white exploita-
tion of black labor. Since slaves could not own property, they could not be
fined for misbehavior, and since incarceration simply exempted them from
work (and deprived the master of profit), whipping was the preferred form of
punishment. But something else was also going on. A 1746 law, for example,
prohibited blacks from testifying against whites, yet allowed them to testify
against each other and levied a sadistic punishment for lying under oath: one
ear would be nailed to a pillar for an hour, then it would be cut off and the
process repeated on the other side, after which the victim received thirty-nine
lashes laid on his or her bare back. This law stands in stark contrast to the afore-
mentioned act of 1746 that criminalized the maiming of white bodies through
boxing. My point is that by midcentury the mutilation of black bodies was
normative and visible in a way few Americans can fathom today. Besides keloid
scars from whipping, slaves often bore brands on their faces or shoulders as
well as other marks of physical trauma. Suspected thieves lost hands to the ax,
and runaways lost feet. Conviction for a capital crime might bring burning or
castration instead of the common (for whites) hanging.26
Perhaps paradoxically, masters fully expected slaves to rebel against this
mistreatment and sought to limit resistance by purchasing Africans from sup-
posedly docile tribes. Planters in South Carolina’s Low Country, for example,
initially sought Gambians, who purportedly understood risiculture already,
but they actually imported more Angolans than any other population, because
whites considered them more manageable. Igbos, by contrast, and certain other
peoples from the Bight of Biafra had a local reputation for physical weakness,
melancholia, and self-destruction through suicide. After the 1739 Stono Rebel-
lion, which had been led by Angolans, Carolina planters’ preferences shifted. I
could find no studies that document conclusively which tribes predominated
around Wilmington. However, evidence from African naming patterns does
indicate the presence here of Akans, Ewes, Fantas, Hausas, and Igbos. This
differentiation by ethnic group suggests that whites wanted to believe rebel-
liousness inhered in a specific population, but other actions indicate that, deep
down, they thought all blacks capable of it.27
Born in the colonial era, this certainty justified preemptive measures against
blacks well into the twentieth century. Whites already considered slave water-
men “natural rebels and outlaws.” They recalled that Blackbeard’s crew had
included four Africans and that a racially integrated group of pirates sailing
under the Spanish flag raided both Wilmington and Beaufort in 1748.28 During
the French and Indian War, fears of a general slave uprising prompted Wilm-
ington’s town fathers to insist that the governor station a sloop in the river to
guard the town and aid the local militia. In the 1770s, white Wilmingtonians
armed against real and imagined slave uprisings sparked by their own war for
independence. As we will see, similar episodes of organized white violence oc-
curred in 1831, 1865, 1898, 1941, 1968, and 1971. Likely a projection of their own
violent tendencies, white fears of a general black uprising recurred whenever
economic, political, and cultural forces created a climate of racial change.
More than a “Frolic”: Black Remembrance and Resistance
How did enslaved people in the Cape Fear region adjust to this emergent cul-
ture of white-on-black violence? A small minority fought back. Court records
reveal slaves burning whites’ houses, murdering their masters, and assaulting
whites. Some resorted to poison, an option that affirms the presence of conjure
men and women, whose knowledge of roots and herbs made them influential
members of their communities.29 Many slaves tried to escape. The lucky ones
found haven in a maroon community. Others lurked in the woods near their
home plantations, relying upon friends and relatives for food and other neces-
sities. They were usually caught.
In the 1750s, the North Carolina assembly passed laws establishing the first
slave patrols. County courts appointed common whites to these positions and
exempted them from militia duty and taxes in lieu of wages. Further, the new
laws allowed patrollers to claim cash rewards for capturing runaways, dead
or alive, and declared that any runaway gone more than two months could be
killed with impunity. These circumstances encouraged brutality when whites
found a runaway. In a final, extreme act of resistance, some runaways commit-
ted suicide rather than submit to their captors’ torture.30 But running away was
not the typical response.
Slaves used their memories of African beliefs and rituals to find solace and
restore self-respect. During the 1980s, scholars studying slavery in colonial
America posited the emergence of a distinctive, African American culture that
worked to assert the dignity and humanity of persons of color within an op-
pressive society. Newer works now insist there was no melting pot for Africans,
just as there was no melting pot for Europeans. Rather than losing their ethnic
distinctiveness, individuals from different places in Africa borrowed, blended,
and affiliated while retaining key elements of their natal identity.31 Moreover,
in some colonial regions, there existed concentrations of many persons from
one or two particular tribes, whose spatial proximity to their counterparts on
adjacent plantations allowed for the long-term maintenance of tribal languages
and customs and memories. The Lower Cape Fear appears to have been just
such a place.
Consider how the circumstances described in Anglican missionary James
Moir’s 1742 letter sheltered West African cultures: “In this county which is pretty
large we have about 3000 Inhabitants, two thirds whereof are Negroes[.] . . .
[N]otwithstanding I ride twice a year betwixt this river [the Cape Fear] and
the Neuse and make all the inquirys I can, it is not possible for me to know
the number of Inhabitants and what they profess[.] [W]e have no churches no
Glebes, no Parsonage Houses. . . . We are subject to so many inconveniences
that I am ashamed to mention them, and don’t at all wonder to hear former
Missionaries were much dissatisfied & had so little inclination to stay in this
Province.”32
Not only was there a dearth of ministers and churches, but Christian mas-
ters of all denominations generally opposed proselytizing their slaves. To admit
that heathen Africans had souls worth saving raised all manner of ethical and
moral questions about their essential nature, and masters rightly feared that
slave conversion would lead to slave baptism and, ultimately, manumission.33
As a result, the thousands of “Negroes” who lived in the region in the colonial
period faced little if any pressure to convert. To the contrary, they managed to
maintain several deeply significant West African religious practices.
One of these practices was the ring shout, a ritual funerary dance in which
the whirling, leaping, crying participants’ steps made an even, continuous cir-
cle symbolizing the cycle of life and death and guided the deceased’s spirit back
to its original plane of existence. In the late 1770s, famed colonial diarist Janet
Schaw observed a shout in honor of Jean Corbin, mistress of a large planta-
tion just outside Wilmington: “the Negroes assembled to perform their part
of the funeral rites, which they did by running, jumping, crying, and various
exercises.” At the time of Corbin’s death, there resided on the property nearly
one hundred enslaved people, a large enough number to account for the per-
sistence of West African customs over time. Twenty years later, a Methodist
circuit rider observed several slave funerals in the area; he noted that each had
“what they called a play for the dead, which was nothing but a frolic, which
lasted to the dawn of day, when they went to the grave of the deceased, mak-
ing great lamentation over it.” The “play,” the minister explained, consisted of
“leaping, jumping, and dancing,” activities that evoke the ring shout.34
Reference to another West African ritual appears in a 1755 letter from Scot-
tish merchant-planter James Murray, who found “all [his] Negroes . . . at a great
loss this Christmas for want of a death to play for.”35 Two conclusions can be
drawn from this short passage. First, his language (“this Christmas”) suggests
that something unusual had happened that particular year to prevent what was
otherwise a regular occurrence. That Murray’s extensive correspondence rarely
mentions anything related to his slaves reinforces the atypicality of their “great
loss” and leads to a second, corollary point: if the activity ordinarily typified the
Yuletide, if it took place annually, then its cause was never something as unpre-
dictable as “a death,” no matter how closely its “play” resembled a funeral’s. In
this case, because of its holiday timing, the lost activity must have been part of
the John Kuner festival, a distinctive event that commenced on December 25,
but had far more to do with memories of West Africa than European Christ-
mas revelry.
Long a subject of white fascination, the Kuner festival marked only a hand-
ful of places in the colonial world, chiefly parts of the British West Indies, but
also coastal North Carolina, specifically Wilmington, Edenton, New Bern, and
their surrounding counties. It takes its name from costumed participants,
called “John Kuners” (variously spelled “John Kooners,” “John Canoes,” or
“jonkonnus”), a troupe of black men who wore carved and painted masks,
grass skirts, animal-skin capes, and jingling bracelets or anklets made of
small animal bones. Processing slowly through the streets, the Kuners always
had two leaders. One wore clothes symbolizing the white master class (in
the colonial period it was usually a regimental coat, a periwig, and a tricorn
hat). The other, the one whites denominated “John Kuner,” wore a particu-
larly hideous mask and carried a short whip, which he shook threateningly
at youngsters in the crowd. He typically had a heavily ornamented, horned
headpiece, as well, and his steps were highly athletic, often vertical leaps into
the air. As the troupe moved through the landscape, members chanted rhyth-
mically to the sound of drums, bells, horns, and triangles. Residents of the
community, both white and black, ran out of their homes to observe and even
follow the procession. Periodically, the horned leader halted and shouted
out “dzaŋĸunu,” which to white ears sounded like “John Kunoo.” That shout
signaled the start of a dance, song, skit or combination thereof—the “play”
James Murray referenced.
Kunering actually involved a variety of related events, some of which seem
on the surface to mimic English wassailing or European mumming traditions.
Kuner songs and skits, for example, often satirized specific whites in the com-
munity, and the performers varied the form of their verbal confrontations ac-
cording to the social stature of their intended targets. In the seaports, where the
Kuners performed for and passed a hat among a largely white, nonelite audi-
ence, the challenge took place in the public space of the street, but sometimes
the Kuners parodied their victim at his own front door, and sometimes, as on
a plantation, they boldly entered the manor house and accosted—albeit play-
fully—the elite occupants in their private realm. In return for their antics, the
performers always exacted some kind of tribute, perhaps small cakes, drams of
liquor, or coins, and moved on to the next stop. After darkness fell, the Kuners
withdrew to a designated spot, far from white eyes, where they shared their
booty with friends during several days of dancing, singing, drinking, and eat-
ing. But as similar to archaic Christmas customs as these activities appear to
us, the resemblance was not noted until white writers began romanticizing the
Old South. In the eighteenth century, Kunering’s African otherness was plainly
evident, albeit opaque.36
To elite white observers, who consistently used adjectives like “weird” and
“grotesque” to describe its various elements, Kunering was a curiosity, a strange
and exotic thing that in its incomprehensibility invited self-serving interpre-
tations. Thus we see Kunering, like the ring shout, dismissed as a harmless
“frolic,” “festival,” “carnival,” “holiday,” or “jubilee.” These pejorative labels re-
inforced the master class’s belief in slaves’ primitive, childlike nature and their
own benevolence for allowing such “play” to continue. Some whites sensed in
the slaves’ behavior something threatening, although to their minds the large
gatherings of free and enslaved blacks merely offered opportunities to plot re-
bellion. Slave processions in other colonies sparked similar fears. In certain
years, as may have been the case in 1755, worried elites prohibited Kunering
altogether.37
Studies by anthropologists and African diaspora scholars enable us to de-
code Kunering’s actual purpose. In brief, I believe it evolved from traditional,
community-restorative rituals practiced by the Nagos, an Ewe-speaking sub-
group of the Yoruba. Captured from their homeland along the Bight of Be-
nin, forced out through the port of Great Popo and thus called Papaws by the
English, they made up the majority of slaves brought into seventeenth-century
Jamaica. There, Hans Sloane, future founder of the British Museum, recorded a
1687 procession of “Papaws, Koromantins, and Asantes,” who tied hand-made
rattles to their legs and cows’ tails to their backsides and “added such other
odd things to their Bodies in several places, as gives them an extraordinary
appearance.” By the time Jamaican planter Edward Long recorded his oft-cited
account of Kunering in 1774, traders had taken the Papaw-Nagos to other is-
lands and to coastal North Carolina seaports.38
In replicating their procession, enslaved Papaw-Nagos living in Wilmington
reenacted traditional rituals that had allowed their natal communities to adjust
social relationships gone awry. Such rituals commonly occurred during har-
vest festivals held at the start of the dry season, usually late November, when
agricultural labor had ended for the year. While many West African peoples
had similar festivals, only the Nagos’ version contained the procession led by
a horned figure who shouted “dzaŋĸunu”; Ewe for “sorcerer man,” this cry
signaled to the audience his transformation into a beast with horns, fur, and
a tail. For us, it indicates his role as the village’s “assuager of witches.” As an-
thropologist Richard Ferris Thompson argued, Ewe-speakers deploy witchcraft
as a metaphor for exploitation. Witchcraft springs into being wherever “can-
ons of social interaction have been violated,” as when individuals are rude to
each other, fail to share resources (hoard), or behave in similarly antisocial
ways. In sum, it is a manifestation of an individual’s “lack of social conscience.”
Moving slowly, ritually through the village each year, the sorcerer and his fol-
lowers identified such persons so they could be rehabilitated through public
humiliation.39
After each correction came a display of masculinity and martial prowess.
White European observers typically used the term “dance” to describe the in-
tricate combinations of jumping, stepping, and gesticulating they witnessed in
the colonies. Like “frolic,” the word “dance” trivialized the performances and
performers alike. In Africa, the village’s secret male society organized the pro-
cession and its rituals in keeping with their role as warriors/protectors/keepers
of order. Only the biggest, strongest, and most agile men performed solos, and
only the best of these received the audience’s approval and gifts. Other perfor-
mances reinforced their manhood, especially the presence of adolescent males
costumed as women. Wearing belts of bright-colored cloth, elaborate fake
hairpieces, and specially made “beautiful” masks, which had white faces, they
parodied femininity to underscore the masculinity of the adult participants
and their role as defenders/protectors.40 In North Carolina, actual women of-
ten appeared in this supporting role, but black men wearing dresses and wigs
have also been recorded.
The most meaningful continuity between Papaw-Nago rites in Africa and
in North Carolina is the Slave Trader character. Wearing a unique okpesu um-
uruma (translated as “frighten children”) mask, which had distinctively dark,
grimacing, or distorted features and carved teeth, the trader always carried a
cow’s tail whip, which he gestured threateningly at the village children. At the
end of the annual procession, performers offered a skit in which the village
men save a child by defeating the would-be captor. Among the Nagos, the
trader likely embodied fears of the Aro, an Ibo-descended people who rose to
power in the early eighteenth century through their aggressive role as suppli-
ers in the slave trade. Olaudah Equiano passed through Aro hands en route
to port; his famed account of his capture at age nine demonstrates the cruel
reality of child kidnapping.41 Equiano’s father, though a chief, must have shared
the frustration of many men for whom the ability to protect their children was
an important manifestation of their manhood. By portraying the “Aro slave
trader” as a grotesque, comical figure, adult members of male secret societies
symbolically inverted the Aro’s power over them.
The “Aro slave trader” understandably changed in the colonial context into
a “planter/merchant.” In Jamaica, this figure often sported an elaborate paste-
board boat or house affixed to the top of his processional headdress. Misinter-
preted by witnesses and thus later scholars, these structures, I contend, sym-
bolized the sailing ship and the Georgian mansion, the most potent markers of
the white male slaveholder. In other places, including North Carolina, he wore
a comically enormous, tricornered hat, a flowing periwig, a coat, and perhaps
a sash. He often had followers who wore similar garb and wielded oversized
wooden swords. White face paint hid their features, and white gloves covered
their hands. In a world where “black” connoted an “uncivilized” or depraved
character, the Kuners’ use of white face paint or powder and white gloves was
quite deliberate. Swaggering down the streets, leering at women, and singing
nonsensical tunes, these “Anglicized” Kuners projected violence, ignorance,
and licentiousness onto white men. And, of course, when the “sorcerer” and his
“warriors” in their Africanized costumes ultimately won the day, they restored
the proper social order—if only for a brief moment.
Over time, Kunering helped shift the locus of black civic and racial identity
from West Africa to North Carolina. Repeated year after year, starting and
stopping at the same places, the procession served as an exercise in cognitive
mapping, the psychological process by which people employ physical locations
in the construction of mental landscapes that foster personal and collective
identities. For the Papaw-Nagos in West Africa, grass huts, fences, and care-
fully tended fields demarcated the physical space of the village, but it was their
human, social interactions that enabled residents to identify with and feel part
of a specific community. As they processed, their feet inscribed a line, much
like the ring shout’s circle, that linked independent structures into a coherent
whole, and when they stopped at the homes of various villagers and gave them
honor or rebuke, participants asserted their allegiance to their specific place.
With capture and transplantation to the colonies came a profound sense of

spatial dislocation. In the absence of memorable faces and customs, the new
land initially held little meaning for enslaved persons. It took more people
from “home” and more social interaction for them to fashion a “place” from
what was merely a physical space. Because Kunering eventually drew together
people from different villages in West Africa, as well as from birthplaces in
the Caribbean and in the mainland colonies, it helped participants construct
new collective memories and a racial identity as “Negroes.” Reenacted over de-
cades—even centuries—Kunering allowed black Wilmingtonians to construct
a positive, place-based civic identity even when whites denied them one.
The Wilmington “Rebellion”
By about 1760, black Wilmingtonians had a particular reputation in North

Carolina: they purportedly enjoyed lives that “bordered on an almost inde-
pendent existence.” Unlike rural slaves, urban blacks had a modicum of leisure
time, congregated in public, and associated freely with indentured servants
and common whites, especially along the waterfront and in public spaces like
streets, churches, and markets. The scale and scope of Kunering in Wilmington
reinforced the sense that blacks here had greater freedom. More important,
they had access to more and better goods than their rural counterparts. Be-
cause they earned wages, skilled slave artisans and free blacks had the abil-
ity purchase food and possessions legitimately. The hustle and bustle of the
port also provided access to an extensive underground market in which slaves
regularly “trucked” with poor whites to exchange goods and services. Elites
considered this “disconcerting intimacy” a potential threat to their authority,
but instead of awakening shared sympathies among the lower sorts, the clan-
destine trade reinforced racial boundaries by exacerbating economic dispari-
ties. Whether by licit or illicit means, some black Wilmingtonians visibly had
a better standard of living than some whites.42
During the economic crises that followed the French and Indian War, black
Wilmingtonians became ready targets for common whites’ frustration and ag-
gression. Starting in 1758, the North Carolina assembly authorized searches of
all black residences in the colony at least four times a year. The white patrollers
ostensibly sought illicit guns, swords, or other weapons, but elites who served
on county courts empowered them to seize anything that seemed ill-gotten and
to keep such things as part of their compensation. Ransacking black homes,
assaulting black bodies, patrollers took whatever they wanted: food, clothing,
quilts, tools, chickens.43 Poor and wage-earning whites thought they had to
compete unfairly with slaves and free blacks for resources and jobs, and so they
felt entitled to black possessions.
To conciliate common whites’ growing complaints, Wilmington’s city fa-
thers passed a new ordinance in 1765 “for the better regulation of Negroes
and other slaves.” One portion of it prohibited masters from allowing their
slaves to hire themselves out for more than one day at a time and attempted to
prevent enslaved workers from receiving into their own hands any remunera-
tion. Another section sought to restrict black commercial activity. It required
each enslaved vendor at a city market to have a signed ticket from his or her
master, and the ticket had to include not only the name of the slave but a list
of all the items he or she intended to sell. A third provision stipulated that
enslaved people could no longer reside apart from their masters or overseers.
Taken together, these provisions clearly attempted to reserve jobs, commerce,
and housing for white wage-earners. Their impact was short-lived.44 White
residents soon found their attention drawn by other developments.
The black-white competition for economic resources sheds new light on the
particularly virulent response Wilmingtonians had to the Stamp Act passed by
Parliament in March 1765. Unlike other acts passed in the 1760s, this one re-
quired that a tax be paid in specie on all sorts of paper items, from newspapers
and deeds to playing cards. Seaport residents felt especially antagonized be-
cause it taxed ships’ bills of lading, cargo lists that had to be cleared by colonial
customs officers before a ship could leave or enter port. It further stipulated
that violators would be tried in vice-admiralty courts without benefit of jury.
In April, North Carolina’s new acting governor, William Tryon, summoned
the Speaker of the House, John Ashe, in order to plumb the political waters
of the Cape Fear. A merchant-planter with extensive property in Brunswick
County, Ashe belonged to an elite circle made up of the descendants of the
Family. He famously told Tryon that “his people” would resist the Stamp Act
“with blood and death.” When the assembly formally declared its opposition
to the act in May, Tryon prorogued the House, and Ashe returned home to his
wife, Mary Rebecca Moore.
Soon after, Ashe’s brother-in-law, Maurice Moore II, justice of the superior
court, penned a sixteen-page pamphlet denouncing not just the act, but the
“notion of virtual representation” on which it rested. “I have now before me
a Charter given by King Charles the Second to the province of Carolina,” he
declared. It was undoubtedly a copy handed down from his grandfather, James
Moore, whom Charles II appointed first governor of the colony. Because no
one would have “come over to the deserts of America” unless the rights and
liberties of their native country “could be secured to them and their posterity,”
he opined, “King Charles thought proper to grant that an assembly should be

called and established” and that “the freemen of Carolina” should made their
own laws. “Had the crown considered the colonists as being virtually repre-
sented in parliament,” he continued, “such a grant would have been extremely
absurd: for no set of people can be represented at one time in two distinct
and independent assemblies, which may counteract each other.” As a justice,
Moore’s legal interpretation of the charter carried weight with residents of the
Cape Fear, but his specific lineage and use of collective memory further le-
gitimated his words. Moore also made an economic argument: In the wake of
the Currency Act, which had restricted trade by limiting specie, the duty was
“a burthen too great for the circumstances of the colonies to bear.”45 Besides
his name, Moore had inherited his famous father’s primary plantation north
of Wilmington, where his slaves produced naval stores. As a planter as well
as a jurist, then, he understood the stake his neighbors had in this legislation.
Wilmington printer Alexander Stuart published Moore’s pamphlet in the sum-
mer of 1765. Local resistance then began to coalesce.
As generations of North Carolina school children have learned, Wilming-
tonians apparently staged the first Stamp Act protest in the colonies. Actually
comprised of multiple events that occurred over several months, the so-called
Wilmington Rebellion initially gained notoriety not for its timing, but for the
way it solidified this community’s reputation for public violence and political
independence. The insurrection began on October, 19, 1765, when a group of
nearly five hundred armed whites processed through the streets to the court-
house, hanged in effigy “a certain honourable gentleman,” probably Lord Bute,
and burned the mock corpse in a huge bonfire. Period descriptions are delib-
erately vague. Technically speaking, these actions violated the English Riot Act
of 1714, which defined a riot as three or more persons attempting to commit
an unlawful act by using threats, “turbulent” behavior, or actual force. Like the
Kuners, white colonists used public processions to map their own position in
a changing social landscape. Moving through the streets, flaming torches in
hand, members of the unruly crowd dragged the Stamp Act’s supporters from
their homes and publicly corrected them by forcing them “to drink a toast to
Liberty, Property, and no Stamp Act.” Although circumstances clearly war-
ranted intervention, the local magistrate, the sheriff, and constable stood idly
by as the mayhem accelerated. Another, much larger demonstration occurred
on October 31, the night before the dreaded act was to go into effect. It, too, en-
tailed a boisterous procession through the streets, a bonfire at the courthouse,
which symbolized local authority, and a rally.46 In retaliation, Governor Tryon
suspended the courts and closed the port of Wilmington.
Because Tryon moved regularly between his home plantation in Brunswick

County, his town house in Wilmington, and several other official residences,
he could not have missed the rising animosity against him. Ships swayed idly
at their docks. No rice or naval stores went out. No slaves or rum or other
goods came in. Out-of-work sailors and stevedores roamed the waterfront,
grumbling and fighting. Merchants and mechanics alike filled the taverns and
coffeehouses with seditious talk. And yet there was a strong current of loyalist
sentiment in the region, too. Ever hopeful, Tryon privately pressed his case
with local elites and laid plans for his inaugural ceremony, which he designed
as a performance of his royal authority.47
When word arrived on November 16 that a stamp collector had been ap-
pointed for the port of Wilmington, a group calling themselves the Sons of
Liberty roused the townsfolk. Led by several prominent city fathers and mer-
chant-planters, including Cornelius Harnett, Hugh Waddell, John Ashe, and
brothers Maurice Moore II and James Moore, the Sons organized a crowd of
three hundred to four hundred residents into armed ranks. Ashe, then colonel
of the New Hanover County militia, rode at the head of the column with his
men. “Drums beating and colors flying,” they moved from the courthouse to
the inn where the collector, Dr. William Houston, lodged. The rebels called him
outside, seized him bodily, and marched him back to the courthouse, where
they compelled him to sign “a resignation satisfactory to the Whole.” They then
moved to printer Alexander Stuart’s residence. The Scotsman had prudently
closed his printing shop in response to the Stamp Act, but his action left the
community without all sorts of paper items essential to daily life, including
broadsides, blank business forms, almanacs, ledgers, and stationery. Stuart also
published the North Carolina Gazette, which carried news and lists of arriving
and departing ships. The rebel leaders called him out, too, and forced him to
resume his business. As darkness descended, the townspeople gathered for a
raucous public celebration “well-furnish’d with several sorts of Liquors.”48
Later accounts, including some formal histories, downplayed the day’s vio-
lence in order to uphold Wilmingtonians’ virtue and the rebellion’s legitimacy.
Houston, however, maintained that he resigned in order “to quiet the minds of
the inraged and furious Mobb of Sailors &tc.” Similarly, Stuart claimed that he
complied “rather than run the Hazard of Life, being maimed, or have his Print-
ing office destroyed.” What historian Paul Gilje observed for larger colonial
seaports was true here: “On the one hand there were the people clamoring in
the street—mechanics, sailors, and others—who found that they wielded a new
and exhilarating power. On the other hand were the organizers of the resis-
tance movement—generally recruited from higher up in society—who needed
the mob but struggled to restrain it.” Unlike the mobs that ransacked Boston
or Philadelphia, Wilmington’s stopped short of murder and mayhem, but only
because the Sons of Liberty—made up of the elite Moores and their ilk—re-
tained control at all times. Aware that common whites felt deeply frustrated
by competition from free blacks and slaves, the town’s commissioners, militia
commanders, and wealthiest men called the lower sorts together against a new
target, Parliament, and the mob responded. The people undoubtedly expected
a reward at some point in the future.49
The Wilmington rebellion of 1765 included several other crucial events, as
well, ones that cumulatively defined the community as “revolutionary.” On
December 20, for example, the townsfolk disrupted Tryon’s carefully orches-
trated inauguration with an organized “riot.” Planning for this demonstration
began weeks earlier, after a British warship, HMS Diligence, arrived carrying
the dreaded stamps. Tryon had invited the ship’s captain and a full military
escort to accompany him to the courthouse, where he received his official
commission as royal governor. To no one’s surprise, Tyron then proceeded to
lecture the “Americans” on their duty to help “Mother England” by receiving
the stamps. A “general Hiss” went up, and the throng of nearly 2,000 erupted.
Some of the rebels, with axes conveniently at hand, stove in barrels of celebra-
tory ale and beheaded a roast ox, pointedly throwing its carcass to a group of
nearby enslaved people. After Christmas, another warship arrived and began
to stop, search, and seize American ships crossing the shoals off Cape Fear. This
time, rebel leaders protested by ransacking the home of the customs collector,
terrorizing his family, and making off with legal documents pertaining to the
confiscated ships, much as Maurice Moore had done fifty years earlier. When
royal officials ordered that one of the ship owners, Cape Fear planter Richard
Quince Sr., be sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for trial, men from all over the
region converged on Wilmington and signed a formal pledge of association
against the Stamp Act. The next morning, February 19, 1766, a detachment of
150 colonial militiamen held Tryon hostage at his plantation, while a larger
force of about 1,000 armed local men seized the customs house in Brunswick,
burned its records, and rounded up imperial officials, whom they forced to
sign oaths against the Stamp Act. Though Tryon soon escaped, he harbored
no more illusions about his neighbors’ allegiances. Within months, he was en-
sconced safely in New Bern and had authorized construction of a grand resi-
dence now known as Tryon’s Palace.50
By 1884, North Carolina historian John Wheeler could lament, “History has
blazoned this act of Boston [the tea party] to the world, but the act of the
people of the Cape Fear was far more daring; done in open day by men of char-
acter, with arms in their hands, under the King’s flag; and who has heard of it?
Who remembers it? Who tells it?” In 1766, however, the Wilmington Rebellion
was so well publicized that news of it quickly spread throughout the colony.
Reaction was mixed. Two different groups in the backcountry wrote petitions
to the assembly saying that, while they supported the use of organized, brute
force by the Sons of Liberty along the Cape Fear, “let not officers under them
carry on unjust oppression in our province.”51 Clearly not Loyalists, the authors
worried that, if allowed to continue unchecked, the Wilmington elites would
simply assert themselves over the whole colony. Wilmington’s reputation for
violent insurrection was well underway.
Racist violence also increased. Blacks could not help but witness the myriad
demonstrations, processions, and riots that took place in Wilmington between
October 1765 and February 1766. Whites’ rhetoric of liberty and slavery reso-
nated differently for them and sparked greater restiveness. To quell it, start-
ing in August 1766 county magistrates ordered patrollers in Wilmington to
conduct at least three searches of slave residences per week. A year later, in
September 1767, residents learned that “upwards of twenty runaway slaves in
a body . . . are now in this County.” Suspecting that the long-anticipated mass
uprising was afoot, county magistrates ordered the sheriff to raise a posse of
thirty “well arm’d” men to pursue them.52 They further empowered local whites
to “shoot to kill and destroy” any enslaved people who did not surrender. It is,
of course, unknown whether an actual conspiracy existed. What is clear is that
elites used the tense situation to send a message to the black population. Not
only did the would-be slave rebels hang, but the judges ordered their heads
mounted on posts.
The grisly remains served as impressive, albeit temporary, monuments to
white authority. In recent years, scholars have persuasively shown how monu-
ments and memorials, through their size, content, cost, and appearance, reflect
and reproduce hierarchies of power in a given community. In this case, the
location of the posts also mattered. Elites ordered the heads placed strategi-
cally where the four main roads leading through Brunswick and New Hanover
counties entered Wilmington. One of these routes terminated on the west bank
of the Cape Fear, where a ferry provided access to the public wharf and Market
on the east side. Locals quickly dubbed this western route “Nigger Head Road”
and its overlook “Negroe [sic] Head” Point. Through place naming, violence
against blacks became further integrated into the everyday settings and activi-
ties of the community.53
At the same time, as a new discourse about liberty and natural rights cir-
culated through the colonies, a “humanitarian movement to ameliorate the
harshest features of black bondage” emerged. One of the most influential men
in North Carolina, Chief Justice Martin Howard, helped advance it: “Slavery
is an adventitious, not a natural state,” he declared. “The souls and bodies of
negroes are of the same quality with ours—they are our own fellow creatures,
tho’ in humbler circumstances, and are capable of the same happiness and
misery with us.” The occasion of this startling pronouncement from an elite
slaveholder was a charge to a grand jury that had been impaneled in Wilming-
ton when a free white man was indicted for murdering an enslaved black man
in 1771. The Cape Fear jurors had responded with a bill ignoramus, effectively
saying “we are ignorant” of any crime being committed. Howard boldly chided
the white men for their hypocrisy: “[I]t is not easy to express one’s indignation
to behold men, with an unfeeling indifference, holding their fellow creatures in
the most miserable bondage; but when they imagine their own liberty is in the
least invaded, they will gravely, and without blushing, quote every writer upon
government and civil society to prove that all men are by nature equal and by
nature free.”
He saved his sharpest criticism for the “barbarous” belief that a white man
may murder a slave “with impunity.” Playing upon local fears of a mass slave
uprising, he argued further, “Nothing will so effectually preserve us from the
horrors of a BELLUM SERVILE [emphasis in original], or rebellion of slaves,
as a mild, humane, and gentle treatment of them.” Conversely, if slaves were to
feel that “their loss of liberty includes loss of life, whenever the humour or ca-
price of a white man should be pleased to take it away from them,” then slaves,
“depressed as they are in spirits,” will be unable to bear “such an addition to
their burden” and rise up in self-defense. “We should, therefore, be careful not
to make them desperate,” he concluded, “lest we ourselves should become the
first sacrifices to the maxims of our own cruelty.”54
Ordinary Wilmingtonians undoubtedly discussed Howard’s unusual advice
for avoiding “BELLUM SERVILE” that winter. At Christmas, the Kuners made
their annual appearance and talk of an insurrection swirled again. On January
7, 1772, Wilmington’s white freeholders met at the courthouse to elect their
commissioners, and the new officers swiftly passed two ordinances expressly
designed to “prevent Riotting and Disturbances that often happen among
the negroes in the sd town.” No longer content to restrict white-black trade,
civic leaders suddenly prohibited all slaves from selling at stands in the public
streets, and they outlawed any gatherings of more than three slaves at a time
on Sundays and after dusk.55 It was a harbinger of things to come. The more
events of the 1770s threatened white colonists’ liberty, the more they actively
sought to maintain their racial caste system.
Wars for Independence
Among the celebrated patriots who led Wilmingtonians into the American
Revolution, two are especially notable for their efforts to maintain slavery: Wil-
liam Hooper and Cornelius Harnett, both members of the Sons of Liberty.
Hooper, a Boston-born and Harvard-educated lawyer, settled in Wilmington
around 1764; he had followed his brothers, George and Thomas, who ran a gen-
eral commission house and were well connected to the local gentry. He built
a successful legal practice, wed the New Hanover County sheriff ’s daughter,
and acquired his first slaves, some through his marriage and some through
his brothers, who traded humans as well as rice, naval stores, and other lucra-
tive commodities. In 1773 his neighbors elected him to the colonial assembly,
where he introduced an unsuccessful bill that made it a crime to “willfully and
maliciously” kill an enslaved person. Like Judge Howard, Hooper wanted to
eliminate the most damning aspect of slavery while preserving the system as
a whole. Later that year, he led local protests against the Tea Act, and in 1774
he organized a series of public meetings to combat the Intolerable Acts. As
a result, North Carolinians elected him to serve in both the first and second
Continental Congresses.56 Harnett was even more active politically. A planter
whose enslaved workforce mainly produced naval stores, Harnett led the pro-
vincial council that governed North Carolina after Governor Josiah Martin
fled the colony in August 1775. He eventually proved such a firebrand that il-
lustrious Massachusetts patriot Josiah Quincy called him the “Sam Adams of
North Carolina.”
Harnett chaired the Wilmington-New Hanover Committee on Safety, the
body charged with carrying out the Continental Congress’s directives at the
local level. One of its tasks was to ensure that merchants complied with the
nonimportation agreements by refusing to let ships unload banned goods, in-
cluding enslaved people. The slave trade continued throughout the early war
years; merchants frequently arranged secret deliveries at landfalls below Wilm-
ington, and the committee required that, when caught, any slaves seized be
“reshipped back from whence they came.” George and Thomas Hooper lost
valuable bondsmen this way, but the same rules did not apply to Harnett. In
1775, he received from his committee a special exemption that allowed him to
land a slave he purchased in Rhode Island. In 1777, Harnett succeeded Hooper
as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, but he remained in
close contact with friends in Cape Fear country throughout the war.57
Actually, there were two wars for independence—and as whites waged
theirs, they felt compelled to negate their slaves.’ Seldom acknowledged in
popular histories, this point is evident in period sources. Sometime in early

August 1775, for example, Harnett placed a runaway slave ad in the Cape Fear
Mercury. In it, Harnett described his slave, Cuffee, as “an old Negro” and “a car-
penter,” who “formerly belonged to the estate of Job Howe.” The name, “Cuffee,”
strongly suggests a West African birth; it is an Akan day-name, one used to
identify a male born on a Friday. Acculturated by 1775 and highly skilled,
Cuffee likely enjoyed greater freedom than Harnett’s other enslaved workers;
he perhaps resided in Wilmington and heard the talk of liberty. There is no
way to know whether he had planned his escape for a long time or if he simply
seized a sudden opportunity. An “old” man, he knew his body had passed its
prime, yet he had the advantage of a network of friends and relatives in the re-
gion. Harnett certainly thought Cuffee might visit his former home, the Howe
plantation, which he mentioned. At the time, it was easy to believe that a single
runaway like Cuffee desired family more than self-determination. As the num-
ber of runaways increased, however, that comforting image quickly vanished.58
In fact, dozens of Cuffees fled their masters in 1775. In the wake of Lord
Dunmore’s infamous promise to free any enslaved black Virginian willing to
fight with the British, dozens of slaves cutting cypress in the Great Dismal
Swamp of North Carolina piloted their skiffs to Norfolk. Soon, rumors swept
the colony that Josiah Martin, North Carolina’s royal governor, had made a
similar offer. In early July, a slave conspiracy was discovered and suppressed in
the eastern counties of Pitt, Martin, Beaufort, and Craven. Patrollers captured
more than forty suspected leaders, a staggering number when one thought
about the number of potential followers. Whites everywhere learned that a
“deep laid Horrid Tragick Plan” existed to destroy every white person regard-
less of age or sex. At the same time, another rumor arose that the British com-
mander at Fort Johnston, located at the mouth of the Cape Fear, had made a
similar pledge to Cape Fear slaves.59
Wilmington’s leaders acted swiftly to restrain the local black population.
In June, the Committee on Safety authorized Harnett to secure gunpowder
“for more effectually disarming and keeping the Negroes in order.” The same
day, the committee also ordered new patrols to search black residences for
weapons.60 When Janet Schaw arrived in town in July, the enslaved people that
had accompanied her from her host’s plantation were “seized and taken into
custody” to await her departure. Upon inquiry as to the nature of their offense,
she learned that a “great number” of armed blacks had been found hiding in
the woods outside the city and that an insurrection was “expected hourly.”61
White fears of a “bellum servile” increased throughout the war.
However, most restive blacks merely defected to the enemy. In March 1776,
British warships anchored at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and their mus-
ter rolls record how many slaves “deserted from the Rebels.” At least thirty-six
enslaved people defected to the HMS Scorpion, for example, including about
a dozen women. On land, approximately fifty-four runaways formed a unit
called the Black Pioneers that built fortifications, washed clothes, prepared
meals, and managed livestock for the British regulars. Runaways also provided
valuable information about local roads and waterways. When the British Army
launched its southern offensive in 1778, the “trickle of runaways . . . became a
flood.”62
Black resistance took a different turn as British troops advanced north
from Charleston, South Carolina. To provision his troops, Lord Cornwallis
appointed loyalist John Cruden, a Wilmington merchant, to be his “Commis-
sioner of Sequestered Estates” in the Carolina low country. Cruden had fled to
Charleston earlier in the war. In his new line of work, Cruden supervised thou-
sands of enslaved workers on confiscated patriot plantations and redirected
their labor toward the production of food crops. While awaiting the supply
wagons, Cornwallis ordered that the “Negro stragglers” flocking to his army
forage to feed the troops. Moving through the countryside, these former slaves
plundered small farms and great houses alike. Word quickly spread of “Shame-
ful marauding,” “Scandalous crimes,” and “Negroes . . . Using Violence to the
Inhabitants.”63 After Major James Craig and four hundred Redcoats landed at
Wilmington in January 1781, even more slaves ran to the British, and stories
of atrocities committed by black camp followers became legion.64 Fearful of a
mass slave uprising, many white residents fled the area.
Cornelius Harnett joined the ranks of elites driven away by the occupa-
tion. Suffering from chronic gout, he had returned to Wilmington in 1780.
When Major Craig’s fleet was sighted in the river, he left his townhouse, May-
nard, for the relative isolation of his country home, Poplar Grove, near the
sound. There he learned that Craig had seized the Market Street residence
of his friend, merchant John Burgwin, and ordered the arrest of numerous
prominent Whigs, including himself. Harnett again packed his trunks, but
another severe attack of gout forced him to stop at a friend’s plantation. As he
lay abed suffering, someone, perhaps a slave, leaked word of his location to
the British. Although unsubstantiated, the story holds that Redcoats bound
his hands and feet and threw him over a horse like a sack of potatoes. After
the rough ride back to town, Harnett found himself confined to an open-air
“bull-pen” with other suspected traitors. His already poor health deteriorated
further from the effects of exposure. Craig officially paroled him, no doubt
convinced the once fiery patriot no longer posed a threat. Harnett died in
April 1781, and his widow buried him in St. James Cemetery, where his grave-
stone became a collective memorial.65
White Wilmingtonians swiftly transformed Harnett into a martyr.66 From
their perspective, Craig’s men had violated the rules of eighteenth-century
warfare, which protected women, children, the aged, and the infirm from mis-
treatment. Harnett was nearly sixty in 1780, and chronically ill. In 1778, he had
complained to William Wilkerson, his partner in a Wilmington rum distillery,
of severe gout so crippling he could hardly move to write. He attributed much
of his suffering, however, to the loss of a slave, his body servant, Sawney, who
ran off just before Harnett fled Philadelphia with the other members of Con-
gress. To Harnett, Sawney was “one of the greatest Villains living. If I was to tell
you some parts of his behavior, it would amaze you.” A runaway ad that Harnett
placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette accuses Sawney of stealing more than one
hundred pounds of goods from the quartermaster, goods surely intended for
the Washington’s army. It is probable that Sawney sold them for ready cash to
start his life in freedom. The irony is that Harnett railed at Sawney’s disloyalty,
when Major Craig surely felt the same way about Harnett’s behavior. Neither
Harnett’s neighbors nor Harnett himself could see the paradox of claiming in-
dependence while holding others in bondage. On the contrary, Harnett’s words
suggest that he considered himself the victim.67
In The Name of War, historian Jill Lepore asks us to take seriously the way
people in the past wrote about their wartime experiences. Words, she argues,
“have a great deal of work to do: they must communicate war’s intensity, its
traumas, fears, and glories; they must make clear who is right and who is
wrong.”68 The Cape Fear region did not suffer the same depredations as other
parts of colonial America, but locals felt traumatized by their experiences.
As whites and blacks sought to wrest new meanings from the chaos of the
war, each group crafted narratives that helped them explain their suffering.
For Harnett, Sawney’s “villainy” likely stemmed not from the enslaved black
man’s physical acts but from their psychological effects. Runaway slaves chal-
lenged elite whites on a deep, personal level, impugning their masters by
their very absence with charges of cruelty or neglect. A similar crisis may
explain why Harnett’s story came to represent the white community’s war
experience as a whole. Hearing about (or witnessing) their respected leader’s
mistreatment, especially his confinement in a cage-like structure fit only for
animals and slaves, Wilmington’s patriots turned the rhetorical tables, pro-
jecting villainy onto the British and their accomplices while assigning virtue
to themselves. Meanwhile, Harnett’s enslaved workers passed directly to his
widow, and she, having no children, willed them to relatives, who willed
the descendants of those black men and women down the line.69 The slaves’
wartime narrative was never set to paper.
By winter 1781, a general breakdown in military discipline had occurred—
with dire consequences for race relations in this region. Historian Wayne Lee
concluded that the marked brutality of the war’s last years was largely a result of
North Carolinians having already encouraged “legitimate revenge in response
to illegitimate violence.”70 In this culture, a colonist who survived an attack
from a particular band of British regulars might abuse other Redcoats, or he
might even displace his anger onto Tory neighbors, who were easier targets.
The climate also fueled white-against-black retaliation. Reports of “atrocities”
committed by certain slaves in specific places gave white Whigs and Tories
alike a rationale for generalizing black guilt. Tales of blacks invading white
homes, plundering white possessions, and attacking white women and chil-
dren became tropes that justified racist violence long after Cornwallis’s sur-
render at Yorktown.
“This Bloody Land”
If the Revolution saw white Wilmingtonians’ world turned upside down, then
the early national era witnessed their collective effort to set it right again. Hav-
ing lost their best customer for naval stores, the British Empire, local planters
scrambled to make up the difference with rice. More rice meant more work,
and more work meant more enslaved people brought under the lash. In town,
by contrast, masters revived the illegal hiring-out system. In 1785, elites living
along the upper and lower branches of the Cape Fear persuaded the legislature
to pass a special act that exempted Wilmington and Fayetteville slaves from
compliance with the law of 1777. The new law stipulated that a slave who hired
his own time had to file his masters’ permission with the town commissioners,
wear a pewter identifying badge, and pay a tax determined by sex, skill, and
official place of residence.71 By this means, masters attempted to ensure that
they would benefit the most from hired slaves’ labor.
Nevertheless, the number of enslaved blacks who managed to purchase
freedom increased substantially. When the first federal census takers counted
heads in 1790, New Hanover County officially had sixty-four free persons of
color residing within its limits. By 1800, the number had risen to seventy-
five. In both years, the actual number was likely higher. Resented by many
poor whites, free blacks had good reason to hide. In 1795, the legislature re-
quired that “all free negroes, mulattoes, and other persons of mixed blood”
register with the leaders of the town wherein they resided and wear “a badge
of cloth to be fixed on the left shoulder” bearing in capital letters the word
“FREE.” Another law, enacted at the same time, required free blacks from
neighboring states to post a two-hundred-pound bond upon entering North
Carolina and registering. Failure to comply resulted in arrest, trial by a white
jury, and sale at public auction. And even if a free black did pay the bond,
another provision stipulated that he or she leave within twenty days or face
the same fate.72
Whites in New Hanover County also used indentures to control the size of
the free black population. Court records show a sharp increase in the number
of free black children placed into servitude after 1780. That the majority of the
children placed between 1783 and 1860 were labeled “mulatto” suggests that
their fathers were white men and that these children were illegitimate. Inden-
tures for children of color, both black and mulatto, lasted far longer than those
for white children; in the Albemarle region of North Carolina, for example,
black children were ordered to serve thirty-one years compared to whites’
twenty.73 Although state laws forbade indentured servants of any color from
marrying, the prevalence of sexual assault meant that female servants often
became parents. Black women especially suffered: it was not uncommon for an
illegitimate black girl placed out for thirty years to bear a child who was also
placed out for thirty years. In this way, the system functioned as another form
of enslavement.
Despite these circumstances, the free black population increased steadily,
going from more than three hundred in 1830 to nearly seven hundred by 1850
in New Hanover County alone. Some of the local growth resulted from adults
who moved to the port, and some of it reflected natural increase. Carpenter
Anthony Walker, for example, married a young Tuscarora woman named Te-
nah, and they had numerous children. Tenah was the ward and legal heir of
Walker’s owner, Major General Robert Howe, former commander of the Con-
tinental Army. When Howe died in 1785, he set Walker free, probably to secure
Tenah’s future. Howe’s will required that the family take his name, not just his
assets. They complied, and so the Walker-Howe children not only grew up in
unusual comfort, but they became notable community leaders whose experi-
ences enlarge Wilmington’s history.74
Whether free or unfree, blacks who earned wages continued to draw the ire
of working whites. In 1802 a group of twenty-one Wilmington artisans orga-
nized as the Incorporated Mechanical Society. Its members sent to the General
Assembly a petition asserting that they were being underbid by enslaved arti-
sans like Anthony Walker-Howe, who worked for roughly half a “regular bred”
white mechanic’s going rate and who hired on other slaves and black appren-
tices. Recognizing that state laws already prohibited the hiring-out system, they
“humbly” requested the appointment of “one, particular civil Officer” whose
duty it would be to enforce existing statues. Competition from other whites,
including immigrants, did not concern them. Rather, the underlying issue was
a perceived threat to their racial and civic identities. “Your Memorialists also
consider as an additional and grievous hardship that while they are compelled
to perform militia duty, serve on Juries, and pay taxes, the bread should be
taken out of the mouths of themselves and [their] families by persons, who
circumstanced as they are, are the irreconcilable enemies of Whites.”75 As these
phrases indicate, Wilmington’s common whites understood that certain rights
and obligations accrued to free citizens only. Any grant of these rights and ob-
ligations to enslaved men could only come at their own expense. Their protest
went unanswered. Slave-owning elites, who influenced the legislature, wanted
the arrangement to persist.
Wage-earning and elite whites did find common ground in their mutual
concern over the spread of Methodism, a faith that openly challenged white
supremacy and planter authority, at least in its early years. Itinerant preachers
had circuited the lower Cape Fear region in the 1770s and 1780s, and their mes-
sage concerning the equality of all souls, regardless of race, gender, or social
position, won them numerous converts among the free blacks and enslaved
people they met. When William Meredith arrived in Wilmington in 1792 to
establish a permanent mission church, he found an organized black congrega-
tion already in place and readily consented to be its minister.
A white man, Meredith identified as a “Primitive” Methodist, meaning he
hewed to the radical teachings of Rev. William Hammett, who had broken
away from the official Methodist hierarchy and established an independent
church in Charleston, South Carolina. Hammett publicly denounced slavery
as a sin, and Meredith undoubtedly shared his mentor’s views because white
Wilmingtonians took deliberate steps to stop him from preaching. First, the
town commissioners prohibited anyone from holding public meetings with
blacks after sunset, the time of day when Meredith’s congregants were readily
available. That ploy failed to silence him, for the congregation simply shifted to
sunrise services. City fathers then had Meredith jailed for disturbing the peace.
That tactic failed, too. The Methodists just clustered outside his cell window
to hear him speak, and when he finally got out, they redoubled their efforts to
erect a physical church. Like a cat toying with a mouse, Wilmington’s leaders
watched the structure rise and burned it to the ground.76
The congregation fought fire with fire. When another Methodist minister
visited Wilmington in 1798, he reported, “Soon after this [destruction of the
Methodist church], the town itself was burned; and Meredith, undaunted, col-
lected his people together in the market place, and preached to them, among
other things telling them, ‘as they [anti-Methodists] loved fire so well God
had given them enough of it.’” Some scholars insist that Meredith spoke meta-
phorically, sincerely interpreting the fires that swept Wilmington as some form
of divine retribution. But other parts of Jenkins’s letter suggest that certain
properties were targeted for retaliatory arson: “I have been informed by a lady
acquainted with the facts, that there have been five fires in Wilmington since
the burning of the church, and that one of the leading men in this affair [the
burning of the church] has never prospered since.”77 It appears that leaders of
the anti-Methodist crusade made little effort to hide, but even if they had, con-
gregants who were slaves could have easily overheard or acquired information
enabling them to identify their targets and take action against them. In fact,
black Methodists had far greater control over their church’s affairs than white
observers realized. White elites, fixated on Meredith, misjudged the seminal
role of black stewards, who administered the day-to-days needs of the con-
gregation, and black class leaders, who had pastoral duties ranging from bible
instruction to lay exhorting.
The agency of the black Methodists became abundantly clear after Mer-
edith died in 1799. First, they interred him in a place of honor, right below the
vestibule of their new, much larger meetinghouse. That structure, long gone
now, thus served to memorialize the congregation’s past even as it symbolized
present and future achievements. Over the next decade, members rejoined the
Methodist Episcopal Church, hosted yearly visits from Bishop Francis Asbury,
organized the revivals that swept the region, and managed a significant rise
in membership, from approximately two hundred in 1800 to more than seven
hundred in 1810. As weekly collections also rose, the black stewards arranged
for the congregation to buy several lots adjacent to the meetinghouse, which
occupied a prime location at the corner of Walnut and Second streets, just
four blocks north of the Market. According to church records, they hired the
time of several skilled, enslaved craftsmen, who were coreligionists, to build a
series of tenant houses. Simon Campbell, for example, received payment for his
carpentry work, as did “Sam the mason” for his bricklaying.78 How these men
used their wages is unknown, but stewards like Roger Hazel and Sam Toomer,
who bought themselves in 1804 and 1807, respectively, undoubtedly hoped to
foster freedom with their hiring practices. Through the day-to-day efforts of
its black leaders, then, the early Methodist church in Wilmington worked to
undermine slavery directly as well as rhetorically.
Their efforts were desperately needed. Most urban slaves in the 1810s suffered
constant humiliation and brutal mistreatment from white Wilmingtonians.

One of them, Tom Jones, experienced abuse soon after his arrival in town in
1815, when he was just nine years old. His new master, a storekeeper named Mr.
Cowan, put the boy immediately to hard work. “My business there,” Jones re-
membered, “was to open and sweep out the store in the morning, and get all the
things ready. . . . Then I had to bring out and deliver all heavy articles that might
be called for such as salt, large quantities of which were sold in the store; ship
stores, grain, etc., etc.” Jones served as more than a source of labor. For upwardly
mobile southern whites like Cowan, the purchase of a slave, even a young and
therefore inexpensive one, signaled aspirations for respectability, gentility, and
status. As historian Walter Johnson has shown, owners projected onto their hu-
man property their own ambitions and motivations, and when enslaved people
turned out to have wills of their own, as they inevitably did, masters routinely
responded with violence. Thus Cowan flogged Jones unmercifully when he sus-
pected the boy was learning to read. Jones’s function was to work for Cowan’s
betterment, not his own. Jones endured whippings for other offenses as well,
such as “giving saucy language to a white boy,” who was Cowan’s indentured
servant. While Jones did succeed in achieving literacy, his powerful memoir,
published after his eventual escape from Wilmington, testifies to the physical
and psychological suffering he and other local blacks endured on a daily basis.79
The conditions Jones memorialized in print were especially familiar to an-
other black writer: David Walker. In an 1848 edition of Walker’s famous Ap-
peal to Colored Citizens of the World, publisher Henry Highland Garnet stated
that “Mr. Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, Sept. 28, 1785. His
mother was a free woman, and his father was a slave.”80 Using information found
on Walker’s Boston death certificate, historian Peter Hinks corrected the date
of birth to 1795 or 1796, and using internal evidence contained in the Appeal, as
well as other primary sources, placed the future abolitionist in the port city until
at least 1815. Here, Walker learned to read and write, embraced Methodism, and
insinuated himself into the black maritime world. Here, too, he observed first-
hand the unique brutality of American slavery and its deleterious impact on the
black psyche. Garnet recounted that, “When yet a boy, [Walker] declared that
the slaveholding South was not the place for him. His soul became so indignant
at the wrongs which his father and his kindred bore, that he determined to find
some portion of his country where he would see less to harrow up his soul. Said
he, ‘If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as God reigns, I
will be avenged for the sorrow which my people have suffered.’”81
In Wilmington, Walker apprehended the paradox that shaped his later call for
black militancy: enslaved people did all of the work upon which white society
depended, ran their own congregations and businesses, were capable, creative,
and intelligent beings, yet they accepted white claims to black inferiority. Walker
found a similar mindset among blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, where he
lived for several years before moving north. It became his self-appointed task,
shaped and refined by his abolitionist activities in Boston, to awaken his “af-
flicted, degraded, and slumbering brethren” to the reality of black power.
Copies of Walker’s Appeal arrived in Wilmington in late fall 1829, soon af-
ter the pamphlet’s September publication. Walker used the same distribution
strategy in every southern community; that is, a black seaman on a ship from
Boston gave the package to Walker’s designated agent, who handed the text
to his literate friends. Passed around Wilmington from hand to hand, read
aloud to small groups under cover of darkness, the Appeal circulated in secret
for nearly a year. Surely some readers remembered Walker or knew his family.
Someone eventually shared a copy with white authorities.
As an official investigation ensued, fear of an organized insurrection hit the
city like a seasonal hurricane. On August 7, 1830, Wilmington’s chief magistrate,
James F. McRae, informed Governor John Allen that the agent was a slave named
Jacob Cowan, whose master allowed him to operate a tavern near the docks.
Cowan had admitted to the receipt of two hundred pamphlets, along with writ-
ten instructions to distribute them throughout the state. At this time, North
Carolina had no specific law prohibiting the circulation of “seditious” publica-
tions, so the Wilmington Board of Commissioners ordered Cowan shipped to
Charleston and placed on the auction block for sale further south. Meanwhile,
seven other black men were also imprisoned in Wilmington and found guilty of
conspiracy. The Superior Court sentenced them to public execution.82
Soon after it convened in the fall of 1830, the North Carolina state legislature
went into secret session to assess how far the Walker-inspired plot ranged.
Governor John Allen had already informed the assembly that, according to
a recent communiqué from New Bern, slaves there were hiding weapons in
preparation for a mass uprising on Christmas Day. A specially appointed in-
vestigatory committee followed up on the matter and concluded that there was
indeed a vast conspiracy to incite rebellion. On December 1, the congressmen
enacted a punitive law that made it illegal to teach any enslaved person to read
or write. They also prohibited the circulation of “seditious” publications on
pain of imprisonment and whipping (for a first offense) or death without ben-
efit of clergy (for a second offense).83 It was not the last time lawmakers would
use white insurrection anxiety to tighten the screws against black liberty.
North Carolina’s Quakers vehemently criticized the new law. Doctrinally
opposed to slavery yet circumscribed by state manumission laws, individual
Friends had begun by 1810 to transfer ownership of their human property to

the Society of Friends itself. Unlike abolitionists affiliated with the American
Colonization Society, who wanted to emancipate slaves and send them back to
Africa, Quakers sought to keep them in the state. Living in a kind of quasi-free-
dom, these enslaved Quakers garnered wages for their own labor and received
both religious instruction and rudimentary education. They also ran their own
households and exercised control over their own family relationships.84 This
arrangement was now in serious jeopardy.
The Friends were still reeling from a landmark legal decision handed down
in December 1829 in State v. Mann. In that case, Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin
overturned a lower court’s verdict that John Mann had unlawfully damaged
another white person’s property when Mann attempted to kill an enslaved
woman he had hired out. Ruffin not only insisted that Mann, in signing a hir-
ing contract with the woman’s owner, a young girl, had assumed all of her
legal rights, but that “the power of the master over the slave must be absolute
to render the submission of the slave perfect.” It was this latter comment that
caused Quakers such consternation. Through this ruling, Ruffin sought to end
the widespread practice of extending to enslaved people limited rights, like
wages or literacy. Moreover, Walker’s Appeal apparently influenced his think-
ing; Ruffin communicated regularly with family in Virginia, where the pam-
phlet surfaced as he drafted the Mann ruling in December 1829. He concluded
that if enough slaves, through the receipt of even modest privileges, came to
denounce “the in-justice of slavery itself,” they would “band together to throw
off their common bondage entirely.”85 Notwithstanding the Quakers’ protests,
most white North Carolinians agreed with the judge.
Ruffin and planters like him considered the legislature’s response to Walker’s
Appeal woefully inadequate. In the face of agitation from Quakers and coloniz-
ers inside the state and rising antislavery sentiments outside it, some wanted a
strong message sent to abolitionists everywhere. Thus, Calvin Jones, a wealthy
planter from Wake Forest, demanded the legislature seek the return of David
Walker to Wilmington, where he could be dealt with publicly and, no doubt,
violently. Other members of the gentry resented the secrecy of the legislature’s
investigation. Where, exactly, were all these slave rebels hiding? Who would
ferret them out and punish them?86
News of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, on August
22, 1831, confirmed white Tar Heels’ worst suspicions. Apparently, hundreds of
slaves in North Carolina had had foreknowledge of the plot. Many had attended
a Methodist revival on August 14 in Newsom, Virginia, just across the state
line, where Turner preached and recruited participants. In Hertford County,
North Carolina, an enslaved man purportedly forged a pass and ran from his
master’s plantation south of Murfreesboro headed for Southampton, having
“told a negro before he left home, there would be a war between the white
and black people.”87 Local militias and slave patrols terrorized the countryside,
looking for more rebels. Harriet Jacobs long remembered the violence she wit-
nessed in Edenton: “Every day for a fortnight, if I looked out, I saw horsemen
with some poor panting negro[s] tied to their saddles, and compelled by the
lash to keep up with their speed, till they arrived at the jail yard. . . . One black
man, who had not fortitude to endure scourging, promised to give information
about the conspiracy. But it turned out that he knew nothing at all. He had not
even heard the name of Nat Turner. The poor fellow had, however, made up a
story, which augmented his own sufferings and those of the colored people.”88
Further south, authorities using similar methods uncovered a network
linking the Cape Fear counties of Duplin, Sampson, and New Hanover. An
enslaved man named Davey confessed under duress that he and his fellow
rebels intended “to march in two columns to Wilmington, murdering whites,
burning plantations, and rallying blacks” as they went. They said they expected
to join some two thousand blacks in Wilmington who would rise up and burn
the port city down.89
Soon, hysteria gripped many white residents. On September 12, one of tutor
Moses Ashley Curtis’s young charges came home from a neighbor’s and called
to him, saying, “Oh! Oh! Mr. C. There’s an excitement in town!” Skeptical of her
claim that armed blacks were converging on Wilmington, Curtis left the home
of his employer, future governor Edward Dudley, and walked down Front
Street. “Fear & despair, what confusion!” he recalled. “When I reached the gar-
rison there were 120 women packed in a small dwelling half dead with fear. . . .
A few men too I noticed with tremulous voices, & solemn visages, pacing back
& forth in fearful anxiety.” The next day, local men organized and began a
vicious house-to-house search, imprisoning dozens of suspected blacks. On
September 21, four Wilmingtonians known as Nimrod, Abraham, Prince, and
Dan the Drayman received the first sentences: death by hanging. Rev. Thomas
P. Hunt recalled that Dan, an elderly black man, denied his guilt, saying, “Do
you think we niggers fool enough to fight the white folks with nothing but our
fists?” Additional trials took place throughout the fall. When several blacks
were found innocent due to insufficient evidence, members of an organized
“vigilance committee” took them by force from the jail, shot them, decapitated
the bodies, and mounted the heads on poles, which they paraded through the
streets. As in the past, they later placed each pole in a different part of town as
a warning.90
“To Be Truly Free”
Today, the American public associates the Age of Jackson (about 1820–45) with
a robust expansion of participatory democracy, a market revolution, and a re-
markable social reform movement sparked by a wave of evangelical revivalism.
Newer scholarly interpretations of the period counter this triumphal narrative
of national history. While abolitionism increased, they caution us, so did slav-
ery, which followed white settlers across the Mississippi to Missouri, Arkansas,
Texas, and eventually Kansas. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, once consid-
ered a victory for free labor, is now seen as proof of the nation’s commitment to
black bondage and white supremacy. In fact, white Americans began to assert
their collective racial superiority in all sorts of creative ways, from minstrel
songs and ceramic tableware to segregated spaces and legal documents.91 In
Wilmington, as in many communities, enslaved and free blacks continued to
assert their basic humanity. The stories of two relatively famous men, reexam-
ined and reinterpreted here in light of new scholarship, illustrate black Wilm-
ingtonians’ struggle to maintain their autonomy, identity, and self-respect in
this tumultuous period.
The first man, called Moro, moved to Wilmington with his white owner,
James Owen, in 1836. About sixty years old by this date, he was a most un-
usual slave, a kind of celebrity, in fact. For twenty years previously, Owen had
regularly staged what can only be called performances during which Moro
told tales about his homeland in Africa, copied out passages from a Quran
and an Arabic bible in English, and offered dramatic readings of his transcrip-
tions. Moro, whites understood, had been born into some kind of royal “Ma-
homedan” family, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and grew to be a respected
scholar and teacher. One day, “wicked men” captured him and traded him to a
slaver, who transported him to Charleston, South Carolina. There he suffered
horribly under a “cruel” master, who forced him, “a small man and unable to
do hard work,” to toil in the rice fields, until he managed his miraculous es-
cape and journeyed north to Bladen County, where, as Moro liked to say, “our
Lord God brought me forward to the hand of a good man, who fears God,
and loves to do good, and whose name is Jim Owen.”92 By 1836, Moro stories
widely circulated in print and by word of mouth. To contemporaries and later
generations of whites, who kept these stories alive into the 1950s, Moro was an
archetypal “loyal slave,” a symbol of white benevolence and the civilizing influ-
ence of slavery on African heathens.
An alternate reading says Moro was a trickster who cleverly manipulated
whites to gain advantage. His real name, only recently discovered, was Omar
ibn Said. An enslaved Muslim marabout from Senegambia, he escaped from

a South Carolina rice plantation in 1810 and was captured outside Fayette-
ville, North Carolina. Dozens of Cape Fear–area whites, including Owen, came
to the jail to see the strange, delicate-looking man and the strange, delicate-
looking marks he made on the cell walls. Whereas the white narrative of their
first encounter always credits Owen’s compassionate ability to judge Moro’s
true character, Said likely recognized the crowd’s deference to Owen, a wealthy
planter, war hero, and prominent politician. Somehow, Said enchanted Owen
so much that the general took Said home with him. Somehow, Said persuaded
his new master that he could not do physical labor, should spend his days
studying Arabic and English texts that Owen provided, and needed his own
cabin and attendant to bring his meals.93
While “Moro” claimed to be a Christian, there is ample evidence that Said
maintained his Muslim faith. According to an 1827 article, the “Africans” at
Owen’s plantation said “Moro” was what they called “‘a pray-God to the king;’
by which may be understood, a priest or learned man, who offered up prayers
for the king of his nation, and was of his household.” In keeping with his role
as a marabout, Said supplied his fellow slaves with little slips of paper bearing
Koranic phrases (gris-gris), which he often posted on trees around the planta-
tion so that others could find and retrieve them surreptitiously. He fasted dur-
ing Ramadan, decorated his manuscripts with Arabic pentacles, and regularly
wore a close-fitting skullcap and long gown. Most telling, he continued to recite
and write Arabic prayers long after his supposed conversion and baptism as a
Presbyterian.94
Said maintained these practices after he moved with the Owen family to
Wilmington. In fact, “Moro” was a well-remembered element of the urban
landscape, a symbol to whites of their community’s genteel race relations
and part of what made the port city a good place to live. He accompanied
the Owens to their church, for example, which hundreds of other people also
attended. Whites, seeing him in the Owen pew, apparently considered the
light-complexioned Said an “honorary Arab,” but slaves in the upstairs gal-
lery could not have failed to recognize his blackness or he, theirs. Moreover,
many black Wilmingtonians in this era had Islamic names, including “Balaam,”
“Job” (commonly used for “Ayuba”), “Selah,” “Cuffy,” and “Quacco.” Said surely
reached out to the Islamic community here, just as he did on Owen’s planta-
tion. A commitment to serve African-descended Muslims in the port and its
surrounding counties may even explain why Said declined a chance to go back
to Africa. In the 1820s and 1830s, he corresponded regularly with northern
colonization advocates, like Theodore Weld, and other “celebrity” Muslims, in-
cluding Lamine Kebe, who extended the offer to transport him. Said declined.
In important ways, he had become a Wilmingtonian and the port city, home.
He died there in 1862, aged about ninety (figure 1.2).95
Said undoubtedly knew Louis Sheridan, a free black man who was also
something of a local celebrity. In a way, their lives were mirror images. Sheridan
was born a slave in Bladen County in 1793. His father, a wealthy, white, mer-
chant-planter named Joseph R. Gautier, successfully petitioned the legislature
Figure 1.2. Omar ibn Said (Moro), ca. 1855. Said’s life story was appropriated by
white elites and used, along with his person and his image, to justify the civilizing
influence of slavery on African persons. Said aided this process, even as he asserted
his Muslim identity. He died in Wilmington in 1862, aged about ninety. Courtesy of
Ambrotype Collection (P0007), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives,
Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
to manumit Sheridan and his elder brother, Thomas, in 1799; soon thereafter,
Gautier died and left the bulk of his estate to “Nancy,” his “emancipated black
woman,” and “her child, Louis.” Thus provided for economically, Sheridan also
enjoyed the protection of some of the most influential white men in Cape Fear
country, including his neighbor, James Owen, “Moro’s” master. He acquired a
liberal education, like other men of his acquaintance, and he eventually em-
barked on a successful career as a merchant-trader. Though business travel fre-
quently took him to New York City and Philadelphia, he always returned home
to North Carolina. Actually, he had multiple homes in the Tar Heel State: a plan-
tation in Bladen County, a house (“one of the best”) in Elizabethtown, where
he also owned a sizeable store, plus additional properties in Wilmington, where
he was a regular presence. Sheridan also owned at least sixteen slaves.96 His
biographer, Willard Gatewood, argued that Sheridan, who had all the markers
of white identity, from fair skin to civil rights, always recognized his distinctive
“caste” and had an ambivalent relationship with slaves and slavery. But I think
he, too, was a trickster.
In January 1828, Sheridan became North Carolina’s subscription agent for
the first black-owned and -operated antislavery newspaper in the nation, Free-
dom’s Journal. In its weekly editorials and articles, this paper and its successor,
The Rights of All, promoted full equality for blacks, championed the achieve-
ments of African peoples and their descendants in America, and encouraged
abolition at home and abroad. An item in the August 10, 1827, edition, for
example, argued: “We do well to remember, that every act of ours is more
or less connected with the cause of the people of color, and with the general
cause of emancipation. Our conduct has an important bearing, not only on
those who are yet in bondage, in this country, but its influence is extended
to the isles of India, and to every part of the world where the abomination of
slavery is known.” Nearly identical sentiments were expressed in several 1828
articles, including one published by David Walker, who was one of the paper’s
Boston agents. Far from being radical, the ideas advanced by Freedom’s Journal
were widely shared by black reformers across the country.97 Sheridan plainly
endorsed the paper’s views, else he would not have been an agent, and he used
his privileged status to circulate them in North Carolina.
As white society became more and more aggressively supremacist in the
1830s, Sheridan began to understand the precariousness of his own racially
liminal position. In September 1830, when the Cape Fear Recorder charged
Sheridan with aiding David Walker’s insurrectionary aims through The Rights
of All, Sheridan denounced Walker’s pamphlet as “mischievous” and publicly
denied any knowledge of Walker’s relationship to the paper.98 He watched with
growing alarm the rising violence against local blacks, and he grew irate as his
own neighbors (including Owen) passed laws in the assembly rescinding his
legal rights. By 1835, Sheridan had renounced his civic identities as a North
Carolinian and an American. He sailed from Wilmington on December 30,
1837, the head of a party of seventy-one free blacks, including his mother, his
wife and children, some of his former slaves, whom he had emancipated, and
several others he had recruited. They would face the future in Liberia, the only
place, he felt, for blacks “to be truly free.”99
Most black Wilmingtonians lacked the privileges whites accorded Said and
Sheridan. For them, the late antebellum era brought even greater hardship. In
the 1840s, western expansion continued apace with mechanization. Living in
North Carolina’s primary port, Wilmington’s residents benefited from the rise
of King Cotton as well as steamships, railroads, factories, banks, and markets.
As national political debates over the expansion of slavery intensified, promi-
nent and common whites alike embraced a more aggressive sort of proslavery
ideology. Though some progressive white people recognized the cruelty and
inhumanity inherent in the slave system, even they could not imagine an alter-
native. A century of slaveholding had created a deeply entrenched culture that
privileged whiteness by linking blackness to “servitude, dependency, rebellion,
immorality, and poverty.”100 Not even the cataclysm of civil war and emancipa-
tion could dislodge these beliefs.
CHAPTER TWO
Port in a Storm, 1840–1880
Donald MacRae looked down excitedly at the throng below his feet. The fifteen-
year-old perched atop a half-sized, model sailing ship, which had been hauled
to Raleigh for a grand Whig convention. MacRae was part of a large Cape Fear
delegation that had processed ceremoniously north along the newly opened
Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, then west on a rough plank road to the state
capital, making frequent stops for public speeches the whole way. Over Mac-
Rae’s head, the ship’s sails snapped in the October breeze. He spied his father,
Alexander, the railroad’s president, speaking to a distinguished man in a tall
black hat; it was General James Owen, a railroad director, planter, and owner
of the famous enslaved man, Moro. They stood amidst Whigs from all over
North Carolina, each man anxious to secure victory for William Henry Har-
rison, the party’s candidate for president. Too young to vote, Donald MacRae
simply soaked up the atmosphere: the sight of stump speakers and political
fisticuffs, the smell of fresh barbecue and spilled cider, the sound of fifty young
women singing a new song, “Hurrah! Hurrah! The Old North State forever!”
Then, shipbuilder James Cassiday appeared. It was time to deliver the vessel
to its temporary berth, where it would rest until election night. Cassiday’s cli-
ents, Wilmington’s civic leaders, commissioned the model ship as a gift for the
county with the highest voter turnout in November. Yet it also signified the
port city’s self-proclaimed identity as North Carolina’s economic center, the
place where commodities from all over the state arrived by rail to be shipped
around the world and vice versa. MacRae’s eldest brother, John, already oper-
ated a thriving commission house on Front Street; one day, Donald expected
to join him in business. On this day, however, he had adventure in mind. As
the ship drifted away, he disappeared into the crowd, little realizing how he, his
family, his descendants, and their interests would reshape the port city’s future.1
This episode introduces the dramatic changes underway in Wilmington and
in North Carolina in 1840. Ground-breaking railways began to rival historic,
Port in a Storm, 1840–1880 57
water-based modes of transportation, and manufacturing enterprises altered

the nature of work and commerce. Wilmington’s white elite actively embraced
progress, becoming more and more pro-business and industry even as they
maintained ties to agricultural production and plantation culture. At the same
time, a white middle class emerged that included newcomers from the north
and Europe as well as homegrown entrepreneurs. This history, long forgotten
by modern residents, challenges Wilmington’s romantic, Old South heritage of
riverboats, rice fields, and contented “darkies.”
Industrial activity was not only integral to the port city’s development as
a distinctive place, but it sparked spatial, social, economic, political, and cul-
tural changes that helped free and enslaved blacks to resist their oppression. By
1850, the city’s most progressive, forward-thinking whites were struggling to
maintain their supremacy and so they looked, ironically, to the past, especially
remembrances of the colonial era as well as traditional modes of organized
violence. During the stormy years of sectional crisis, southern rebellion, and
Reconstruction, these efforts increased dramatically, but so did black Wilm-
ingtonians’ use of similar methods to gain freedom and citizenship. Today,
it is common to view the Civil War as a watershed in American history, but
in the port city, neither whites nor blacks found their revolution vindicated.
For emancipation did not bring blacks equality, nor did “Redemption” bring
whites sovereignty. By 1880, an uneasy and temporary racial truce had resulted,
instead.
“Wilmington . . . Has the Most Go-a-headity of the Yankees”
The 1840 opening of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, hailed as the
longest railway in the world at that time, brought new prestige to the state’s
largest town. Wilmington had at least 5,335 inhabitants that year. Some of the
increase came from old, established families, who still dominated the commu-
nity. Sixty-five-year old Thomas Frederick Davis, for example, a direct descen-
dent of “King” Roger Moore and John Baptista Ashe, already had seven adult
children (including George Davis, future attorney general of the Confederacy)
when his third wife presented him with an infant son. Similarly, Dr. Armand
De Rosset and his wife, Eliza Jane, had eleven children, who lived with them
in an aged Georgian-style town house built by De Rosset’s grandfather, Moses,
famed mayor of Wilmington during the Stamp Act Crisis. As Lorri Glover and
other scholars have shown, men like Davis and De Rosset took great pride in
having many progeny. Elite southern fathers “envisioned themselves as critical
to the future success of their children, especially their sons,” and considered
“the ability to launch fiscally and morally sound children” a gauge of their own
success or failure as men.2
The MacRae family especially fits this pattern. Young Donald’s father, Al-
exander, descended from a Highlander who emigrated in 1777 and acquired
land in what is now Chatham County. Just as adventurous as that MacRae,
Alexander served in the War of 1812, traveled around, and eventually settled in
Wilmington, where he rapidly ascended the social ladder. Although an early
supporter of the railroad (in 1837 he became its first superintendent), he in-
vested broadly in real estate and various commercial endeavors. By 1840 he had
nine young sons to provide for, including Donald, and his second wife, Anna,
was pregnant again. One imagines he hoped for a girl.3 (See figure 2.1.)
The MacRaes had one foot in the past and one in the future. Alexander
MacRae deliberately passed memories of his collective Scottish heritage on to
his family. (In the 1950s, Donald’s daughter, Agnes, would establish the still-
popular Highland Games, held annually on North Carolina’s Grandfather
Mountain.) He called his house “Dunnegan Castle,” maintained a crest, and
used Scots Gaelic. According to some accounts, the family even ate haggis!4
At the same time, Alexander made sure that all of his sons received formal
instruction in the liberal arts along with specialized training in science, math,
and engineering. They also acquired the graces and connections essential for
leadership. Thus, the MacRae boys joined Wilmington’s paramilitary organiza-
tions, those vehicles of elite southern masculinity, and several became officers,
an honor signifying their stature among their peers. John, the eldest, opened a
commission merchant business: he bought local commodities like naval stores
and exported them overseas while importing goods from New York, Europe,
and the Caribbean and selling them wholesale to shopkeepers and grocers. He
also had a separate career in the 1840s and 1850s as a civil engineer with the
North Carolina Railroad. Donald became John’s business partner, but he, too,
pursued industrial interests. Another son joined the Navy and traveled the
globe, making astronomical observations with founder of the U.S. Naval Ob-
servatory J. M. Gillis.5 None of the MacRae brothers, in fact, became a planter.
Antebellum Wilmington was full of similar men of enterprise. A new breed,
they directed the city’s ten steam-powered saw and planing mills, fourteen tur-
pentine distilleries, two shipyards, two commercial rice mills, iron foundry,
copper boiler manufactory, and numerous storefronts, offices, and workshops.
Like entrepreneurs in other southern cities, they shared a distinctive world-
view shaped by constant “business transactions for material gain” and identi-
fied themselves by the activities that consumed their waking hours. Thus, when
the census taker came to his door in 1850, Oliver G. Parsley gave his occupation
Figure 2.1. Reproduction of a portrait of Alexander MacRae in his Masonic regalia.

A prominent civic leader, MacRae belonged to the Concord Chapter of the Royal
Arch Masons, which was chartered in 1815, and served as director of the Wilmington
and Weldon Railroad. His descendants had a profound impact on Wilmington’s
growth and development. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
as “President of Wilmington Commercial Bank,” even though he owned a large

plantation and more than one hundred slaves. Edward Kidder, who operated
a lucrative saw and planing mill, preferred the title “merchant,” as did his big-
gest competitor, lumber magnate Platt K. Dickinson. About ten years earlier, a
local newspaper had lambasted Wilmington parents who allowed their sons to
become merchants; calling them “genteel vagabonds,” the author unfavorably

contrasted effete, would-be capitalists with “manly producers” like farmers and
planters. By the late 1840s, however, dozens of men proudly identified as mer-
chants, and the press uniformly praised them as “leading citizens,” those who
promoted charity at home and the city’s reputation abroad. Indeed, Wilming-
ton’s elites were eager to boost their location to outside investors: none other
than Alexander MacRae submitted the detailed description of North Carolina’s
resources and manufacturers that appeared in J. D. B. De Bow’s first Commer-
cial Review of the South and West (1847). Tellingly, Wilmington was the only
North Carolina city he mentioned.
Driven by a shared desire to accumulate profits, men like De Rosset, MacRae,
Parsley, Kidder, and others invested in one another’s projects, served together
as town commissioners, and collectively reshaped the built environment. In
1840, an extensive fire destroyed several blocks downtown.6 Shortly thereafter,
affluent property owners began to replace old, mixed-use, wood-frame struc-
tures with fire-safe brick buildings that sported fashionable stone or cast-iron
facades. Large, plate-glass windows admitted more light into storefronts and
allowed shopkeepers to display their wares more enticingly, while iron pillars
and beams supported multiple stories and opened up new spaces for storage
and manufacturing. The city’s first truly grand public buildings went up as well,
including the federal customs house designed by famed New York architect
John Norris. Inspiring Gothic churches and elegant Italianate residences like
the De Rossets’ new home completed the transformation. Today, these struc-
tures form the core of Wilmington’s historic district, a place designed to evoke
an Old South seaport. When a journalist appraised the city’s new look in 1846,
however, he likened it to the urban North, saying, “Of all the places in the state,
Wilmington has the most go-a-headity of the Yankees.”7
Joining the elite merchants, manufacturers, and professionals in their out-
look were a host of cashiers, grocers, shopkeepers, clerks, and bookkeepers.
Historian Jonathan Wells has recently argued that a southern middle class
emerged in the 1840s, not the 1910s as C. Vann Woodward long ago contended.
Though smaller in size and fewer in number than those of the mid-Atlantic
and northeastern United States, the Old South’s towns and cities underwent
similar processes of urbanization and modernization.8 Wilmington’s nascent
bourgeoisie regularly consumed northern magazines, books, and pamphlets.
They patronized touring theater companies, which brought new plays and
musicals, and they avidly participated in the era’s burgeoning consumer cul-
ture, anxious to display their gentility and civility. Like urbanites in Richmond,
Norfolk, Vicksburg, and elsewhere, Wilmingtonians founded temperance so-
cieties, lyceums, schools, and other reform-minded organizations designed to

spread sobriety, literacy, industry, and thrift, values disdained by the planter
class.9 In many ways, they had more in common with their peers in Boston
or New York than with common whites or planters living in New Hanover or
Brunswick counties. Yet they shared two things with their rural neighbors of
consequence: strong ties to their specific place and a deep commitment to their
peculiar institution.
Transformations and Traditions
The rapid commercialization and urbanization of the era altered both slavery
and race relations in the port city. About three thousand enslaved men, women,
and children lived in Wilmington in the 1840s. They numbered far fewer than
the nearly ten thousand who resided in Richmond, the South’s leading indus-
trial city, or the roughly twenty thousand enslaved people in Charleston, yet
in some ways they all experienced similar conditions: none engaged in field
work. Most of Wilmington’s slaves toiled on the docks, in private homes, or in
various small businesses around town. A significant minority, however, per-
haps 15 percent, toiled in industrial, large-scale commercial, or manufacturing
settings. The thirty-eight adult men enslaved by cotton factor Henry Nutt, for
example, undoubtedly manned his massive warehouse, where they unloaded
railcars and flatboats, repackaged and compressed roughly ginned bales from
the upcountry, and loaded them onto waiting ships for transport. The sixty-
four men owned by Platt Dickinson, by contrast, worked in his steam-powered
saw and planing mill, where they processed thousands of board feet and mold-
ings a year. Only fifteen slaves worked in Benjamin Beery’s shipyard, a much
smaller-scale operation, while ten served the steamer Wilmington and nine,
the Gladiator. Alexander MacRae personally owned eighteen enslaved men,
women, and children, who ranged in age from fifty-five to two; through the
Wilmington railroad, which owned its own slaves, he directed an additional
two hundred adult males. Some of the city’s enslaved industrial workers were
so highly skilled that owners took out insurance policies on them. One of these
individuals was listed as an engineer. More typical were turpentine workers,
distillers, boilermakers, carpenters, sawyers, and coopers.10
This increasing reliance on skilled, industrial slaves coincided with a rapid
influx of white wage earners, especially immigrants from pre-Famine Ireland.
New Orleans had the largest Irish population (15 percent of all whites in that
city) in the South at this time, followed by Savannah (10 percent), Memphis (8
percent), Mobile (7.8 percent), and Charleston (5.5 percent). In Wilmington, the
only city in North Carolina to have an Irish settlement worth noting, the major-
ity were either skilled artisans or storekeepers. Shoemaker John Fitzpatrick, for
example, boarded at his home four other Irish-born shoemakers, who worked
in his shop. Having a lucrative trade did not guarantee a white man a living,
however. Wilmington’s changing economy produced a more segmented labor
force that assigned certain kinds of work to enslaved or free blacks. In the early
1840s, for example, Alexander MacRae authorized the employment of Irish la-
borers on the Wilmington and Weldon line, but he soon stopped the practice,
declaring that “the class of white men secured was less reliable than the slaves.”11
Shut out of certain jobs, stereotyped as drunken, brawling Papists, the Irish
also found themselves sequestered geographically. Most of them resided in
a low-lying, poorly drained area called Dry Pond because of the quagmires
that formed there when it rained. By 1845, there were enough Irish living in
Wilmington for the Charleston diocese to approve Wilmington’s first Catholic
parish. In no time at all, members pooled their collective resources and erected
St. Thomas the Apostle Church on Dock Street. The substantial brick building
not only fostered their distinctive faith and ethno-cultural identity, but it fixed
the Irish community’s place on Wilmington’s cognitive map.12
Joining the Irish were immigrants from Germany. These newcomers gener-
ally fared well. Names like “Wessel,” “Mindel,” and “Erhardt” hung on signs
for specialty shops like bakeries, confectionaries, and tobacconists. A hand-
ful of Jewish families established dry-goods and grocery stores. Most ethnic
Germans, however, were unmarried craftsmen and clerks, young men very
much on the make. Along with their employers, they founded several German
singing societies, a brass band, a militia company called the German Volun-
teers, and a Lutheran church.13 Like the Scots before them, the new immigrants
strove to maintain their Old World values even as they embraced new civic and
racial identities.
One other population of “foreigners” deserves our attention: transplanted
New Englanders. After the Panic of 1837, northern farmers began migrating
west into the new territories of Illinois and Ohio, but artisans and businessmen
often came south to seek a living in the region’s burgeoning seaports and river
towns. Wilmington attracted northerners from nearly every state on the east-
ern seaboard. Builder John Coffin Wood and his brother, Robert, came from
Nantucket in 1839 to direct the construction of St. James Episcopal Church, a
monumental Gothic structure on Market Street. Their uncle, Phineas Fanning,
a printer, already resided in the city and may have helped them get the contract.
Many other Fanning-Wood relatives, also carpenters and builders, arrived in
the wake of the 1840 fire that destroyed a large section of Wilmington.14
Newcomers rarely questioned the chattel principle that undergirded south-

ern society. To the contrary, as they acculturated to what scholars call the wages
of whiteness, they quickly developed a desire to acquire slaves of their own.
Fortunately for them, Wilmington had the largest slave market in the state of
North Carolina. Although impersonal market forces like the expansion of cot-
ton and sugar in the Deep South obviously helped fuel a growing slave trade
inside the United States, new scholarship attributes the rising demand for black
bodies to the ambitions of white consumers. As historian Walter Johnson suc-
cinctly put it, “They imagined who they could be by thinking about who they
could buy.”15
White Wilmingtonians purchased already enslaved people by one of three
methods. Some went directly to the slave pen, a large, nondescript structure
near Fifth and Market streets. Like pens elsewhere, it hid behind a high, blank,
brick wall that concealed an exercise yard, multiple holding cells, and a private
showroom, where “Mr. Howard,” the owner, sold to the most discriminating
buyers. Others attended an open-air auction held at the foot of Market Street,
by the river, where itinerant traders set up a temporary wooden platform for
sales to the general public. According to John Dillard Bellamy Jr., a planter’s
son who regularly observed these sales as a child, white sellers stood their
black wares upon the platform, and the auctioneer “would cry out the age, sex,
and capability of the slave, just as they sold livestock, then and now.” As late
as 1945, Bellamy could unabashedly state the typical white person’s opinion of
these transactions: “There was nothing cruel in the treatment of the slaves to
be sold, for they were well cared for, the only objection was that human beings
were being traded.” The third option required a potential buyer to peruse the
advertisements that regularly appeared in local newspapers. “FOR SALE,” read
a typical ad. “A valuable Negro woman and girl. The woman is an excellent
cook and good house servant. Apply at the office of the W&W RR Co., G. W.
Galloway.” With these few, carefully chosen words, Galloway invited the reader
to imagine how his or her domestic life would improve through this purchase.
Such private sales occurred frequently, for they allowed buyers and sellers to
avoid the trader’s fee.16
The example of the Nantucket-born Wood family illustrates how some new-
comers adopted slavery to advance their own mobility. As builders, John and
Robert Wood initially encountered slaves on job sites: following the custom of
the country, they hired free black contractors like Alfred Augustus Howe, son
of Anthony and Tenah Walker-Howe, who supplied teams of enslaved carpen-
ters, masons, and plasterers all hired out from their owners. In 1841, only two
years after their arrival in Wilmington, the Woods built the Carolina Hotel,
which they operated as a separate business. The hotel staff included nine en-
slaved people owned by the Woods themselves, as well as several they hired
from others. Barber Richard Edens, for example, provided essential grooming
services to hotel guests and “worked for his mistress on shares.” The Wood
brothers also had a brickyard on nearby Smith Creek, where they employed
more than a dozen additional slaves that they owned. For this upwardly mobile
white family, at least, success clearly required unfree labor.17
A close reading of slavery in late antebellum Wilmington reveals the same
paradox noted in recent studies of other southern cities: while compatible with
commercial and industrial pursuits, the region’s “peculiar institution” and its
traditional system of race relations became destabilized in the midst of urban
life. For one thing, blacks in cities, both free and unfree, were far less isolated
than their rural counterparts. In Wilmington, the expanded use of railroads
and steamships in the 1840s and 1850s increased the movement of people and
ideas through the port. Literate blacks continued to communicate with resi-
dents of other cities; they even maintained ties to Africa, especially Liberia,
where Louis Sheridan and other North Carolinians still struggled to make the
colony successful. For another thing, the city’s overall prosperity fostered a
rise in the number of free blacks from 356 in 1840 to nearly 800 in 1850. Most
of these individuals were skilled craftsmen who purchased their own freedom
through the hiring-out system. Twenty-seven of them went on to acquire prop-
erty. James Sampson, for example, identified in the 1850 U.S. Census as a “mu-
latto” carpenter, owned $16,000 worth of real estate, which compared favorably
to the $27,000 owned by Alexander MacRae. More typical was Mercury Rich-
ardson, a free black painter who owned a lot valued at $2,700. Though blacks
continued to dominate the building trades, during this period they expanded
into a range of other occupations, drawing wages as barbers, shoemakers, coo-
pers, fiddlers, draymen, fishermen, sailors, dyers, steamboat firemen, waiters,
laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks. Their collective income spawned new,
majority-black institutions like the Baptist church and school that formed in
1846 and 1847. The urban context thus expanded attitudes, activities, and insti-
tutions antithetical to slavery and white supremacy.18
Whites employed various methods to control and minimize the presence of
black people in public. The Market remained a particularly challenging place.
In 1848 the commissioners ordered the erection of a state-of-the-art, cast-iron
structure: measuring an impressive 25 by 187 feet, it stretched down the center
of Market Street from Front Street toward the water. The city carefully limited
the number of licenses awarded to black vendors, but their very existence ag-
gravated tensions because of their fixity and visibility. “Mom Tenah,” for ex-
ample, occupied her stall for so long that bookkeeper Nicholas Shenck marked
her place in his hand-drawn, cognitive map of the city decades later. Actually,
blacks could be found at nearly every store and business, and their numbers
ensured their domination of public spaces like streets. Hence, new ordinances
required free and enslaved blacks to give way to whites on the sidewalks, avoid
making eye contact with whites, and wait to be recognized by whites before
speaking. Older laws still prohibited blacks from congregating in groups and
forced them indoors by nine o’clock at night. The owners of the Academy The-
ater allowed blacks to purchase tickets, but required them to sit upstairs and
keep quiet. Similarly, the city’s many new churches welcomed blacks for wor-
ship services—so long as they sat on benches in the rear or in balconies out
of white sight. Most tellingly, Wilmingtonians banned blacks from the county
courthouse, city hall, the federal customs house, and other government build-
ings, thereby excising them visually from the body politic.19
Still apprehensive of their own civic status, whites minimized black par-
ticipation in the port city’s most symbolic communal events. Here, as in most
other American cities, civic celebrations became more frequent, larger, and
better organized in the 1840s. Independence Day offers a good example. Wilm-
ingtonians revered their specific Revolutionary heritage; by 1840, they had af-
fixed a cannon from the war to a pedestal at the foot of Market Street, where
it faced the water in a permanent display of their inherited martial spirit. The
cannon memorialized the spot where the Stamp Act riots began during Tryon’s
inauguration and where the Cape Fear Minutemen gathered before departure.
Every July 4, civic leaders organized a parade that started at the cannon’s loca-
tion, now a meaningful place. Every prominent, white community organiza-
tion participated, and the route always passed by (and sometimes stopped at)
other meaningful places, such as St. James churchyard, where Harnett’s body
lay, and the Burgwin-Wright house, where Cornwallis had made his headquar-
ters. In processing this way, the antebellum marchers reiterated individual and
collective identities, both racial and civic, that attached to commemorative
sites in the cultural landscape. Black and white members of the community
lined the streets in support, their presence actively affirming the broader pur-
pose of the performance. However, whites then withdrew to their respective
churches for indoor ceremonies featuring speeches and patriotic songs.20
Similarly, the whole community turned out for militia musters. The largest,
most important one always took place on February 22, George Washington’s
birthday. The event began with cannon fire; then the all-white regiments spent
the morning marching through the streets and executing maneuvers. At mid-
day, the men enjoyed a lavish meal and heard patriotic speeches; then they
marched and drilled some more. Wilmingtonians were especially proud of the
Clarendon Horse Guards, who debuted in 1844: “Their dress, we had supposed
would be neat, but we were by no means prepared for seeing one of the rich-
est, and at the same time, one of the most tasteful costumes in which we have
ever seen a Military Company equipped,” declared the Wilmington Journal.
Each militia restricted membership to those men it deemed “respectable” and
“honorable,” and leadership often passed from fathers to sons, as it did in the
case of the MacRaes, the De Rossets, and other elite white families. Immigrant
men, excluded from participation, formed their own companies, like the Ger-
man Volunteers, as a way to communicate their civic mindedness at a time
of intense nativism. Parading behind the Horse Guard and other prestigious
militias, they also displayed their common whiteness and masculinity in a way
that publicly expressed their affiliation with the gentry, despite their lower so-
cioeconomic status. Like secret fraternal orders and volunteer firemen associa-
tions, militias staged parades to proclaim their role as community guardians
and to reassert that access to public space was a white male privilege. As in
other southern cities, then, civic processions in antebellum Wilmington facili-
tated collective identity construction by publicizing the exclusive relationship
between gender, race, and citizenship.21
White civic leaders, men like the Davises, MacRaes, and De Rossets, strategi-
cally allowed a few token blacks to participate in musters. In a tradition dating
back to the Revolutionary Era, two or three enslaved or free black musicians
accompanied each white military unit. The most famous was Philip Bassadier,
a native of Guadeloupe, who formerly belonged to Thomas Nicholas Gautier,
commander of the U.S. Naval Station at Wilmington from 1808 to 1818; Gautier
purportedly impressed slaves captured from British vessels and forced them to
work on naval gunboats.22 After Gautier freed him, Bassadier operated a barber
shop. However, whites remembered him better for his musical role than for his
business sense or skill with a razor. For nearly four decades, he served as the
official bugler of the Light Horse Company. During the muster, he donned a
“cocked hat and red flannel coat,” appeared “very early in the morning . . . [and]
sounded his horn at the corners of the streets. Then the Negro drummers beat
the reveille in front of the courthouse at Market and Front streets. . . . [T]he
fifer and drummers were ordered to march down the line and volunteers were
directed to fall in behind them.”23 For all his visibility, Bassadier clearly had a
symbolic function. Armed only with a trumpet, he served as a source of enter-
tainment, a visual reminder to the white company and the larger community
of the black man’s lack of formal citizenship and subordinate status.
Blacks found many ways to resist their marginalization and subordination,
but the most impressive demonstration still came with the Kuner procession at
Christmas. By the late antebellum period, they had made numerous alterations
which, using the lens of anthropology, we can decode as cultural performances.
They supplemented their distinctive grass skirts, for example, with conventional
garments to which they sewed hundreds of long, fluttering strips of brightly
colored fabric that mimicked earlier costumes. These “rag men,” as whites de-
risively called them, still wore painted, wooden masks with “remarkably dis-
torted noses, widely grinning mouths, horns, and beards, fierce and terrifying
to behold.” The horned leader (the Sorcerer) still wore the most fantastic garb,
but now he, not the “Slave Trader,” carried “a raw-hide whip with which he pre-
vented interference from urchins in the street.”24 The “Slave Trader” character,
by contrast, had changed his costume from a tricorn hat and regimental-style
jacket to a black top hat and a frock coat. White observers called him “The
Fancy Man,” which suggests they saw a kind of “Zip Coon” or black “dandy”
figure, but I contend that his dress and behavior still parodied the slave trader/
owner. The rest of the company wore their regular clothing, however, and were
identified as Kuners simply by the musical instruments they held.
Whereas in the colonial era the Kuners’ West African attire and athletic
“dances” recalled their warrior heritage and tribal identity, antebellum partici-
pants were clearly engaged in signification, a rhetorical strategy that allowed
enslaved people to channel “their anger, aggression, and frustration into a rela-
tively harmless exchange of wordplay.” As in the past, Christmas was the one
time enslaved people could address whites directly, shake hands with them,
dance with them, enter their private homes, even mock them—all supposedly
done without fear of reprisal. Consider Harriet Jacobs’s statement:
It is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle. If he
does, they regale his ears with the following song:
Poor massa, so dey say;
Down in de heel, so dey say;
Got no money, so dey say;
Not one shillin, so dey say;
God A’mighty bress you, so dey say.
Some scholars liken these lyrics to the lines of an English carol: “Christmas is
coming, the goose is getting fat. / Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. / If
you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do. / If you haven’t got a ha’penny then
God bless you.” The Kuner version, however, sung when no money appeared,
functioned not as a blessing, but as an insult. “Got no money, so dey say. / Not
one shillin, so dey say [emphasis added].” The repeated phrase challenged the
veracity of white claims to poverty and twisted the meaning of Christian char-
ity around. Another song that had the same effect has also survived, recorded
in the same dialect: “Run, Jinnie, run! I’m gwine away. / Gwine away, to come
no mo.’ / Dis am de po’ house. Glory habbilulum!” Such taunts were not con-
fined to common whites encountered on the streets. Indeed, the antebellum
Kuners’ actual targets were affluent, white, slave-owning families. For this rea-
son, they planned their parade route to move through the principal residential
streets and past the homes of specific households.25
The confrontations proceeded according to a clear pattern. As they pro-
cessed, the Kuners chanted: “Hah low, here we go. / Hah low, here we go. /
Kuners come for my lady.” These distinctive lines notified elites that enslaved
people were coming to collect their annual Christmas gift from the mistress
of the house. White women traditionally supervised the meting out of new
clothes and Christmas food rations on plantations; in Wilmington they handed
out coins, cakes, and drams of whiskey. Depending upon the house, the Kun-
ers either stopped on the sidewalk or paraded into the front or side garden,
where they chanted until the targeted residents came out. Then, the Kuners
performed.
Their surviving songs often identify white oppression as the source of black
suffering. One survival from this period laments a wife or sweetheart who has
been captured or sold away: “She stood long on the shore. / Eyes grow dim
with tears, / Oh, I lak to melt. / She went across the seas. / She swung a kiss
to me. / I’ll wait for her. / I’ll be true to her. / As de skies above, / I’ll await my
darling girl.” Another Kuner song popular in Wilmington recounted the ar-
rest of a black man for teaching: “Old Beau Bill was a fine old man. / A riggin’
and roggin’ in the world so long. / But now his days have come to pass, / And
we’re bound to break up Beau Bill’s class. / So sit still ladies and don’t take a
chill, / While the captain of the horses ties up old Bill.” Most whites remem-
bered Kuner songs as “weird,” “wild,” “barbaric,” even “gibberish,” terms that
may indicate a deliberately “incomprehensible mixture of African and English
words.” The dances during this period also struck white observers as “strange”
and “boisterous,” words suggestive of retained African movements.26
The antebellum Kuners typically featured a performance by a black man
dressed as a white woman. Judge Alfred Moore’s granddaughter, Rebecca Cam-
eron, who fondly remembered Christmas at Moore’s Cape Fear plantation, Bu-
choi, vividly recalled the particular dance involving the “female” Kuner: “Faster
and faster falls the beat of the flying feet, never missing the time by the space
of a midge’s breath. One after another the dancers fall out of line, until only the
woman and leader are left to exhibit their best steps and movements.” Cameron
went on to describe what appears to have been a skit portraying the horned
leader’s symbolic taking of the “woman.” Though Cameron either missed or
ignored the symbolism, I think modern readers can see how the male dancer
was identified by his non-western costume as black/African whereas the “fe-
male” partner, by virtue of “her” western garb, was white/American; in other
words, “she” represented the white mistress. A similar representation occurred
at another plantation, where the Kuner leader entered the mansion, drew his
mistress into the foyer, and proceeded to dance with her, his hands on her
body, in full view of her husband.27
Elite planters had good reasons to overlook such displays, but common
whites could and did take offense. In rural Perquimans County, for example, a
group of patrollers broke up a particularly loud and boisterous 1846 Christmas
Eve celebration at Jacob Boyce’s “Big House,” where they found the planter’s
enslaved black men “cavorting” with his daughters. In this case, a lower court
agreed with the patrollers who wanted Boyce convicted of having a disorderly
house and contributing to public immorality through interracial dancing.
Judge Edmund Ruffin later acquitted Boyce, however, insisting that there were
“no brawls; no profane swearing, nor other vicious disorder,” merely “harm-
less merriment” of the sort a slaveholder had the right to permit during the
season.28 Whites might thus disagree over the meaning of these dances, but
for black participants, they inverted slave owners’ sexual conquest of black
women and thereby translated the ritual battle with the Aro slave trader to suit
the antebellum North Carolina context.
The most important change can be seen in the Kuners’ grand finale, which
occurred when the procession reached the Market House and participants
offered a skit about Isaac and Rebecca.29 The choice of content is worth ex-
amining, for in Christian tradition, Rebecca is the mother of God’s chosen
people, the Israelites. Married to the much older Isaac, she remained barren
for twenty years until a miraculous pregnancy resulted in the birth of twin
sons, wooly haired Esau and smooth-skinned Jacob, who were foretold to
found two warring nations. In time, she arranged for Jacob to take Esau’s
birthright and fulfill the prophecy that said the older would serve the younger.
After Isaac learned of Rebecca’s and Jacob’s deception, Jacob fled while Esau
assumed control of Isaac’s property. Esau eventually married two Canaanite
women, but his choice of brides prompted great dismay from his parents.
As the Kuners surely knew, the Canaanites descended from Canaan, who re-
ceived from Noah the fabled curse of Ham, which consigned Esau’s progeny
to perpetual servitude. White southerners had long used this biblical story to
justify slavery, so the Kuners likely offered a parody that inverted the racial
hierarchy. Although we cannot be certain, this interpretation is consistent

with other Kuner inversions. Plus, the Isaac-Rebecca skit occurred at the Mar-
ket, where slave auctions occurred. The city’s black people, the Kuners slyly
asserted, were strong, vital members of Wilmington’s community who de-
served love and happiness, not violent oppression. Whites, by contrast, were
not worthy leaders, but cruel, selfish people who would get their due eventu-
ally. Read as part of a broader cultural performance, the skit, like the myriad
other alterations I have described, enabled black Wilmingtonians to correct
publicly their white oppressors and construct through inversion a positive,
place-based civic identity reflective of their racial heritage.
“Foam and Fury”: The Secession Crisis
In 1858, Wilmingtonians celebrated the opening of an elegant new opera house,

Thalian Hall. Seated in a special box, high above the masses, was Donald Mac-
Rae, president of the Thalian Association, the city’s leading arts organization.
Now thirty-three years old, he was a successful commission merchant, director
of the North Carolina Railroad, and board member of the Bank of Wilming-
ton. Outwardly, he appeared calm and self-assured. Yet his correspondence
reveals a more complex inner life. First, he had recently replaced his aging fa-
ther, Alexander, as the MacRae clan’s “keystone”: Donald’s elder brother, John,
had been crippled in an accident; his younger brothers were typically out of
town supervising engineering projects; and Alexander Jr., who opened a china
and glassware store in 1852, had sizeable debts. Second, Donald MacRae began
in the late 1850s to face new challenges regarding slavery. Like most of his
peers, he owned slaves and stood to inherit more when his father died. More
to the point, he managed hundreds of enslaved men who toiled on the railroad
and who increasingly resisted their oppression by slowing their labor, disobey-
ing orders, and running away. Finally, he worried about his children’s future.
Widowered in 1852 and left with a young daughter, he had recently married
Julia Norton, a newcomer from Maine who taught French to Wilmington’s
elite children. They had an infant son, born July 3, 1858, and named “Norton”
in honor of his mother’s New England roots. MacRae’s northern connections,
reinforced through two marriages, likely encouraged his attention to national
debates over the expansion of—indeed, the very legitimacy of—slavery. Like
many southern Whigs, he worried about the disintegration of his party and
wondered what the looming sectional crisis meant for his city and state. He
never wavered in his commitment to the South’s peculiar institution, however.
“In character he was prompt, manly, decided; with no disposition to com-
promise or temporize,” observed an early biographer and friend. “He had the
courage of his convictions, and the combativeness to defend them to the last
ditch.”30 These convictions would soon be tested.
Despite the glittering spectacle afforded by the 1858 grand opening of
Thalian Hall, all was not well in the port city. Only a year earlier, the United
States experienced a financial panic that led to a severe, nationwide economic
depression. The effects were deeply felt in Wilmington, where white journey-
men’s simmering resentment of the hiring-out system boiled over. In contrast
to the 1802 episode, the 1857 labor protest escalated into violence and vandal-
ism. An angry white mob demolished a building under construction by free
and enslaved black artisans and left a written notice in the rubble threaten-
ing that “a similar course would be pursued in all cases against all buildings
to be erected by Negro contractors or carpenters.” A public meeting made it
clear that the workmen’s challenge would not succeed. A speaker for the gentry
condemned the “lawless” action and said if the artisans disliked the “present
situation of things as regards slave competition in labor,” then they could just
“seek a living elsewhere.”31
Soon, even middle class businessmen began to suffer. Robert Coffin Wood
“lost everything”: his contracting business, the brickyard, and the Carolina
Hotel. He sold his fashionable, lovingly built home on Market Street to Don-
ald MacRae and relocated to Beaufort, where he contracted with Captain W.
H. C. Whiting of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a new federal
lighthouse at nearby Hunting Island, South Carolina. Based at the Corps office
in Wilmington since 1852, Whiting knew Wood personally. Most Wilmingto-
nians, however, had neither the skills nor connections required to start over.
When the Front Street Methodist Church organized a mass revival in 1858,
thousands turned out to pray, repent, or convert.32
Other events exacerbated tensions in the city. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that people of African descent were not
and never would be citizens of the United States. Wilmington still had a size-
able population of literate, militant, politically conscious blacks, both enslaved
and free. Many of them, like their counterparts in other southern cities, took
offense at Chief Justice Roger Taney’s contention that blacks were “beings of
an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either
in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect.” For Abraham Galloway, an educated,
enslaved builder who hired his own time, and Richard Eden, the enslaved bar-
ber who worked at Wood’s now-defunct Carolina Hotel, the time had come to
escape; the two friends sailed out of Wilmington, hidden in the stinking hold
of a schooner carrying turpentine.33 By 1858, many local blacks had run away
or found other ways of asserting their independence, just like the enslaved
railroad laborers that Donald MacRae struggled to curb.
The autobiography of William H. Robinson, who was born a slave in Wilm-
ington in 1848 and resided in the city and its hinterlands until 1862, describes
many different forms of slave protest in the late 1850s, from verbal challenges
to physical acts of self-defense. In one example, enslaved people who had gath-
ered for a secret prayer meeting in an abandoned cabin reacted to word of an
impending raid with defiance. When the armed whites stormed the structure,
the blacks filled shovels with live coals and threw them in the patrollers’ faces
as they ran by into the darkness.34 Theirs was a double protest—first against
the master’s religion and second against his police power. Circulated orally
throughout the region and then recorded in Robinson’s memoir, the story of
their victory likely spurred others to acts of resistance.
Robinson also documented the existence of an extensive “underground rail-
road” that operated on the Cape Fear River in the 1850s. His father, Peter, an
enslaved river pilot, had been sold from the Wilmington slave pen because
whites suspected him of helping slaves escape north. Peter apparently worked
closely with two Quaker ship captains, Samuel Fuller and a Mr. Elliot. As Wil-
liam Robinson explained: “Father was with Messrs Fuller and Elliott every day
towing them in and out from the oyster bay. This gave them an opportunity
to lay and devise plans for getting many into Canada (the only safe refuge for
the negro this side the Atlantic) and my father was an important factor in this
line. . . . One man would haul the slaves at night to the end of his station and
get back home before daylight, undiscovered, then they would be conveyed
the next night in wagons from that station to the next, and so on. . . . If anyone
connected with the underground railroad was caught the penalty was a heavy
fine and expulsion from the state.”35
Wilmington’s reputation as North Carolina’s chief “asylum for runaways”
had been cemented years if not decades earlier. Quakers established an un-
derground railroad in Guilford County in the 1820s, and their coreligionists
in Cape Fear country successfully adapted their model for the river. Other
white Wilmingtonians participated, however. Merchant Zebulon Latimer, for
example, a native of Connecticut, helped one of his own slaves escape on a ship
in 1848. White dockhands aided Abraham Galloway and Richard Eden in 1857,
and white railroad workers helped William Robinson’s elder brother, James,
escape in a boxcar in 1860. How many other blacks left by underground means
cannot be known, but news of lives in freedom often filtered back to the Cape
Fear, giving hope to the majority left behind.36
Because of black restiveness, both real and imagined, the white population
dramatically overreacted when news of John Brown’s raid on the federal ar-
mory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, reached the port city on October 18, 1859.
The Wilmington Light Infantry immediately wired the governor of Virginia
to offer assistance. The officers undoubtedly read an inflammatory article in
the Daily Herald, which called it “A Negro Outbreak” and said that “750 fully
armed [black] men” had taken the armory. The same paper, usually known for
its moderate Whig stance, ominously implied that white retribution would be
swift and terrible, stating that “the poor, deluded Negro, of course, is the great-
est sufferer” of the tragedy. “When will they learn who are their best friends and
who are their enemies? It seems as if never.” The Wilmington Journal similarly
reported that the “negro outbreak” had been “instigated to murder and rapine.”
Eventually, the Herald correctly reported that only a handful of blacks partici-
pated in the uprising, but it also ran a five-column piece detailing the heroism
of Colonel Robert E. Lee and the U.S. Marines who took Brown into custody.
The Journal also retracted its initial claims, though the editor concluded that
“panic was a natural reaction” for whites and argued that the whole affair dem-
onstrated the need for better patrols. Elsewhere in the state, most Tar Heels
paid the raid little mind, but in the so-called “black belt,” including the lower
Cape Fear, where slaves outnumbered whites, it prompted near-hysteria.37
By the late 1850s, slavery had made politics a deadly serious arena. It had
already resulted in the death of a prominent Wilmingtonian, Dr. William C.
Wilkings, who fought a duel in 1856 and lost. Historians generally treat this
event as a curious footnote to the antebellum era—the “last duel fought in
North Carolina,” they call it. There is more to the story, however. Following
the formation in 1854 of the Republican Party and the passage of the Kansas-
Nebraska Act, Southern Democrats became militantly proslavery. Wilkings, an
officer in the local Democratic association, used the occasion of a political rally
to make insulting verbal remarks about Wilmington merchant Joseph H. Flan-
ner, a Whig running on the American (or “Know-Nothing”) ticket in Novem-
ber 1856. Flanner responded with a stinging card (or personal notice) placed
in the Daily Journal, and Wilkings subsequently issued his challenge. Many
southern businessmen, especially Whigs, had begun to distance themselves
from the region’s cult of honor and rejected dueling as a barbaric, immoral
practice. Flanner apparently fell into this category, for he tried several times to
arrange through his seconds a nonviolent settlement that would satisfy both
men. Wilkings refused, and the decision cost him his life.
What we need to note is the public response to what was ostensibly a private
matter. Although Whigs were rapidly losing ground nationally, they remained
strong locally, and so the duel functioned as a kind of proxy for communal
conflict. Thus, the pro-Whig Journal covered the men’s disagreement in detail
for several days prior to the event. Since dueling was illegal in North Caro-
lina, the men met in Fair Bluff, South Carolina, just across the state line. A
large group of Wilmingtonians traveled there to witness the bloody exchange,
and afterwards, Wilkings’s friends and supporters placed cards in the newspa-
per expressing their grief and declaring that proslavery Democrats were not
“disheartened” by the loss of one of their ablest leaders. Finally, on the day of
the funeral a “concourse of people” followed the coffin to Oakdale Cemetery.
(Some even packed picnic lunches so as to better enjoy the spectacle.) Buoyed
by this reaction, Democrats quickly transformed Wilkings into a martyr to
their partisan causes, including universal white manhood suffrage. As it hap-
pened, North Carolina was the only state in the union that still had property
restrictions on voting. The party aggressively appealed to the region’s white
store clerks, railroad workers, mechanics, and other property-less former
Whigs, and their support helped win a constitutional amendment removing
property requirements in 1857. Wilkings’s death thus became a rallying point
for the Democrats, who sought to become the majority party in Wilmington.38
To regain power, the Democrats began to impugn the character and loy-
alty of transplanted northerners, to manipulate public opinion through the
press, and to organize mass events. They also cultivated a reputation for hot-
headed violence. Thomas Fanning Wood recalled a time in 1859 when a group
of rowdy, intoxicated young men gathered at the store of his employer, Louis
Erambert, a Democrat and known fire-eater. All of the men were armed, and
when the political debate over secession turned ugly, Erambert opened fire.39
Such tactics would be remembered by the Democrats’ descendants in the 1870s
and 1890s.
Dr. John Dillard Bellamy Sr. was one of the city’s most outspoken, proslav-
ery Democrats. Born in South Carolina and a self-professed “follower of John
C. Calhoun,” he owned an extensive plantation in Brunswick County, where
his two hundred slaves grew rice and produced naval stores for export. So con-
fident was he of slavery’s future in 1859 that he commissioned a grand new resi-
dence for his family on the corner of Fifth and Market. Still one of Wilming-
ton’s most prominent landmarks, Bellamy’s elegant, white-columned, Italianate
mansion reflected the artisanry of many different kinds of black craftsmen. The
white builder, another transplanted New Englander, confided to his diary: “I
took pleasure in showing the foremen how to carry out my drawings; it how-
ever seemed strange to keep in mind, that almost to a man these mechanics
(however seemingly intelligent,) were nothing but slaves [emphasis in original]
and capable as they might be, all the earnings that came from their work, was
regularly paid over to their masters and mistresses.” Ironically, Bellamy’s en-
slaved artisans made the builder question the South’s peculiar institution just
as their owners were demanding to expand it. As chairman of the Democratic
Association, Bellamy regularly hosted elite political gatherings in the house
and wrote his public speeches there, making it, in effect, party headquarters.
Thanks to Bellamy, in fact, more and more Cape Fear whites began to ally with
the party’s “ultra” or extremist wing.40
As sectionalist, proslavery sentiment increased in southeastern North Caro-
lina, some of Wilmington’s leaders resorted once again to constructed memo-
ries of the American Revolution. Scholars today would say they attempted to
create “a usable past,” one that reinterpreted history to address present-day
needs. We can see how this process worked in the 1857 dedication of the Pa-
triot’s Monument at Moore’s Creek battlefield in Pender County. Configured as
an eighteen-foot-high obelisk, the monument marked the hallowed site where
North Carolina militia units defeated Loyalist forces in February 1776. That
battle, which the inscription commemorated as “the first victory gained by the
American arms in the war of the revolution,” ended royal rule in the colony.
Moore’s Creek had a singular meaning for Wilmingtonians, however. The com-
mander in chief was Colonel James Moore, son of Maurice Moore, and the
primary field combatants were “a Wilmington battalion of minutemen.” Not
only did port city residents attend the ceremony honoring their homegrown
patriots, but a special committee asked the main speaker, Wilmington’s Joshua
Grainger Wright, descendant of an original settler, to publish his speech for the
benefit of the entire community.41
We can see in his text several important local themes. First, Wright spent
considerable time explaining why Alexander Lillington, a New Hanover
planter and son an original Cape Fear founder, was the real hero of the day,
not Richard Caswell, a transplanted Marylander. Further, Wright reminded his
audience that “the serpent of tyranny which had stolen into our Eden was here
[at Moore’s Creek] scotched, not killed,” and, he insisted, “other men at other
times” had had to “crush out its venom and its strength,” especially those men
of “Cape Fear Country, well worthy of being called the Gibraltar of North Car-
olina.” Though he never directly referenced the sectional tensions then plagu-
ing the United States, the image of a returning, Hydra-like “serpent” and use of
words like “tyranny,” “liberty,” and “freedom” encouraged audience members
to connect their ancestors’ past with their own present.
Similarly, the Revolution’s enthusiasts singled out for attention and preser-
vation the homes of “signers” William Hooper and Cornelius Harnett. In this
project they reflected the influence of Wilmingtonian Alice Hill London Dick-
inson, North Carolina regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for 1858
and 1859. A descendant of one of the Cape Fear’s founding families, the Ashes,
and of a Revolutionary War general, Dickinson grew up in Harnett’s former
house, Maynard, which her grandfather Hill owned. Though the MVLA em-
phasized the first president’s image as an impartial, nationalist statesman, it
simultaneously promoted his southern, historically Virginian, values. To devo-
tees like Dickinson, preserving the first president’s home plantation, the source
of his civic virtue, was a way to validate slavery’s role in creating and sustaining
the United States. So, too, preserving Hooper’s and Harnett’s houses as pilgrim-
age sites helped validate the values of living elite Wilmingtonians and affirm
their collective virtue by connecting them metaphysically to southern patriots
in other eras and places.42
In fact, southerners everywhere in the late 1850s began to reinterpret their
Revolutionary history in a sectional but local way. In Charleston, the annual
Palmetto Day festival, which originally commemorated residents’ patriotic
June 28, 1776, defense of Fort Moultrie against the British navy, had become
by 1859 a “truly Southern jubilee” that honored states’ rights. In Richmond
in 1859, civic leaders erected in Capitol Square a massive equestrian statue of
Washington. In contrast to an earlier, 1796 monument that depicted him as
Cincinnatus-returned-to-his-farm, this one showed a soldier on horseback,
a nod to the region’s martial culture and the perception that Virginia needed
warrior-leaders to guide them in the 1850s. North Carolina did not have the
same historical patrimony as Virginia, but Tar Heels found their own unique
symbols of Revolutionary identity, such as the Mecklenburg Declaration of
1775 (signed a full year before the Continental Congress’s version, as people
noted with pride). In Wilmington, meanwhile, elites continued to emphasize
the 1765 Stamp Act rebellion, which they felt established their community’s
reputation and early leadership role in the movement for independence. In
the 1850s, they augmented that existing narrative with new chapters and new
mnemonics in the landscape. But most important is the timing of these par-
ticular commemorative efforts, which southern urbanites intended to promote
intersectional conciliation while valorizing local resistance to tyranny.43
Unionist sentiment ran strong in the port city. The MacRaes, for example,
had many New England ties, both personal and professional, and these con-
nections, coupled with the family’s Whig heritage, kept them out of the Dem-
ocratic Party.44 Other prominent families agreed, including the De Rossets,
the Hills, and the Davises. So did Alfred Moore Waddell, the young scion of
two founding families, who endorsed the American Party’s Millard Fillmore
for president that year, as did all the “real, earnest, and enthusiastic Union
men,” whom he labeled “the conservative element of the population.” Waddell
moved into the city in 1856 to open a legal practice. After John Brown’s raid in-
flamed public opinion in favor of the Democrats, Waddell abandoned the law,
purchased the Daily Herald, and devoted himself to the Constitutional Union
Party. Years later, after he became a staunch Democrat, he chose a familiar
metaphor to describe the intense feelings that political disruption in the late
1850s caused the city: “[T]he current of public events, although swiftly gliding
toward the cataract and whirlpool . . . broke into foam and fury,” he wrote.
“With sudden and startling effect,” Cape Fear country “awoke to a realization
of its close proximity to an appalling catastrophe.”45
“The Argument of the Sword”
In their political disagreement, whites in and around Wilmington reflected

circumstances in the state as a whole. In the western, mountainous region,
where small subsistence farms predominated, Unionist feeling prevailed. This
was also the case in the so-called Quaker Belt, a wide swath cutting through the
central, Piedmont counties. Across the coastal plains, however, where slavery
was a vital economic and social institution, states’ rights dominated. By 1860,
the state was so divided that, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s election, the legis-
lature called two statewide meetings to determine whether enough popular
support existed for a secession convention. At the second one, held on No-
vember 19, 1860, the state’s Unionist majority won the day. At the local level, by
contrast, fire-eating Democrats like Bellamy successfully swayed New Hanover
County voters to support secession.46
After South Carolina seceded on December 20, Wilmingtonians’ revolu-
tionary spirit surged higher. Thomas Fanning Wood, who clerked in Louis
Erambert’s drug store, recalled that secessionists like himself began to wear ro-
settes made of “pine burrs” to identify themselves to each other. At Christmas,
tensions ran so high that the Kuners dramatically scaled back their usual num-
bers. Then reports arrived in early January 1861, saying that President James
Buchanan had sent supplies and troops to Fort Sumter. An agitated group of
men, fearful that a similar plan existed to garrison Union forts Caswell and
Johnston, which guarded the mouth of the Cape Fear River, quickly took up
arms and gathered at the courthouse. Well aware of their shared heritage, the
crowd heard a rousing speech by merchant Robert G. Rankin, who insisted
that “Black Republicans” intended to cripple Wilmington’s trade and thereby
suppress their liberty. Civic leaders then convened a Committee of Safety, a
group that in its name deliberately alluded to the city’s Revolutionary past.
They also called up a volunteer army, which they christened the Cape Fear
Minutemen. Finally, they applied lessons from the past to address their present
crisis: by acting independently, they said they hoped to force “the speedy action
of the Legislature in trusting this great question [of how to deal with Northern
tyranny] with the people, by doing which and by placing the State in a proper
condition for defense, they may make secession peaceable.” On January 9, 1861,
the Minutemen sailed downriver to Fort Johnston, the old defense outside the
seaport of Smithville, and forced its sole keeper to surrender. They then sailed
across the bay to Fort Caswell and took possession of it, hoping their leader-
ship would compel the rest of the state to secession. To their dismay, when
Governor John W. Ellis learned of the attacks, he ordered the forts immediately
returned to federal authorities, and the North Carolina legislature, just back
from its break, voted to send delegates to a special “Peace” Conference to be
held in Washington, DC, in February.47
Wilmington’s George Davis was among the Tar Heels sent to the national
capital. His biographer and cousin, historian Samuel A’Court Ashe, described
him as “dark, rather than blonde, of medium height,” and “entirely the product
of Cape Fear influences.” Now a mature man of forty-one, a devoted husband
and father, he was also by 1861 general counsel for the Wilmington and Weldon
Railroad, a noted figure in the state Whig Party, and a staunch Unionist. In
Washington, he joined delegates from fourteen free states and six other slave
states. Like many of them, Davis hoped to find a “fair and honorable” solution
to North Carolina’s predicament, and he listened attentively to the debates.48
Hindsight compels many modern Americans to think the Civil War inevita-
ble, yet during the first two months of 1861, northern and southern politicians
worked long hours hoping to devise a successful union-saving, war-avoiding
strategy. For the 131 men who gathered at the Willard Hotel, a few blocks from
the White House, the primary issues remained as they had been for nearly ten
years: resolving the legal status of slavery in the trans-Mississippi West and the
property rights of slaveholders, broadly. Southern Unionists like Davis played
a decisive role in hammering out a new compromise. In brief, it permitted
slavery to expand into the western territories below the 36°30’ parallel and
prohibited Congress from making any federal laws that would affect slavery
where it already existed. It also required monetary compensation to slaveown-
ers for runaways lost through “violence or intimidation” under the Fugitive
Slave Law, and it legitimized slavery in the District of Columbia. These planks
were considered essential not only to placate the most radical southerners, but
to persuade the seven seceded states to rejoin the Union. To appease northern-
ers, the proposal prohibited the foreign slave trade, required that any new bill
for statehood have a four-fifths majority to pass, and removed the constitu-
tional “protection” of slavery in the territories (essentially reverting to a kind
of popular sovereignty). The final document thus resembled several earlier,
failed plans, especially the so-called Crittenden Compromise of December
1860, which had very nearly passed. The convention sent it to Congress on
February 27 and adjourned to await the final vote.49
Back in the port city, people passed the time holding their own debates
until finally, on March 2, a somber Davis returned and gave a dramatic public
speech at Thalian Hall. We learn from its text, which survives, not only that the
conference proceedings transformed him into a secessionist, but why: the pro-
posed amendment, he declared, did not “distinctly acknowledge and guarantee
property in slaves” or extend over human chattel the “full and adequate pro-
tection” accorded “all other forms of property.” For these reasons, he said, he
had not been able to support it. At the time of this speech, Davis undoubtedly
knew that the House of Representatives, which had met the day before, had not
been able to muster a two-thirds majority, and he surely anticipated that the
Republican-dominated Senate would reject the Peace Conference’s proposal
(as indeed it eventually did). After all, that “Black Republican” Lincoln had
run for election on a promise to confine slavery, not expand it. Thus, the future
attorney general of the Confederacy concluded “by emphatically declaring that
the South could never—never!—obtain any better or more satisfactory terms
while she remained in the Union.” When he finished, an observer said a hush
fell over the crowd, “as though the speaker’s judgment had settled that of each
one who heard him.”50
Starting in the Progressive Era, Tar Heel historians insisted that their ances-
tors seceded “grudgingly” and only did so to avoid “fighting against the South.”
This view helped advance reconciliation and promote New South boosterism,
but modern scholars now agree that the real motive for secession was to pro-
tect slavery. Planters, yeomen, plain folks, and mechanics—together, the vast
majority of white North Carolinians—viewed slavery as the foundation of a
society far superior to the one that rested on free labor. More than an eco-
nomic and social system, slavery encapsulated for white southerners a range
of political liberties, especially the right to property and the sacred freedom to
live their lives as they saw fit. Lincoln’s election had not sufficiently threatened
those liberties, but his call for 75,000 soldiers to put down the southern rebel-
lion did. This use of force convinced even conditional Unionists that the time
for political debate had ended. As James Sprunt, another convert to secession,
recalled, the only argument left was “the argument of the sword.”51
“A Changed Town”
Wilmingtonians took up arms as soon as word of Lincoln’s call for troops

reached North Carolina. Acting under orders from Democratic Governor John
Willis Ellis to re-seize Forts Caswell and Johnston, Colonel John L. Cantwell
called up the Wilmington Light Infantry, the German Volunteers, the Wilm-
ington Rifle Guards, and the Cape Fear Light Artillery. More than 120 men
gathered the morning of April 16 at the intersection of Market and Front
streets and assembled into ranks. Surrounded by a throng of cheering men
and handkerchief-waving women, they processed the short distance past the
Revolutionary cannon to the waterfront, where they boarded a steamer that
took them downriver.
Among them were several of the younger MacRaes, who upon disembark-
ing at Smithville assisted in strengthening the old forts and arming them with
new artillery. Meanwhile, at the behest of the newly formed (and symbolically
named) Committee on Safety, their elder brother, John C. MacRae, went to
Charleston to request of South Carolina’s Governor Pickens “such cannon and
gun carriages as our necessity requires.” After the secession ordinance passed
in May, William, Henry, Walter, and Robert Bruce MacRae formally enlisted
in various North Carolina state regiments, and all four were commissioned of-
ficers. Their sixty-five-year-old father, Alexander, a veteran of the War of 1812,
led the local effort to recruit a heavy artillery battalion and personally com-
manded one of its companies. Donald MacRae, in Boston on business when
the war began, quickly returned home to supervise the family’s affairs.52
Other men of the region also returned home and enlisted in the new Con-
federate Army. Merchant Gaston Meares, for example, was living in New York
City with his wife, Katherine De Rosset Meares. A veteran of the Mexican War,
he was commissioned a colonel with command of the Third North Carolina
regiment. His brother-in-law, William Lord De Rosset, served as his second in
command. The bulk of the volunteers, however, were not elites, but common
whites, whom the officers put to work building numerous defensive fortifica-
tions. The officers also impressed into service hundreds of enslaved people
from the surrounding plantations, as well as yeomen farmers from the back-
country. As one local historian concluded, “Next to Charleston, Wilmington
was the most heavily fortified city on the Atlantic seaboard.”53
Wilmington’s businessmen did their part by converting their industries to
wartime production. Shipbuilder James Cassiday received a government con-
tract to build Confederate ironclads at his yard below Church Street, as did
his competitors, the Beery brothers, on Eagle Island. The city’s two existing
iron works fabricated a variety of much-needed metal parts, and German im-
migrant Louis Froelich expanded his metal-button factory to encompass the
production of swords, bayonets, surgical instruments, and bowie knives. Even
the vast state-owned salt works increased its production. Located on nearby
Masonboro Sound, its furnaces and drying sheds evaporated enough sea water
to produce nearly three thousand bushels a day, barely enough to meet war-
time demand for food preservation, leather tanning, and cloth dying. A new
concern, more humble yet just as vital, opened at the foot of Chestnut Street:
Henry Lowe & Company employed more than a hundred women, who took
home machine-made stocking pieces and knit them together. Workers in these
industries, deemed critical to the war effort, received exemptions from military
service, but high turnover plagued the city, and white manufacturers still relied
on slave labor.54
The port also experienced a marked shift in its commerce. At first, ship-
ping dried up completely. Donald MacRae, in Boston when Lincoln extended
the blockade to North Carolina in early 1861, wrote to his friend and business
partner, John W. K. Dix, in Wilmington that, “all masters [of ships here] are
panic stricken & don’t know what to do—fear to do anything.”55 Up and down
the Cape Fear, wharves sat empty for weeks. Even the so-called corn crackers,
regional boats that brought bushels of golden ears to town for milling, stayed
away. After Union surveillance ships began arriving off the coast on July 21, the
situation changed. The U.S. Navy clearly lacked enough vessels to pull the drag-
net tight, and Wilmington’s commission merchants, aware that skilled Cape
Fear pilots could easily out-navigate the cruisers, embraced blockade running
as a lucrative opportunity.
Much romanticized and central to Wilmington’s war narratives, as many
as one hundred different blockade runners plied the waters off the cape. Usu-
ally sailing under cover of darkness, they kept the Confederacy connected to
European manufactories by funneling goods to and from neutral ports in the
Caribbean. Old, established mercantile firms handled most of the trade. The
De Rosset family, for example, sent one of its scions, Louis Henry De Rosset,
to Nassau to open a new office. Commission-merchant houses like De Ros-
set and Brown especially profited from imported goods like brandy, parasols,
nails, and medicines, which they auctioned off to the highest bidder. Critics
contended that the government turned a blind eye to the black market that
resulted, but quite the opposite was true. Not only did the Confederate States
of America regard the illicit trade closely, it owned its own blockade runners,
which it used both to generate income and to import much-needed war ma-
teriel, including lead, saltpeter, blankets, rifles, and cannons, which black ste-
vedores loaded onto railroad cars for reshipment to southern battlefronts. As

long as the port of Wilmington was open for business, then, the city’s Rebels
felt they had a strong chance to win.56
Just as they claimed for their colonial forebears a unique and essential role
in achieving American independence, so white Wilmingtonians now hailed
their special contribution to the Confederate war effort. Instead of boycot-
ting stamps and tea, they embargoed cotton. When the war began, thirty-nine
different nations had consuls or vice-consuls in southern port cities, includ-
ing Wilmington. In April 1861, Donald MacRae accepted an appointment as
British vice-consul for the Carolinas. Reporting to Robert Bunch, the English-
born consul in Charleston, MacRae tracked the number of British ships cleared
for Wilmington, the amount of customs paid, and any problems pertaining to
cargo or crewmen. His correspondence reveals an interesting phenomenon:
in August the Wilmington Committee of Safety, formed to ensure domes-
tic security, began to interfere with British trade. They started by seizing the
schooner Carrie Sandford, which had aroused suspicions when it arrived from
Havana empty despite having British papers. Locals believed she was actually
an American vessel, owned by a Yankee master, who sailed her under a false
flag intending to bring southern cotton north. When the ship’s captain sought
assistance, vice-consul MacRae felt duty-bound to inform Bunch.
MacRae described the committee as a “self-constituted body” of “patriotic
civilians,” and said they had passed “a local ordinance forbidding any vessel to
enter Wilmington in ballast and leave without cargo.” Bunch then complained
to North Carolina Governor Henry T. Clark, who wrote to President Jeffer-
son Davis, but in the meantime, the committee detained several empty British
steamers, the Napier and the Bruce. In these cases, Wilmingtonians evidently
sought to enforce the CSA’s informal cotton embargo, by which means Davis
and his cabinet, which now included Wilmington’s George Davis, hoped to
compel British recognition. MacRae again wrote Bunch. This time, he reported
that Mayor John Dawson warned the captains that, “if they attempted to lade,
he would not protect them from mob violence and no decision of the Gover-
nor or President would affect him.” Further, Dawson told MacRae the com-
mittee felt justified in its extralegal actions because they were “in accordance
with the wishes of the Richmond government.” In this highly public way, then,
Wilmington’s civilian leaders simultaneously demonstrated their loyalty to the
Confederacy and their willingness to use violence in its cause.57
While MacRae’s service as vice-consul continued even after the cotton em-
bargo sputtered out in 1862, the post remained incidental to his own business
interests. In fact, the war provided opportunities that would generate income
for his progeny well into the twentieth century. For example, in early 1862, he,
his brother John, and their partner John Dix purchased a large tract along the
Deep River in northern Lee County, where they erected an iron furnace. This
part of the state was well known for its rich mineral deposits, and MacRae al-
ready owned land in the vicinity, where he harvested timber and naval stores.
His summer home, located near the town of Sanford, had housed his family
since the summer of 1861; Julia bore the couple’s third child, Donald Jr., that
May, and when she was well enough to travel, the entire household relocated
there for safety. MacRae frequently rode out to supervise the furnace, which
supplied the Confederate arsenal in Fayetteville with pig iron, and he acquired
additional tracts of woodland, which would one day boast a summer resort
(the still popular Linville). He traveled back to Wilmington from time to time
to manage his affairs there, and he corresponded regularly with family, friends,
and business contacts when away. John Dix’s letters were especially important,
for as deputy vice-consul he cleared ships and relayed crucial business infor-
mation when MacRae was away.58
Dix’s letters stopped during a yellow fever epidemic that swept the city. It
began in August 1862, when a blockade runner from Nassau brought sailors
carrying the disease to Wilmington. It had been an unusually rainy summer;
stagnant pools of water incubated the mosquitoes that transmitted it from
victim to victim. Shopkeepers shuttered their doors and windows, and resi-
dents, black and white, fled the city, reducing its population to roughly 4,000
inhabitants. Doctors like James H. Dickson, who tended the ill until he, too,
succumbed, recommended that townsfolk wear tar-soaked patches of cloth
on their chests and burn rosin pots to ward off swampy “miasma,” which they
considered to be the cause. By the end of November, when temperatures fell
low enough to kill mosquito larvae, more than 650 people had died, including
thirty-year-old Dix, who probably lies in the mass grave dug hurriedly at Oak-
dale Cemetery. Although other southern cities experienced yellow fever epi-
demics during the war, Wilmington’s losses were particularly high and greatly
weakened white morale.59
For black Wilmingtonians, the disease seemed like divine providence. In
September 1862, at the peak of yellow fever panic, a group of eight enslaved
men made a daring escape. Among them was William B. Gould, an articulate,
talented mason and plasterer who had created the elaborate interiors of John
Bellamy’s Italianate mansion. Gould’s later writings describe in detail how he
and his friends stole a small boat under cover of darkness and rowed it some
thirty nautical miles through a driving rain to the mouth of the Cape Fear.
There, sailors on board a Union steamer, the USS Cambridge, spied a “strange
sail,” and picked up the eight black men, who were immediately conscripted
into the U.S. Navy. Federal policy concerning runaway slaves had shifted dur-
ing the early years of the war; they were now to be treated as contrabands and
put to work rather than returned to their owners or set free. Gould shoveled
coal and performed odd jobs as the Cambridge patrolled the coast off New
Inlet. Although the volume of blockade runners decreased as word of the epi-
demic spread and the Confederates at Fort Johnston began enforcing longer
quarantines, the U.S. cruisers remained busy. On February 16, 1863, Gould
tersely noted in his diary that they “pass’d Rich Inlet very close in shore. Took
a good look at the place I left in ’62.” Though the steamer had made this run
before, it was apparently the first time he had been able to see the wooded
shore marking the edge of his former owner’s plantation. How he felt can only
be imagined; several days later he noted receipt of three letters by mail boat, so
he clearly stayed in contact with family and friends left behind. He also com-
municated regularly with his future wife, Cornelia Williams. Freed in 1858 and
living on Nantucket, she gave his escape purpose.60
In Wilmington as in other southern ports, the white community’s traditional
controls on the enslaved population—never perfect—steadily weakened. White
owners placed frequent advertisements seeking information concerning the
whereabouts of runaways, most of whom they expected to seek shelter behind
enemy lines. In July 1863, the town commissioners, fearing an uprising, passed
a local ordinance forbidding any meetings of slaves or free blacks without the
express written permission of the mayor himself. They also revived the nine
o’clock curfew for all blacks, unless they had special passes. That particular or-
dinance proved nearly impossible to enforce. Blockade runners arrived at night
and had to be unloaded and reloaded with great haste, a task that required
many hands. Some enslaved men apparently seized the new opportunity to
hire themselves out as stevedores and, as in previous eras, their competition
provoked great hostility from common whites. In 1864, the Daily Journal pub-
lished an angry letter to the editor that upbraided local slave owners for their
continued violation of state law, which had caused the town to be “inundated
by gentlemen of color who fare better than their masters, who parade the streets
in fine apparel, seldom or never saluting white persons, and reluctantly giving
them room to pass on a sidewalk.” For this writer, competition for work was
the “chief cause of disorder” in town, but his sneering reference to “gentlemen
of color” suggests that disintegrating social systems played a role, as well.61
A range of new social problems arose between 1861 and 1865. Everything
seemed “topsy turvy,” according to one resident. “[The town] is a perfect sink
of iniquity,” reported another. The sex ratio, roughly equal before the war, now
skewed sharply to men. Wartime brought hundreds of foreign and American

steamship crewmen, speculators, and adventurers into the city. Confederate
soldiers were present, too, but they were stationed in Wilmington to protect
the government’s interests, not civilians,’ and they were often just as disorderly.
James Sprunt vividly recalled the frequent fights that arose between the “rogues
and desperadoes” who roamed the streets. As early as October 1862, a local pa-
per reported that three different stores had been burgled and implied that food
theft was the motive: In November 1860, a dozen eggs sold for fifteen cents; by
January 1865, they cost a whopping ten dollars. In one well-publicized robbery,
thieves tunneled underground and broke into the basement of a warehouse,
which they readily plundered. Violent assaults occurred more frequently, as
well. Some of these were simply alcohol-fueled brawls, but many civilians were
held up at gunpoint and robbed of cash or other personal items. Letters written
by members of the De Rosset family suggest that elite women felt the danger
keenly. As Drew Gilpin Faust and other scholars have shown, the demands of
war swept away the old patriarchal order, liberating some southern women and
leaving others feeling frustrated and vulnerable. Even the editor of the Wilm-
ington Daily Journal, a pro-secessionist paper, greatly lamented the changes
that war had wrought: “Previous to the war, Wilmington was very gay and
social. . . . It is indeed a changed town.”62
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow”
Long in the making, the Union campaign for Wilmington began just before
dawn on December 24, 1864: “A brilliant flash for a split second made the sea
face of Fort Fisher blaze white, and the early morning calm was ripped by a
shattering blast that smashed glasses on board ships out at sea and could be
heard in Wilmington thirty miles away.”63 The explosion came from the USS
Louisiana, which Union General Benjamin Butler had ordered his men to fill
with gunpowder casks, float toward shore, and detonate. In the bomb’s wake,
small, wooden boats deposited Union troops in the shallow waters. As they
slogged towards the fort, they realized with horror that the breastworks re-
mained intact and retreated. Over the next two weeks, however, nearly eight
thousand Union forces arrived, secured the beach, and commenced a three-
day assault on the fort. Confederate commander Colonel William Lamb and
General Chase Whiting, both of whom received critical wounds during the
final battle, surrendered on January 15, 1865. In days, the other forts guarding
the mouth of the river were in Union hands, and the soldiers in blue began
their advance toward the port city.64
On paper, the Union objective was to capture Wilmington and use it as a

supply base for General William T. Sherman’s army, then moving from Georgia
into the Carolinas. Whites residents were fearful, of course, yet still defiant.
They knew from previous reports that some four thousand black soldiers were
among the estimated eight thousand blue coats marching toward them, and
they knew that among the four thousand blacks were a large number of their
own runaway slaves, yet they did not comprehend that such a force, by its very
nature, would defeat their way of life. Blacks in the area, by contrast, readily
grasped the ultimate resolution of the crisis and took clear steps to aid its com-
ing. Chris Fonvielle’s excellent study of the Wilmington campaign describes
numerous instances when rural slaves and free blacks aided the Union forces
by providing much-needed information about Confederate troop movements
and the local terrain.65
In the city, residents alternated between apprehension and impatience. The
white pastor of the historic Front Street Methodist Church, Rev. L. S. Burk-
head, became so agitated at the thought of his black congregants’ liberation
that he called the class leaders together and threatened them, saying
That the Confederates might possibly retake the City and if they [black
men] were guilty of the commission of wrongs upon the whites they
might expect in that case to be severely punished. That I did not regard
them as responsible for the war and there was no necessity for them to
suffer its horrors, but should they pursue an unwise course and array
themselves against the whites, sooner or later they might stand a good
chance to be destroyed as a race, for they could never contend single-
handed and successfully against the white man. . . . That Yankee chap-
lains—even colored chaplains—might labor to win their hearts. . . . If
they should take the unwise step indicated and attempt to nullify my
pastoral authority and refuse to obey the rules of the church, I should
feel bound by my own solemn vows and convictions of duty to enforce
the Discipline against them.66
This remarkable speech reveals Burkhead’s naked desire to maintain his au-
thority over the predominantly black congregation. The leaders saw his need,
too. Ever prudent, they knew the Jubilee rapidly approached and simply reas-
sured him of their loyalty. Then they left to plan their future.
The official evacuation of Wilmington began on February 21, 1865. Retreat-
ing Confederates, well aware that Union forces were moving north through
Brunswick County, destroyed several bridges on the roads leading to Wilm-
ington from the west. They also burned the trestle that carried the Wilmington
and Western Railroad and dismantled a pontoon bridge that had long carried
traffic across the river to Eagles Island. Delayed by these tactics and by several
skirmishes, the first Union troops did not arrive until three o’clock that after-
noon. As the Union forces gathered on the west side of Eagles Island, Colonel
John Jackson Hedrick ordered his rebels to position two cannons at the foot of
Market Street, where the old Revolutionary War armament stood, and bom-
bard the enemy. When the U.S. troops partially withdrew, Hedrick personally
ferried one of the weapons to the island and opened fire. This “last stand”
prompted swift retaliation: Union cannons rained shells down upon the city
until Hedrick retreated.
Around this time, General Braxton Bragg stepped off the train at the Wilm-
ington and Weldon depot, six blocks north of Market Street, and surveyed
the chaos. He could readily see Union soldiers massing on the opposite bank.
Frightened citizens packed the station platform, hoping for a seat, but prison-
ers of war and injured rebel soldiers had priority. As he walked toward the
Market, Bragg saw dozens of families fleeing in buggies and wagons, while
merchants and clerks struggled to board up their storefronts. Bragg had earlier
given his men orders to remove as much Confederate government property
as possible and to destroy any remaining stores. To accomplish this task, his
soldiers impressed about two hundred enslaved men and rounded up all able-
bodied white males between the ages of seventeen and fifty to help. Thousands
of dollars’ worth of cotton bales, packed into the warehouses along the river-
front, were already aflame. Bragg’s men also set fire to dozens of barrels of tar
and turpentine, the Cassiday and Beery shipyards, the city’s two foundries, its
turpentine distilleries, and various vessels docked at the wharves. A brisk wind
fueled the blaze and sent dense black clouds of choking, stinking smoke up
to the heavens. At nightfall, the city appeared fully deserted. Those residents
unable or unwilling to evacuate hunkered down in their homes, afraid to light
even a single candle.67
Union troops entered the city early the next morning, February 22, 1865.
It was Washington’s birthday, formerly a day of civic celebration. By eight
o’clock, Mayor John Dawson and a crowd of civilians had gathered near the
Revolutionary War cannon to watch ferries bring soldiers from the Sixteenth
Kentucky Infantry across the river. Meanwhile, Union General Alfred Terry’s
advance guard began arriving on foot from the south. As the column appeared
at the southern end of Front Street, led by a drum and bugle corps playing
“Yankee Doodle,” more and more people moved into position to watch the pro-
cession. They supplied an enthusiastic reception that shocked and surprised
the Federals, but that was largely because most of the community’s die-hard
Confederates had fled the city. An even greater celebration came when the men
of the Thirty-seventh U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) made their appearance.
Deliberately positioned at the end of the column, the black soldiers in their
blue uniforms came on with “burnished barrels and bayonets gleaming in the
bright sunshine . . . singing with one accord . . . the famous John Brown song.”
A white bystander recalled that the black citizens suddenly “came alive” and
flooded wildly through the streets: “The men danced in jubilation, the women
went into hysterics, then and there on the sidewalks.” Alfred Moore Waddell
stood amid the crowd of onlookers. Years later, he still recalled with detail the
reaction of an elderly white man, who with “an indescribable expression of
mingled horror and disgust exclaimed, ‘Blow, Gabriel, blow, for God’s sake
blow.’”68
“They Will Soon Be Practically Enslaved Again”
Rendering final judgment on white Wilmington was not God, but General
Joseph R. Hawley, commander of the District of Wilmington from February
to June 1865. General Terry had placed him in command because Hawley was
a North Carolinian by birth. However, Hawley had spent most of his adult life
in Connecticut, where he became an ardent abolitionist and Radical Republi-
can. He deliberately made his headquarters in the Bellamy mansion on Market
Street, and from this meaningful place he implemented a program designed to
punish former slaveholders by rewarding their former slaves.
Following the spirit of the March 1865 Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which gave
the president authority to set apart “such tracts of land within the insurrection-
ary states as shall have been abandoned,” and redistribute them in parcels of no
more than forty acres, Hawley seized four contiguous plantations bordering the
Cape Fear and divided them among “loyal refugees and freedmen.” The prop-
erties affected were Orton, Kendall, Lilliput, and Pleasant Oaks, all established
in the eighteenth century by founding families. In town, he commandeered
any houses that were not physically occupied by their owners, especially those
of the gentry. Astonished, an irate Donald MacRae wrote to authorities, “If a
man owns two or more houses, he cannot be expected to occupy them both,
when they are as far apart as mine are.” Hawley was unmoved. Focused on the
immediate needs of destitute war refugees, black and white, who streamed
daily into the community, he filled every empty building to capacity. He also
established a civilian food relief committee, a hospital, and a work program.
Mayor John Dawson and the city’s municipal authorities, overwhelmed by the
magnitude of these changes, simply stayed out of Hawley’s way.69
In late April, well after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and

Johnston’s near Raleigh, Wilmingtonians learned that Hawley now reported
to Major General John M. Schofield, commander of the new Department of
North Carolina. Schofield issued two general orders that would shape race
relations for the next two decades. Number 31 urged everyone “to cultivate
friendly relations with the same zeal which has characterized our conduct of
war.” Number 32 declared all slaves free by virtue of the Emancipation Procla-
mation. It went on to insist that former slaveholders must pay wages and that
newly freed men and women must stay and work for their former masters.
If they left their present situations, the order stipulated, they must find work
elsewhere, for “they would not be supported in idleness.” Schofield’s underly-
ing attitude here is significant, for he revealed his views on how best to achieve
Reconstruction—by conciliating with the former Confederates, not punishing
them as Hawley did, and by setting black people back to their labors again, and
quickly.70
Black people had their own ideas. Newly freed slaves from surrounding
plantations swarmed into the port city, hoping to locate missing loved ones,
find employment, and taste the fruits of liberty. They had little besides hope.
Even battle-hardened Union soldiers were moved to pity by the lines of former
slaves, barefoot and carrying their meager belongings. Hawley himself wrote
his wife that “I stood dumb before the great misery. . . . [E]very few hours my
throat would choke and my eyes fill as I looked on.” Wilmington provided a
cold welcome. According to one historian, “the military government estimated
that there were six to seven thousand refugees, white and Negro, one to two
thousand wounded soldiers, and 8,600 liberated Union prisoners of war, who
were in ‘frightful condition,’ several thousand of them suffering from jail fever,
a contagious disease that even killed two of the physicians treating them.” Ev-
ery available building was full, so the newcomers fended for themselves on the
streets, in doorways and alleys, and in makeshift camps at the edge of town.
Inadequate food, shelter, medical care, and sanitation led to a high death rate;
one of the first businesses to reopen was a carpenter shop, which provided a
steady supply of rough board coffins.
Joy mingled with sorrow. Many black men and women exulted in their free-
dom. Music rang from the Front Street Methodist Church on Sundays, and
laughter sounded merrily from black children at play. Significantly, the freed-
men formed “arrangements committees” and held regular meetings to discuss
problems that affected them collectively. The city’s antebellum-era black lead-
ers guided these efforts, but new black civic activists emerged, as well. George
W. Price Jr., for example, helped organize and lead an April 27, 1865, memorial
procession in honor of the assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln. Price, a

formerly enslaved plasterer, escaped from Wilmington with William Gould
and served with him in the U.S. Navy. Whereas Gould remained in Massachu-
setts, where he had mustered out, Price came home to family in Wilmington.
His neighbors later elected him one of the city’s first black aldermen.71
On hand to assist black Wilmingtonians were agents from the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Created in March 1865 as an arm
of the War Department, the so-called Freedmen’s Bureau had “control of all
subjects related to refugees and freedmen,” and required the appointment of a
chief based in Washington, DC, as well as an assistant commissioner in each
state “declared to be in insurrection.” By the time President Andrew Johnson
appointed Major General Oliver Otis Howard chief in May, sympathetic field
officers like Hawley had already taken matters into their own hands, seizing
and redistributing land, food, and clothing. Eventually, the bureau’s officers
established black schools and hospitals, adjudicated legal disputes between
black and white civilians, and attempted to reunify black families. These efforts
drew sharp criticism from northern and southern whites alike. Some feared
the creation of a permanently dependent black underclass. Others resented the
provision of federal services to “undeserving” blacks over “our own people.”
Hostility was especially high in Wilmington, where Captain Allan Rutherford
presided over the field office of the bureau’s Eastern District.72
Rutherford’s men had no power to curb the “steady campaign of everyday
violence” that southern whites waged against blacks. For one thing, the rapid
demobilization of Union troops created high turnover rates among bureau
agents and numerous vacancies. Wrongs to freed people “increase in just pro-
portion to their distance from United States authorities,” reported a frustrated
official in western North Carolina. “The feeling of mastership and the convic-
tion that Blacks have few rights that a white man is bound to respect have not
been eradicated,” explained another. Across the South, Confederate veterans
used racist violence to assuage feelings of loss and humiliation generated by
the devastation of their families and communities. Historian James Marten
perceptively argues that “the brazenness with which former Rebels commit-
ted acts of violence against both black and white enemies must have resulted
from a powerful if fleeting sense of mastery that belied the veterans’ status as
members of a defeated army.” In the port city, where Union troops maintained
a visible presence, white attacks on vulnerable blacks also increased. In April
1866, bureau agent W. H. H. Beadle testified to a congressional committee
that Wilmington police often organized the violence in concert with civilians.
Without the bureau’s limited help, a freedman in the port city told some visit-
ing generals, blacks would be “at the mercy of those who hate us,” and “in less
than two weeks you will have to allay a [white] riot in Wilmington.”73
Perhaps to defend themselves, more than 150 freedmen enlisted in the
Thirty-seventh USCT. Military life proved exceedingly miserable. Over the
next few months, the size of the regiment began to drop as death, desertion,
and disability took their toll. More important, black soldiers became targets of
racially motivated violence. High levels of animosity existed within the regi-
ment itself, and as the black men of the Thirty-seventh took up guard posts
in the city and at the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad station, they clashed
with other Union troops as well as white civilians. Local whites claimed the
black soldiers were bullying them and pilfering their property, but they espe-
cially accused them of “stirring up” the former slaves by placing in their heads
improper notions of racial equality. It was a familiar refrain: “our blacks are
obedient, they love us and know their place, so if they are acting up, getting out
of line, it is only because outsiders are inciting them to it.” In June 1865, Alfred
Moore Waddell wrote to the provisional governor, William W. Holden, on the
city’s behalf, claiming that the presence of the USCT actually threatened white
safety. Their effect on “the negro inhabitants is growing worse every day” and
“will inevitably result in a massacre,” he warned, unless the governor removed
them from the city. His language (and the emphasis he placed on the word
“massacre”) was deliberately vague: would the colored troops be victims of
organized white violence or perpetrators of an assault against whites? Did the
answer even matter? In either case, Holden had no authority to intervene. He
simply referred the matter to federal authorities.74
In fact, white Union officers often sided with former Confederates and vice
versa. Historian William McKee Evans speculated that the desire “to make a
dollar” led many Wilmington businessmen to make peace, especially entrepre-
neurs like Mayor John Dawson, who opened his own bank, and H. H. Munson,
who started a newspaper aptly called the Herald of the Union. Aiding local
elites’ shifting loyalties was the fact that military reconstruction had given way
to presidential reconstruction and a kinder, gentler form of occupation. In June
1865, General John Worthington Ames became commander of the Wilmington
District. Unlike his predecessor, the radical Hawley, Ames did not support
black equality. He and his men readily fell under the “cake and wine influence”
of the city’s elites and sympathized with the views of their civilian friends on
the subject of black behavior. A freedman living in town at the time said, “The
fact is, it’s the first notion with a great many of these people, if a Negro says any-
thing or does anything they don’t like, take a gun and put a bullet into him.”75
The forging of white solidarity was rapid. In July 1865, a confrontation oc-
curred when a black provost guard spotted a white man whose coat bore brass
buttons with the CSA insignia. Veterans frequently wore their old uniforms;
some had no other clothes, but others deliberately sought to signal continued
resistance. For this reason, especially, federal authorities had prohibited the
public display of Confederate symbols, and the black soldier ordered the man
to remove the offending garment. What happened next is illuminating: their
heated exchange of words prompted a white Union officer to intervene. He
grabbed his black subordinate, incensed at what the paper called his “saucy”
behavior toward the white civilian, kicked him across the street, and forced
him back to his regiment.76 In August, an altercation between a white mu-
nicipal policeman, Samuel Wycoff, and a black USCT soldier led to mass
violence. Wycoff shot the soldier, who cut him with his bayonet. Another
black soldier drew his firearm to defend his wounded comrade, and a black
guard detail arrested the wounded white man. When Wycoff ’s hearing came
up, however, the federal provost marshal dismissed all the charges against
him. An angry crowd of black soldiers and their civilian supporters soon
surrounded the city hall, and Mayor John Dawson ordered the city police
to disperse them with clubs. That night, the protesters evened the score: in
small bands, they attacked the local police as they made their rounds of the
city and killed at least one man in the process.77 Chronically undersupplied
and underpaid, the men of the Thirty-seventh realized that summer that they
were on their own.
As historian Richard Reid has argued, “[I]t was the presence, not the behav-
ior, of the black soldiers that lay at the root of Southern concerns.” The men of
the USCT contradicted the deeply held belief that blacks were innately servile,
cowardly, and ignorant. Colonel William Lamb, former commander of Fort
Fisher, employed this trope in his memoirs when he wrote disparagingly of the
black troops that landed at Federal Point. So did J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton,
who recounted “outrages” committed by black soldiers in Wilmington in his
1914 work, Reconstruction in North Carolina. In fact, most of the men in the
Thirty-seventh were seasoned veterans. They had enlisted in the spring of 1863,
when North Carolina’s black brigades were first formed in the refugee camps
of New Bern. David Cecelski described them as “the most ardent radicals, the
most incorrigible troublemakers, the most militant artisans, the most defiant
slave preachers—in short the black Carolinians who most ardently dared to
defy or deceive slavery.” Already predisposed to militancy, these men enlisted
well aware of long-standing traditions that linked military service to citizen-
ship and manhood. By the time they reached Cape Fear, they had fought in
the battles of New Market, Fort Harrison, and Chaffin’s Farm in Virginia. Nine
of them wore the Medal of Honor, awarded for their gallantry in the field.
When the Thirty-seventh led an attack near Wilmington, a Union officer ap-
provingly said, “they were well-disciplined . . . and went forward with alacrity
in capital form,” and they persisted for two days despite overwhelming odds.
White Wilmingtonians were completely unequipped to handle this new reality.
Certainly, they had known black men like Louis Sheridan and John Sampson,
but their intelligence and courage could be easily attributed to their elite, white
fathers. The men of the USCT could claim no such parentage, and yet there
they were, conquerors. A bitter and deeply frustrated John MacRae expressed
the views of many of his peers when he said he would rather face “the evils of
the sick season” than black soldiers.78
In November 1865, General Thomas H. Ruger, then commander of the Dis-
trict of North Carolina, finally capitulated to southern white demands and or-
dered the Thirty-seventh to replace white troops at Union-held coastal fortifi-
cations, far from the region’s population centers. The move was part of a larger
effort by the U.S. Army to decommission thousands of volunteer soldiers. In
Cape Fear country, the timing of this draw down exacerbated local tensions.
All fall, as Waddell’s earlier comment about a massacre indicated, rumors had
been circulating that former slaves were going to rise up at Christmas and
wreak their vengeance on white North Carolinians. In contrast to past versions
of this insurrection rumor, this one attributed black anger to land lust. Presi-
dent Johnson had ordered all confiscated white properties returned to their le-
gal owners, and the commander in Wilmington, Colonel John W. Ames, will-
ingly complied with the directive. Now labeled “squatters,” the black families
who had earlier been given clear leases to abandoned plantations, farms, and
houses were ruthlessly evicted, and many white locals believed they intended
to take the properties back by force. Whites knew how eagerly enslaved people
had anticipated control, not just of any land, but the estates on which they
had long lived and labored. Indeed, black men and women had developed
over the generations deep attachments to the places and spaces they called
“home.” Historian Steven Hahn has written of the strong sense of entitlement
they felt even to the animals they tended. They also believed prophecies about
a biblical jubilee that “joined freedom with the restitution of land to its right-
ful claimants.” At their meetings in the city and its environs, freedmen surely
discussed their mistreatment and debated solutions, but there is no evidence
of an insurrectionary plot. Still, white Wilmingtonians were culturally pre-
disposed to view black gatherings with alarm. As Christmas approached, the
level of hysteria peaked. By mid-December there remained in the entire state
a mere 2,209 Union soldiers, down from a high of 42,000 in June. Although
the Wilmington Dispatch complained that Ruger’s actions demonstrated his

“utter blindness” to the danger, Christmas passed without incident.79
The city directory for 1865–66 provides an interesting glimpse into the col-
lective mind of white Wilmington at this crucial juncture. Published by Frank
D. Smaw Jr. sometime in the fall of 1865, it chiefly provided practical informa-
tion—what businesses and industries were back in operation and where they
could be found. Yet it opens with a lengthy history of the city. Not surprisingly,
the colonial era receives five pages, with emphasis on the role of Hooper and
Harnett in the Revolution. Then follows a mere two pages covering the first
half of the nineteenth century: one lists the Borough of Wilmington’s official
representatives to the state legislature to 1835, and the other recounts the deeds
of local heroes in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. As always, Wilmingto-
nians were eager to advertise their pivotal contributions to state history. Tell-
ingly, however, the sectional crisis and Civil War merited no more than a pass-
ing reference. They were far too recent and too painful to assess, and anyway,
I suspect Smaw’s audience wanted to move forward, to get back to business as
usual. Thus, the “Historical Sketch” ends very abruptly with commercial sta-
tistics for 1854 and 1860–61. They were an obvious bit of boosterism, implying
as the charts did that the value of future imports and exports would be just as
good.80
Besides boosterism, implicit throughout the directory is white civic lead-
ers’ need to reassure themselves that their community was still a good place
in which to live and work. Certainly, the city had suffered when evacuating
Confederates torched the waterfront and destroyed local railroad bridges. But
they wanted to show how Wilmington was bouncing back, unlike Richmond,
Charleston, and Atlanta. Even under occupation by Union troops (whose office
addresses appeared on the very last page), it had in operation three steam-pow-
ered lumber mills, three turpentine distilleries, two iron and brass foundries,
a gaslight company, a corn and flour mill, four banks, and four newspapers.
Three different rail lines and dozens of steamship companies served the port,
and their trade, coupled with the optimistic presence of thirty-eight different
commission merchants, suggested wharves humming with activity again. In
addition, Smaw identified more than 120 other “principal” mercantile, busi-
ness, and professional ventures, including nineteen dry goods sellers, fifteen
saloons, eight hotels, seven insurance agents, six butchers, four druggists, three
bakers, two cabinetmakers, and two gun dealers. Had he included black-owned
businesses, the numbers would have been even higher.
Instead, the directory deliberately omitted any mention of black Wilming-
tonians at all. This absence echoes loudly across the years. To persuade them-
selves and others that Wilmington was still a good place to do business, the
city’s leaders had to show that the labor supply was under control, and in 1865
it most assuredly was not. Southern conservatives would eventually enact a
series of new laws, collectively called the Black Codes, to accomplish that goal,
but when Smaw compiled his directory, the Cape Fear’s former slaves were still
free agents. Many refused to work without wages or at least a contract negoti-
ated by the Freedmen’s Bureau, located in an office on the corner of Front and
Chestnut. Some blacks, at least in those heady, early months of freedom, un-
derstandably opted not to work at all. But those who had been skilled artisans
and businessmen before the war put their knowledge of economics to ready
use. Blacksmith Alfred Hargrave, for example, worked on the Wilmington and
Weldon Railroad in the 1850s and hired his own time shoeing horses during his
lunch breaks. After the fall of Wilmington made him a free man, he opened his
own shop on busy Market Street, where he attracted a great deal of business;
by the time the federal census taker found his door in 1870, Hargrave owned
more than three thousand dollars’ worth of real estate.81 Unlike Hargrave, at
least fourteen black men already had sufficient property in 1865 to pay property
taxes that year. Among them were carpenters Alfred Howe and William Kel-
logg, who would eventually become a representative in the state assembly.82
When famed New York Times correspondent Whitelaw Reid visited and toured
the town, he concluded that “the native negroes of Wilmington . . . are doing
well. They are of a much higher order of intelligence than those from the coun-
try; are generally in good circumstances, and already find time to look into
politics. They have a Union League formed among themselves, the object of
which is to stimulate industry and education, and to secure combined effort for
suffrage, without which they will soon be practically enslaved again.”83 What
impressed northern visitors angered southern locals. Well aware of blacks’
sense of economic self-determination, Wilmington’s business leaders ignored
nonwhite entrepreneurs as a way of casting all blacks as laborers. They were
whistling in the dark.
“To Something Nobler We Attain”
Sometime in the spring of 1865, soon after the U.S. occupation of Wilmington
began, the Equal Rights League opened its doors downtown. Formed by the
first national freedmen’s convention, which had met in Syracuse in 1864, the
league aimed to end racial discrimination and promote political and economic
equality for newly emancipated black people. Among the leaders of the North
Carolina chapter was a former Wilmingtonian, Abraham Galloway, who ar-
rived in January 1866 to oversee the new league office. Galloway was the en-
slaved builder who in 1857 escaped by hiding in the hold of a turpentine ship.
His admitted father, John Wesley Galloway, a white Brunswick County planter,
had died in 1864, and he still had white kin nearby, though they never deigned
to recognize him. Soon, however, no one could ignore him, for he quickly
became the Republican Party’s mouthpiece to the city’s black residents. In a
particularly dramatic 1867 speech, Galloway climbed onto the roof of the Mar-
ket, once the site of slave auctions, and addressed a crowd freshly arrived from
a torchlight procession. “My people stand here tonight fettered, bound hand
and foot by a Constitution that recognizes them as chattel,” Galloway shouted.
Now free, he proclaimed a new and radically different future, and black Wilm-
ingtonians eagerly embraced his vision. Under the auspices of the league, they
coordinated voter registration campaigns, called for black municipal appoint-
ments, organized black militia companies, and assisted in the formation of a
statewide Republican Party. Through these actions, executed at meaningful
public places, members not only claimed their political rights, but crafted new
civic identities as members of multiple polities.84
Black political organizing actually began soon after provisional governor
William Holden called for a statewide convention to frame a new civil govern-
ment for North Carolina. Insisting that delegates could only be elected by those
who had had the vote before the war, Holden officially signaled that blacks still
had no place in the body politic. They responded by organizing a convention
of their own. In mid-September 1865, black Wilmingtonians staged a large rally
at the historic Front Street Methodist Church. So great was the turnout that
organizers directed hundreds to a secondary location at nearby First Presby-
terian. On September 22, another mass meeting occurred, this time at Thalian
Hall, the largest public space in the city. The main speaker, John P. Sampson,
focused on the need for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution so that “every
black man in every state in this union” could vote. Born into a wealthy, free
black family, Sampson grew up in Wilmington, received his education at elite,
white schools in Boston, and had been at turns a teacher, writer, lecturer, and
newspaper publisher in Cincinnati, Ohio. Now back home to oversee Freed-
men’s Bureau schools in the Third District of North Carolina, he arguably had
little in common with the crowd he addressed, and yet Wilmington’s blacks
elected him to represent them at the Freedmen’s Convention, which gathered
in Raleigh in September 1865. There, Sampson joined Abraham Galloway and
a group of some 120 other black men, who together represented about half the
counties in the state.85
New York journalist Sidney Andrews, a white man who observed the North
Carolina Freedmen’s Convention, noted a wide range of abilities and motives

among delegates. “There were parties, demagogues, ambitious men—there was
‘log rolling’ and ‘wire-pulling.’ . . . It was pleasant to see, however, that the great
body of delegates not only had a clear conception of what they wanted to do,
but . . . also of what they wanted not to do.” According to Andrews, northern
educated men like Sampson and “Jacobinical” types like Galloway were pushed
aside. Among other things, the delegates passed a series of resolutions con-
cerning black labor and education, recognition for Liberia, and the memory
of heroes like Abraham Lincoln and John Brown. Their main task was to pro-
duce an address to the white convention, scheduled to convene in October.
Instead of militant demands for equality, which no one expected whites to an-
swer, they asked “respectfully and humbly” for the abolition of discriminatory
laws, affirmed their intimate “attachments for the white race,” and sought the
white members’ “protection against rapacious and cruel employers.” The white
convention received the petition and duly passed the buck along to the new
legislature, which had just been constituted, arguing that the circumstances it
described required “a new system of laws upon the subject of the freedmen.”
As Andrews archly commented, they were not “wise enough to see that there
must be no laws for white men, no laws for black men, but only laws for all men
alike.”86
Blacks met with somewhat greater success in reshaping Wilmington’s mu-
nicipal government. When they occupied the town, Union military authorities
granted the existing mayor and board provisional appointments that were set
to expire in January 1866. Local white boosters, eager as always to promote
their location over other North Carolina communities, used the occasion to
lobby the new legislature for a new city charter with procedures intended to
ensure their control. Passed in March 1866, this charter divided the city into
four wards, each with two elected aldermen. The mayor, however, hereafter had
to be elected by the people at large, as did the chief marshal, a new position
that merged oversight of the Fire and Police departments. At that time, there
were about eighteen thousand inhabitants, most of whom were black. As the
December election day neared, the Union League worked especially hard to
nominate black candidates and register black voters, but despite blacks’ greater
numbers, an all-white, all-Conservative board won (and John Dawson became
mayor again). Local blacks complained to General E. R. S. Canby, Union com-
mander of the Second Military District, which included North Carolina. Canby
closed all municipal offices in the port city and appointed an all-Republican
board consisting of six white and three black men. A similar situation occurred
at the next election, in 1868: the so-called “Citizens’ Ticket” of elite, white Con-
servatives prevailed despite the Republicans’ far greater numbers. By this time,
Governor Holden had switched allegiance to the Republican Party and won
election in his own right. Having campaigned as a friend to freedmen and
feeling securely positioned at the helm of a legitimately reconstituted North
Carolina state government, he overturned Wilmington’s all-white, Democratic
board and replaced it with a biracial, Republican one.
Neither Republican board effected serious change in Wilmington. Later
chroniclers accused the Republicans of “misrule,” but the disorder actually re-
flected the competing actions of three very different groups of authorities: oc-
cupying Union forces; Holden’s appointed biracial, Republican board; and the
elected all-white, Conservative board. What mattered most during the tumult
was that blacks held municipal office for the first time. Indeed, the same three
black men boldly served as aldermen during these years: William Teller, G. H.
Jackson, and George W. Price Jr. Price eventually went on to political acclaim;
one of the men who daringly escaped downriver in 1862, he served with Wil-
liam Gould in the U.S. Navy, returned home after the war, became a prominent
Republican leader, and later served in the state legislature. In their very public
willingness to represent their neighbors in local government, all three embod-
ied the dramatic shifts in black identity that were underway.87
Blacks faced a similar struggle to be recognized in Raleigh. The state leg-
islature elected in 1866 consisted largely of former Confederates pardoned
by President Andrew Johnson. They included a direct descendent of Wilm-
ington founder Joshua Grainger, William Augustus Wright, a merchant who
represented New Hanover County and thus, the port city. Almost all of the
legislators were Conservatives (soon to call themselves Bourbon Democrats),
despite many having identified as Whigs or Unionists before the war. As other
historians have demonstrated, North Carolina’s white elected officials generally
refused to consider any meaningful changes in race relations, especially in the
realm of political rights. Instead, they clung to a long tradition in American
civic life that “conflated white men’s exclusive right to political authority with
their role as putatively honorable patriarchs” entitled to mastery over their de-
pendents and inferiors.88 This view led them to enact a punitive series of Black
Codes, laws designed to keep all “persons of color” in a subordinate position to
whites, and to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, which redefined citizenship
to include former slaves, even though approval was required for readmission
to the Union.
Black North Carolinians got a second chance when Radical Republicans in
Congress imposed military rule on the South, dissolved these early state gov-
ernments, and required a second constitutional convention to be held in 1867.
This time, white elites reluctantly permitted black men to participate, and with
thousands of black ballots cast, Republicans won a firm majority of the seats
(107 out of 120). Of the victors, fifteen were black men, the first North Carolin-
ians of color to enter the capitol building as representatives of the people. Three
Wilmingtonians attended on behalf of New Hanover County: the former slave-
turned-activist, Abraham H. Galloway; a former Union General turned lumber
magnate, Joseph C. Abbott; and the Rev. Samuel S. Ashley, a Connecticut-born
member of the abolitionist American Missionary Association and local agent
of the Freedmen’s Bureau. All three men played influential roles in shaping the
1868 constitution. Galloway served on the judiciary committee, for example,
where he argued persuasively that justices ought to be popularly elected. Other
reforms included universal male suffrage, increased state support for public
schools, and changes to the state’s penal code, all of which reflected the con-
cerns of black Tar Heels specifically. The final document was ready for ratifi-
cation in March 1868. If approved, it would give blacks a significant degree of
influence.89
Back in Cape Fear country, Conservatives immediately denounced it as a
government of “pure brute force.” They claimed it had been “foisted” upon
them not because their ideas “lacked validity” but because the other side sim-
ply had more “population.” The new black voters, in their view, were incom-
petent to judge the Conservative platform and so a tyranny had resulted—a
tyranny which their heritage bound them to resist. By this point, however, they
knew they had no power in either Washington, DC, or in Raleigh. Instead of
political maneuvering, they embraced illegal tactics like voter intimidation and
racist violence to kill the new document.90
On March 24, 1868, the Wilmington Morning Star alerted its readers to a
strange occurrence. A “number of mysterious notices” had been posted the
previous night at several prominent points in the city. “They are supposed to
have emanated from the headquarters of the somewhat notorious ‘Ku Klux
Klan,’ whatever that may be.” Historian William McKee Evans rightly noted,
“These words were written tongue in cheek,” but he erred by stating that politi-
cal violence was a new strategy for Cape Fear Conservatives. It was, of course,
their legacy, and no one knew this better than the Wilmington Klan leader,
Colonel Roger Moore, a direct descendent of “King” Roger Moore. Thirty years
old in 1868, veteran commander of the Third North Carolina Calvary and regi-
mental staff officer of the reorganized New Hanover County Militia, Moore
had only recently pledged himself to the secretive group. Not coincidentally,
men who had served under Moore during the war flocked to the new organiza-
tion, just as Confederate veterans did in other southern communities.91
Under Moore’s leadership, Wilmington’s Klansmen launched a nighttime

campaign of terror that spring. Dressed in white bed sheets, they galloped en
masse through Dry Pond and other predominantly black neighborhoods fir-
ing weapons, assaulting blacks, and vandalizing property. Downtown, a Klan
drinking cup fabricated from a human skull appeared in the window of the
Wilmington Star. The newspaper boasted that five hundred people came by
during business hours to see the gruesome relic. It is impossible to quantify
white support for the Klan and its tactics. The organization’s state leader, Wil-
liam L. Saunders, sometimes published editorials in the Wilmington Daily
Journal, which his brother-in-law, Major Englehard, operated, so its gleeful
reporting, like the Star’s, is suspect. More telling is the behavior of the Union
League. For four successive nights in April, members organized into patrols
and took back control of the streets. Many of these black men had guns; at
least one band carried fence rails. These actions bespoke their conviction that
white-supremacist violence was real and pervasive.92
In many parts of the state, especially where blacks comprised a minority, the
Klan’s tactics succeeded, but not in the Cape Fear region. Abraham Galloway,
nominated once again for the state senate, campaigned vigorously in his own
district, Wilmington and its environs, New Hanover and Brunswick counties,
as well as in neighboring Columbus and Sampson, where he aided fellow Re-
publican candidates. When the polls opened in April 1868, black Republicans
came out in droves. They not only ratified the new constitution, but elected
William Holden as governor. Galloway won, too, with 3,569 votes compared to
his opponent’s 2,235. Once back in Raleigh, he and the other members of the
newly seated, Republican-controlled assembly ratified the Fourteenth Amend-
ment and sent two Republican senators to Washington. In July 1868, North
Carolina finally reentered the Union.93
As Conservative whites in Wilmington struggled to make sense of these
new humiliations, their frustrations helped spawn the Lost Cause thesis locally.
Advanced throughout the South, it offered a comforting explanation for the
situation former Rebels found themselves in: the Confederacy had not been
defeated by a morally superior foe; rather, the brave men in gray merely suc-
cumbed to the North’s superior numbers. In this view, the South’s cause was the
just one and its white people the true heroes. In Wilmington, the Ladies’ Me-
morial Association led the process of reshaping collective memories of the war.
Smaw’s 1865 city directory listed the group among the city’s civic organizations
and even supplied the names of the genteel women who directed it: Mrs. Julia
E. Oakley (president); Mrs. Stacey Van Amringe (vice-president); Miss Belle
Williams (recording secretary); Mrs. Gaston Meares (corresponding secretary);
and Miss Lizzie Parsley (treasurer). All five were tied by blood or marriage to
leading white men. Mrs. Meares, for example, née Katherine De Rosset, lost
her husband at the Battle of Antietam, but remained connected to nearly every
prominent family in the region through her or her husband’s relations. A similar
pattern of elite female control prevailed in every southern community, where
the local Ladies’ Memorial Association honored the Confederate dead.94
The chief mechanism for disseminating the Lost Cause narrative in this
period was Confederate Memorial Day, an occasion for myriad ritual obser-
vances. These events, held each May, offered Old Wilmington’s white families
an opportunity to reflect communally and publically on the meaning of the
war. They typically featured a parade of uniformed veterans and other no-
tables, who processed out Market Street to Oakdale Cemetery for speeches
and wreath-laying ceremonies. Since the occupying forces typically prohibited
these observances, the association’s activities struck many locals as courageous
acts of civil disobedience. In some measure, then, the LMA not only soothed
the psychological trauma of defeat but deployed collective memories to en-
courage further resistance.95
The Cape Fear Military Academy for Boys provided a way to inculcate these
new collective memories of the war in the next generation. Raleigh Edward
Colston established the school in 1868. Colston had been a professor at the
Virginia Military Institute in the 1850s, rose to the rank of brigadier general
in the Confederate Army, and after the war took charge of the Hillsborough
(NC) Military Academy, which closed after only a few years. These experiences
explain why the Wilmington Academy’s postwar curriculum featured skir-
mish drills and target practice as well as Latin, Greek, German, mathematics,
chemistry, geography, history, and literature. The rigorous curriculum typically
required five years to complete. Each class had its own rank, with cadets ad-
vancing from private to corporal and so forth until graduation. Some students
boarded on the premises, the former home of Mordecai and Rebecca Lazarus,
but a great many resided with their families, who lived nearby. Either way, the
school was expensive: $250 yearly for tuition, board, washing, fuel, and light-
ing, or $12–15 per quarter, depending upon the course of study. The cost plus
the emphasis on strict military rules might have dissuaded parents in other
communities, but Colston knew his audience. Testimonials from academy
parents demonstrate their desire to implant the core qualities of white south-
ern manhood: honor, neatness, decorum, strong morals, and self-discipline.96
More than anything, however, parents sought to instill a deep sense of southern
pride. Former Confederates (especially local veterans) were not to be pitied for
their defeat, but praised for their courage and chivalry.
The academy obliged on all counts. What better way to honor the past than
by reenacting it in the present? On a daily basis, even at their desks, the cadets
wore gray coatees, pantaloons, and kepis recalling the Confederate Army. They
engaged in weekly drills out in the yard. More important, the cadets partici-
pated in every Confederate Memorial Day ceremony, reaffirming their heritage
as they proudly led the community to Oakdale Cemetery and reminded their
neighbors of days gone by. As one former soldier waxed in May 1869, “General
Colston’s band of little ‘rebs’ were out yesterday on parade, in all of the glory
of the gallant grey, brass buttons and bright muskets. They served to remind
us strongly of the time when . . . [we] first donned the grey and bore the mus-
ket behind a soul-stirring fife and drum to the glorious tune of Dixie.’”97 The
cadets experienced their greatest moment of transmission in May 1870, when
Robert E. Lee visited the city. Sixteen-year-old John D. Bellamy Jr. vividly re-
called the day: as captain of the Cadet Corps, he led the delegation of students
and prominent Wilmingtonians who met Lee’s train and followed his carriage
to George Davis’s house, where the general reviewed the young “troops” and
personally shook hands with each one.98
In contrast, education for blacks focused on the future. Despite antebellum
laws prohibiting their education, many free blacks and slaves had managed
before the war to acquire basic literacy, sometimes more. These individuals
proved especially supportive when the Freedmen’s Bureau established schools
in Wilmington. Initially, there were six facilities, all directed by white new-
comers from New England. On the north side of town stood the Colored Free
School, later called the Peabody School for a Massachusetts benefactor. On the
south side, the American Missionary Association presided over the Williston
School, named for another wealthy northern donor. Soon, black parents began
to press for instructors of their own race. They believed, rightly, that freedmen
needed role models from their own community, men and women who could
provide not only basic literacy and numeracy, but practical advice on how to
live in free society.
Many whites viewed these efforts with alarm. Believing that northern teach-
ers were radicals intent on putting ideas of racial equality into the heads of
local blacks, they threatened to fire their black employees if they took classes
on their own time and forbade them from sending their children to school, as
well. In some cases they resorted to violence, as when a grown, white man beat
a young, black girl. They also harassed the white teachers, spitting on them,
hurling insults, and impugning their sexual virtue. Miss Amy Morris Bradley,
for example, became the subject of a public smear campaign when the Wilm-
ington Star informed readers that she had been seen “riding the streets yester-
day in company of a Negro man.” An earlier article accused her of teaching “the
doctrines of Free Lovism, Communism, Universalism, Unitarianism, and all
the multiplicity of evil teachings that corrupt society and overthrow religion.”
Bradley was a mature woman in her forties. She had been a Union nurse during
the Civil War and came to the port city in 1866 to educate poor white and black
children together, but she soon capitulated to local pressure and established
three private, free schools for white children only. In 1871, Bradley also founded
the city’s first Normal School—it, too, was segregated.99
Access to education was just one of many civil liberties blacks had that
caused whites concern. As municipal, state, and federal codes changed, blacks
gained equal access to public places like courthouses, hotels, saloons, and the-
aters. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in July 1868, acknowledged their
basic civil rights, including the right to own property, to make contracts, and
to have equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in
February 1870, brought voting rights. Black Wilmingtonians generally cele-
brated these successes. In April 1870, hundreds of emancipated people paraded
from City Hall, symbol of municipal power, to Dudley’s Grove, a riverside
park overlooking Cornelius Harnett’s old house, still an American Revolution
pilgrimage site, where they heard numerous patriotic speeches. That night at
Thalian Hall, Joseph Abbott, a former Union general, told the mostly black as-
semblage that the Fifteenth Amendment meant the United States had “fulfilled
its pledge to four million of its people.”100 But the franchise precipitated even
greater retribution.
Incensed by the changes taking place during Reconstruction, Cape Fear
Conservatives set out to “redeem” the state government. In their eyes, Gov-
ernor William Holden’s administration still lacked legitimacy. A prominent
Democrat in the 1850s, he had switched sides during the war and been ap-
pointed governor by the occupying Union Army. When he won election in
1868 with the aid of black voters, his predecessor, Jonathan Worth, claimed
that Holden was still a puppet of radicals in Washington and refused to cede
the office until the threat of troops made him back down. By 1870, however,
only 277 Union troops remained in the entire state. Holden’s enemies felt they
had suffered long enough. They especially detested his appointment of black
men into positions of authority, such as magistrates, county commissioners,
and city aldermen. For two years, Conservatives had waged a successful war
at the local level: pockets of extreme “lawlessness and statelessness” existed
throughout the state, a powerful sign of Holden’s weakness. When the Re-
publican-dominated legislature gave Holden authority to suppress “insurrec-
tions” without local consent, their tactics shifted.101 Targeting the August 1870
elections, they launched a coordinated propaganda campaign, using the state’s

Democratic newspapers.
In Wilmington, Democratic leaders recycled an old strategy of their own.
Prominent businessmen pointed out to the community their economic power,
claiming that “of the 3,500 voters in the city, 2,000 were employed by Conserva-
tives.” Just as they did to curtail black education, Wilmington elites threatened
to dismiss all employees who voted against them, and they urged residents to
boycott Republican-owned businesses. Finally, they noted how large a share
of the city’s property taxes they paid and argued that “those with business in-
terests should dictate the city’s future.”102 Since most Conservatives in the port
city had inherited their property and businesses, they were effectively making
a hereditary claim to power.
They had competition from a new business class whose members, mostly
northern newcomers, felt they had just as much right to make policy, if not
more. Men like Joseph C. Abbott and George Z. French, for example, had dra-
matically reshaped the economic, political, and social landscape of the Cape
Fear. Abbott came to town in 1865 as a brigade commander and never left. Af-
ter the war, he purchased three thousand acres of good timber land some fifty
miles inland along the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherfordton Railroad.
He hired hundreds of men, black and white, built a sawmill and woodwork-
ing shop, and laid out a northern-style company town, called Abbottsburg,
which became a model of efficiency and a source of local pride. French had
a similar story: “A sharp-witted New England Yankee,” he came to town as a
Union army sutler, established a mercantile store after the war, and became a
commission merchant, selling cotton and naval stores for farmers upriver. He
eventually bought his own plantation at Rocky Point, where he applied pro-
gressive agricultural methods, produced truckloads of fruits and vegetables
for export north, and opened a plant that manufactured lime for fertilizer.
These economic successes propelled Abbott and French into the so-called Re-
publican “Ring” that controlled politics in the port city in this period. As the
August 1 election day neared, the Ring mounted a vigorous campaign against
the Conservatives.103
Most of the city’s approximately two thousand Republicans were black.
With suffrage now protected, more black men became politically active during
the 1870 campaign, and names that would define black civic leadership for the
next century began to appear on the rolls: Cutlar, Sadgwar, Taylor, Merrick,
and Holloway, to state just a few. Other prominent black Republicans included
Solomon W. Nash Jr., Anthony Howe, and William Kellogg, men whose fathers
had been notable members of the community a generation earlier. And State
Senator Abraham Galloway, running for reelection, remained a local favorite.

Unfortunately for these party stalwarts, the Ring did not generally support
black candidates. In fact, its white members actively competed with each other
for political office and promoted such intense factionalism that Republicans
nearly lost control of the city government that fall. Only the power of black
political organizing kept Wilmington in Republican hands.
Conservative Democrats won everywhere else, from coastal New Hanover
and Brunswick counties to the most remote mountain regions in the state.
When the “Redeemers” gathered in Raleigh in November 1870, they rewarded
the party faithful. To thank the state’s western voters, for example, they im-
peached Holden for his actions against the Klan there. To thank their support-
ers in Cape Fear country, they redrew the congressional district around Wilm-
ington. For extra insurance, they cut off the northern portion of New Hanover
to form Pender County and replaced self-government with a system of ap-
pointed boards of commissioners. Finally, the Conservative legislature issued
a new charter for the port city that gerrymandered its voter precincts and ward
boundaries. The charter also revised the city’s governance structure. Hence-
forth, each ward elected two aldermen, and the ten members of the Board of
Aldermen then elected one of their own as mayor. But the real power rested
with another body, the Board of Audit and Finance. Its five members were to
be appointed by the General Assembly, which Conservatives now controlled.
With stricter voter registration and election laws to exclude more blacks from
the polls, changes implemented after Redemption restored political control of
the region to its historic planter elite—or so it seemed.104
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Wilmington’s traditional lead-
ers were actually losing ground. Abbott, French, and other newcomers had
more progressive economic ideas as well as social and political views, and their
values were rapidly transforming the region. True, the 1870s did see a brief
resurgence of rice because of high protective tariffs passed by the U.S. Con-
gress. But competition from Louisiana, where planters implemented a new
mechanized process for harvesting the grain, limited the revival. True, too, the
naval stores industries had resurged. However, the great forests of southeastern
North Carolina were largely “boxed out,” no longer capable of producing large
quantities of raw turpentine, tar, or rosin. Where many locals saw ruin, a hand-
ful of entrepreneurs saw promise. Most notably, a group of innovative Wilm-
ington newcomers formed the Carolina Oil and Creosote Company. Creosote
is derived from lightwood and used to strengthen, protect, and waterproof
timber. The Carolina Company patented processes to distill creosote, thereby
making local resources go further, to pressure treat lumber, making it last lon-
ger, and to extract a similar wood preservative from coal, which it mined along
the Deep River.105 Soon other creosote firms joined them, and the competition
grew fierce.
A few of Wilmington’s traditional leaders also developed new industries. In
1874, Donald MacRae built the Wilmington Cotton Mills, the city’s first textile
factory. It was a modest venture, employing only forty male and eighty female
operatives, but it represented an important change in local attitudes. Before the
war, southern communities had always sent their cotton away for processing
into cloth. Afterwards, mills and mill villages sprouted up everywhere, just
like so many bolls. Like other southern capitalists, MacRae decided to redirect
a portion of his commission profits into manufacturing. Within a year, his
predominantly white workforce produced three thousand yards of cloth per
day. He placed his younger brother, Walter G. MacRae, in charge of the entire
plant, which included a small, all-white village of workers’ cottages located on
the southern edge of Dry Pond.106
Donald MacRae also helped develop another pioneering enterprise, the
Navassa Guano Company. The guano in its title referred to bird droppings,
which Cape Fear vessels taking lumber products to the Caribbean brought
back as a lucrative return cargo in the antebellum period. Eventually, chemists
discovered that the rock formations the birds roosted on worked even better, if
they could be processed efficiently. The Navassa plant did just that; built atop
Meare’s Bluff, a site five miles upriver from Wilmington, it contained nearly
twenty separate structures for cleaning, drying, crushing, mixing, screening,
and packing “superphosphates.” Superintendent Christopher L. Grafflin pro-
vided the technical expertise; his family owned several guano manufactories
in Baltimore, plus a large-scale phosphate-rock-mining operation on Navassa
Island, a small crag near Haiti. Two of Grafflin’s brothers signed the charter
of incorporation along with seven Cape Fear entrepreneurs. The firm’s presi-
dent, Robert Rufus Bridgers, led the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad and
arranged for a spur line to be built across the river to the plant. MacRae, the
firm’s secretary-treasurer, provided the business and financial acumen. Like
the cotton mill, the fertilizer plant had an adjacent company town with twenty
modest tenement houses, but its employees were overwhelmingly black. Many
of the one hundred employees resided off site, however.107
One of the city’s fastest-growing concerns was Alexander Sprunt & Son. Its
founder, James Sprunt, came to Wilmington from Scotland (by way of Trini-
dad) with his father, Alexander, in 1852. During the Civil War, he became a
blockade runner and amassed a small fortune that he used in the late 1860s to
establish a legitimate commission business. At first, the firm’s chief commodi-
ties were naval stores, but in the 1870s, Sprunt pioneered a modern business
system that soon made cotton the city’s export king. First, he contracted di-
rectly with sellers in inland towns, paying some commissions and hiring others
on salary to purchase small bales from farmers and sharecroppers; by eliminat-
ing factors, buyers, and other independent intermediaries, each of whom had
traditionally taken a cut, he boosted the profits generated for the producers
(landowners) as well as the consumers (Alexander Sprunt & Son and its cus-
tomers). Second, he acquired a controlling interest in the Champion Cotton
Compress, where workers took loosely compacted bales from country gins,
sorted the contents according to the needs of different mills, and recompressed
the cotton into large, dense bales suited for shipment overseas. To make the
new system even more efficient, Sprunt built a large complex of warehouses
between the railroad and the firm’s private wharves, where the company’s own
stevedores loaded them onto oceangoing steamships. From nearly thirty em-
ployees in the early days, the company mushroomed to more than one thou-
sand two decades later.108 Nearly all of them were black men.
These endeavors, while technologically innovative, actually had their roots
in the antebellum era. Long before the emergence of the New South, the port
city had a group of elite civic leaders who embraced industrialization, banking,
railroads, and waged labor even as they managed large plantations manned by
hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children. Such endeavors grew natu-
rally out of the naval stores trade and commission mercantile ventures their
grandfathers established in the eighteenth century. By the 1840s, visionary
businessmen looked at the Cape Fear and saw steamships instead of schooners,
smokestacks instead of tar kilns. In keeping with Whig Party philosophy, they
recruited immigrants and Yankees, expanded the hiring-out system for skilled
slave craftsmen, and allowed a small number of free blacks to live more or less
independently, as long as they stayed in their proper place. They lost their in-
fluence during the secession crisis and war, but the Union victory, an influx of
newcomers, and the ascension of the Republican Party restored their hopes for
the city’s prosperity. Some former Whig families, chiefly the MacRaes and their
ilk, used their commercial connections to forge new alliances and rebuild their
wealth. Donald MacRae, for example, continued his northern business trips,
partnered with various transplanted New Englanders, and sent his young sons,
Donald Jr. and Hugh, to Boston, where they studied math and science before
enrolling at MIT. Other gentry scions, by contrast, like John D. Bellamy Jr., who
shook General Lee’s hand, clung to an imagined past and struggled to support
their families through traditional pursuits like law, politics, and staple-crop
agriculture. The two groups never fully reconciled, yet they did find common
ground on one point: the sanctity of white supremacy. No matter what form
Wilmington’s future might take, its racial hierarchy remained inviolable.
Whites’ preference for traditional race relations can especially be seen in
postbellum hiring practices. Notwithstanding emancipation, old stereotypes
about the physical hardiness and expendability of black workers persisted.
White employers continued to restrict them to the dirtiest, most dangerous
occupations available. At Navassa and the other four fertilizer manufactories
that joined it, black men hauled rock in simple wheelbarrows, hand-loaded
the mechanical crushers, and chopped wood for the drying-house boiler; in-
side the mixing house, where they treated the powdered rock with sulfuric
acid, they faced chemical burns and toxic vapors. Workers in this industry
typically earned anywhere from $3.50 to $7.00 per month, but deductions for
company housing dramatically reduced their take-home pay.109 By contrast,
planters reviving the region’s rice fields considered mechanized equipment,
now readily available, too advanced for black minds to handle; they insisted on
traditional hoes and shovels instead. In 1882, black farmhands could earn up
to $1.25 per day, depending upon the nature of their work, but despite the pay-
ment of wages, the task system remained firmly in place. As in the past, blacks
in the rice fields faced alligators, malaria, and grueling heat, all of which scared
white immigrants and rural transplants away, thus reinforcing white employ-
ers’ perception that blacks were naturally suited for certain kinds of labor, but
unfit for other ones. No black person could ever become a textile operative,
for example, or a store clerk, a foundry hand, a stove maker, or an ironworker.
In some cases, jobs once held by skilled slaves, such as coopers and river pi-
lots, became lily-white overnight. No matter how innovative, white employers
thus restricted the majority of blacks to the same occupational categories they
held before the war: draymen, stevedores, and common laborers (for men) and
laundresses, cooks, and maids (for women). The segregated marketplace, in
turn, reinforced the privileging of whites in other spheres of life.
Despite this broader pattern, a small group of blacks carved out new oc-
cupational niches in the 1870s. Thomas Rivera, for example, appears in period
directories as one of at least four black grocers. William Kellogg Jr., who sat on
the board of aldermen, owned and operated a carriage-making business, and
there was even a physician, Washington Thomas. There remained a sizeable
number of building tradesmen, draymen, and barbers, just as there had been
before the Civil War, but businessmen like Rivera, Kellogg, and Thomas are
notable because they mainly catered to a black clientele, which offered them an
intoxicating kind of economic independence. A few women also charted new
paths, but one example will suffice: Mary Washington Howe. The daughter of
builder Alfred Howe, granddaughter of Anthony and Tenah Walker-Howe, she

attended school in Philadelphia and returned to teach at Williston Grammar
School in 1874, when the city acquired control of the facility and adopted a
black-only hiring policy. In 1880, she became Williston’s principal, an esteemed
position that she held for the rest of her life.110 Thanks to this small but strong
cohort of new business and civic leaders, blacks emerged from Reconstruction
with a cautious sense of optimism.
George W. Price Jr. spoke for many black Wilmingtonians when he declared,
“There is a bright future before us. But there is also a great duty for us to per-
form in the reformation of the customs and habits of our people.” His words
flowed over a massive crowd gathered at Hilton Park, the former home of Cor-
nelius Harnett, on July 4, 1876. Speaking at the apogee of the nation’s Centen-
nial observance of Independence, he used the occasion to assert the unique
and essential place of “the negro or African American” in the civic polity. By
that date, the port city had roughly 10,400 black residents compared to about
6,800 whites. How many blacks turned out to hear him is unknown, but his
audience was undoubtedly large and segregated. He reminded his listeners of
their remarkable African ancestry, conjuring images of ancient Egypt, Tim-
buktu, and Bambara. Without an appreciation of this past, he argued, “there
can be no progress, no education, and no elevation of our race.”111
More interesting, however, is that he billed his address as a lecture on eth-
nology, a branch of anthropology that examines the ethnic and racial divisions
among human beings. “My object,” he said at the outset, is “to prove by his-
torical facts and scientific authority that the differences which exist between
men . . . are dependent not on any inherent diversity [emphasis in original] but
on climate and climate alone.” The son of a minister, he insisted that, “From
one parentage, so the bible teaches, descends the whole human family,” yet he
also agreed with Charles Darwin that “the human race . . . had its birthplace
in Africa.” The Negro race, he thus declared, was the “parent and progenitor
of those various races which so boastingly pride themselves as only and ex-
clusively representing the ancient Caucasian race.” Whites, by contrast, had
actually “degenerated from the original complexion of Noah’s family.” The real
purpose of his remarkable speech, then, was to demolish the premise of white
supremacy.
It was a bold move, indicating Price’s confidence in black Wilmingtonians’
ability to redefine their place in local, state, and national polities and societies.
By 1876, Price had ended his legislative career; however, he still had a promi-
nent civic role as Wilmington’s city marshal, the position created in 1868 to
oversee the Fire and Police departments. He remained active in Republican
Party circles, and he also continued his business as a journeyman plasterer.

All of these roles required him to cooperate with white Wilmingtonians. Not
surprisingly, this same spirit of collaboration suffused his speech. Deploying
familiar rhetoric about “the Star of Empire,” he concluded that the key “to
the American negro’s future will be found in the acquisition of the US of the
whole Southern countries and continent, which is inevitable.” Once the Pacific
has been reached, “[the American people] will necessarily turn South,” and
“the African American, purified and ennobled by his sufferings, will become
the pioneer of a common empire when thus southward both races take their
predestined way.”112 By 1876, self-government had been restored and, though
Conservative redeemers were gaining power, men like Price clung to a biracial,
democratic vision:
Standing then on what so long we bore,
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We shall discern, unseen before,
A path to higher destinies;
Nor deem the irrevocable past
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising from the wreck, at last,
To something nobler we attain.
Even as Price spoke, Union troops continued to demobilize. In 1877, the last
bluecoats left North Carolina and her sister states. Thereafter, black Wilming-
tonians were on their own.
CHAPTER THREE
Slack Water, 1880–1920
Moving into his own home in 1889 was a major accomplishment for Frederick
C. Sadgwar. Listed in public records as a carpenter, he was actually a highly
skilled builder who had learned his trade from his father, David, while both
were enslaved in Wilmington. After emancipation, David Elias Sadgwar ac-
quired property in rural New Hanover County, where his family lived in the
1870s and 1880s, but he had also purchased several investment lots in the city,
and when he died, Frederick erected a modest, wood-frame house on the one
at 15 North Eighth Street. It was an auspicious location for an upwardly mobile
freedman. Just two doors north sat the impressive, three-story Giblem Lodge,
built by Wilmington’s leading black Masonic order. To the south, a low-walled,
formal garden encompassed the entire corner. It belonged to Donald MacRae,
who lived next door to it at 713 Market. From his back porch, Sadgwar could
easily see into MacRae’s rear yard and observe the comings and goings of the
white man’s black domestics and delivery men. Sadgwar envisioned a different
life for his twelve children.
Sadgwar and his wife, Caroline, believed in the power of educational uplift.
They had already enrolled several of their eldest offspring at Gregory Normal
Institute, formerly known as the Williston School, and Frederick (who even-
tually graduated from Lincoln University) looked forward to celebrating their
many achievements. Though he did not know it in 1889, his daughter, Carrie,
would go on to Fisk University and earn fame as a featured soprano with the
Fisk Jubilee Singers. Several of her siblings would follow her there, including
Julia, who was as yet only ten. Julia’s degree from Fisk would be much harder
won than Carrie’s, however. A lack of money especially plagued her: “I found
that I could not always wear whole shoes or dresses as some other girls did,”
Julia Sadgwar later recalled. “There were days when I would have only bread
or perhaps a potato . . . but nothing stopped me.”1
By the early 1900s, when Julia went off with high hopes to Nashville, cir-
cumstances had changed dramatically for Frederick Sadgwar and his fam-
ily. Having redeemed North Carolina society in the 1870s specifically to stop
racial progress, whites bitterly resented the economic, political, and social
gains that blacks continued to make. Despite concerted efforts by Conserva-
tives, a biracial Republican-Populist coalition gained power over state and
local governments in the 1890s. North Carolina’s Democratic Party once
again responded with a vicious white supremacy campaign and successfully
re-redeemed the legislature in November 1898. Meanwhile, a small group of
oldtime, elite, white businessmen launched what they called the “Wilmington
Revolution” to end “Negro Domination” at the local level. Although the com-
memoration of these events in 1998 prompted several new scholarly inquiries,
including one ordered by the North Carolina General Assembly, neither the
revolution’s connection to Wilmington’s long history of racist violence nor its
relationship to the community’s place-based heritage has been inadequately
acknowledged.2
Going against conventional narratives, I contend that the 1898 Wilming-
ton massacre and coup d’état were not aberrant events in the city’s history;
rather, the instigators consciously replicated old patterns of behavior as a
way to resolve mounting conflicts over race, place, and memory. Grounded
in local elites’ interpretations of the 1770s and 1860s, the Wilmington revolu-
tion of 1898 occurred after lynching emerged in the 1880s as a spectacle of
organized racist violence, while the mass media (newspapers, popular fiction,
advertising, film) were shaping a national color line, and before southern pro-
gressives crafted their coherent vision of a modern, economically diversified,
and racially segregated South. Metaphorically speaking, between 1880 and
1920 race relations were at slack water, a phase when the tide reached usually
low levels yet still had strong, dangerous currents.
Though violence swept many Wilmingtonians, especially blacks, out of
the port city in 1898, others soon arrived, drawn by the white revolutionaries’
burgeoning truck farming, manufacturing, railroad, and tourism industries.
Oldtimers and newcomers alike struggled to navigate the new Jim Crow
landscape and created new mnemonics to help them mark the way. Freder-
ick Sadgwar, for example, embraced the Baha’i faith, which emphasizes the
oneness of humanity, and his expanded, remodeled home soon became the
center of a new spiritual community. But racial unity did not come to pass.
During World War I, black blood flowed again during a deadly “race riot”
fueled by white shipbuilders’ and soldiers’ racial animosity. Similar episodes
of organized racist violence occurred throughout the twentieth century. And
Frederick Sadgwar’s descendants experienced all of them. Now a Baha’i cen-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 113
Figure 3.1. The Sadgwar family gathered on the front steps of the Sadgwar home, 1925. Caroline
Sadgwar is the white-haired woman seated at center. The photo was taken just after Frederick
Sadgwar’s funeral, which all of his children and grandchildren attended. Courtesy of Cape Fear
Museum of History and Science, Wilmington, NC.
ter, his house still stands, silently bearing witness to its builder’s hopes for his
city, memorializing black achievements, and shaping black counter-memories
in the present.3 (See figure 3.1.)
“Indications Are Bright”: Upbuilding Black Wilmington

When the Sadgwars returned to the port city in 1889, they joined a growing
black population. In 1880, there were 10,462 blacks in the city compared to
6,888 whites, and by 1890, these figures had risen to 11,324 and 8,731, respec-
tively. Besides small business owners like Frederick, there was now an array
of black professionals, like Francis Shober, the first black physician to prac-
tice in North Carolina; his brother-in-law, John Edward Taylor, store owner;
James B. Dudley, principal of the Peabody School; and Rev. Daniel J. Sanders,
Presbyterian minister and newspaper editor. Set apart from the masses, such
men had college degrees gained in the North, occupations that enabled them
to have incomes independent of white patrons, and a commitment to speak
up on behalf of their race. Like their counterparts in New Bern, Charlotte,
Durham, and elsewhere, these “Best Men” dedicated themselves to upbuild-
ing their city physically and institutionally as well as socially, politically, and
economically.4
Signs of black progress were everywhere. Besides founding several new
schools, Wilmington’s black leaders established the Benjamin Banneker Liter-
ary and Library Association, which not only served the practical purpose of
“improving [members’] minds and increasing their facilities for the attainment
of useful knowledge,” but invoked the famed mathematician to commemorate
black intellectual success across space and time. There were two benevolent
associations, each with its own social hall, and multiple fraternal associations.
The Masons had Giblem Lodge, which housed retail space as well as public and
private meeting rooms, and the Odd Fellows had a similar mixed-use building
on South Seventh Street. Period maps of the downtown commercial area show
that black businesses like John Taylor’s shoe emporium stood side by side with
white ones. In addition, black entrepreneurs developed a secondary shopping
district in an expanding neighborhood called Brooklyn: its four blocks boasted
fifteen grocers, three restaurants, three saloons, two druggists, two barbers, two
boot and shoe stores, one milliner, one confectionery/baker, and one doctor’s
office by 1889. Real estate offered another lucrative source of income. Carpen-
ter John G. Norwood, for example, owned numerous properties around town,
plus a summer home on Greenville Sound. In fact, black property-ownership
rates in Wilmington were among the highest in the nation.5
Anxious to protect their physical properties, black residents organized sev-
eral volunteer fire companies, including the Cape Fear Steam Engine Company.
Under the leadership of their foreman, Valentine Howe, a builder and city al-
derman, the black crew embodied the upbuilding process. Highly visible to
whites, they drilled monthly, just like a militia, in order to act in unison when
called to duty. They competed regularly in regional and statewide competi-
tions and won numerous awards. From period photographs and newspaper
accounts, we can imagine the impression they made while marching in their
Slack Water, 1880–1920 115
bright blue and red parade jackets, pristine white gloves, and pressed black
pants. To their black neighbors, firefighters like Howe did much more than put
out fires. Wherever they went, they signaled black Wilmington’s success and
strong sense of civic pride. Even more important, they represented everything
white society said black men could never be: dedicated, brave, trustworthy,
respectable, and selfless.6
An 1886 fire revealed black residents’ continued vulnerability and inequal-
ity, despite their best efforts to rise. The blaze began at the steamship docks,
but as it spread into adjacent areas it destroyed two majority-black neigh-
borhoods, an older one that surrounded the historic Front Street Methodist
Church as well as the newer one, Brooklyn. Afterwards, the white city fathers
established committees to appraise the damage and raise funds for the vic-
tims. None of the committeemen were black. Instead, several oldtime, white
Wilmingtonians, including Donald MacRae and Roger Moore, were chosen to
ensure the public good. Not surprisingly, they first assessed the damage to the
waterfront and published the names of the insured so people elsewhere could
see that Wilmington’s trade would rebound. Next, they assessed the black ar-
eas, which they projected to have suffered ten thousand dollars in losses. The
Relief Committee raised less than two thousand, including a four-hundred-
dollar donation from the city’s Merchants Committee, far less than the fire’s
black victims needed.7
Nevertheless, on March 1, members of the Cape Fear Engine Company felt
obligated to convey the thanks of the entire black community. In a letter sent
to Donald MacRae, chair of the Relief Committee, firemen Valentine Howe,
J. J. Hill, and James Bland not only thanked the white elite for a special com-
mendation they had received from the city, but for “the generous benefaction
bestowed upon those of the colored race who were sufferers in the recent fire.”
The black men then went on to comment on the state of race relations: “It is
proper that we should all feel that there is a community of interest between
those who live in the same place, regardless of color, and such trusts as those
committed to your care and discharged in such an impartial and kindly man-
ner tend to confirm us in the opinion that those of the white race are always
ready to alleviate suffering among those of the colored race.” That phrase,
“there is a community of interest between those who live in the same place,”
cleverly invoked a shared sense of civic identity as Wilmingtonians, yet the
letter’s deferential tone and closing signature (“Very respectfully, your ob’t
serv’ts”) revealed a very real need to conciliate white power. They understood
that, for all of its paternalism, the white community regarded black success
warily and could, in a fit of caprice, use organized violence to check it.8
In fact, white North Carolinians had recently revived the old practice of
lynching. Generally viewed today as spontaneous behavior, these vigilante
murders became so standardized in the 1880s as to follow a predictable pat-
tern. First, law officials took a black person into custody to await charges for
an alleged crime. Within hours of the arrest, white civilians appeared at the
jail, seized the target, and took him to a “secret” location that was usually well
known to members of the community. There, lynch mobs acted with deliberate
precision. They routinely tortured their victim, often by cutting off body parts.
That death sometimes preceded the lynching affirms the noose’s ancillary role
as a weapon; hanging had long been a traditional penalty for capital crimes, so
the rope symbolized the lynchers’ faith in local justice. More pragmatically, it
allowed them to display their prey high above the crowd, where everyone could
see and appreciate the lesson.9
We forget that most whites who attended these events took pleasure in
them. In many cases, hundreds of participant-observers flocked to the site to
witness the lynching first-hand. Moreover, they enjoyed these demonstrations
of white power well after the event. As recent scholarship shows, audience
members helped mutilate the corpse and scrambled to take bits of cloth or
bone or hair as grisly souvenirs. By the late 1880s, professional photographers
attended specifically so they could fix the excitement on paper. These lynching
prints, sold for a few dollars apiece to local, regional, and national consumers,
kept violent memories vividly alive. And though the images often included
easily identifiable white faces, no one feared prosecution. Indeed, the point of
a lynching was to demonstrate publicly the participants’ collective contempt
for the law.10
Blacks in Wilmington fully grasped this new threat to their well-being. In
1885, the Colored Preachers’ Association of New Hanover County held a spe-
cial meeting at Mount Olive A.M.E. Church on South Second Street to discuss
the topic, “Are Judge Lynch and his Jurors Countenanced by the Authorities
of Our State and National Government?” The answer to this question was a
resounding “yes.” A constant stream of articles in the Wilmington Star made
it very clear that white jailers would not defend their black charges, that wit-
nesses would not identify lynchers nor sheriffs arrest them or prosecutors re-
ally prosecute them. Though most lynchings in North Carolina took place in
rural districts, urban ministers regularly traveled through the countryside to
preach, and they sincerely feared for their own safety, as well as that of relatives
and congregants. More important, they knew that lynching’s primary purpose
was to “impress on blacks collectively their general vulnerability to mob vio-
lence and the whims of the white community.” Like stories of mounted skulls in
Slack Water, 1880–1920 117
earlier periods, reports of dangling bodies created mental images that lingered
in collective memory long after the fact.11
This reformulation of lynching coincided with a series of economic and
political crises that plagued Wilmington and its region, as well as other parts
of the South, broadly. Black and white alike, rural families struggled against
falling crop prices and rising transportation costs. Sharecropping exacer-
bated old racial tensions by pitting white tenant farmers against their black
neighbors. In 1887, however, innovative ideas about scientific agriculture and
collective bargaining resulted in the establishment of the Farmers’ Alliance,
which immediately enlisted forty-two thousand members in fifty-two North
Carolina counties. Leaders of the predominantly white movement looked to
that bastion of Jeffersonian agrarianism, the Democratic Party, for relief, but
their calls for serious change were rebuffed by politicians who benefited from
the conditions farmers opposed. In 1892, the alliance split. Its radical wing,
under the leadership of Leonidas L. Polk, created the new People’s Party,
which demanded price controls, free-coinage of silver, aggressive regulation
of railroads, usury laws that would stop predatory lending by banks, and
an end to special tax benefits for big businesses. Impoverished white men
responded very favorably to this platform, awarding Populist candidates 17
percent of the vote that November. The 1893 depression further galvanized
support.12
In Wilmington, Benjamin Franklin Keith Jr. led the Populist vanguard.
Though his father had been a middling planter and slaveholder before the war,
“Bennie” grew up behind the plow. By renting some of the family’s land to black
sharecroppers, he started to prosper and soon moved to the port city, where he
became a prominent wholesale grocer. When such a man began writing pro-
silver, anti-special interests editorials in a self-published newspaper, the New
Era, the entire community took notice. In 1892, he addressed his neighbors
at a mass meeting at the Chamber of Commerce and then again at the court-
house. Soon after came invitations to speak at Populist rallies in Raleigh and
elsewhere.13
Using what historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the Agrarian
Myth,” Keith drew white, urban wage-earners to a farmer’s party by invoking
memories of their collective rural past. Like freedmen, hundreds of common
whites abandoned their farms in the 1880s and cast their lots with the port
city’s commercial economy. By 1890, Wilmington boasted a white population
of 8,731, up 1,843 from 1880. Some of these white newcomers ended up work-
ing at the local fertilizer plants, others on the docks. Alexander Sprunt & Sons
employed nearly 900 men at its sprawling riverside complex, which included
the Champion Cotton Compress. Meanwhile, over 100 white women and
children toiled at Donald MacRae’s cotton mill, which MacRae had expanded
since Reconstruction into a five-building plant. Like their counterparts in
Piedmont mill villages or in industrializing cities like Durham, Wilmington’s
newly arrived farm people resented the long hours, unsafe working condi-
tions, and lack of freedom that accompanied their paychecks. In 1886, the
Knights of Labor attempted to organize various industries in Wilmington,
but unions made little headway in a place where rural values like indepen-
dence and seasonality persisted. After the depression of 1893, however, the
city’s white workers were more receptive to calls for change.14
Disunity among Wilmington’s Republicans aided the Populists’ success.
Since Reconstruction, the party had been dominated by a group of wealthy
whites, mainly newcomers, called the Ring. Their leader, Daniel L. Russell Jr.,
was a political maverick: son of the wealthiest planter in antebellum Brunswick
County, he was a Whig before the war and joined the Republican Party in 1865.
He and his followers (derided as “scalawags and carpetbaggers” by the oldtime
Democrats), accepted the legality of black civil rights but still expected black
deference in all things, especially politics. Black Republicans, who comprised
the majority of the party faithful, bitterly resented their marginalization. In
1888, a group of political activists, including George W. Price Jr., Frederick
Sadgwar, and Washington Howe, Valentine’s brother, withdrew from the Re-
publican Party to create an Independent Faction, declaring: “We consider that
the time has fully come when as free American citizens, we should rise in our
might and the dignity of our manhood and throw off the yoke of political
oppression. . . . [A] few white men assuming control of the political affairs,
speculate year after year and upon 3,000 Negro votes, with the same degree of
conscious self-righteousness as did the (other kind) of slaveholders before the
war.”15
This passage captures the Independents’ strong sense of local and national
history, as well as their civic identity and race pride. Charging the Ring with
corruption and bossism, they opposed the Regulars in every local election,
fielded their own slates, and drew to them disaffected black voters. In 1891, they
attracted national attention by trying to secure the appointment of an Indepen-
dent as federal collector of customs for the port of Wilmington. By 1894, these
black activists had weakened the Regulars so much that Russell reluctantly
allied with the People’s Party.16
That year, the so-called Fusion coalition of Regular Republicans and Popu-
lists won control of the General Assembly, a political event with enormous
repercussions for the port city. To stay in power, the Fusionists passed a series
Slack Water, 1880–1920 119
of laws that facilitated black voter registration and returned home rule to local
jurisdictions. Wilmington got another new charter that ended the appoint-
ment of city aldermen, but retained existing, gerrymandered ward boundaries.
When the next municipal election once again produced a Democratic majority
on the city board, the Fusionists realized their mistake and established a five-
man, governor-appointed Police Board, which usurped the aldermen’s power
to appoint law enforcement officers, the city attorney, treasurer, and clerk, and
various other city employees. Engineered by New Hanover County’s newly
elected representative to the state legislature, Republican George Z. French,
a Union sutler who had set up a dry goods store in Wilmington after the war,
the new Police Board also had the power to set municipal salaries and pass
local ordinances. In effect, it rendered the duly elected aldermen and mayor
irrelevant.17
At this volatile moment in Wilmington’s civic life, four activist blacks
came to public attention: Alexander, Frank, Henry, and Lewin Manly. The ac-
knowledged grandsons of Charles Manly, governor of North Carolina from
1849 to 1851, the brothers grew up in Wake County. Alex, the eldest, arrived
first. Though classically educated at Hampton Institute, he had also acquired
training there as a house painter, and he initially found work with Frederick
Sadgwar. Very quickly, he opened his own painting business and persuaded
his brothers to relocate. The Manlys joined Reverend Sanders’ Chestnut Street
Presbyterian Church, which provided social entrée, and they affiliated with
other activist Republicans. They made their mark, however, by establishing
a newspaper, the Wilmington Record, in 1891. Alex became general manager
while his brothers worked as compositor, foreman, and salesman. Builder John
T. Howe, Valentine Howe’s cousin and a Republican who previously repre-
sented New Hanover County in the legislature, served as Manly’s traveling
agent. Thanks to the Manly brothers’ talents and Howe’s connections, the paper
was soon in distribution across the state.18
One of the Record’s regularly featured writers was David Bryant Fulton,
a former Wilmingtonian living in Brooklyn, New York. I mention him here
because his early works unwittingly laid the groundwork for a later proj-
ect, a thinly veiled historical novel about the white-instigated Wilmington
revolution. That is, his early essays and short stories seemingly recounted his
experiences as a Pullman porter, but actually exposed the hypocrisy of white
supremacy. In “The Land of the Sky,” for example, he described a hike from
the depot at Asheville, North Carolina, into the mountains, where he en-
countered a stereotypical hillbilly—unkempt, tobacco-chewing, moonshine-
drinking. The white man mistakes the well-spoken, neatly dressed Fulton
for a “nigger guvmint man” come to find his still and tries to scare him off
with a ghost story about the “haunted” woods. His racially subversive prose,
which inverted dialect and other devices common to the majority-white real-
ist school, must have delighted the Record’s readers. And there were plenty of
them: In 1880, 20 percent of Wilmington’s black population was fully liter-
ate, compared to 17 percent of all black North Carolinians; by 1900, some 35
percent of Wilmington’s black residents could read and write.19
As their paper’s circulation grew, the Manlys urged readers to agitate for
racial equality and political change. “The air is full of politics, the woods are
full of politicians,” Alex wrote in an 1895 editorial. “Some clever traps are
being made upon the political board. In North Carolina the Negro holds the
balance of power which he can use to the advantage of the race, state, and na-
tion if he has the manhood to stand on principles and contend for the rights
of a man.” He then sounded an ominous note: “While all of the views of the
older leaders cannot be endorsed, we would remind young leaders to be sure
you are right, otherwise it will be suicide to go ahead. While concocting a
safe remidy [sic] for the people, death may be dropped in the pot. Some have
already shown their hand. Others are lying low, others are sleeping with one
eye open. We will wait til the iron is hot, then grasp our sledge and strike at
selfishness, corruption, and every man who looks as if he wants to use the
negro vote to further personal needs.”20 While his references to suicide and
death acknowledged the very real threat of violence that black activists faced,
the pledge to strike with a hot “sledge” promised whites a good fight.
The Record’s militant stance notwithstanding, many of Manly’s neighbors
agreed with Booker T. Washington. In his famous 1895 Atlanta Exposition ad-
dress, he argued, “whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, that
when it comes to business pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro
is given a man’s chance in the commercial world.” Scholars now note that dif-
ferent audiences drew different meanings from Washington’s rhetoric. When
he urged southern blacks to cast down their buckets where they were, white
business leaders heard an apologia for limited education, the sort appropri-
ate for low-skilled, menial work. Blacks, by contrast, heard a call to invest in
their hometowns. The Manlys apparently heard that message. They not only
printed the full text of Washington’s address, but Alex published the following
editorial:
The indications are bright for the

[torn] business all over the country.
[torn] enterprises are starting
Slack Water, 1880–1920 121
[torn] South. We hope

[torn] past, and that
[torn] hand. Let Hardtimes
[torn] and give the poor
[torn] ise, and the laborer
[torn] get living wages for
[torn] wherever you get it.
Despite the damage to this page, the language and tone are clearly positive.
Several black Wilmingtonians attended the exposition, including architect
John Harriss Howe, and may even have heard the speech first-hand. To pro-
fessional blacks in Wilmington, Washington’s prediction about “a new era of
industrial progress” seemed accurate.21
A final clue to the magnitude of change underway can be seen in black
Wilmington’s commemorative rituals. Most notably, the Kuners greatly de-
clined during this period. Newspaper accounts from the 1870s and 1880s show
that participants had to secure permission from city authorities both to parade
through the streets and to wear masks in public. Republican officials passed
these regulations to suppress local Klan activity, and some writers think they
may have also suppressed black demonstrations against the prevailing order.
That a small number of blacks, at least, continued to use Kunering for protest is
suggested by the continuity of their behavior; that is, they still hid their identity
with elaborate costumes, still sang their white-signifying songs, and still per-
formed satirical skits at the Market House.22 But a better explanation for the
decline is that blacks now had many other opportunities to express themselves
in public. In Wilmington as elsewhere, black civic leaders increasingly directed
community resources toward more conventional events like public concerts,
church-sponsored excursions, and agricultural and industrial fairs.
The most important black commemorative rites took place on January 1,
the date Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Begun in the 1860s,
Emancipation Day celebrations typically featured an array of activities, includ-
ing processions through city streets, religious services, and public orations.
Initially, volunteer committees planned and executed the elaborate ceremo-
nies, but in the 1870s Wilmingtonians created a permanent organization with
elected officers to carry out what became an elaborate annual project. In 1895,
for example, the Emancipation Day parade featured veterans of the U.S. Col-
ored Troops and members of the local black militia, who marched all the way to
City Hall, then led the crowds to Thalian Hall’s Opera House, where Valentine
Howe presided over an opening solo by soprano Carrie Sadgwar and assorted
readings and addresses.23 Decoration Day and Independence Day served the
same function. Bringing together the poor and the prosperous, transplanted
newcomers and descendants of free black families, they deployed the power
of place to affix black counter memories to specific buildings, monuments,
and spaces, transforming white-figured civic sites into mnemonic devices for
future generations. That these sites—city streets, City Hall, the Opera House—
were shared by white Wilmingtonians, who were simultaneously inscribing
their vision of the past on the landscape, made these memories all the more
meaningful.
“The Annals of a Brave and Generous People”: Whites

Remember Their Past
As numerous scholars have noted, the 1890s witnessed a strong surge in white,
southern, collective-memory projects. In contrast to commemorative efforts
during Reconstruction, when white communities favored life-sized Confed-
erate soldier monuments tucked away in local cemeteries, the new heritage
movement favored massive sculptures in conspicuous locations like court-
house squares, city parks, and urban intersections. The newly formed North
Carolina Monument Association, for example, launched a statewide campaign
in 1895 to raise funds for an official Confederate memorial in Raleigh. The
primary speaker at the dedication of the seventy-five-feet-tall monument was
Wilmingtonian Alfred Moore Waddell, a former congressman, published lo-
cal historian, and descendent of both “King” Roger Moore and Revolutionary
leader Hugh Waddell. His hour-long speech insisted that northern narratives
of the Civil War constituted “a monstrous perversion” and urged his listeners
to assert the “truth” about the Confederate cause and North Carolina’s special
role in supporting it. He especially insisted that southerners like himself had
not sought “to destroy the best government on earth,” but rather, to protect it
by asserting “the equality and reserved rights of the States,” the same rights that
had led North Carolinians to issue the so-called Mecklenburg Declaration of
Independence exactly 120 years earlier.24
Back in Wilmington, Waddell’s neighbors read the version of the speech
he had had published for their edification and strove to answer his call to ac-
tion. The North Carolina Society of the Colonial Dames, established in 1894
by Wilmingtonian Florence Kidder, a direct descendent of Maurice Moore,
endeavored to erect a monument to Revolutionary hero Cornelius Harnett.
The Dames secured a donation of land from the city and hosted a series of
fund-raising “entertainments.” Many of the Dames belonged to the Cape Fear
Slack Water, 1880–1920 123
chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had also been or-
ganized in 1894. Presided over by Mrs. Eliza Nutt Parsley, one of Wilmington’s
most prominent matrons, the Daughters initially sought to “preserve records”
so that a “truthful history of the War between the States” could be written.
After the 1896 death of Wilmingtonian George Davis, attorney general of the
Confederate States of America, erecting a Davis memorial became their central
cause.25
The annual Decoration Day celebration illustrates the shift in white Wilm-
ington’s collective memory-making efforts. (See figures 3.2 and 3.3.) In addi-
tion to grizzled, uniformed Confederate veterans, after 1896 the processions
once again featured dozens of fresh-faced boys. They belonged to Com-
pany A, First North Carolina Regiment, United Boys Brigade of America, a
paramilitary organization designed to promote Christian manliness among
working-class youths.26 Affluent, oldtime members of the Immanuel Presbyte-
rian Church founded the brigade in 1896 as a social uplift program. However,
it would not have succeeded without the boys’ parents. These men and women,
Figure 3.2. Gathering of Confederate veterans on the steps of the Wilmington Light Infantry
Armory, located on Market Street, ca. 1890s. Before the war, this building was the home of one
of Wilmington’s most prominent families, the Taylors, whose fortunes declined in the 1870s. Its
function as a site of Lost Cause memory came into play in a new way during the Wilmington
Revolution of 1898, which members of the WLI aided. Courtesy of Lower Cape Fear Historical
Society.
Figure 3.3. This stereographic image shows a gathering at the Confederate Monument, Oakdale
Cemetery. The date and size of the crowd suggest strongly that these Wilmingtonians are celebrating
Decoration Day. The women’s bustled dresses point to a potential date in the 1880s. Courtesy of Lower
Cape Fear Historical Society.
mostly wage-earners living in Dry Pond, where the church was located, wanted
their sons to imbibe elite, martial values. It was no coincidence that the bri-
gade’s commanders were Confederate veterans who modeled honor and valor.
Weekly drill exercises taught discipline, religious instruction taught reverence
for God, and addresses by prominent citizens taught civic duty. The boys even
had military-style uniforms and wooden swords, which they proudly wore at
a variety of public events. Yet they were clearly children. By inviting them to
march in the Decoration Day procession, white Wilmingtonians altered the
holiday’s meaning, shifting its focus from the past to the future. Watching the
veterans pass, followed by the Boys Brigade, observers linked white Wilming-
tonians’ defense of southern rights in the 1860s to the assertion of southern au-
tonomy in the 1890s, a time when whites felt increasingly threatened and when
they anticipated taking action. The uniformed boys thus symbolized whites’
renewed search for a usable past.
Other elites in Wilmington reinterpreted the past for future gain, too, in-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 125
cluding James L. Sprunt, owner of the largest cotton exporting firm in the
United States at the time. A blockade runner during the war, he used his profits
to establish Alexander Sprunt and Son, a name he chose to connote heritage
and longevity. In fact, the elder Sprunt, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, had im-
migrated to Wilmington in 1852, died in 1884, and never had a major role in
the business that bore his name. Such inventiveness also characterized James
Sprunt’s other endeavors. In 1896, he published his first book, Tales and Tradi-
tions of the Lower Cape Fear, 1661–1896, a series of collectively constructed, oral
accounts that he augmented with original research and wove into a celebratory,
master narrative. Sprunt’s stated intention, “to catch the vanishing lines of [the
Cape Fear’s] history and traditions for the benefit of those who may not be
unmindful of the annals of a brave and generous people,” reveals his desire to
create a usable past for his fellow white citizens.27
Sprunt’s lively text, still frequently cited, helps us understand how older nar-
ratives about Wilmington’s past gained new currency. Fittingly, the book begins
by describing a modern steamer, the Wilmington, docked along the Cape Fear
River at Southport. Moving geographically, not chronologically, Sprunt leads
his readers on an imaginary tour of historic places commemorating events
that he felt forged the city’s distinctive identity. These range from “Negro Head
Point” and “Gov. Tryon’s Palace–Scene of the First Outbreak of the Revolution-
ary War” to “Price’s Creek Lighthouse Confederate States Signal Station,” “Fort
Fisher,” and “Hospital Point.” Lest you miss the connection between past, pres-
ent, and future, Sprunt included a lengthy appendix titled “Advertisements,”
which is actually his list of “heroes whose lives are an example for others.” In
“Men of the Past,” he included a whopping 161 city fathers (some long-dead,
like Hugh Waddell, and others still living, like Donald MacRae), while “Men of
the Present” identified leading businessmen and their firms (Donald MacRae
appeared here, too).28
Around the same time, Sprunt began an extensive remodeling project at
his town house, the urban mansion built by antebellum Whig governor Ed-
ward B. Dudley. Sprunt not only expanded and updated the 1825 structure,
which still dominates that end of South Front Street, he added an enormous
three-story, classical portico to the facade. Inside this monumental home, his
wife, Luola Murchison Sprunt, directed the Colonial Dames’ effort to pre-
serve the historic ruins of St. Philips Church, which marked the original loca-
tion of Brunswick Town.29 Here, too, the Dames frequently gathered for their
monthly “reading circles,” when the ladies discussed colonial documents and
heard lectures by local historians, including Alfred Moore Waddell. The man-
sion thus served as more than a private residence. It sheltered the production
and dissemination of historical knowledge about white Wilmington’s Anglo-

Saxon forebears, their instrumental role as local leaders of the American Rev-
olution, and the distinct revolutionary spirit that suffused the community. As
a visible symbol of local elites’ renewed emphasis on their shared heritage, it
had few rivals.
Whatever their form, heritage projects helped white elite southerners in
Wilmington and elsewhere resolve what Bryan Wagner describes as an episte-
mological crisis.30 The by-now constant sight of well-dressed, well-educated,
politically engaged black men and women had irreparably disrupted one of
their most deep-seated cognitive schemas for ordering social relationships, the
one predicated on black inferiority. Whereas black servants could still dandle
white babies and shave white cheeks, black lawyers and aldermen and teachers
provoked fear and ire. Unsettling questions came unbidden. Is what we long
believed to be true about them actually false? If blacks are not what they seem,
then what are we? Heritage projects assuaged their existential dilemma. By
staging costumed pageants, preserving historic structures, and tracing their
genealogies, elites asserted the continuity of values and way of life that colonial
forebears represented. In this way, in their own minds, at least, they bolstered
their authority in the present.
With this commemorative context in mind, let us turn to the political
sphere, where the annals of the past were also very evident. Republican Daniel
Russell, for example, knew in launching his gubernatorial campaign in 1895
that he needed to conciliate activist blacks in his home district around Wilm-
ington if he hoped to win. Men like the Manlys still distrusted white Repub-
licans’ rhetoric about equal rights and publicized again and again a private
letter in which Russell labeled blacks “savages” undeserving of the franchise.
Once aware of this breach, Russell sought to make amends by invoking what
he considered a positive historic image: “I stand for negro rights and liberties.
I sucked at the breast of a Negro woman. I judge from the adult development
that the milk must have been nutritious and plentiful.” For oldtime, white elites
like Russell, memories of Mammy recalled the warm feelings that previously
bound whites and blacks together; thus he was shocked when forty prominent
blacks, including the influential federal collector of customs, John C. Dancy,
held a convention to get Russell removed from the Republican ticket. Chang-
ing tacks, Russell and members of the Ring responded with a staged slave auc-
tion to suggest what would happen to black Wilmingtonians if their actions
led to a Democratic victory. In the end, Russell narrowly won but with only
59 percent of the black ballots cast. It was a powerful lesson in humility, for he
appeared to be merely the lesser of two evils.31
Slack Water, 1880–1920 127
To reward his supporters, Governor Russell revised Wilmington’s city char-

ter to increase black office-holding and declared that henceforth he would ap-
point one of each ward’s two aldermen. White Democrats resisted, interpreting
these executive acts as political tyranny. Thanks to their actions, four different
groups claimed to be the legitimate Board of Aldermen after the next municipal
election in March 1897. One board, following the new charter, comprised the
five winning candidates elected from each of the five wards (three Democrats,
two Republicans) plus five Russell appointees (four Republicans, one Populist).
This board was biracial. The incumbents, all white Democrats, made up a sec-
ond board; led by Mayor William N. Harriss, an oldtime Wilmingtonian, they
declared the revised city charter “unconstitutional” and “held over” their seats
while their attorneys filed suit. A third board emerged when the three just-
elected Democrats, fearing the incumbents might actually win, seceded from
the first board (now Fusionist) and teamed up with the white Democrats who
had lost. But when members of this third board fell out over the best choice for
mayor, the three secessionists withdrew again, forming a fourth board. Chaos
ensued as the different boards began doling out plum municipal positions—
city clerk, treasurer, harbor master, police, health inspectors, even lamplighter.
Many of these appointments went to black Republicans and white Populists.
When a local judge, a Democrat, ruled in the incumbent Harriss board’s favor,
the Fusionists appealed to the state Supreme Court.32
Here, too, we see whites’ collective memory at work. John D. Bellamy Jr.
represented the incumbent Democrats. In an impassioned, two-hour-long
speech that would have greatly pleased his father, whose states’ rights oratory
galvanized the city’s young firebrands in 1860, Bellamy justified the so-called
“hold over” government: “It was quite the order of things for Wilmington to
be resisting the infamous legislation by which her citizens are deprived of lo-
cal self-government,” he insisted, “for it was the citizens of this city who first
resisted the odious British Stamp Act.” The state Supreme Court, dominated
by Republican justices, rejected this defense and overturned the lower court’s
decision. In November 1897 the biracial Fusionist board assumed full authority
to govern. As the stunned Democrats witnessed the dramatic changes that fol-
lowed, they elected a new campaign committee, led by the patrician Bellamy,
whom they tasked with winning the next election by any means.33
The Wilmington Revolution of 1898
Later portrayed as a sudden uprising of armed blacks quelled by Wilmington’s

heroic civic leaders, the revolution of 1898 was actually a coup d’état orches-
trated by oldtime, elite, white businessmen to regain control of their commu-

nity. Recent histories, including A Day of Blood, situate the port city’s political
takeover squarely within the white supremacy campaign that Democratic
Party leaders directed from Raleigh that year. While this outside-in approach
helps explain how white animus against black Wilmingtonians developed into
mass hysteria and violence, it has the unintended effect of diminishing the
instigators’ role and obfuscating their true motives. If we take an inside-out
approach and examine the coup from the standpoint of the revolution’s prime
movers, its meaning shifts in important ways. As we will see, the revolutionar-
ies hid their plans from prominent Democrats because they intended to act re-
gardless of the election’s outcome. And though a staged “riot” or “day of blood”
was essential to their success, the violence followed an established pattern re-
garding race, place, and memory.34
Like previous insurrections in Wilmington, this one targeted a perceived
tyranny: the Fusionist board of aldermen and their illegitimate, autocratic (to
oldtime elites) alterations to the traditional, day-to-day operations of the city.
The chair of the Finance Committee, for example, Benjamin Franklin Keith,
had slashed appropriations to the Fire Department from $17,500 to $11,000.
Like his progressive political mentors Leonidas L. Polk and Marion Butler,
Keith favored greater efficiency, organization, and empirical evidence in mu-
nicipal government. After carefully reviewing the costs of hoses, blacksmith-
ing, hay, and other essentials, he declared the fire companies bloated “social
clubs” that bilked the citizens for their “wines and dines,” and replaced them
with a paid, professional force. When municipal ledgers showed excessive
monies paid to street contractors for crushed oyster shells, Keith had the con-
tract cancelled and arranged for the city to buy its own equipment for pulver-
izing and spreading rock, which his research showed cost less in the long run.
Most significantly, he initiated an effort to create Wilmington’s first municipal
utilities. In 1897, privately held companies controlled all of the city’s essen-
tial services: water, sewer, gas, electric, and street railways. The problem was
that the men behind these firms held powerful positions in Wilmington. And
Keith’s efforts to reform public services made him many enemies.35
One of the businessmen angered by Keith and his Fusionist colleagues
was Hugh MacRae, the acknowledged instigator of the 1898 revolution and
the youngest son of Donald MacRae. Born in 1865, he earned an engineer-
ing degree from MIT, ran a profitable mica mine, and established the Linville
resort near Grandfather Mountain. When Donald died in 1892, he returned
home to take over the Wilmington Cotton Mills, the city’s largest manufactur-
ing concern. But Hugh MacRae had his hand in multiple ventures, including
Slack Water, 1880–1920 129
the Stone’s Bay Oyster Company (which supplied the shells used to pave city
streets), the Clarendon Water Works (the city’s main source), and the National
Bank of Wilmington, among others. He also had his eye on the Wilmington
Street Railway, which sold its excess electricity to businesses and homes along
the main line. In many ways, he embodied the New South.36
Historian Glenda Gilmore has argued that men of MacRae’s generation re-
garded their fathers with contempt, blaming them for the Confederacy’s fail-
ure. It is tempting to fit Hugh MacRae into this pattern. However, Donald was
a man of industry and commerce, like his father, Alexander, before him. Family
letters suggest a close, though formal, father-son relationship. The lessons in
Scottish thrift and productivity were constant: Donald’s missives often came
on Navassa Guano Company letterhead. Young Hugh wanted to make his own
way in the world, to prosper through his own talents and hard work, not his
patrimony. By 1898, MacRae occupied with enthusiasm his hereditary place
at the top of the city’s social, economic, and political hierarchies.37 He resided
with his wife and children in his childhood home, he worshipped at the Pres-
byterian church his grandfather had helped to found, and he knew the stories
of his Scottish ancestors, the men who fought at Culloden, Moore’s Creek, and
Fort Fisher—memories encouraged by his sister, Agnes MacRae Parsley, who
belonged to the North Carolina Society of Colonial Dames.38 Now, it was his
turn to wave the red shirt.
MacRae’s plan to overthrow the municipal government likely crystallized
in July 1898. No eyewitness accounts survive, but we do know who his co-
conspirators were and that they met at MacRae’s castle-like home on Market
Street. (See figure 3.4.) Picture nine middle-aged men seated around a din-
ing table: To the right of our host is Walter L. Parsley, president of the Hilton
Lumber Company and MacRae’s brother-in-law. Also present are: wholesale
grocer J. Allan Taylor, druggist Leonidas B. Sasser, attorney Pierre B. Manning,
livery owner Hardy L. Fennell, fertilizer magnate William Gilchrist, dry goods
merchant William A. Johnson, and bookkeeper Edward S. Lathrop. MacRae
knew each man well. Fennell, Sasser, Johnson, Manning, and Gilchrist lived
right across the street. Parsley lived next door, Taylor and Lathrop around the
corner from him. Some of them attended MacRae’s church, some served with
him on corporate boards. He appealed to them not only as businessmen, but
as his neighbors, friends, and fellow civic leaders.39
Their host undoubtedly chose his words carefully: “Negro domination” is
not the real problem, no matter what the Democratic Election Committee
is saying. On the contrary, whites still dominate the Board of Aldermen, the
Board of Audit and Finance, and the Chamber of Commerce. No, the problem
Figure 3.4. Hugh MacRae’s home at 715 Market Street, ca. 1902. Nantucket builder John Coffin Wood
built the house in 1853 for his own family but sold it to Donald MacRae in 1859, after a national financial
panic. Donald MacRae transformed it into a Scottish castle complete with medieval crenellations and
turrets by 1860. This view shows a new, rear addition that Hugh MacRae commissioned from Henry
Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, who grew up in the house right across the street. Frederick
Sagwar’s residence stood on the opposite side of the garden, just beyond the right edge of the frame. A
prominent fixture in the city’s landscape, the MacRae house was razed in 1955. Courtesy of Cape Fear
Museum of History and Science, Wilmington, NC.
is that the Russell-appointed, Fusionist board is undermining private enter-

prise, advocating collective bargaining for workers, and promoting equality
for blacks. These policies do not merely offend elite white racial sensibilities—
they directly threaten Wilmington’s economic future. Moreover, the seats up
for grabs in the coming election are in the Congress, the state legislature, and
county government, not on the city’s Board of Aldermen. There is no guarantee
that Democrats will win in November, but even if they do, Keith and his fellow
Fusionists will continue to govern Wilmington until the legislature changes the
city charter again, municipal elections occur, and new aldermen take control.
We cannot wait, MacRae concludes. It is time to act.
Frequently named by scholars, but never analyzed, MacRae’s co-conspira-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 131
tors, dubbed the “Secret Nine” in the 1930s, demonstrate that a small group of
elite men passed civic authority down from generation to generation. Walter
L. Parsley, for example, presided over one of Wilmington’s oldest and largest
lumber concerns, which had been established by his father, Oscar G. Parsley,
a two-time mayor. J. Allan Taylor, a wealthy wholesale merchant, descended
from John Allan Taylor, who came to Wilmington in 1820, married into the
prominent Harriss family, and eventually operated a profitable tugboat and
ferry line. Allan’s father, Col. John Douglas Taylor, a respected Confederate
veteran, served as clerk of the New Hanover County Superior Court. Hardy
Fennell also had a distinguished, Old Wilmington family. His father, Owen, a
veteran of Sharpsburg, was former treasurer of New Hanover County and had
been one of the Democrats elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1897. Hardy
operated a lucrative horse-and-carriage business while his brother, Henry,
served as general agent for the Atlantic Coastline Railroad (ACL), which pro-
vided the city’s primary rail service. The other men had similar pedigrees and
portfolios, and each stood to benefit materially and socially from the coup.40
At the Secret Nine’s behest, another group began to meet that summer, as
well. They included attorney William S. Smith, Walker Taylor (Allan Taylor’s
brother), Henry G. Fennell (Hardy Fennell’s brother), Thomas D. Meares, John
Beery, and William F. Robertson. All six were prominent men of affairs, and
all belonged to Old Wilmington families. Beery, for example, was the nephew
of Benjamin W. Beery, whose shipyard on Eagles Island had long dominated
the riverfront. Meares, whom James Sprunt called a “conspicuous representa-
tive of an old and honored family of the Cape Fear,” served in 1898 as general
agent of the Seaboard Air Line, the railway that connected the port city to the
state’s western Mountain region. Robertson was not so blue-blooded, but he
did have an ax to grind: as superintendent of the Clarendon Water Company,
private owner of the municipal works at Hilton Park, he controlled the city’s
water supply.41
The purpose of this smaller group was to instigate the racist violence needed
to validate the coup. Walker Taylor took the lead in developing the plan. Like
other men of his elite social class, Taylor had had to recreate himself after the
Civil War. Now an insurance agent, he belonged to both the Chamber of Com-
merce and the Democratic Executive Committee, so he was an important
source of information for the Secret Nine, a kind of double agent. Far more
important, he commanded the Wilmington Light Infantry (WLI), a unit of the
state militia, which in a strange twist of fate occupied Taylor’s former family
home on Market Street. Using a military structure, he and his group divided the
city into sections and assigned a civilian division captain to oversee each one.
Each captain commanded a series of civilian lieutenants, one per block, whose
task it was to identify white adult males and conscript them to form nightly
patrols. Taking their cue from newspaper reports of lawless “midnight maraud-
ers” and “insolent, arrogant, and insulting negroes,” the captains claimed to be
protecting their neighbors from black violence. Armed to the hilt and stationed
on strategic street corners throughout the summer, they actually prompted vio-
lence by stopping, searching, questioning, and assaulting “suspicious looking”
blacks. They also drilled publicly as a larger paramilitary unit under the direc-
tion of Roger Moore, whom they had elected as their honorary general from
among the division captains. Many Wilmingtonians later recalled the actions
of Moore’s men, who they labeled the “Vigilance Committee,” but they had no
knowledge of the committee’s true leaders or its ultimate purpose.42
The Group Six had unwitting allies in the White Government Unions
(WGUs) that emerged that summer. The Democratic Executive Committee
used the unions to stir up support for white supremacy and thereby register
as many Democratic voters as possible. They began in August with a notice
in the Messenger inviting “full attendance of all citizens interested in good
government.” Attorney John D. Bellamy Jr., now a Democratic candidate for
Congress, hosted two ward meetings outside his downtown law office, as did
William B. McKoy, his replacement as chairman of the Executive Committee.
Union leaders crafted their message especially to appeal to poor and wage-
earning whites. They complained of hiring practices in the city, which they
claimed favored blacks, and they urged resolutions requiring that employers
hire whites only. Adding fuel to this fire, the Morning Star published articles
purporting to describe the expensive consumer goods owned by prominent
black families like the Sadgwars and Howes. In the 1890s, pianos, parlor sets,
and hall stands emerged as potent symbols of respectability, refinement, and
middle-class status. By taunting common whites with visions of black prosper-
ity and gentility, the WGU exacerbated racial prejudice and anger.43
After the official Democratic campaign got under way, Wilmington’s leading
Democratic newspapers began publishing inflammatory reports of black crime
and aggression: burglary, murder, assault, public drunkenness, prostitution,
and even infanticide. Several insisted that “the color line is sharply drawn,”
suggesting common use of that phrase by this date. Cumulatively, the press
resurrected the old trope of black men as hypersexual, deviant beings. On July
13, for example, the Messenger reported on a lynching in Virginia, and a follow-
up piece on July 22, titled “The Crime and Its Remedy,” insisted that “savage”
assaults against “white women and little girls” would never cease until “the
black devils are all hanged.” Lest anyone miss the cause of black aggression, on
Slack Water, 1880–1920 133
August 12 the Star published a plaintive piece titled: “As Others See Us. Negro
Control in Wilmington. Unbridled Lawlessness. Incompetent Officials.”44
To no one’s surprise, Alex Manly responded to the vitriol spewing from
the white papers. (See figure 3.5.) On the evening of August 18, the Daily Re-
cord published an editorial refuting a speech given by Mrs. Rebecca Felton in
Tybee, Georgia, and reprinted in the Messenger that same morning. Felton’s
address had actually occurred on August 12, 1897, exactly a year earlier, but
her central premise, that “the lynching problem” stemmed from unscrupu-
lous white politicians who befuddle “the colored man” and make “him think
he is a man and brother,” so nicely fit the white supremacy themes of the
Democratic campaign that Messenger editor Thomas Clawson carefully ex-
cerpted certain passages and made it appear as though she had just spoken.
Figure 3.5. Alex Manly, editor of the Daily Record. Courtesy of Manuscript
and Rare Books Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University.
Predictably, Manly took special umbrage at Felton’s claim that all black men
were “ravening human beasts” intent on raping white women. Now engaged
to marry Carrie Sadgwar, who was touring with the Fisk University singers
in England, the handsome, educated journalist likely spoke from experience
when he argued that many black men “were sufficiently attractive for white
girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is well known to
all.” He offered a different solution to “the lynching problem”: “[T]each your
men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimi-
date and torture a helpless people. . . . You set yourselves down as a lot of carp-
ing hypocrites in that you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you
seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don’t think ever that your women will
remain pure while you are debauching ours. You sow the seed—the harvest
will come in due time.”45 In response, white merchants immediately with-
drew their ads from the Record. Five prominent black Republicans, including
customs collector John C. Dancy, urged Manly to issue a public apology, but
he demurred. Within a week, he had lost many subscribers, received death
threats, and was evicted by the paper’s white landlord.46
This episode of resistance to white supremacy worked to the conspirators’
advantage. Manly’s black supporters had publicly rallied to his cause, rais-
ing additional subscriptions, massing outside the Record office to prevent
his lynching, and moving the Manlys’ equipment to a new location across
town. Like their ancestors in the past, the white men of Group Six shrewdly
promoted these events as signs of impending uprising. An October 9, 1898,
Messenger article, “Trying to Buy Guns,” for example, asserted “Wilmington
Negroes Getting Ready for Trouble—The Dark Scheme Detected” and con-
cluded that “This order for guns is but another evidence of what the negro in
his ignorance and folly has been led up to under the fusion government that
blackens, disgraces, and debauches North Carolina. . . . [A]s we observe, he
[the negro] is preparing for sedition and riot.” In another article, the Morn-
ing Star accused a black man named Frank Thompson of “inciting a riot”
in Brooklyn. That incident supposedly began when Thompson confronted a
white neighbor, but the two-man fight grew to include a large crowd of both
races. In the aftermath, the Star reported that local blacks boasted “that their
children all had matches and bottles of kerosene knew how to use them and
would run some women out of their homes before morning.” Bennie Keith
vividly recalled the widespread fear of retributive black violence that per-
vaded Wilmington that fall. “Everyone believed they would rise up and kill
the whites,” he said.47
Tellingly, the task of preparing white citizens for the much-anticipated black
Slack Water, 1880–1920 135
uprising fell to the “Businessmen’s Campaign Committee” instead of the mu-

nicipal police, the Wilmington Light Infantry, or any other official military
unit. As fate would have it, two units of federal troops were already in the
city: Company K of the 2nd North Carolina Volunteer Infantry, commanded
by Donald MacRae Jr., and the crew of the USS Nantucket, both furloughed
in September without seeing any action in the Spanish-American War. Nei-
ther received an invitation to help defend the city. In part, the local conspira-
tors sought to avoid discovery by federal officials, but they also knew from
undercover detectives hired by Walker Taylor that local blacks were “doing
practically nothing” to arm themselves. Confident of their authority, they dis-
couraged all sales of weapons and ammunition to black residents and made
arrangements to purchase a Colt rapid-firing gun for themselves.48
Feeling bolder, the conspirators offered the community a glimpse of their
true motives in early October. The Chamber of Commerce, which included J.
Allan Taylor, Hugh MacRae, Walter L. Parsley, Pierre B. Manning, and Walker
Taylor, convened as usual on October 6 for their monthly meeting, but this
time, the members passed a series of official resolutions, which they published
in the Messenger and the Star as a public notice. “Negro Domination” of the city
“hampers commerce and repels capital which might otherwise find investment
in our midst,” it said. While the members conceded that the chamber’s “prov-
ince is commercial, not political,” they insisted that “the conditions confront-
ing us and calling for solutions are commercial and social, not political,” and
that “prosperity, peace, and happiness” were not possible “under the present
regime.” In effect, they declared that conventional political remedies like voting
were inadequate. Thirty-eight prominent “citizens and businessmen” signed
the document.49
About a week later, in mid-October, handbills emblazoned with the words
“Remember the 6,” a skull-and-crossbones symbol, a pistol, and a black hand
mysteriously appeared all over downtown. Determined to win the election
by any means necessary, the Democratic Executive Committee targeted six
prominent, white, municipal officials for special abuse: Dr. Silas P. Wright, the
Fusionist mayor; commercial agriculturalist George Z. French, the New Ha-
nover County sheriff and Republican who had engineered the 1897 city char-
ter; lumber baron William H. Chadbourn, Republican-appointed postmaster
and county treasurer; Flavel Foster, mill owner and Republican chair of the
county commission; John Melton, the Fusionist-appointed chief of police; and
attorney Caleb Lockey, Republican Election Committee chair. Both Chad-
bourn and Foster were targeted by mobs who forced them to sign statements
retracting their allegiance to the Republican Party. The other four fled the city
under duress. Prominent Populists like Bennie Keith also experienced threats
and harassment. “They have not killed or run me out of town yet,” he assured
Marion Butler, “although they hate me with all the hatred that corporation
influence can inspire.”50
Whereas the Secret Nine had the Vigilance Committees, the Democrats
employed Red Shirts, a paramilitary organization that powerfully appealed to
white Wilmington’s distinctive combination of Scottish heritage, revolution-
ary spirit, and white-supremacist ideology. The group made its first appear-
ance in North Carolina as the attendants of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, South
Carolina’s fiery former governor, who spoke at a mass rally in Fayetteville.
The port city sent a special Democratic delegation for the event. “Why didn’t
you kill that nigger editor?” thundered Tillman from the podium. “Send him
to South Carolina and let him publish any such offensive stuff and he would
be killed.” At a second rally in Charlotte, Tillman reiterated his charge that
Cape Fear men were weak and ineffectual. “In South Carolina, no negro edi-
tor could slander the white women as that Wilmington negro did. That negro
ought to be food for catfish in the bottom of the Cape Fear River!” Dozens of
Wilmington men heard him speak at these rallies, and dozens more read his
mortifying words in the press. In defense of their reputation, Wilmington’s
Democratic Party leaders purchased and distributed bolts of red fabric and
ready-made red shirts that seamstresses fashioned into militaristic garb. Then,
at a local rally, William B. McKoy, a prominent Democrat, attorney, business-
man, and amateur historian, gave a stirring speech reminding locals of the
Scots who settled the Cape Fear area and their Highlander ancestors who
waved bloody shirts to incite retaliatory attacks against their enemies. His
familiar narrative held that the blood of true revolutionaries—the Jacobites—
flowed metaphorically through their veins.51
The most powerful invocation of white Wilmington’s heritage occurred on
October 24, when Democratic leaders hosted a large rally at the elegant opera
house in Thalian Hall. Here, in the place that symbolized Wilmington’s cultural
refinement, former Confederate colonel Alfred Moore Waddell declared, “[W]
e will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are
resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with
carcasses.” In vivid prose, Waddell offered a horrific image of black bodies,
tangled and bloated, like the jams that used to occur in the old days, when en-
slaved black men poled logs down the river to Wilmington. Water and blood,
violence and commerce: Waddell knew well the city’s distinctive qualities. A
long-time resident, he had practiced law there, published a successful newspa-
per, represented the Cape Fear in the U.S. Congress (1870–78), and authored
Slack Water, 1880–1920 137
numerous local history books. His most important qualification to be on the

rostrum, however, was his genealogy.
Waddell’s great grandfather and eponym, Alfred Moore, fought at the Battle
of Moore’s Creek under the command of his great-great uncle, James Moore;
and another ancestor, the illustrious Hugh Waddell, led the militia to capture
Brunswick during the Stamp Act crisis. In short, he was not simply acquainted
with the city’s revolutionary spirit, he embodied it, linking in his silver-haired,
sixty-three-year-old person the rebellions of 1765, 1775, 1861, 1877, and 1898.
Fully aware of his unique role, he deliberately ended his speech with a specific
invocation of place-based collective memory: “We are the sons of the men
who won the first victory of the Revolution at Moore’s Creek Bridge . . . and
only left the service of their country when its independent sovereignty was
secured. We are the brothers of men who wrote with their swords from Bethel
to Bentonville the most heroic chapter in American annals and we ourselves
are men who, inspired by these memories intend to preserve at the cost of our
lives if necessary the heritage that is ours.” By all accounts, Waddell was not
part of the Secret Nine’s plan, nor was he active in the Democratic Party’s white
supremacy campaign until that night. Thereafter, he received daily requests to
address the public.52
Shortly after Waddell’s speech, Governor Daniel J. Russell received startling
news from Wilmington: “We are now are on the brink of a revolution which
can only be averted by the suppression of the republican ticket,” the letter read.
“The white people . . . have been driven to desperation and . . . the next elec-
tion day will precipitate a conflict which may cause hundreds, and perhaps
thousands of lives and the partial or entire destruction of the city.” Russell had
been monitoring the climate in Wilmington for weeks, but he must have felt
blindsided by the audacious request. He summoned the authors, businessmen
James Sprunt, James H. Chadbourn, and E. K. Bryan, to Raleigh, where they
explained that 2,965 blacks had preregistered to vote in Wilmington, compared
to only 2,918 whites. These figures made another Republican victory seem very
likely. They insisted that the city’s whites would riot if that happened and urged
him to avoid mass violence by refusing to endorse an official party slate. When
Republican loyalists in Wilmington confirmed for him the awful atmosphere
there, Russell tried a different approach: he offered to withdraw the black can-
didates from the Fusion ticket and replace them with white Republicans less
objectionable to the Democrats. The Democrats rejected this option and reiter-
ated their arguments. To be fair, Sprunt, Chadbourn, and Bryan were undoubt-
edly unaware of the way Wilmingtonians were being manipulated, and so their
plea succeeded. Russell reluctantly agreed to suppress an official Republican
ticket if he could veto certain Democratic candidates. Thenceforth, any Repub-

licans who ran would have to do so as Independents.53
By election week, the air in Wilmington crackled with anticipation. On No-
vember 3, the Red Shirts staged a grand parade designed to frighten black vot-
ers away from the polls. Former Grand Wizard of the short-lived Klan, now
general of all the vigilance committees, Roger Moore served as grand marshal.
It was no coincidence that he, like Waddell, descended directly from one of
the city’s founders. More than one hundred armed white men followed be-
hind him, wearing their “bloody” red shirts and firing weapons as they moved
through the majority-black neighborhoods of Dry Pond and Brooklyn. Nearly
one thousand white people later converged at a celebratory barbecue in Hil-
ton Park, and as night fell, blacks became ready targets for white aggression.
On Front Street, a group of Red Shirts “ran amuck,” “tackling every nigger
that came along” and dragging several black men into alleys. A similar round
of racist violence occurred on the night of November 5, but there were un-
doubtedly other episodes that never made it into the papers. Armed guards
patrolled the streets, and ward meetings took place nightly. On November 6
the Fusionist Board of Aldermen took the precaution of stopping all sales of
“intoxicating liquors” for November 7, 8 and 9. And all the while the newspa-
pers kept up their endless reports of black-instigated assault, burglary, arson,
and disorder.54
On the day of the election, Tuesday, November 8, Democrats left nothing
to chance. Attorney George Rountree and other Democratic Party leaders told
the Red Shirts and WGU members to take their firearms to the polling places
and “stand guard.” Although most eligible black voters prudently opted to stay
home, a brave few ventured out and cast ballots. Around midday, Governor
Russell arrived; despite threats to his personal safety, he felt it an important
gesture to vote in his hometown. Walker Taylor, acting in his capacity as com-
mander of the WLI, helped escort the governor from the train to the polling
place and back again; Taylor was also Russell’s cousin. As soon as Russell left
the city, the Democrats stormed black-majority precincts in the First and Fifth
wards to disrupt the official ballot count. At one polling place, about a hun-
dred men surged into the small building, a former stable, deliberately knocked
out the lights, and pushed the officials out of the way. Former mayor William
N. Harriss led the crowd and personally stuffed several hundred ballots into
Democrat John D. Bellamy’s box. In another precinct, the officials eliminated
all of the Republican ballots, insisting they violated a state rule requiring the
use of pure white, unmarked paper. In the end, the Democrats won by a land-
slide. The real revolution, however, was still to come.55
Slack Water, 1880–1920 139
The Secret Nine also left nothing to chance. At some point on November
8, Hugh MacRae had a notice placed in that evening’s Messenger. After-dinner
readers searching for updates on the day’s election saw the following headline:
“Attention All White Men. Important business to Transact, 10AM at the Court-
house.” Irrespective of the election’s outcome, MacRae and his conspirators
had drafted a set of resolutions calling for a new municipal order. The first five
resolutions demanded changes in property owning, taxes, hiring practices, and
Wilmington’s business reputation, duplicating the economic concerns identi-
fied by the Chamber of Commerce on October 6. The sixth resolution asserted
the right of white men to protect their families from insult or injury, and the
seventh demanded that Alex Manly close the Record and leave the city. These
last two items differ considerably from the others in content, so much so that
they seem afterthoughts, tacked on to the list at the last moment.56
Hundreds of people eagerly packed into the courthouse’s auditorium on
Wednesday morning, November 9, to have their curiosity assuaged. Some had
missed the Messenger’s evening announcement, but awoke to find a similar
notice in the Morning Star. Witnesses later recalled that MacRae and his al-
lies sat on the rostrum, along with dozens of other prominent city leaders.
Merchant Solon H. Fishblate, a chamber member, prominent Democrat, and
former mayor, called the room to order and summoned Alfred Waddell to
come forth from the audience. For once, Waddell did not know his lines. He
accepted a document from Hugh MacRae and began to read the seven resolu-
tions. When he finished, the crowd rose to its feet, stamping and clapping and
yelling approval. Fishblate quickly moved to add an eighth resolution, requir-
ing the resignations of the current mayor, the chief of police, and the Board
of Aldermen. It was a brilliant tactic. By calling for the city’s officials to resign
voluntarily and by having Fishblate introduce the idea after the other resolu-
tions, the Nine could rest assured that the crowd would approve the amend-
ment. The populace had clearly indicated as a body their agreement with the
document’s overall depiction of Wilmington’s economic plight and its cause.
All they needed was a solution: ousting the municipal government.57
By this point, Democratic Party leaders realized that something was afoot.
One of them, lawyer George Rountree, moved that a committee be formed to
write the eighth resolution. Since it was his motion, the crowd appointed him
chair. The other four members were attorney Iredell Meares (whose brother
was one of the Group Six), Hugh MacRae, Walker Taylor, and Solon Fishb-
late. Records do not indicate what happened when the committee met, but it
is likely that MacRae and Taylor informed Rountree and the others of their
plans. Meanwhile, Bellamy, Waddell, and others tried to keep the room under
control. Many men present wanted to lynch Manly and burn the Record. Ten-
sions ran even higher when the committee returned with a final resolution
that demanded only the resignations of the chief of police and mayor. When
Nathaniel Jacobi, a hardware dealer, protested that this language “did not go
far enough,” Rountree ominously replied, “That matter [of the entire board’s
resignation] would be attended to.” Thus appeased, the assembly approved the
final document. They christened it “The White Man’s Declaration of Indepen-
dence,” and every man present signed it, so that posterity would know that he
was a revolutionary.58
A committee of twenty-five men had the official task of carrying out all
eight resolutions, but their actual role was to inform the black community of
the coming change. To this end, they summoned twenty-five of the city’s most
influential black men, their ostensible counterparts, to whom they revealed
the declaration. Obviously, no official minutes of this meeting were taken, but
the Messenger later printed the names of the entire “Colored Citizens’ Com-
mittee,” so we know that deputy customs collector John Holloway, architect
John T. Howe, and builder Frederick Sadgwar were among those present. The
white committee’s chair, Alfred Moore Waddell, also gave them an ultimatum:
submit their written acquiescence on behalf of the entire black population, or
suffer the consequences.59
The black men had fourteen hours to produce their reply, which remains in
dispute over a century later. According to lawyer Armond Scott, who placed
the letter in the mail instead of taking it to Waddell’s house, its few sentences
addressed resolution seven, the only one they could affect, and simply stated
that since Manly had fled the city “the alleged basis of conflict between the
races had been eliminated.” Waddell, by contrast, claimed that the black men
“respectfully” begged to say “in the interests of peace we will willingly use our
influence to have your wishes carried out.” The difference is striking. Whereas
Scott’s version obviated the need for further white violence (the problem,
Manly, is already gone), Waddell’s validated the use of force by making its tar-
gets liable (we will do what you want or pay the price). A similar “blaming-
the-victims” approach can be seen in later, white-authored accounts asserting
that, if Scott had hand-delivered the reply to Waddell as instructed, then it
would have arrived by the deadline and averted the violence. Modern scholars
often excuse Scott, concluding that he understandably feared for his safety if
he walked, alone and unarmed, into Waddell’s neighborhood. But I find these
analyses misleading. Irrespective of the letter’s contents or mode of delivery,
no one could have stopped the coming attack. It was an essential part of the
revolution.60
Slack Water, 1880–1920 141
Few who awoke in Wilmington the morning of November 10 knew what

the day actually held in store. By 8:00 a.m., some five hundred armed white
civilians had gathered outside the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory build-
ing on Market Street. Men from all walks of life were present, including min-
isters, professionals, elite businessmen, and wage earners. Waddell arrived
and soberly reported that he had received no reply from the black committee.
After conferring with others, he announced plans to seize Manly and force
the editor to leave Wilmington forever. Rather than sending a vigilante posse,
however, he and the other leaders organized the entire crowd into a single
column that stretched two city blocks. As word of the procession spread,
schools let out and businesses closed their doors. Chief of Police John Melton
later recalled that it took the column almost an hour to pass his location on
the corner of Seventh and Market. Women came out to stand on porches
and wave handkerchiefs. One man proudly recalled that his young daughter
especially “distinguished herself ” by marching along the sidewalk for several
blocks.61
The destruction of the Daily Record office proceeded as if according to a
script. When the head of the column reached the building, Waddell knocked
decorously and called the editor to appear. The target, of course, had already
left Wilmington. Several men forced open the door, and the crowd proceeded
to ransack the spaces inside. In the absence of a black body, they threw Man-
ly’s personal effects, including a beaver hat and several photographs, into the
street, where “cheering onlookers” destroyed them. Meanwhile, someone set a
fire using kerosene lamps already on the premises. Even then, things never got
out of control. After the flames began to threaten nearby structures, one of the
“rioters” sounded the alarm at a nearby firebox, and when the Cape Fear Steam
Engine Company arrived, white members of the crowd actively assisted the
black firefighters in putting out the blaze.62 Still more interesting, members of
the mob then posed for formal portraits, just as whites often did at lynchings.
At this celebratory moment, frozen in time by the camera lens, the violence
appeared over. It was not.
Today, scholars describe the events that transpired as a “race riot,” a “racial
massacre,” or “racial violence,” phrases that call to mind a random, chaotic,
spontaneous kind of bloodshed. Certainly many incidents of that sort did oc-
cur, but much of the day’s violence was controlled and organized. For example,
mounted paramilitary groups started patrolling at daybreak. Thus, when news
of the Record’s destruction prompted a large group of concerned, angry black
workers to gather at Sprunt’s cotton compress, Roger Moore and members of
his Vigilance Committee arrived almost instantaneously, as did U.S. Army
Captain Donald MacRae Jr., conveniently supplied with Company K’s riot gun
and about seventy-five pounds of cartridges. Meanwhile, back at the armory,
the men of the WLI were preparing for battle. The post commander, Colonel
Walker Taylor, had deliberately ordered his men to steer clear of Waddell’s
procession. By the time Waddell and the column had returned, Taylor had
already telegraphed Governor Russell: “Situation here serious. I hold mili-
tary awaiting your orders.” He and Roger Moore had developed their strategy
several weeks earlier, and it was time to begin implementation. It was almost
11:00 a.m.63
The first documented deaths occurred in Brooklyn, the majority-black
neighborhood on the north side of town. Some white men, just returned from
the Record, confronted a group of black men at the corner of Fourth and Har-
nett and ordered them off the streets. Most white-authored accounts insist that
the black men fired first. A policeman on the scene, however, later testified that
only the whites had weapons, and the crime-scene evidence suggests the for-
mer marchers opened fire in swift succession (witnesses called it a “fusillade”).
Three black men died instantly, and several others were seriously wounded
but managed to flee on foot, aided by friends. The first white casualty was a
bystander named William Mayo, who had been standing on his front porch,
observing the verbal fracas. His injury, while not mortal, sparked what wit-
nesses called a “running firefight.”64
As part of their grand “defense” of the city, Taylor and Moore had prear-
ranged that white men stationed at specific locations around the city should
phone the armory if any untoward violence broke out. The first call came from
Dr. Bernice W. Moore, whose drugstore was located at Fourth and Harnett.
When he heard gunshots, he immediately called his cousin, Roger Moore, who
called the armory. By this time, Taylor had received a telegram from Governor
Russell authorizing him to “preserve the peace” by declaring martial law. He
did not move quickly. Instead, sources indicate that Taylor slowly led the WLI
down Market and turned north on Third Street, where he stopped his men
once to meet the U.S. Naval Reserves and once again to accept “blessings” from
a group of ladies.65
When the WLI finally crossed the Fourth Street bridge into Brooklyn, Al-
lan Taylor and Hugh MacRae were already there, each man at the head of a
vigilance patrol. Dozens of black men and women had come running home
from their workplaces, summoned by the sound of gunfire and the sight of
smoke plumes rising from their neighborhood. Armed whites shot several of
them on purpose, while others got caught in the crossfire. One band of men
engaged in a manhunt for William Mayo’s killer; when a “half-breed Indian”
Slack Water, 1880–1920 143
approached Allan Taylor and identified the shooter as Daniel Wright, a posse
dragged Wright from his home, beat him with a pipe, and then forced him to
run a brutal gauntlet. Wright’s unconscious black form, bleeding from thirteen
bullet wounds, was left in the street for nearly thirty minutes until he could be
carried to safety. Other bodies also littered the ground. “I nearly stepped on ne-
groes laying in the street dead. Oh it was awful,” recalled a member of the WLI
later. Captain Donald MacRae Jr. soon arrived from Sprunt’s and attempted to
establish a skirmish line. Someone stopped him, he remembered, saying “Don
is a US Army officer and if found in this business, he will be gotten after by the
President.”66
Taylor used machine guns to terrorize the civilian population. He directed
Captain William Rand Kenan, commander of the WLI machine-gun squad, to
haul his weapon through Brooklyn’s streets in a brutal show of power. Taylor
personally accompanied Kenan’s men to Manhattan Park, a dance hall on a
large, fenced lot. There, the soldiers riddled the wooden building with bullets
before moving in to take control. They arrested four black men who surren-
dered, then fired a “volley” at a fifth man, who was attempting to escape and
“tore off the top of his head.” A second rapid-fire gun, operated by the U.S. Na-
val Reserves, also threatened the neighborhood when Captain Morton ordered
it aimed at crowds.67
Having demonstrated through their staged “riot” the Fusionist city govern-
ment’s inability “to preserve order and take care of the property of the city,” the
Secret Nine moved forward with the coup d’état. Around 2:00 p.m., MacRae
and J. Allan Taylor convened the elite, white Committee of Twenty Five. Law-
yers George Rountree and John D. Bellamy were also present. Two men were
sent to find Mayor Silas Wright and Chief of Police John Melton and compel
them to convene the Board of Aldermen. The rest of the committee considered
how to manage the multiple resignations and then turned to the question of
appropriate replacements. Ultimately, they formed a new board by appointing
seven of their members, including J. Allan Taylor and Hugh MacRae. They
also agreed to add three businessmen from the community at large. The men
then “stacked their weapons” and proceeded to City Hall with an escort of one
hundred armed men.68
Fusionist mayor Silas Wright, under duress, had called the board to a spe-
cial meeting at 4:00 p.m. The aldermen were discussing the day’s violence
when the Committee of Twenty Five boldly entered the room and Allan Tay-
lor announced they had come to seize the reins of government. One by one,
six Fusion aldermen resigned, each replaced in turn by his designated suc-
cessor. Two individuals were absent, Bennie Keith and C. D. Merrill. MacRae
and Taylor prudently declined to take their positions until the missing alder-
men could be located. Meanwhile, the new board forced Chief of Police John
Melton and Mayor Silas Wright to resign and replaced them with Edward G.
Parmele and Alfred Moore Waddell, respectively. Then, Mayor Waddell of-
ficially adjourned the meeting.69
The city’s revolutionary officials continued to control events through the
night. Police Chief Parmele deputized an entirely new police force and ordered
them to patrol the streets. When the Kinston Guards, a state militia unit, ar-
rived, Waddell assigned them to guard the city jail, where armed white civilians
threatened to lynch the black occupants. In Brooklyn, black residents collected
the dead and wounded. Downtown, coroner David Jacobs, a black man, exam-
ined numerous bullet-riddled corpses and attempted to impanel several juries.
Unaware that the purpose of the day’s violence was to justify the coup, most
blacks rightly believed their lives were in jeopardy and many sought safety in
Pine Forest cemetery and other nearby wooded areas. Suffering in the cold,
damp November air, they and their children would be long haunted by trau-
matic memories.
The next day’s morning Star declared: “BLOODY CONFLICT WITH
NEGROES. White Men Take up Arms for the Preservation of Law and Order.
BLACKS PROVOKE TROUBLE.” The words in capital letters plainly indi-
cated who would bear the blame. Prominent black men were rounded up and
exiled from the city. MacRae and his coconspirators supplied a list of names
to the police, who went from house to house, dragging some victims to the
train station. Seven black men who had spent the night in jail, surrounded
by an angry lynch mob, were marched through the city’s streets and given
one-way tickets. All of them were notable Republicans, businessmen, or activ-
ists. Equally important was the public exile of leading white Republicans and
Populists. These included County Sheriff George French, Police Chief John
R. Melton, Mayor Silas Wright, and U.S. Commissioner of Justice Robert H.
Bunting. Despite the presence of federal troops and state militia, no one came
to their aid.70
Most whites reacted with joy when they realized what had happened. The
first celebration occurred late afternoon Friday, November 11. While the Com-
mittee of Twenty Five met at City Hall to effect the revolution, others orga-
nized a procession of five different military companies: the Wilmington Light
Infantry, the Kinston Guard, the Maxton Guard, the U.S. Naval Reserves, and
Company K of the Second North Carolina Infantry. White residents cheered
as the home guard marched in unison with federal troops and the three rapid-
fire machine guns that had terrified black Wilmingtonians into submission.
Slack Water, 1880–1920 145
At the state level, too, jubilation reigned. Raleigh Democrats organized a city-
wide “jollification” complete with torchlight parade, fireworks, and communal
feasting. But on Sunday November 13, the mood in Wilmington became sober.
At the First Presbyterian Church, Hugh MacRae’s congregation, Rev. Peyton
Hoge drew his sermon from Proverbs: “He that ruleth his spirit is better than
he that taketh a city.” “We have done both,” Hoge declared. “Since we last met
in these halls we have taken a city. That is much. But it is more because it is
our own city that we have taken. . . . It has been redeemed for civilization, re-
deemed for law and redeemed for decency and respectability.” This man of the
cloth, who had participated in Thursday’s violence, then reminded his flock of
their Christian duty to uplift the black race. All over town, in fact, ministers in
white churches offered a similar message. On Tuesday, MacRae and the other
members of the revolutionary Board of Aldermen demonstrated what uplift
would look like: they fired all black municipal workers and gave their jobs to
local whites. The men of the Cape Fear Steam Engine Company were the first
to go.71
“Public Sentiment Is Primary Law”
By the 1990s, white Wilmingtonians had largely forgotten the city’s violent
past, but in 1898, both the massacre and coup were front-page news. In fact,
a national audience was what chiefly distinguished this episode of organized
racial violence from Wilmington’s previous ones; thanks to the Associated
Press, sophisticated telegraph and telephone systems, and rapid rail transit,
many Americans learned about the revolution the very next day, November
11. Newspaper headlines grabbed readers’ attention with bold-faced words like
“bloody,” “riot,” “war,” and “terror.” All of these articles, moreover, described a
white-instigated attack. The New York Times’s lead story, for example, “VEN-
GEANCE OF WHITE CITIZENS,” stated that the trouble “commenced . . .
when an armed body of citizens numbering around 400 and led by ex-Repre-
sentative Waddell . . . proceeded to the publishing house of a negro newspaper
editor.” Other phrases, like “A fusillade was immediately opened upon them
by the whites” and “A crowd was formed to take from the jail and lynch new
negroes” offered further proof of white instigation. The Albuquerque Morning
Democrat included the same text, verbatim, but pointedly noted that Waddell’s
assembly “included most of the solid citizens of the town.” The Columbus Daily
Enquirer described the white mob as “crazed.” The Birmingham Age-Herald,
sensitive to its southern readers, inserted a small subtitle, “The Negroes Re-
sponsible,” and included an affidavit from the yardmaster for the Atlantic Coast
Line Railroad in Wilmington, to show that “There was no doubt that the ne-
groes are responsible for precipitating of the race war.”72
With the eyes of a nation upon them, Wilmington’s revolutionaries had to
convince outsiders that their actions were legally and morally defensible. The
nearly identical articles that appeared on November 11 suggest that someone,
likely Thomas W. Clawson, city editor of the Messenger, wrote the original
story and disseminated it via AP wires. Having prudently declared martial
law, Walker Taylor successfully kept outside journalists at bay for several days.
Then, the city opened its arms in welcome. “The reporters who represented the
big New York and other dailies were carefully looked after on their arrival at
the depot,” Bennie Keith recalled. And when it came time for them to leave, he
said, they expressed regret because they had had “the time of their lives.”73
The city’s new municipal authorities could not control the testimony of the
banished men, however. On November 15, Washington, DC-based correspon-
dents for the New York Times and the Boston Daily Advertiser reported that
three of the exiled white Republicans, including U.S. Commissioner Robert
H. Bunting, had had meetings at the Department of Justice and at the White
House. The men told federal authorities that a white-supremacist mob had
forced them out because of their political affiliation. The Boston article added
that Alex Manly tried to call on President McKinley, too, and declared that
“Negro refugees who are here [in DC] predict awful retribution to the city of
Wilmington for the unlawful work done by the whites.”74 Manly had been in-
terviewed by the Herald, the paper that served Asbury Park, New Jersey, where
he had taken refuge with relatives. He denied charges that his editorial started
the riot, noting that he published it in August and there had been no talk of
mass violence until the Democratic papers in Raleigh “misquoted him for po-
litical effect.” This interview, too, was sent out through the AP and appeared in
papers ranging from the Kalamazoo Gazette to the Butte Weekly Miner. Soon,
a furious public debate was taking place in white America: Who really started
the “race war”? Was the horrific violence justifiable? Was the new city govern-
ment legitimate?
Black Americans, by contrast, recognized the coup d’état for what it was
and understood that Wilmington’s blacks were not the wrongdoers. Noted au-
thor Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, called
the attack “an outbreak of pure, malignant and altogether indefensible race
prejudice.” Across the Northeast, black ministers organized public meetings
to formulate a collective response. Alex Manly was guest of honor at one such
event in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on November 16. Another mass meeting, or-
ganized by civil rights activist T. Thomas Fortune on November 17, drew some
Slack Water, 1880–1920 147
six thousand people to New York’s newly opened Cooper Union. The New York
Times reported that “George Washington Brown of Wilmington, NC, who was
one of the negroes assaulted in the recent riot, was presented to the audience,
and though he did not make a speech, he was the hero of the night.” At least
eight others addressed the crowd on behalf of Brown and his fellow victims.
Fortune made an especially impassioned plea: “We are here to start the fight for
right and justice,” he announced. Contrasting his approach to that of the white
revolutionaries, he continued, “We come with no vindictiveness in our hearts,
no dynamite up our sleeves, and no Winchesters in our closets. . . . Let us make
our fight by law and order.” A North Carolina minister named J. W. Scott coun-
tered that “the appeal must be made to the pulpit, to the Christians, and to the
good white people of the country if there was any good to be accomplished,”
but the bulk of the crowd at the Cooper Union demanded federal action. At
the end of the evening, they adopted a set of resolutions, including one for a
constitutional amendment that would empower the president to intervene in
local affairs and one that would reduce the representation in Congress of states
that disfranchised black voters.75
Blacks and whites both questioned what kind of response the federal govern-
ment should make. Americans knew from newspaper accounts that McKinley
had had a long meeting with his attorney general the day of the revolution.
People wondered why he had not sent federal troops, whether or not he would
launch an investigation, or if he would condemn the violence in his December
address to the nation. In Washington, DC, federal politicians worriedly dis-
cussed the ouster of Robert H. Bunting, whose position as justice of the peace
for the U.S. Circuit Court raised alarms. They especially debated how to handle
allegations about newly elected Congressman John D. Bellamy’s involvement
in voter fraud.76
As the weeks passed, white Wilmingtonians’ jubilation evaporated. The
U.S. Attorney General’s Office announced plans to investigate allegations of
murder, northern newspapers spewed new criticism daily, and even promi-
nent North Carolinians like historian John Spencer Bassett condemned the
violence to their friends and acquaintances. To make matters worse, black
residents abandoned the port city in droves. Despite verbal assurances from
Waddell’s government that they need no longer fear white retribution, nearly
four hundred blacks had departed by the end of the month. The refugees’
horrifying oral accounts of organized mobs and mass graves greatly intensi-
fied the negative publicity about Wilmington. As a result, the revolutionaries
quickly got to work on damage control.77
On November 26, Collier’s Magazine printed an article that became the
first official narrative. Written by Mayor Alfred Moore Waddell, it necessar-

ily portrayed the violence as an act of white self-defense against black rioters
and refuted charges that an illegal takeover had occurred. “There was no in-
timidation used in the establishment of the present city government,” Waddell
declared. The cover illustration vividly represented the main theme, depicting
two black men with guns upraised. Waddell had good reasons to lie, having
just reclaimed a status-bearing leadership position commensurate with his dis-
tinguished lineage. Although the mayoralty paid only one thousand dollars a
year, this salary greatly augmented his meager income and enabled his young,
third wife, Gabrielle, to stop teaching music lessons in their parlor. Moreover,
he believed in violent revolution as a matter of principle. “I have always con-
tended it was the only way,” he privately informed a friend in early December.
“The good, Anglo-Saxon way of patiently waiting for a government to become
intolerable and then openly and manfully overthrowing it is the best.” Voter
fraud was temporary and “fraught with evil and demoralization” for whites,
whereas “the shotgun and bloodshed” were both lasting and just.78
Statements like these affirm that certain Wilmingtonians, including its
elite civic leaders, still valued organized racist violence as a traditional social-
control mechanism. Embedded in regional culture since the colonial era, this
attitude found new expression due, in part, to the transformation of the Old
North State’s legal system at the end of the nineteenth century. The central-
ization of courts greatly lengthened the average adjudication time. Ordinary
people often found it difficult to understand the legal machinations that took
place in county, state, and federal courthouses. They wanted an immediate ver-
dict based on “common sense,” that is, the kind of shared knowledge that re-
flected their distinctive, place-based values and relationships. In their minds,
vigilante justice was the real justice because the courts, dominated by carpet-
baggers and blacks, were corrupt and incompetent. Many white Wilmingto-
nians felt this way, not just elites like Waddell. In a lengthy, post-revolution
editorial, the Messenger warned the banished men never to return and insisted
that their exile was legal because “public sentiment is primary law; primary
law banished certain corrupt and offensive men from this community.” Here,
the author credits the violence and coup to the collective white community
(public sentiment), which had actively participated in the events. In his view,
which he assumed his readers shared, organized violence was not only legal,
but right.79
The pervasiveness of this attitude also explains why no one was ever pros-
ecuted. On December 3, U.S. Attorney General John Griggs directed his sub-
ordinate in the Eastern District, Claude Bernard, to prepare bills of indictment
Slack Water, 1880–1920 149
against those who had removed Robert H. Bunting from office and to inves-
tigate accusations of murder and intimidation. Griggs personally conducted
a series of interviews in Raleigh while Bernard subpoenaed several banished
men in Wilmington and called a grand jury in mid-December. Both attorneys
were stymied by difficult witnesses; there were so many that the judge dis-
missed Bernard’s case on December 17 due to the lack of testimony. Meanwhile,
Bellamy’s erstwhile opponent, Oliver Dockery, the Republican candidate for
Congress, filed suit in federal court against the Democratic Party. He tried to
take depositions from voters and election officials throughout the Sixth Dis-
trict, not just in Wilmington. He, too, found locals uncooperative.80
The lack of any federal indictments emboldened white North Carolinians
to expand and codify the emergent Jim Crow system. Other southern states
had already passed legislation requiring segregated railroad cars, and the Tar
Heel State quickly passed its own “Act to Promote the Comfort of Travelers
on Railroad Trains” in March 1899. Over the next decade, white officials pro-
ceeded to segregate schools, libraries, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, prisons,
parks, theaters, cemeteries, morgues, sidewalks, and nearly every other space
where blacks and whites might mingle. The cornerstone of Jim Crow, however,
was black disfranchisement.81
On January 6, 1899, Democratic lawmakers introduced a resolution for a
state constitutional amendment designed to restrict black suffrage and elimi-
nate any future opposition to their party. The chief author of the bill was Wilm-
ington’s own George Rountree, who had been elected on November 8 to repre-
sent New Hanover County. Working with two legislative colleagues, Rountree
employed procedures used successfully in Louisiana: a poll tax; literacy and
property qualifications; and a grandfather clause that exempted from the new
restrictions any citizens whose grandfathers were registered to vote on January
1, 1867. Since free blacks in North Carolina had been disfranchised in 1835, and
mixed-race mulattoes could seldom prove their white ancestry on paper, the
amendment would exclude practically the entire black population. Educated
black men like Congressman George White and U.S. Customs Collector John
C. Dancy adamantly opposed the amendment, and though they persuaded
their Republican allies in the legislature to vote nay, it passed by a large mar-
gin. After a lengthy referendum, the people of North Carolina approved it in
August 1900.82
For Wilmingtonians, the most important legislative act was a new city char-
ter that returned home rule, a prerogative cherished by local civic leaders since
the eighteenth century. Although George Rountree introduced that bill, too, its
provisions came from a committee led by Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor.
Section 1 pointedly repealed both sets of Fusionist amendments (enacted in

1895 and 1897), which had required the governor to appoint 50 percent of the
aldermen and established the governor-appointed Police Board. Henceforth,
all ten aldermen would once again be popularly elected, and the retention
of gerrymandered ward boundaries ensured white Democratic control. The
new charter retained the appointment of the Board of Audit and Finance by
the governor, but Section 8 specifically replaced Russell’s men with five local
Democrats, who would serve until the next executive took office in 1901, and
Section 9 required that the future governor choose the city’s executive commit-
tee from a list generated by a local primary. When the time came to vote, only
a handful of the more than three thousand eligible black voters in Wilmington
even cast ballots.83 The revolution was secure.
Constructing and Resisting the Color Line
The forms of oppression experienced by southern blacks after 1898 reflected

both national and international conversations then taking place about race. In
northern cities like Boston and New York, self-defined WASPs (white Anglo-
Saxon Protestants) worried about the influx of swarthy-skinned immigrants
from Southern and Central Europe. In the West, descendants of gold min-
ers and pioneers fretted over the Yellow Horde, and everywhere European-
descended Americans doubted that native Hawaiians, Cubans, Filipinos, and
other dark-skinned residents of annexed territories had the capacity for self-
government. In this climate, southern whites argued that African-descended
blacks had even less aptitude for citizenship. The spread of Social Darwinism
and the rise of new “scientific” theories about race aided this conclusion. Es-
sentialism, in particular, attributed behavioral characteristics, long assumed
to be environmentally determined, to outward markers of difference, like skin
and eye color, hair texture, or facial physiognomy, which many people consid-
ered objective proof of biological heritage. As in earlier eras, federal law both
reflected and shaped the new thinking. In 1896, the Supreme Court insisted in
the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson that the light-skinned, mixed-race defen-
dant could no longer be “mulatto” but had to choose to be either black or white.
Nor were white Americans alone in trying to deny the miscegenated reality of
their society. In the United States, however, in contrast to, say, Britain, Ger-
many, and France, whites’ collective constructions of blackness were chiefly
applied to citizens within the geographic boundaries of the nation-state, rather
than colonized subjects overseas.84
In Making Whiteness, historian Grace Elizabeth Hale argues that European-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 151
descended Americans in this era sought “to mediate the ruptures of moder-
nity.” Desperate for some form of social stability in a time of constant move-
ment, whites across the nation found common ground in their nostalgia for
the Old South, but they did not want to recreate that world in its entirely, just
its gentility, honorability, and rigid social hierarchies. White southerners espe-
cially believed that they (and others) needed constant reminders of who they
really were. To this end, they “elaborated spatial mediations—ways of attaching
identities to physical moorings, from bodies to buildings to larger geographies
like region and nation.”85 And as white Americans in other parts of the country
embraced segregation as the solution to their own identity problems, the color
line spread from sea to shining sea.
Popular culture accelerated the national project of remaking whiteness and
blackness. The 1890s saw the rise of mass advertising campaigns that con-
sciously deployed old slave stereotypes to promote branded consumer goods.
Trademark characters like Aunt Jemima and the Gold Dust Twins reinforced
to shoppers (configured as white) the idea that modern blacks were still in-
nately ignorant creatures who existed solely to serve white needs. Minstrelsy
worked the same way. In the 1890s and early 1900s, black-faced whites moved
off stage into new forms of mass entertainment, such as the nickelodeon, the
amusement park, the fair, and the patent medicine show, where they reached
larger and more ethnically diverse audiences than before, encouraging them
through laughter to feel their own racial superiority. Even literary works fos-
tered white supremacy and black subordination. Starting with Joel Chandler
Harris’s Uncle Remus tales in the 1880s, Old South narratives not only invited
western and northern middle-class readers to identify with the genteel white
characters, but they supplied a “usable and heroic past in an attempt to satisfy
a desire for national homogeneity.” In overt and constant ways, then, the grow-
ing mass market presented a stark dichotomy between whiteness, a category of
coveted traits enjoyed by select European-descended persons, and blackness,
a cohesive set of undesirable traits applicable to any person of color regardless
of age, class, gender, or skin-tone.86
Black intellectuals and civil rights activists divided over the best way to re-
spond to the color line. Booker T. Washington, undoubtedly the most influ-
ential black figure in turn-of-the-century America, accepted its existence and
advocated accommodation even as he privately encouraged black advance-
ment. At the other end of the ideological spectrum was Henry McNeal Turner,
bishop of the A.M.E. Church and the foremost proponent of black separatism.
Turner also accepted the line, but argued that, since whites would never let
blacks cross it, the solution was emigration back to Africa, where educated
African Americans would rule the “Dark Continent.” Somewhere in the mid-
dle stood W. E. B. DuBois, at that time a leading voice of integration. Unlike
the other two men, DuBois rejected the legitimacy of the white-figured color
line, insisting that agitation for civil rights was the proper course of action.
Although all three men embraced elements of race essentialism in this period,
none accepted the white construction of blacks’ innate, biological inferiority.
Instead, they were unified in their belief that whatever shortcomings blacks
had were not the result of their physiological make-up, but three hundred years
of institutionalized white oppression.87
Two of the Cape Fear’s black sons added their voices to the national debate
about race. In 1900, David Bryant Fulton published his first novel, Hanover, or,
the Persecution of the Lowly, under his pen name, Jack Thorne. Then in 1901,
Charles Waddell Chesnutt published The Marrow of Tradition. As black writers
with close ties to the port city, Fulton and Chesnutt shared a unique burden to
tell the truth about Wilmington’s black residents, who had been so maligned
by the national press that most white Americans viewed them as savage brutes
requiring subjugation. Each man had friends and relatives who experienced
the traumatic events of November 10, 1898, and each had deployed his pen in
the past to challenge white supremacy. Recognizing, however, that the violence
and coup were no longer current events, Fulton and Chesnutt designed their
works to recapture the white public’s imagination and engage readers in a criti-
cal evaluation of race and the color line. Thus, both men used the historical
novel genre, but set their stories in what I call the “just past” past. This decision
forced readers to encounter Wilmington’s people, places, and events in almost
real time, thereby immersing them more completely in the reality of early-
1900s southern race relations. Additionally, both authors took liberal license
with key characters, subplots, and timelines, even as they barely veiled cer-
tain actual persons and events.88 While historians tend to dismiss these works
as primary sources, I think they yield important insights. Using the methods
of literary analysis, we can see how the novels carried key elements of black
Wilmington’s factual counter-narrative to a national audience and became lit-
erary monuments to the black victims.
Fulton’s book begins with a series of newspaper articles. Some literary schol-
ars interpret these documents as part of a longstanding effort in African Amer-
ican letters to legitimize a black author’s literacy and interpretation of events.
But in Hanover, they function less to authenticate Fulton and more to prove
that what occurred was “a massacre” (Fulton’s term) of peaceful, respectable
black citizens. Not just a writer, Fulton considered himself a historian. In the
late 1890s, he joined a Yonkers-based group of self-trained intellectuals called
Slack Water, 1880–1920 153
the Men’s Sunday Club. Members included John Edward Bruce and Arthur
Alfonso Schomberg, both noted collectors of African American scholarship,
historic texts, and ephemera. This exposure to the emerging discipline of his-
tory, with its emphasis on the systematic collection and analysis of primary
sources, explains why Fulton’s work is more historically accurate than Ches-
nutt’s text. Hanover, for example, correctly identifies the date of the violence,
November 10, whereas The Marrow of Tradition places the riot in September,
nearly two months early. Fulton’s violence takes place in broad daylight, while
Chesnutt’s occurs under cloak of darkness, and Fulton’s conspirators are the
“city’s leading white citizens,” especially its “first families,” who are “descen-
dants of the survivors of Culloden,” while Chesnutt’s are three stock characters
(a “bigot,” a “demagogue,” and a “politician”). Most important, Fulton insisted
that the revolutionaries staged the violence in order to justify the coup d’état.
He stated, “Since the massacre on the 10th of November, 1898, over one thou-
sand of Wilmington’s most respected taxpaying citizens . . . have fled to es-
cape murder and pillage, intimidation and insult at the hands of a bloodthirsty
mob . . . fanned into frenzy by their more intelligent leaders whose murderous
scheme to obtain office worked charmingly.” Internal evidence, especially Ful-
ton’s detailed descriptions of actual people, places, and events, adds credence
to his interpretation, and reflect his personal knowledge of the city, its history,
and its race relations.89
Then and now, white readers often miss these factual elements because
they find Fulton’s literary devices discomfiting. Hanover has a black, female
hero—Molly Pierpont, a beautiful, mixed-race, “kept woman.” Rejecting the
Jezebel trope that defined black femininity for white audiences, Fulton calls
her a “Poor Magdalene,” and blames her fall on white male turpitude. Molly’s
awakening to her true, virtuous self begins when Ben Hartright, the wealthy,
white man who lured her into concubinage, tells her of the plot to attack the
city’s defenseless black residents and restore white supremacy. He insists that
she will be safe because she is “almost as white” as he is and that “pretty Nig-
ger girls” such as she “will be all right.” Instead of reassurance, she feels shock,
repugnance, and finally, anger. Declaring, “I realize as never before just who
and what I am,” she ends her relationship with Hartright and reveals the plot to
two sympathetic community leaders, her black foster mother, Mrs. West, and
the mayor, Silas Wingate, asking each of them to warn the residents. On the
day of the massacre, Molly bravely prevents the slaughter of black workers at
Sprunt’s cotton compress. Then she swoons and is “tenderly” carried away to
Mrs. West’s Brooklyn home, fully restored to the symbolic bosom of the black
community. Molly’s selfless act does not end the novel, however. Fulton follows
it with several more chapters describing the horrific violence in Brooklyn, the
heroism of numerous other blacks, and the immediate aftermath of the mas-
sacre and coup.
Because Hanover is a counter-narrative designed explicitly to challenge
white-authored justifications for the color line, Fulton returns to the theme
of white turpitude in a lengthy chapter titled “At Mrs. McLane’s.” It takes place
several weeks after the massacre and coup, on Thanksgiving Day, to be precise.
A group of elite white women gather for afternoon tea, and their conversa-
tion turns to the sermons they heard at church that morning, sermons that
thanked “the true and patriotic, blue-blooded Southern gentlemen” who “put
a stop to Nigger high stepping.” Two women gleefully recall some of the sights
they witnessed during the massacre, especially the forced strip-searching of
black women, whom they refer to as “creatures.” Their hostess, Mrs. McLane,
reproaches them severely and proceeds to argue that whites are the inferior
race, not blacks: “These men in their blind zeal to restore white supremacy and
to defend women have unmistakenly demonstrated their weakness. White su-
premacy cannot be maintained by resorting to force. . . . [T]he supremacy that
will be acknowledged, is supremacy of character, supremacy of deportment,
supremacy in justice and fair play. We [the whites] have irreparably lost our
hold upon the negro because we lack these attributes.”90
McLane further shocks her guests by voicing the unspoken truth about in-
terracial sex, that the problem is not black men’s lust for white women, but
white men’s lust for power. She explains: “Our men sin and boast in it. Consort-
ing with women of the alien race to them is only an indiscretion. While even
to acknowledge that in the Negro man are the elements of genuine manhood
would make a Southern white woman a social exile, and make her the butt of
ridicule. Does not this account for the human sacrifices that have shocked the
nation? . . . The passing of laws since the war prohibiting intermarriage of the
races is proof that the men do not trust us as implicitly as they pretend. The
lynchings and burnings that are daily occurring in the South are intended as
warnings to white women as well as checks to black men.”91 Boldly dismissing
the notion that white women need protection from black men, McLane con-
cludes with the confident assertion that all blacks are fundamentally good and
decent people. There is no legitimate cause to segregate them, oppress them,
or degrade them. The last, short chapters of Hanover affirm her argument, and
thus, by the final page, Fulton’s defense of “the persecuted lowly” is complete.
Chesnutt challenged the color line in a different way. In 1899, he contracted
with Houghton Mifflin to write a full-length book on the order of his popular
“conjure stories,” which employed racist stereotypes of black southerners.
Slack Water, 1880–1920 155
Instead, he used the Wilmington tragedy to explore the implications of pass-

ing on (because it was tradition) an erroneous belief in blacks’ biological
inferiority (presumed to reside in their marrow). In this regard, The Marrow
of Tradition reflects the author’s lifelong attempt to make sense of his own
genealogy. His paternal grandfather was Waddell Cade, a wealthy Cape Fear
planter (and distant relative of Alfred Moore Waddell’s), and his maternal
grandfather was Henry Sampson, of the Sampsons of Sampson County. Both
white men had long-standing extralegal relationships with enslaved women,
whose mixed-race children they recognized and eventually freed. Chesnutt’s
light-skinned parents moved to Ohio, where Charles was born in 1858, but
they returned home to Fayetteville after the Civil War. Thus, as a young boy,
Chesnutt walked the same streets Louis Sheridan had walked and, like the
Liberian founder, he became “acutely aware of the paradoxical social position
of mulattoes” in a biracial society. He eventually fled north, where he worked
as a journalist, then as a court stenographer, and finally as an attorney. All
the while, he wrote stories like “The Goofered Grapevine” (1887), confiding
to his journal that “the object of my writings would not be so much the eleva-
tion of the colored people as the elevation of the whites.” By 1898, he was an
acclaimed writer, yet when news of the Wilmington revolution reached him,
he said he felt “personally humiliated.”92 This reaction, especially, explains
the difference between the two books: for Fulton the Wilmington tragedy
and the color line both stemmed from whites’ depraved desire for power; for
Chesnutt, they reflected whites’ revulsion for miscegenation and people of
color.
Chestnutt’s subjectivity explains why his story altered well-publicized facts
about the Wilmington revolution: The mob burns the black hospital, not a
newspaper office; the violence occurs at night, instead of midday; the coup and
banishment campaign comprise a side note, rather than the climax. One might
conclude from these errors that Chesnutt lacked knowledge of the events he
dramatized. In fact, he interviewed Thomas R. Mask, one of the Colored Citi-
zens’ Committee, when the Wilmington doctor visited Cleveland, and he trav-
eled to the port city specifically to depose local informants in 1899. He un-
doubtedly knew about the Secret Nine, yet he deliberately altered the group’s
leadership, size, and scope. In The Marrow of Tradition, the violence and coup
are instigated by just three men: Major Philip Carteret, an imperious news-
paper editor (the demagogue) who is moved to embrace violence when his
delicate, much younger wife finally produces a male heir, Theodore (“Dodie”);
General Belmont, a former lawyer descended from an old planter family (the
politician); and Captain George McBane, a rough, grasping Scots-Irish par-
venu (the bigot). A more sophisticated writer than Fulton, Chesnutt used stock
figures and familiar tropes to great effect. Indeed, though many scholars like to
map his characters to actual Wilmingtonians, it is better to see them as com-
posites of various persons, real and imagined.93
Like Fulton, Chesnutt deliberately created a mixed-race anti-hero. The son
of a wealthy “colored” stevedore, Dr. William Miller is introduced to us as “a
mulatto, but one who showed nowhere any sign of that degeneration, which
the pessimist so sadly maintains is the inevitable heritage of mixed races.”94
In his first scene, Miller rides on a train heading South, is joined by a white
colleague, and suffers humiliation when they cross into Virginia and a white
conductor forces him to move to the Jim Crow car. It is Captain McBane that
recognizes Miller from Wellington and tells the conductor that Miller is actu-
ally a black man, despite his appearance. Here, Chesnutt asks the reader to feel
Miller’s frustration with the arbitrary nature of Jim Crowism. But the anti-hero
does not protest: “He had long ago had the conclusion forced upon him that
an educated man of his race, in order to live comfortably in the United States,
must either be a philosopher or a fool; and since he wished to be happy, and
was not exactly a fool, he had cultivated philosophy.” That philosophy, tellingly,
rested on a belief in black endurance. The narrator asks, “Was it not, after all, a
wise provision of nature that had given to a race, destined to, along with servi-
tude and a slow emergence there from, a cheerfulness of spirit which enabled
them to catch pleasure on the wing and endure with equanimity the ills that
seemed inevitable? The ability to live and thrive under adverse circumstances
is the surest guaranty of the future. The race which at last shall inherit the
earth . . . will be the race which remains upon it.”95 This attitude guides Miller
at several other crucial points in the story, as when he declines to lead the black
resistance and refuses to avenge the death of his son, killed by a stray bullet
during the massacre.
Miller’s value system, grounded in rationalism, is paralleled by his wife’s,
grounded in emotion. “Janet had a tender heart. . . . [S]he was of a forgiving
temper; she could never bear malice.” Described by Chesnutt as a “handsome
young woman . . . whose complexion, in the twilight, was not distinguishable
from that of a white person,” Janet Miller is the only other clearly biracial char-
acter in the book. She is the product of a hidden, but legal, Reconstruction-era
marriage between Olivia Merkell Carteret’s father, Sam Merkell, and his “mu-
latto” housekeeper, Julia, who helped raise Olivia after the first Mrs. Merkell
died. Well educated and modest, Janet bears an uncanny physical resemblance
to her older half-sister and yearns for some sort of “blood” recognition from
her “sole living relative.” When it finally comes, only as part of Olivia’s desper-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 157
ate effort to save her dying son, Dodie Carteret, Janet dramatically rejects her
“white sister” (along with their shared white patrimony) and directs “Will”
to “go with her” to show Olivia that she, Janet, is the superior woman. At the
novel’s end, then, the moral victory belongs to both Millers.96
Like Fulton, Chesnutt employed genteel, moral, and intelligent “mulattoes”
to help white readers empathize with black southerners and see the absurdity
of the color line. Marrow reiterates at numerous points the Millers’ incredulity
at a society that demeaned people on the basis of the “one drop” rule. Further,
Chesnutt revealed the tortuous process of rationalization “mulattoes” engaged
in to survive in such a society. On the train heading south, Dr. Miller con-
templates the “Colored” sign on the passenger seat above him and the filthy
conditions of the car’s interior. Miller wrestles with the self-knowledge that he
is no one’s inferior and repeatedly reassures himself of his own identity. Janet
Miller manifests a similar angst. She longs to be acknowledged by her half-
sister Olivia Carteret and constantly berates herself for her “lack of pride, or
even a decent self-respect,” attributing this “weakness” to the “heritage of her
mother’s race,” her “slave” marrow. A victim of white disdain himself, Chesnutt
unsparingly shows the constant discrimination the Millers experienced and
the psychological damage it caused. By novel’s end, the good doctor and his
wife ultimately rise above their immiseration and embrace their true selves,
just like Fulton’s heroine, Molly Pierpont. Even so, readers could not fail to see
the contrast between the tormented Millers and American popular culture’s
happy “darkies.”
Not surprisingly, most white Americans hated Chesnutt’s book, which cir-
culated widely, thanks to the author’s prior reputation. The Wilmington Mes-
senger called it “a book of lies and slander” that sought “to misrepresent and
pervert the real causes that led to the most remarkable local revolution that
ever occurred.” Editor Thomas Clawson castigated Chesnutt as “an ingenious,
deliberate, and inveterate liar [who] is busy calumniating people who bore
more and longer outrages than the people of any community in the United
States have ever borne.” Note here his concern to defend Wilmington’s reputa-
tion as a good place full of good people. Chesnutt’s literary colleagues rejected
it, too, and for similar reasons. William Dean Howells, dean of American Re-
alist fiction, felt it “had more justice than mercy in it,” and said it would have
been better “if it was not so bitter.” Another white critic believed that Ches-
nutt had humiliated whites so much as to make the novel “utterly revolting.”
Congressman Edgar Dean Crumpacker of Indiana also criticized the book.
Chesnutt had sent copies to multiple federal officials in Washington, hoping to
illuminate for them the illogic of segregation. Nothing worked.97
As whites everywhere in the United States expanded and affirmed the new
system of oppression called Jim Crow, blacks living in the port city resigned
themselves to their fate. Garnet Hargrave, who turned twenty-one in 1901, de-
scribed his response: “There’s a difference, you know, in how people are raised
today. There’s a difference. We were taught. Now, I don’t mean to say that others
weren’t taught. . . . The Almighty sees you so you got to do right. Now I can’t
hold no malice. I try to do right. Not everything I do goes smoothly. Not all my
business runs smoothly. But I live, huh? God says in the Twenty-third Psalm
that the angel shall feed you. I’ve set a table for you in the presence of thine
enemy, and hasn’t it been done! In the presence of mine enemies, the Lord has
fed me.”98 The grandson and heir of an enslaved blacksmith, Alfred Hargrave,
who after emancipation had a prosperous business on Market Street, Gar-
net accepted the accommodation strategy advocated by many notable black
Wilmingtonians. In their view, the pursuit of economic enterprise, education,
and high character would eventually bring white recognition of black politi-
cal rights. Many of Wilmington’s other black residents also agreed with this
strategy, but not all. Some had neither the time nor the resources to commit to
such a path. Inferior schools, inadequate wages, substandard living conditions,
and no political recourse engendered feelings of betrayal, resentment, fear, and
anger that often gave way to defeatism and apathy.
Progress and Progressivism in the “Metropolis of North Carolina”
In 1901, the same year Chesnutt published The Marrow of Tradition, Theodore
Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States and Charles Brantley
Aycock as governor of North Carolina. Both politicians embraced the spirit
of progressivism then sweeping the country, but in very different ways. Roos-
evelt, a former Republican, famously championed the regulatory power of the
federal government, while Aycock, a Democrat, favored home rule. Aycock’s
approach, situated as it was within the broader progressive trend, is especially
germane to Wilmington’s developing narrative, for he knew that outsiders con-
sidered North Carolina a slumbering, Rip Van Winkle state. Once in office, he
vowed to rouse the economy, restructure the agricultural and transportation
sectors, and implement much-needed social reforms, especially in the areas
of public health and education. Like other reformers in the one-party system,
however, he sought to preserve important southern traditions and blunted his
more radical programs when challenged by powerful conservatives, especially
Senator Furnifold Simmons and members of his statewide political machine.99
The color line necessarily drew Aycock’s attention. During the 1898 cam-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 159
paign, he revealed himself to be a real “race baiter,” to use the parlance of the
day. His own gubernatorial campaign in the fall of 1900 employed Red Shirts
and other violent, white-supremacist tactics, and in his inaugural address, he
specifically applauded the Wilmington coup, attributing it to the “revolution-
ary spirit of 1776.” As 1901 unfolded, however, Aycock and other southern pro-
gressives realized that disfranchisement and Jim Crow ordinances could not
fully resolve “the Negro problem.” In effect, they faced the same problem their
forebears posed a century ago: How could white elites get their “inferiors” to
accept and internalize their subordination?100
As a first step, Aycock called for an end to the “bitterness” that had divided
the races and the cessation of “race war.” The organized racist violence of recent
years had been intended to control the black population, not eradicate it. Too
much black blood had been spilled. Well aware that the state needed black
labor to advance economically, the chief executive now proposed what histo-
rians later termed the North Carolina Way. John Godwin has described it as a
compromise between what progressives saw as “the lawless racism of inflexible
conservatism” and “an extremist vision of total integration as sought by the
NAACP and others.”101 Motivated by critics who considered North Carolina
hopelessly backward, Aycock vowed to respect certain constitutional rights of
his black constituents, especially their right to education. But it was a pedagogy
of endless toil and voluntary subjugation he advocated:
[L]et him [the Negro] learn that no man, no race, ever got anything
worth the having that he did not himself earn; . . . that he cannot, by reso-
lution of council or league, accomplish anything; that he can do much by
work; that violence may gratify his passions but it cannot accomplish his
ambitions; that he may eat rarely of the cooking of equality, but he will
always find when he does that “there is death in the pot.” Let the negro
learn once and for all that there is unending separation of the races, that
the two peoples may develop side by side to the fullest but that they can-
not intermingle; let the white man determine that no man shall by act
or thought or speech cross this line, and the race problem will be at an
end.102
Ordinary white voters remained wary of Aycock’s education program. They

resisted higher taxes for white schools, let alone for black ones, and religious
groups feared the centralization and standardization that Aycock and his sup-
porters proposed. There was so much opposition to Aycock’s pro-education
platform that some scholars now question how “progressive” North Carolina
was in the first place. What no one doubts is the reformulation of racism that
occurred during this period. Even the most progressive Tar Heels, including
acknowledged ones like Aycock, upheld white supremacy as the key to material
prosperity and social reform.103
Wilmington’s civic leaders shared Aycock’s progressive philosophy and em-
ployed it to advance their local agenda. Boldly asserting that “Progressive cities
have never been the result of accident,” the Chamber of Commerce published
Wilmington Up-to-Date: The Metropolis of North Carolina Graphically Por-
trayed (1901) to attract like-minded investors. Thus, the introduction features
photographs of three meaningful places, each of which symbolized a long-
cherished community trait: the New Hanover County Courthouse (democratic
government); historic St. James Episcopal Church (organized religion); and
the grand, Queen Anne residence of Robert R. Bellamy, with its male owner
and his children strategically positioned in the foreground (white patriarchal
authority). Oddly, these arresting graphics have no connection whatsoever to
their surrounding text, which stresses the “delightful” climate. Instead, the pic-
tures and words combine to affirm the chamber’s thesis that “progressive cities”
emerge from natural and artificial conditions, both “very clearly defined and
unquestionable in their existence and influence.” Since the descriptions of the
average temperature, the amount of annual rainfall, and proximity of the ocean
plainly identify the “natural” causes of Wilmington’s success, it is the images
that illustrate the “artificial” or man-made ones.
As the pamphlet continues, it enlarges each of the three artificial condi-
tions through additional text and photographs. For example, after “admiring
the handsome houses of the well-to-do,” represented by Bellamy’s impressive
abode, the reader learns that Wilmington is a “city of homes,” a place where an
ample supply of “neat, but inexpensive,” houses “have created a class of citizens
who are content and are bound up with the interests of their community.” Four
other wealthy Wilmington businessmen’s homes appear in the next twenty-five
pages, along with repeated references to pamphlet readers as “home-seekers.”
In this way, the text slyly invites its imagined white, male audience to iden-
tify with the port city’s leading patriarchs and literally picture themselves in
their contented domestic positions. With government (manifested through
additional sites like the post office and city hall) and organized religion (more
churches and charitable organizations), patriarchy is thus “clearly defined” and
“unquestionable” in its contributions to “the welfare of the city.” And these
traits are what make Wilmington such a desirable place to live.104
Wilmington Up-to-Date also signaled important information about local at-
titudes toward race relations. The Romanesque Revival courthouse, scene of
the White Man’s Declaration of Independence just four years earlier, served
Slack Water, 1880–1920 161
as a powerful locus for collective memories of the revolution. Photos of it had

appeared in newspapers across the United States, but especially in northern
cities, where lived the very capitalists the pamphlet targeted. Knowing their
reputation had been bruised by the media, the chamber purposefully used
that building rather than city hall, yet referenced the violence obliquely. “Our
business is not with the past, but with the present, with living men and their
daily occupations,” the text proclaims. Two photographs showing black straw-
berry pickers and stevedores, a passing reference to thirteen “colored” congre-
gations, and a sentence affirming the “negroes’ . . . eagerness for education”
suffice to confirm the presence of black workers. Like Smaw’s 1865 directory,
the chamber’s pamphlet erases black businesses, organizations, and civic lead-
ers from the public sphere. White Wilmingtonians, by contrast, are pictured
everywhere: on Market Street, at City Hall, entering the post office, standing
in front of the YMCA, out in the fields supervising the lettuce harvest. In this
subtle way, the chamber used images to “graphically portray” its members’ vi-
sion of “racial harmony.”
The Chamber of Commerce primarily wanted to promote the port city’s
“general advantages” to investors. To this end, the pamphlet proposed manu-
factories for furniture and various kinds of wooden wares (buckets, shoe lasts,
ax handles, and so forth), which could capitalize on local sawmills and stands
of southern pine. It especially boosted truck farming, a new endeavor that
exploited the subtropical climate and the fact that “suitable help can be ob-
tained here with facility and is much lower than where only white help can
be procured.” But the best argument for Wilmington’s potential was the “Se-
ries of Comprehensive Sketches of Representative Business Enterprises” that
comprised the entire second half of the pamphlet. Altogether, there are de-
scriptions of 109 different endeavors, ranging from large, multinational opera-
tions like Alexander Sprunt and Company, to small one-man shops like R. C.
De Rosset’s book-and-stationary store. Other enterprises vital to commerce
were included, like banks, insurance companies, and hotels. Coupled with the
churches, societies, schools, resorts, and industries described in the narrative
section, the “sketches” reinforced the conclusion that “Wilmington bids fair to
go ahead rapidly.105
This kind of targeted boosterism drove the port city’s significant growth
in the next two decades. In 1900, the Delgado Mill opened on a large lot at
the eastern edge of Dry Pond; surrounded by a ring of small, frame cottages,
the factory employed 260 white men in the production of cotton cloth. Its
president, E. L. Holt, admitted frankly that “he would not have invested his
money in Wilmington under the former [Fusionist] administration.” In that
same year, the Atlantic Coast Line of South Carolina, which included the for-
mer Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, merged with the Atlantic Coast Line of
Virginia. Two years later, an even more momentous event occurred as the ACL
acquired several railways in Florida and Georgia, forming one massive consoli-
dated system with more than forty-six hundred miles of track. Headquartered
in downtown Wilmington, the new ACL employed nearly 1,000 men locally.
With ready rail access to northern and southern markets, the local truck-pro-
duce industry expanded during the early 1900s, as did jobbing and small-scale
manufacturing.106
Rural folk came to the city in droves. Census data show a marked increase in
the number of white residents, from 10,566 in 1900 to 13,621 in 1910. The num-
ber of black residents rose as well, from 10,407 to 12,107. Despite the trauma
of the 1898 massacre and the initial exodus of black residents, Wilmington
continued to offer opportunities unavailable elsewhere. Durham’s industrial
expansion, for example, which eventually supported America’s “Black Wall
Street” and a concomitant black middle class, seems obvious in hindsight, but
in the opening years of the twentieth century, the Bull City’s growth remained
unknown.107 The port city, by contrast, had a history of black advancement.
Though shut out of most industrial jobs, blacks continued to dominate the
building trades, the waterfront, the fertilizer plants, and Sprunt’s Cotton Com-
press. For a sizeable minority of workers, steady wages fostered a relatively
high standard of living. By 1910, nearly 27 percent of black Wilmingtonians
owned their own homes, a figure that ranked the port city sixth in the state
for black property ownership.108 Rural blacks and whites also gained access
to better schools, which still received funding from northern philanthropists;
established churches, social clubs, and benevolent societies; and specialized
stores and entertainment venues.
The city’s physical geography changed to accommodate these new demo-
graphic patterns and industrial developments. Aided by Jim Crow laws as well
as the fact that, for the first time in history, whites comprised a majority of
residents, elites inscribed whiteness onto the landscape in new ways. Most
obviously, the city fathers embraced residential segregation. Directories show
plainly that Dry Pond and Brooklyn became more exclusively black, though
not entirely so. Poor whites had very little choice in the matter of their housing.
Middling and affluent white households, by contrast, moved into whites-only
suburbs platted along the city’s expanding streetcar lines. These developments
featured rows of neat, frame houses, often from mail-order companies like
Sears, and bore evocative names like “Oleander,” “Audubon Park,” and “Sunset
Heights.” They also boasted modern conveniences at a time when black neigh-
Slack Water, 1880–1920 163
borhoods still lacked paved roads, electricity, indoor plumbing, and buried
sewer systems. Segregated shopping districts emerged, as well, which removed
the black presence from downtown in a way that had not been desirable in
previous eras.
New public monuments reassured oldtimers and newcomers alike that, de-
spite the changes underway, core values remained intact. In 1907, hundreds of
white adults and children dedicated a physical memorial to Cornelius Harnett,
colonial embodiment of the city’s revolutionary spirit. Donated by the North
Carolina Society of Colonial Dames, it consisted of a twenty-eight-foot, Wash-
ington-style obelisk located in a plaza right in the middle of Market Street.
While the north face honors the statesman, the other three sides pay tribute
to “the 150 men who made the first armed resistance in the colonies to the op-
pressive Stamp Act,” to the establishment of Brunswick and Wilmington, and
to the Dames themselves, who erected it to memorialize “the colonial heroes of
the lower Cape Fear” and who were lauded in speeches for “their distinguished
ancestry.”
In 1910, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a conceptually
similar memorial to George Davis, “Senator and Attorney General of the Con-
federate States of America.” Like the Harnett monument only one block away,
it sits in the middle of a Market Street plaza but features a life-sized, bronze
sculpture of Davis atop a massive pedestal. Its inscriptions honor his individual
virtues (scholar, patriot, statesman, Christian), but they recognize as well the
influence of “his memory” on the “hearts of his people,” that is, living Wilm-
ingtonians. The dedication reinforced this linkage to the present through the
physical presence of the Daughters, blood descendants of other veterans, and
their guests of honor, George Davis’s living children: Junius, Monimia (Mrs.
Donald MacRae Jr.), Meta (Mrs. George Rountree), Mary (Mrs. M. F. H. Gou-
vernor), and their respective offspring. Hugh MacRae, Walter Parsley, and
Walker Taylor were in the crowd, too, along with Alfred Waddell, the Wilming-
ton Light Infantry, the Chamber of Commerce, and other leaders of the 1898
revolution. Together, these monuments and the rites surrounding them tell us
something important: white Wilmingtonians in the 1900s still favored a kind
of organic collective memory that asserted a single, continuous, civic identity
and grounded it in the unique aspects of their place of residence—its history,
geography, and, especially, the bodies of its best citizens.109
No one influenced the prosperity of Progressive Era Wilmington more than
its “Most Constructive Citizen,” Hugh MacRae, who passed both monuments
every day en route from his private castle to his downtown office. He had ben-
efited enormously from the revolution’s restoration of free enterprise, having
served on the Board of Aldermen for several years and directed its Finance
Committee. During his tenure in government, he successively purchased the
city’s privately owned streetcar system, the water company, and the only elec-
tric utility and merged them in 1902 into the Consolidated Railways, Light, and
Power Company. A subsidiary firm, Hugh MacRae and Company, purchased
and developed land on the city’s periphery for new, whites-only streetcar sub-
urbs. By 1907, MacRae presided over the Southern National Bank, the only
bank listed in the directory that year, and the Carolina Trucking and Devel-
opment Company, which cultivated produce in Pender County for transport
throughout the eastern seaboard.110 Though he continued to expand his resort
community at Linville, Wilmington and its environs were clearly his primary
focus.
MacRae aggressively marketed the area’s distinctive, coastal geography to
white tourists. One of his busiest trolley lines ran due south from the corner of
Market and Front to Wrightsville Beach. There, at Station No. 7, the last stop
on that line, the savvy engineer-turned-developer built one of the Cape Fear’s
best-known and best-loved institutions: Lumina Pavilion. A massive structure
built in 1905 on two hundred feet of oceanfront property, it housed a bowling
alley, a shooting gallery, and a snack bar on the ground floor plus an elegant
dance hall above. During the daytime, thousands of white tourists flocked to
its attractions, promenaded around the second-floor deck, and watched the
sunbathers below. At night, people returned, dressed in their finery, to hear
orchestras hired all the way from New York and Chicago, while others sat on
the sand to view silent films projected onto a screen erected fifty feet out in the
surf. Overnight guests could stay at MacRae’s nearby Oceanic Hotel, and at
certain times of the season, vacationers could enjoy special events like bathing-
beauty pageants, baby contests, regattas, and fishing competitions that MacRae
cosponsored with the Wrightsville Beach Chamber of Commerce.111
For all of MacRae’s forward-looking business ventures, he remained fas-
cinated by the idea of a mythic, agrarian past, so much so that many of his
peers considered agriculture the chief work of his life. According to a popular
account, MacRae was standing on his porch one blustery January day, watch-
ing a mockingbird and marveling at its ability to feed itself in cold weather.
An idea suddenly dawned upon him: “The south will come into its own when
its fields are green all winter.”112 In addition to his commercial and indus-
trial properties, MacRae owned 60,000 acres of farmland. At Invershiel, his
750-acre farm in Pender County, he raised Black Angus cattle, and he had
been wondering for some time how to feed his herd more efficiently and
cheaply. Thanks to the mockingbird, which was eating a kind of local berry
Slack Water, 1880–1920 165
that flourished in cold weather, MacRae realized that farmers had simply
copied western and northern agricultural practices without allowing for the
particularities of the Cape Fear climate. Ever the engineer, he began to ex-
periment with different kinds of cattle feed to see what else thrived in Janu-
ary. He soon concluded that southern agriculture itself was broken beyond
repair. Not only were the crops unsuitable to the soil and weather, but so were
the very methods southerners used to farm, especially tenancy and share-
cropping, which merely replicated the slave system and its reliance on black
labor.113 Instead, MacRae proposed to recreate Jeffersonian communities of
independent, white yeomen.
This project, like the revolution of 1898, was conceived as a solution to the
persistent “Negro Problem.” By 1903, MacRae had recruited a small group of
struggling farmers to relocate to an abandoned plantation he owned in Pender
County. He assigned each family a small (ten to twenty acres) farm and directed
them to plant truck crops like strawberries rather than cotton. When that ex-
periment failed, MacRae decided that native-born southern whites lacked the
necessary drive for such an innovative, communal endeavor and conceived a
new plan to recruit European immigrants. He had brochures printed to adver-
tise the project and hired agents overseas to scout for potential families willing
to relocate to the United States. The first recruits arrived in 1905. In December
1908, he traveled to New York City, where he made a special appeal to the Sons
of North Carolina for assistance in identifying immigrants already in the coun-
try. Within a year, “MacRae’s Colonies” were a thriving success and popular
fodder for the city’s Progressive Era mythos.114
MacRae called them a grand experiment in “human engineering.” As a
young man at MIT, he had studied euthenics, a variant of eugenics, which tried
to correct bad genes with environmental and behavioral reforms. Like other
progressive southern Democrats, he blamed the region’s economic woes on
black men and women, who as members of “the lowest race on earth” necessar-
ily provided “the lowest type of labor.” He could not fit them biologically for the
society he envisioned, but he could banish them from the rural landscape and
replace them with “human units” hereditarily predisposed for success: Dutch
and Germans, as well as hand-picked Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Hungarians.
Each race occupied a different colony, where they received instruction in sci-
entific farming methods. However, MacRae also cultivated the human units
themselves, enjoining them to physical labor, cleanliness, and godliness. To
encourage fertility, each new bride received a five-dollar gold piece, and each
child born brought an additional ten dollars. Proud of his handiwork, MacRae
brought friends and strangers alike out to tour the colonies, wrote articles in
national publications to promote his ideas, and gave multiple interviews to

journalists.115
While other Wilmington businessmen shared MacRae’s beliefs about black
labor, they generally found the colony concept costly and unnecessary. By 1910,
the city had 25,748 residents, of whom 53 percent were white. Whites also en-
joyed a slight majority in New Hanover County and other parts of the lower
Cape Fear.116 Given the abundance of poor whites coming into the community,
outside labor recruitment seemed superfluous. Moreover, the revolution of
1898 had succeeded, in part, by promising local whites preferential treatment
in all aspects of daily life, including hiring. Though they frequently deferred to
MacRae’s business expertise, in this matter they clung to prevailing norms.
Wilmington had its share of black progressives, too. In 1909, Dr. Frank
Avant began to comprehend in a new way the persistent nature of white ra-
cial privilege in Wilmington. Avant had just begun to practice medicine from
an office in Brooklyn. The city hospital, named for its elite, white benefactor,
James Walker, had a brand new annex reserved for black patients, but its wards
were wholly inadequate for the community’s size and need. To make matters
worse, the all-white board denied black doctors surgical privileges at the facil-
ity. As a result of this discriminatory policy, Avant had to make frequent house
calls. His memoir, A Lonely Road, records some of the dreadful situations he
experienced tending the black poor: performing surgery on kitchen tables,
delivering babies in homes without running water, fighting hookworm where
open sewers festered. Other doctors also served the black population at this
time, including Dr. Thomas Mask, whose experiences had shaped the charac-
ter of Dr. Miller in The Marrow of Tradition, and Dr. Egbert Scott, brother of
banished lawyer Armond W. Scott. Avant felt a particular sense of obligation,
however. A descendant of Anthony and Tenah Howe, he belonged to one of the
city’s oldest black families. Challenging Jim Crow became his life’s work.117
David Clarke Virgo shared Avant’s mission, but focused his efforts on ed-
ucation. A native of Jamaica, he attended Tuskegee Institute and embraced
Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist, self-help strategy. He later received
a BS degree from the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Greensboro,
taught at the State Normal School in Elizabeth City, and came to Wilmington
convinced of the port city’s need for a public high school. At that time, black
children only had recourse to the Williston Graded School, an old, two-story
frame structure that had been built by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Located in Dry
Pond, the school had been named for its Yankee benefactor, Samuel Williston,
and it kept the name after the Wilmington Board of Education took possession
in 1873. Its long-time principal, Mary Washington Howe, died in 1900, and
Slack Water, 1880–1920 167
with the statewide shift toward progressive education under Charles Aycock,
Williston’s curriculum became increasingly vocational. In 1905, for example,
Superintendent John Blair told black parents, “The day is near at hand when,
we hope, every girl upon leaving school will have the ability to make a dress
for herself and cook a good meal; and every boy will go out in the world with
some knowledge gained by working in wood and metal and know something
of the planting of seed and the raising of crops. In these simple principles lie,
we believe, the solution of the race problem in the south.”118
Outwardly, Virgo seemed to agree with this restricted philosophy. Like his
idol, Washington, however, the charismatic man with the lilting voice was a
master at telling whites one thing and blacks another. As he went door to door
drumming up support for a new Williston Primary and Industrial School, con-
struction proceeded—at the city’s expense—of a large, modern facility at Tenth
and Church. When it opened in February 1915, the curriculum offered the ex-
pected courses in agriculture, cooking, and carpentry, but thanks to Virgo,
students could also follow a classical, college-preparatory curriculum.119
Progressive, educated blacks’ resistance to Jim Crow intensified with the
1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pathbreaking film, Birth of a Nation. While one
much-noted storyline concerns black lust, the film’s larger narrative justified
Jim Crow by reminding audiences how political equality, offered maliciously
to former slaves by Radical Republicans, stimulated blacks’ pursuit of social
equality, including interracial marriage. This interpretation resonated in Wilm-
ington, where the film’s scenes of black-faced soldiers stuffing ballot boxes,
black-faced legislators nipping whiskey, and black-faced magistrates sentenc-
ing an innocent white man seemed to depict their specific, recent past, not a
generalized, distant one. In fact, Griffith based his script on Thomas Dixon’s
play, The Clansman, which integrated material from two earlier novels that
transported actual elements of the Wilmington revolution into the 1870s. Both
of Dixon’s best-selling novels were available in Wilmington shops, and thou-
sands of white locals packed into Thalian Hall to watch his play when it opened
in 1905. By the time the film finally debuted at the Academy of Music in March
1916, people were very familiar with its general plot and the controversy sur-
rounding its depiction of the past. They were not disappointed. “Everyone who
has seen the picture is enthusiastic in praise,” declared a Wilmington reporter.
“Nothing like it has ever before been seen in the city.”120
As scholars have shown, The Birth of a Nation was a technological mar-
vel. Previous moving pictures, shown in nickelodeons, had one reel and lasted
about fifteen minutes. Griffith’s masterpiece filled twelve reels and ran nearly
three hours! To appreciate the experience, we have to consider the impact of
the darkened theater, the sound of a full orchestra, hired hands that provided
screams and moans and other sound effects, and, above all, the constant, flick-
ering images. Griffith and Dixon crafted a modern, racist spectacle to “create
a feeling of abhorrence” in white audiences, and to a certain extent, it worked.
Whites gave the Rebel Yell during battle scenes, tapped their toes to “Dixie,”
laughed at the “darkey” legislators, hissed at Silas Lynch, and cheered the
Klan’s arrival. A reporter for the Wilmington Evening Dispatch noted a range
of physical responses, from a “lump in his throat” to “the fierce beating” of his
heart. Blacks had strong reactions, too. In Boston, someone threw an egg at the
screen, others set off stink bombs, and when the police arrived, fistfights fol-
lowed. In Philadelphia, an orderly NAACP protest turned into a riot as angry
blacks tried to shut the theater down.121
New analysis suggests that the film’s technical elements directly contributed
to its prolonged, damaging effect on race relations. First, it commodified and
circulated a white-authored representation of Reconstruction for mass con-
sumption. Second, as Alison Landsberg has argued, early cinema had a unique
ability to supply memories and historically grounded identities to people with
no actual experiences of a place or event or era. Through retinal object per-
sistence, those flickering images imprinted themselves in spectators’ minds,
engendering emotions that made people squirm and scream like they were
“really there” and which they remembered as if they had been. For older view-
ers, those in their sixties or seventies, who had actual experiences of Recon-
struction, the film sometimes prompted powerful counter-memories, as when
blacks decried the allegations of Negro misrule. For younger viewers, anyone
born after about 1870, it had no opposition. Whites often believed what they
saw about “the Other” on screen, and when they saw the Other in person, they
remembered what they had seen.122
White Wilmingtonians clearly used a variety of mnemonics to construct
their memories of black disorder and white supremacy. These included prints
of photographs taken during the revolution and metal souvenirs purportedly
cast from the Record’s melted-down printing press. Besides visual and material
culture, their memory-making processes also employed textual methods, like
the 1905 reminiscences of Wilmington Light Infantry members or references
in local histories, like James Sprunt’s 1916 Chronicles of the Cape Fear, and ritual
reminders, like the formal reunions of participants that were held for at least a
decade, as well as oral accounts and physical places. But though these devices
often aided white narratives, their function could shift dramatically in different
hands. Indeed, blacks had their own very similar, sometimes identical mne-
monics, which they used to advance a powerful counter-narrative.123
Slack Water, 1880–1920 169
White Supremacy during the Great War
On April 16, 1917, nearly a thousand black Wilmingtonians packed into the
new auditorium at Shiloh Baptist Church to hear noted Baltimore evange-
list Spurgeon Davis, who took as his topic “The Negro, His Part, and Place in
the World’s Greatest Conflict.” Wearing small American flags pinned to their
clothes, audience members listened raptly as he exhorted local men to defend
“their” country. Fifteen black men had already enlisted by this date. However,
white fears of armed and trained black soldiers produced a selective draft. To
join the army, a black man had to pass a series of physical and mental evalua-
tions by racist white officers. Most were turned away from the Wilmington re-
cruiting station, but by June more than twelve hundred black men had success-
fully enrolled and gone away for military training. A select group qualified for
officers’ camp, including Thomas J. Bullock, a veteran of the Spanish-American
War and former principal of the old Williston School. Dr. Egbert Scott joined
the Medical Corps. Surviving rosters show that many old time black families
sent loved ones to war: the Artises, Bryants, Nixons, Taylors, Sampsons, Tel-
fairs, Barbers, and Merricks. Another large group of black men bore names as-
sociated with old white families: Waddell, Beery, Fennell, Taylor, Moore, Davis,
MacRae, Boney, McKoy. Deeply enmeshed in their community’s heritage, the
city’s best and brightest black men set out to do their duty as Wilmingtonians,
as North Carolinians, and as Americans.124
In their speeches, prominent black leaders appealed directly to black Wilm-
ingtonians’ distinctive civic identities. Dr. H. A. Harris urged his neighbors to
“rally to their country’s call,” while Dr. L. J. Davenport reminded “the Negro” of
his ties to “this, the land of his involuntary and yet acceptable adoption.” Like
their counterparts in other American cities, they saw the war as an opportunity
to assert black manhood and the male responsibilities of political citizenship.
In their zeal to accomplish this goal, they deliberately urged black men to put
their gender over their race. Specifically, they urged listeners to “forget” the
daily “indignities” and “insults” they suffered under Jim Crow and insisted that
“the all out effort on the battlefield, in the home, on the farm, and in every walk
of life would result in a right inheritance.” Thousands of black residents joined
the “all-out effort.” They formed a Food Conservation Commission to regulate
domestic consumption, established a Red Cross chapter and a Special Aid So-
ciety to funnel emergency kits overseas, and hosted social events for soldiers.
In September 1917, black Wilmingtonians proudly lined the streets to watch
a grand parade intended to honor local recruits and send them off with fan-
fare. Twenty floats accompanied the ranks of soldiers, and church choirs filled
the air with patriotic songs.125 Though the uniformed black men marched at
the very end, their sober expressions and precision movements signaled their
commitment to make the world, if not yet North Carolina, safe for democracy.
For Hugh MacRae and his fellow civic leaders, war mobilization offered a
golden opportunity to make Wilmington more attractive to business. In early
1917, members of the white Chamber of Commerce organized a successful ef-
fort to win a federal shipbuilding contract for the port city. They established
the Carolina Shipbuilding Company on paper then launched a “vigorous pub-
lic relations campaign” to boost the unique advantages of a Cape Fear River
location. Well connected to the national Democratic Party, they lobbied their
contacts in Washington, especially Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels,
the former Raleigh newspaper editor who parlayed his prominent role in the
white-supremacy campaign of 1898 into a political career. To sweeten the deal,
the chamber even arranged the donation of valuable riverfront property for the
future shipyard; the city contributed a large parcel south of town, and chamber
secretary Louis Toomer Moore’s in-laws, the wealthy Kidder family, added an
adjacent tract. When news of the contract for eight concrete ships reached
them, the city fathers moved forward with their plans to transform Wilming-
ton’s economy.126
As part of its formal proposal, the Chamber of Commerce had stressed its
ability to attract and retain labor. By September 1918, Carolina Shipbuilding
employed more than eight thousand people and boasted a payroll of fifty thou-
sand dollars. Most war workers were white; however, the need was so great that
black men were hired in nearly every capacity, from unskilled laborers to car-
penters to riveters, despite Jim Crow prohibitions. By late November, the local
supply had diminished, and the company began to recruit from as far away as
Georgia and Massachusetts. In January 1919, some two hundred angry white
shipbuilders gathered to protest the retention of “unskilled negro labor on par-
ity with white men.”127 They held their mass meeting at the courthouse, mind-
ful that the revolution of 1898 had been intended to restore white supremacy
in the workplace as well as in the political arena. Once again, white business
executives had betrayed them.
The white workmen’s protest reflected deeper racial fears stemming from
the sudden increase of black men in and around the city. As a result of the
war effort, the population of Wilmington soared from 25,748 in 1910 to 33,372
by 1920. Nearly 6,000 of the newcomers were white, but at least 1,300 more
were black.128 To accommodate the growth, the federal government authorized
the construction of federally funded war workers’ housing, but that project
took months to get off the drawing boards. In the short term, city residents
Slack Water, 1880–1920 171
rented out their attics and basements, hurriedly converted old outbuildings
into apartments, and raked in a tidy profit for their trouble. As the city’s leading
real estate developer, Hugh MacRae stepped in to meet the demand with two
new suburbs, one for whites and one for blacks. He strategically located both
developments along the trolley line his Tidewater Power Company operated,
aware that the occupants would need public transportation to reach not only
the shipyard, but churches and businesses downtown. With so many strangers
crowded together, street fights and bar brawls occurred regularly, especially on
Saturday nights, when hundreds of single men converged. Once again, white
city leaders blamed blacks for increased crime and disorder.
White concerns about black war workers sparked rumors of an armed upris-
ing led by radical outsiders. So strong was the fear this time that local business
leaders organized a unit of the American Protective League (APL), a nation-
wide, voluntary surveillance organization established during the war. Accord-
ing to historian Jeannette Keith, the APL chiefly aimed to ferret out German
agents in the United States and so had limited appeal in the South, where the
so-called “foreign element” was very small. Wilmington, however, had both a
sizeable Germanic population and a history of militant black activism. In ad-
dition, as Mark Ellis has shown, newspapers regularly ran stories alleging that
German spies intended to stir up the black population. The New York Tribune,
for example, reported the arrest of two German nationals in Greensboro, North
Carolina, in April 1917 and said, “Absolute social equality with the white man has
been one of rewards dangling before the eyes of the black man.”129 These factors
explain why Wilmington had one of only a handful of units the APL successfully
organized in North Carolina. (The others were in Raleigh and Salisbury.)
Described as “a posse comitatus,” APL members carried cards that said “Se-
cret Service Division,” and conducted a widespread intimidation campaign
that included outright harassment, opening private mail, and investigating
newcomers. They questioned people who refused to buy Liberty Bonds or
criticized the government. They seized food and other goods from purported
“hoarders” and “profiteers,” and they pursued over a hundred cases of “citizen
disloyalty and espionage.” That black agitators were their true concern is evi-
denced by the APL’s enlistment of fourteen black Pullman porters, men who
would be in an especially good position to mark the comings and goings of
suspicious strangers. Starting in the spring of 1918, the local APL also began a
series of “slacker raids” through the port city. Ostensibly intended to round up
draft evaders, socialist-anarchists, and conscientious objectors, the raids tar-
geted black neighborhoods. In the end, the Wilmington APL claimed to have
“taken up” thirty-seven people this way.130
The onset of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 dramatically curtailed the APL’s
activities. “People died like flies,” recalled Marilyn Devany Pierce, a white
Wilmingtonian. She was fourteen that year and vividly recalled the epidemic
decades later, especially the little bag of “onion flavor” she wore on a cord
around her neck to ward off contagion. Blacks suffered the devastation of the
disease disproportionately, and whites generally believed that blacks’ innate
ignorance and willful uncleanness fueled the crisis. In actuality, the segregated
wards at James Walker Memorial Hospital, confined to the ground floor of a
1905 annex, were wholly inadequate to meet the community’s health needs at
the best of times. To ease the suffering, the black women members of the In-
dependent Order of Tents organized a makeshift hospital in their social hall at
901 Castle Street. Although blacks resided in segregated neighborhoods, their
movements through the city and their interactions with whites at their places
of employment reinforced fears of contagion.131
The myriad pressures of the war years precipitated yet another episode of
organized racist violence against Wilmington’s blacks. It began with a fight on
a trolley car on January 19, 1919. Unlike the railroads, which had either separate
or divided cars to segregate the races, southern trolleys still required passen-
gers to share space. Wilmington’s city ordinances stipulated that the white sec-
tion began with the first row of seats behind the conductor and that the black
one started with the last row. In between was a grey area. At peak times in the
mornings and evenings, dozens of workmen, black and white, packed into the
cars, jostling each other for room. On the night of January 19, white riveters
riding the trolley instigated a biracial brawl by attempting to throw several
black workers off the car. The city police arrived and arrested four black men
for “rioting.” A white man received a serious skull fracture during the fight,
but no other injuries were reported. Nevertheless, when black shipbuilders
arrived at the shipyard gates the next morning, they found themselves face-to-
face with both the Sheriff ’s Department and the Wilmington Light Infantry.
The white men in uniform collectively claimed to be preventing a race war,
but their aggressive actions bespoke a different agenda. For one thing, they
searched each and every black worker for hidden weapons while whites went
through unaccosted. Second, the men of the WLI were still under the com-
mand of Walker Taylor, whose tactical mind had directed the violence against
blacks in November 1898. The day passed without event; that night, however,
segregated gangs of black men and white men roamed the city. Mayor Parker
Quince Moore ordered the entire Police Department out to disburse them.
The WLI also played a crucial role.132 As in the past, white elites successfully
deployed the local militia to quash any black resistance to their authority.
Slack Water, 1880–1920 173
Black resistance to white supremacy did not disappear after the war ended.
Instead, veterans like Foster F. Burnett came home and formed a new vanguard
for change. Burnett, a Wilmington native who graduated from Howard Univer-
sity Medical School, served as a first lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps.
He was discharged for an injury in 1918, returned to Washington to marry his
college sweetheart, and opened his practice on Walnut Street in 1919.133 Like
Dr. Frank Avant, he was appalled by the inadequate medical facilities reserved
for people of color and incensed that neither he nor any of his peers, who
had saved so many lives during the Great War, had surgical privileges at the
hospital. He found kindred souls at American Legion Post No. 4, which had
been named for Thomas J. Bullock, killed in action at the Second Battle of the
Marne. With Dr. Avant and other progressive black physicians, he success-
fully organized Community Hospital, a small segregated facility located in a
converted residence. Burnett also urged his colleagues to join the Wilmington
chapter of the NAACP.
Organized in May 1919, the Wilmington branch of the NAACP was one of
eighty-five that opened across the nation after Armistice Day. The purported
spark locally was a public slight to returning black veterans. The war having
officially ended in September 1918, the city council held yet another parade to
honor the war dead, celebrate living heroes, and map white civic identity. They
deliberately excluded blacks, despite their honorable service. By late winter, a
group of black activists had determined a new course of action. The NAACP
chapter elected as its first president Rev. Arthur Fletcher Elmes, pastor of First
Congregational Church, and began a member drive. A local circular, reprinted
in the Star, proclaimed its purpose was simply to further “the education of the
people and the unity of the race.” However, the NAACP had a strong reputa-
tion for agitation. A different document insisted upon the “exercise of all the
rights and privileges of citizenship.” By 1920, the Crisis reported to black read-
ers everywhere that Wilmington had the best-funded chapter in North Caro-
lina.134 It was a sign of changes to come.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990
In 1920, a group of Wilmington women began writing a play that would

“review the heroic traditions of the Lower Cape Fear as an incentive to the
achievement of a more glorious future.” The five authors, all members of the
Literary Department of the North Carolina Sorosis women’s club, relied on
published local histories in preparing their drama, The Pageant of the Lower
Cape Fear. Citing works by local historians James Sprunt, Alfred Moore Wad-
dell, and Samuel A’Court Ashe, they included epigraphs and footnotes to lend
the weight of professional, masculine authority to the final, privately printed
script. For an added boost, they dedicated it to James Sprunt, who vouched
in a foreword that the pageant “can be depended upon for real historic data.”
But despite these claims to veracity, the past presented in the play’s eleven his-
toric “episodes” and three interludes is far more fictional than factual. In fact,
the script exemplifies what Grace Elizabeth Hale calls “the strange slippage of
time, the movement from the imagined past to the present and back again”
that marked southern writing of the early twentieth century. Read in our own
time, it reveals Wilmington’s white civic leaders’ struggle to retain the most
salient elements of their collective past while fashioning a modern, progressive
identity.1
In the first episode, titled “The Springtime Gathering of the Indians, 1663,”
we can see how the authors traced three of Wilmington’s acknowledged tradi-
tions—eager pursuit of commerce, willingness to use violence, and supremacy
of white elites—back to the moment of European contact. It begins with the
Natives, a comical troupe who are holding an annual festival (stage directions
suggest a kind of bacchanal) when Captain Hilton and several other English-
men arrive on an expedition from Barbados. “Mighty pale face, you come from
the big sea water. You are welcome,” announces Chief Watcoosa. “Watcoosa
friend to pale face. He give game and furs. Pale face give fire sticks and fire-
water.”2 Hilton’s aide, Peter Fabian, privately urges the captain to get land, not
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 175
pelts, and Watcoosa, correctly interpreting their fierce looks and intense whis-
pers as threats of war, proceeds to offer Hilton his two daughters as wives. This
act elicits several ribald jests from Fabian, but Hilton agrees to the match, pro-
vided the native women come with “dowries” of land. While clearly intended to
evoke laughter from the audience, the scene has a serious purpose: It casts the
Indians as willing helpmeets in the settlement of the Cape Fear. More precisely,
it portrays them as ignorant, buffoonish subordinates needing white direction
and control.
Black characters are presented the same way. “Negro servants” first appear
in “Resistance to the Stamp Act, 1766,” bearing trays of barbecue and a quill pen
for the stamp collector’s forced resignation. In the “Reception of Flora Mac-
Donald” episode, set at a grand pro-Jacobin ball in 1774, two fiddlers named
“Zip Coon” and “Old Dan Tucker” supply the scene’s background music, an
aural metaphor for the imagined supporting role slaves played in white Wilm-
ingtonians’ drive for independence. The pageant’s most important black char-
acter, that is, the only one with dialogue, is “Scipio,” the “Negro bodyguard and
slave” of planter Bob Harrison. Along with a dozen or more unnamed “dark-
ies,” he “bows and scrapes,” performs “John Kooner songs” and “corn shucking
dances,” and readily supports the Confederacy through three Lost Cause epi-
sodes: “A Plantation Wedding, 1861,” “Running the Blockade, 1862,” and “The
Fall of Fort Fisher, 1865.” Tellingly, it is the loyal slave Scipio who searches for
his captured master, waits faithfully for Harrison’s return, and first recognizes
“Marse Bob” when the white man reappears, bedraggled and wounded, just in
time to join the Confederate retreat. Then General Braxton Bragg dramatically
signals the end of the port’s old way of life: “Well, Wilmington, goodbye!” he
declares, exiting.
The play shifts abruptly from 1865 to the present (ca. 1920), deliberately
omitting Reconstruction, the years of black upbuilding, the events of 1898, and
the emergence of the New South. After a brief “Call to Arms, 1917,” with men
in uniform drilling to martial music, the white-gowned Spirit of Wilmington
enters. She commands her attendants, Courage, Loyalty, and Venture, to “go on
dancing feet, that our hands and hearts may meet, whom you bring to join our
train, Progress—or all else in vain.” Structurally, the appearance of Progress’s
gold-draped figure, following so closely upon Bragg’s retreat, attributes the
city’s modern-day prosperity to its devastation during the Civil War. This way
of thinking about the southern past was quite new in 1920. Historian Ulrich
B. Phillips advanced it in his influential 1918 work, American Negro Slavery,
which said the large expenditures required to feed, clothe, and house slaves
placed such a burden on white southern elites as to hinder regional economic
development.3 The pageant’s authors not only made this argument, but they
strengthened the causal link between war and local prosperity when they had
Progress declare:
Wilmington, behind me stand,
Whene’er a crisis is at hand.
You bravely stood, as nations know,
At call to arms four years ago.
Now that peace has come once more,
Turn your gaze upon our shore.
See our port, our growing pride,
Foreign vessels side by side.
With our boats and ship yards vast,
May the Future bless the past!4
Though World War I, too, brought death and devastation, the end result for
the port city was positive: a revitalized international market and a surge of
manufacturing. Water and blood, commerce and violence—these traits still
went hand in hand, albeit in different forms.
To the thousands of Wilmingtonians who attended three performances
staged in June 1921, the play proved immensely satisfying. Like other popu-
lar, white-authored literary works of the era, such as The Leopard’s Spots, the
pageant’s “strange slippage of time” worked to justify traditional hierarchies
of race, class, and gender even as it pronounced a modern, forward-looking
ethos. Here, however, elements of the physical production amplified the mean-
ing of the words. For example, according to the published Pageant, most of
the leading white characters were played by their direct descendants, some of
whom wore or carried personal effects that once belonged to their famous fore-
bears. Key cast members thus embodied the continuity of Wilmington’s elite
leadership from past to present. Similarly, except for Zip Coon and Old Dan
Tucker (played by white men in blackface), the “Negro Servants” and “Planta-
tion Slaves” were actual black men and women. None of them had their names
listed in the published text, not even Scipio. By denying the black cast members’
identities as real people living in 1921 Wilmington, the Pageant’s authors erased
them from the present and asserted the timeless quality of black subservience.
Even the scenery helped perpetuate links to the past. A surviving photograph
shows how the set designers used the Cape Fear River as a backdrop. (See fig-
ure 4.1.) Sliding silently behind the stage, the river represented the passage of
time and the mystic bond that connected “These, who dwell upon the shore”
with “those who went before.”5
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 177
Figure 4.1 Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, June 1921, the pageant in progress. The donor’s grandfather,
Robert C. Cantwell Jr., played the part of merchant-planter Parker Quince (1743–1786) and is the
costumed figure just right of center in a dark-colored cape and tricorn hat. The scene depicted is Episode
III: “The Battle of Moore’s Creek, 1776,” the only one in which Quince’s character appears. Besides
suggesting the size and racial character of the audience, this image reveals how the Cape Fear River
provided a physical backdrop for the pageant, and, through its metaphorical and memorial properties,
reinforced the slippage of past, present, and future. Courtesy of Cape Fear Museum of History and
Science, Wilmington, NC.
As the twentieth century advanced, Wilmington’s old, established elites

found it more difficult to maintain this comforting slippage of time. The en-
ergy of the Roaring Twenties prompted renewed efforts to boost the city and
its nearby beaches, and thousands of newcomers relocated to the area. During
the Great Depression, when Wilmington’s leisure-based economy suffered a
major blow, racial tensions flared anew. But at this point, civic leaders started to
shift the local narrative. In particular, white elites began to disavow racist vio-
lence, strategically tailoring the presentation of their past to fit the emerging,
statewide rhetoric of civility and racial progress—what Tar Heels later called
the North Carolina Way. Still, old ways continued to ebb and flow. After the
onset of World War II, the city experienced more frequent and more extensive
“race riots,” the most notable ones in 1941, 1958, 1960, 1968, and 1971. These
violent events resulted partly from certain white residents’ efforts to maintain
traditional racial privileges and partly from certain black residents’ growing
activism for equal rights. These confrontations also reflected the economic,
demographic, and political transformation of the region as industry and ag-
riculture declined, tourism expanded, and institutions of higher education
and military bases appeared. Despite the successes of the civil rights era, the
controversial 1972 trial of the Wilmington Ten demonstrated how little racial
progress had occurred. By the mid-1980s, the New Right was ascendant in
North Carolina, and black Wilmingtonians’ search for social justice on criti-
cal issues of race came to a standstill. And though certain events were unique
to this community, most of the changes that occurred here reflected broader
trends in twentieth-century America.
Wilmington’s New Negroes
If in the 1920s Wilmington’s white elites looked backwards to define race

relations for the twentieth century, then their black counterparts looked for-
ward. Following philosopher-activist Alain Locke, many of the city’s black
leaders imagined themselves New Negroes, men and women who not only
pursued individual achievement but embraced capitalism as a vehicle for
collective black economic independence and self-determination. Like their
counterparts in cities like Durham, they used complex strategies to resume
the upbuilding process begun in the 1880s. In fact, the Bull City’s most prom-
inent black businessmen, Charles C. Spaulding, John Merrick, and Dr. Aaron
Moore, founders of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, fre-
quently visited Wilmington and opened a branch office on Red Cross Street
in Brooklyn.
On any given day, the Mutual’s Wilmington agent, E. Mencer Butler, could
walk through a thriving, segregated business district, past Frederick C. Sadg-
war Jr.’s funeral parlor, Lee How’s California Laundry, the North Side Drug
Store, the law office of R. McCant Andrews, and on to the Liberty Lunch Room.
Butler singlehandedly transformed the Mutual office into a regional headquar-
ters; he undoubtedly read lawyer Andrews’s popular 1920 biography of John
Merrick and knew that Merrick’s philosophy “had a single aim, to build a great
institution which would teach by its example what the Negro could achieve in
the world of finance.” Other black businessmen had similar aims, like printer
and publisher Robert S. Jervay, who in 1924 joined with Dr. Frank Avant,
Frederick C. Sadgwar Jr., and several others to organize the city’s first Colored
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 179
Chamber of Commerce. Its concerns encompassed economic development,

law enforcement, education, and health and sanitation, and they successfully
pushed city council to create an Inter-Racial Committee to explore black resi-
dents’ complaints. Wilmington was not Durham, yet blacks here were making
impressive strides within the confines of Jim Crow.6
Like their white counterparts, savvy black businessmen astutely grasped
the potential profits to be made from tourism. Seabreeze, a black-only re-
sort located on the northern tip of what is today called Carolina Beach, en-
compassed several square miles of prime real estate between the sound and
the ocean. In the early 1900s, Dr. Frank Avant built a private cottage there,
as did John Merrick and other affluent, black North Carolinians. Wherever
black tourists went, black-owned hotels, restaurants, and dance halls followed.
In 1923, white developers noted the rising number of blacks vacationing in
the region and decided to build a second destination closer to Wilmington.
Called Shell Island, it centered on a large pavilion and boardwalk located on
a small islet north of Wrightsville Beach. Dr. Avant displayed familiar, place-
based boosterism when he declared that, “Certainly no city in the United
States, except Wilmington, can boast two seashore resorts exclusively for the
pleasure and recreation of its Negro citizenry . . . [they] are ideally located
and afford exhilarating pleasure and happiness for our group.” Shell Island,
“the premier Negro resort of America” boasted “private cottages . . . which
afford every comfort, pleasure and privacy,” but hotels and campgrounds also
existed for wage-earning blacks. On the Fourth of July, the resorts drew thou-
sands of people, including day-trippers who attended special commemora-
tive events staged near the beach.7
The visibility of New Negroes in the 1920s likely helped spark a resurgence
of the Ku Klux Klan in the Cape Fear region. As scholars have shown, the
hooded order that emerged in this period bore little resemblance to its Recon-
struction Era sibling. Nationally, most members came from the ranks of mid-
dle-class, small-town America, and while they still worried about “the Negro
Problem,” their list of concerns had grown to encompass immigration, Juda-
ism, Catholicism, and all forms of social, racial, and civic corruption. Formally
called the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the organization got
its start in November 1915, a time strategically chosen by its chief instigator,
William Simmons, to coincide with the Atlanta premiere of D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation. A former minister with a secular “fraternalist” calling, Sim-
mons had the prescience to copyright the new group’s distinctive rituals and
hooded costumes, which were deliberately modeled on the ones in Griffith’s
film. Simmons also created a new, bureaucratic structure with professional re-
cruiters (Kleagles), local unit leaders (Terrors), regional chapters (Klaverns),

state officials (Grand Dragons), and a national ruler (the Imperial Wizard).
North Carolina’s Grand Dragon, Judge Henry Grady, lived in Clinton, Duplin
County, but he was a frequent visitor to Wilmington, where he belonged to the
Masons’ Plantagenet Commandery No. 1.8
Perhaps because of the handsome, charismatic Grady’s influence, Klan
strength surged in the port city. On October 16, 1922, for example, several hun-
dred local Klansmen gathered at Fifth and Ann, marched down Fifth to Grace,
followed Grace to Front, and then processed slowly along Front to Market.
According to the Star, the white-hooded marchers had the desired effect: fear
showed plainly in the faces of black observers. But Klansmen did more than
march. Violent floggings occurred in numerous counties, including Duplin,
Robeson, and Bladen in the lower Cape Fear. In 1924, Klansmen from all over
the state converged in Wilmington for a summer “ceremonial.” Later that sum-
mer, some five thousand Klansmen visited one of the area’s white beach resorts
and lit the night sky with burning crosses. These gatherings became annual
events in the 1920s and put the black community on notice that further prog-
ress would not be tolerated.9
Heritage Tourism in the Automobile Age
The popularity of Cape Fear beaches in the 1920s reflected the dramatic impact
of the automobile. Cars offered freedom from overcrowded trolleys, freedom
from rigid train schedules, and freedom to stop at other places along the way.
The Automobile Touring and Amusement Company advertised its services in
the Morning Star as early as 1906; for twenty-five cents per person, a driver
would take visiting tourists or local day-trippers out to Wrightsville Beach in
the comfort of a private conveyance. Unfortunately, major routes like the Shell
Road were in very poor condition. Populist councilman Bennie Keith had been
onto something back in 1898 when he tried to replace rutted, oyster-strewn
lanes with smooth, macadam streets. In 1920, Cameron Morrison, “the Good
Roads Governor,” finally convinced a skeptical Tar Heel legislature to fund
nearly fifty-five hundred new miles of paved roadway. Aided by the declining
price of cars and trucks, even middle- and working-class North Carolinians
began traveling to seek out distant goods and services as well as leisure oppor-
tunities, including sightseeing and summer vacations.10
Wilmington entrepreneurs eagerly met the demand. One of them, an ambi-
tious, soon-to-be-prominent civic leader named Bruce Barclay Cameron, es-
tablished himself as an independent oil and gasoline distributor; he also joined
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 181
with two friends to open an automotive parts dealership and garage on busy
Third Street, a primary access road into the city.11 Even long-established firms
adapted to the automobile. Hardy Fennell, who helped engineer the coup of
1898, transformed his carriage and livery service into a garage, while Hugh
MacRae added city busses to the Tidewater Power Company’s services. Mean-
while, their friends on the City Council approved alterations downtown to
accommodate curbside parking, traffic, and service stations. These and other
physical changes wrought by the automobile radically reshaped the landscape
and economy of the city.
Automobility eventually prompted forward-thinking civic leaders to re-
think the purpose of the riverfront. For several decades, the white Chamber of
Commerce had touted to tourists the region’s temperate climate and healthy
outdoor activities. Practically every southern city promoted its locale’s thera-
peutic qualities, however. By the 1920s, businessmen in New Orleans, Mobile,
and Savannah had begun to market their communities’ distinctive histories
as a way to distinguish themselves as unique destinations. Charlestonians
proved especially adept at this strategy, transforming their faded, dilapidated
downtown into “America’s Most Historic City.” For their part, Wilmingtonians
united with other regional business leaders to form the Coastal Highway As-
sociation, which raised state and federal funds for a scenic highway running
all the way down the coast to Jacksonville, Florida. That Wilmington was the
proposed highway’s northern terminus speaks to the prominent role that local
businessmen played in its completion. They realized that historic buildings,
cobblestone streets, and colorful characters were not enough to draw tourists
off the main road and into the downtown. To make Wilmington a destination
in and of itself, they needed to craft a wholly unique, authentic identity for the
port city. And they logically chose to emphasize their community’s rebellious,
progressive history, which they associated spatially with the foot of Market
Street. No longer the actual locus of Wilmington’s commerce, the historic wa-
terfront became its symbolic heart, instead.12
To assert publicly this new identity as a historic tourist destination,
Wilmington’s city fathers launched the Feast of Pirates Festival in 1927. Pi-
rates had enormous appeal in American society at the time. N. C. Wyeth’s
iconic illustrations of Treasure Island had made them into romantic figures,
and their association with beaches, adventure, rum, and rebellion against
authority made them seem especially appropriate role models for Prohibi-
tion Era tourists. An official festival logo made the pitch: it featured a large,
glowering pirate face hovering over a tiny damsel-not-in-distress, who lies
on her stomach, head propped up on one hand, one leg coquettishly kicking
the air. Though cartoonish, the figures look directly at the viewer, inviting
him or her to identify with one of them and adopt appropriate “piratical”
behavior. Similarly, the official program explicitly urged visitors to “come
bury your cares” and “have a jolly time as did Captain Kidd and Blackbeard.”
Notwithstanding Blackbeard’s fame on the Outer Banks, the event’s organiz-
ers invoked the time in 1757 when pirates sailed up the river, seized control
of Brunswick Town, and generally terrorized the entire Cape Fear region. To
open the festival, costumed men creatively reenacted the raid to the delight
of large crowds. Wearing eye patches and brandishing swords, the “pirates”
sailed from Wrightsville Beach, engaged in a mock river battle with the Coast
Guard, disembarked at the foot of Market Street, and then ran en masse to
City Hall, where they ran the Jolly Roger up the flagpole. That signal marked
the start of a three-day party featuring cold gin, hot jazz, and a new form of
dance called “shagging.”13
Scheduled over a long weekend in August, the festival included a lengthy
parade that, like numerous other processions, functioned as a cultural perfor-
mance. Louis Toomer Moore, an oldtime Wilmingtonian, photographer, local
historian, and avid booster, recorded the event with his camera, as did sev-
eral other prominent businessmen. Their surviving images reveal organizers’
desire to preserve traditional social mores even as they embraced modernity.
A large float sponsored by Efird’s Department Store, for example, featured a
pair of oxen, an automobile, and a biplane above the words “Efird’s Progress!”
and “Lindy and Anne!” Here, a leading mercantile establishment hailed the
transportation revolution and its latest innovation, aviation, which Wilming-
tonians had acquired with the opening of Bluethenthal Airfield during World
War I. Local civic groups also sponsored modern-themed floats, including the
Kiwanis Club, the YMCA, and the Improved Order of Redmen. Other elements
of the parade promoted Wilmington’s historic identity: the float titled “Stamp
Defiance” obviously recalled the events of 1765, while an antique carriage bear-
ing men dressed as Cornelius Harnett and William Hooper commemorated
local contributions to the American Revolution. (See figures 4.2 and 4.3.)
The Pirates Festival Parade also worked like so many other processions to
reinscribe the racist caste system upon which Wilmington’s prosperity rested.
A particularly arresting float featured a white woman dressed as an allegorical
figure, probably Lady Liberty. (See figure 4.4.) As captured by the camera, she
has long, flowing hair, wears a classical white gown, and holds onto a flag-
pole that provides secure footing atop her carriage. More interesting, her black
driver is plainly visible: perched atop the box, he wears a top hat indicating his
traditional role as coachman. It was a striking visual display for the audience:
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 183
Figure 4.2. A crowd gathered in front of City Hall to watch the Feast of the Pirates Festival Parade, ca.
1927. The festival deployed a common set of symbols that deliberately linked revolutions in various eras
with ongoing assertions of white supremacy in the modern age. Features in the urban landscape, like
Italianate and classical public buildings, reinforced these symbols and shaped participants’ understanding
of racial and civic identity. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
the Stars and Stripes unfurled behind her, linking whiteness to citizenship in
the nation-state and blackness to subservience.14
While black residents undoubtedly participated in the festival, their pres-
ence in the photographs is negligible, suggesting their marginal place. A pho-
tograph of the crowd in front of a store at Front and Market, for example,
captures 144 people, of whom only 19 have dark faces. A more typical image
is a street scene showing a black woman holding the hand of her young white
charge. Her body and arm are positioned in a gesture that says, “It is time to
go,” but the child twists its body away from her as if replying, “No, not yet.”
Relatively few other blacks can be identified among the parade’s spectators,
yet they were everywhere: the festival’s success depended upon the presence of
hundreds of black maids, busboys, waiters, cooks, washerwomen, and bartend-
ers. These service workers filled the hotels and restaurants downtown. They
also staffed the whites-only resorts at Wrightsville Beach, where parade goers
Figure 4.3. Attorney John Jay Burney Sr. and the Feast of the Pirates Festival chairman, Paul
O’Crowley, dressed in colonial garb and riding in a historic carriage during the Pirates Festival
Parade. They were portraying North Carolina patriots Cornelius Harnett and William Hooper
and thus commemorating local contributions to the American Revolution. Courtesy of New
Hanover County Public Library.
later watched a bathing-beauty contest, and at Lumina, where white couples

danced beneath Confederate battle flags and patriotic bunting.
Despite its initial promise, the Feast of Pirates Festival fell victim to a state-
wide economic crisis. North Carolina still had a predominantly rural, agricul-
tural economy in the 1920s. Tobacco was its most valuable crop, but overpro-
duction was endemic. Prices fell from seventeen cents per pound in 1928 to
twelve cents in 1930 and less than nine cents in 1931. Neither cotton nor peanuts
offered respite, thanks to competition from other southern states. Landown-
ers began defaulting on their mortgages. The manufacturing sector became
equally depressed. Despite increased foreign trade from European factories
after Armistice Day, North Carolina’s capitalists continued to build mills in
the piedmont. Textile magnates compensated for falling prices by implement-
ing speed-ups and second shifts. In 1926, Governor Gardner, himself a mill
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 185
Figure 4.4. Float with white “Lady Liberty” and her black, top-hatted driver, Feast
of the Pirates Parade, 1927 or 1928. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
owner, helped organize a trade association that attempted to regulate produc-

tion across the industry, but it proved only modestly successful. The Gastonia
strike of 1929 vividly demonstrated the plight of the state’s mill workers. Then
the stock market collapsed, expanding the financial emergency into the white,
urban middle-class. When these families, the festival’s core constituency, be-
gan to tighten their household budgets, Wilmington’s Chamber of Commerce

pragmatically cancelled the 1930 Feast of the Pirates.15
Black Wilmington during the Depression
Even before the Great Depression officially began, North Carolina’s public and
private welfare agencies found themselves completely overrun with requests
for assistance. As early as 1927, the Colored Chamber of Commerce invited
Lawrence Oxley to help them create an effective welfare program for their
poorest neighbors. Oxley, the first director of the State Board of Charities’ new
Division of Work among Negroes, had developed a community organization
model based on principles of collective action and self-help. At this time, self-
help was an act of defiance against white oppression and exclusion, for its goal
was to empower blacks to resist the overt and covert dehumanization processes
they faced on a daily basis. Nearly 300 black Wilmingtonians gathered at St.
Stephens Church on January 15, 1928 to hear Oxley speak, and nearly 1,600
people turned out for a second public meeting a week later. Following his pio-
neering model, a Negro Advisory Committee raised over $1000 to employ the
city’s first professional welfare worker, Miss Carrie G. Hargrave, granddaughter
of blacksmith Alfred Hargrave and a graduate of Hampton Institute. By 1930,
black civic leaders like Frederick C. Sadgwar, Jr. and Dr. Foster Burnett had
created United Charities, an organization charged with coordinating relief ef-
forts for black residents. Hargrave was closely involved; she directed the distri-
bution of food and clothing and organized a segregated, public kitchen where
black people could can donated fruits and vegetables. Despite these efforts,
the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By 1932, Wilmington’s United
Charities had on its rolls some 400 indigent black households each of which
received a meager sixty-two cents per month.16
The establishment of the federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1933
brought much needed assistance, but efforts to alleviate the effects of the De-
pression in North Carolina were uneven. A 1935 map showing the percentage
of population on relief by county identifies the hardest-hit areas as the coastal
and mountain regions. In the lower Cape Fear, New Hanover and Pender coun-
ties each had more than 17.5 percent of their residents on welfare. By 1936, re-
lief rates in the majority-white northeast, central, and western portions of the
state had declined significantly, but not at all in the majority-black southeast.
To state an obvious point: black people received far less aid than white ones,
thereby deepening black poverty in the area around Wilmington and the his-
toric disparities created by slavery and Jim Crow.17
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 187
Many blacks headed north. Census figures for Wilmington reflect these de-
partures as slowed growth. From 16,779 “negroes” living in the port city in
1930, the black population grew to only 17,057 by 1940—a difference of merely
278 persons. The true impact of the Great Migration is better seen in annual
city directories. In the one compiled for 1934, for example, a much larger num-
ber of vacant houses afflicted the “colored” sections of town than the white
ones. In the 1300 block of North Fifth Street, only eight of the twenty addresses
had occupants, and three of these were headed by women. Across town, Shutt’s
Alley, located between Bladen and Harnett streets, sheltered fifteen houses; of
these, six were headed by black women and two were vacant. At nearby Rus-
sell’s Alley, five out of eleven addresses were vacant, and three of the occupied
units were headed by black women.18 Directories for other streets and for other
years show the same pattern. Other sources, especially oral histories, confirm
the black flight.
Fearful of losing their labor supply forever, some affluent whites considered
paternalistic, make-work projects a solution to the crisis. James and Annie
Sprunt, for example, “hired a landscape architect to come down and design
public gardens at Orton,” their country house along the river. Originally the
eighteenth-century seat of “King” Roger Moore, the property had been lov-
ingly refurbished by Sprunt’s maternal grandfather, Kenneth Murchison, in
the 1880s. Murchison’s daughter, Luola, and son-in-law, James Sprunt Sr., con-
tinued his work, transforming the house into a white-columned shrine to the
Old South. Their only child, James Sprunt Jr., went even further. In the 1930s,
he hired dozens of local black men to create an idealized plantation landscape.
Instead of producing rice fields, their backbreaking labor created acres of live
oaks, crepe myrtles, azaleas, and other iconic southern species. Opened to
white visitors in 1938, the property soon became a major tourist attraction.19
Other business leaders seized upon federal projects to sustain the local
economy. Southern Democrats typically opposed the New Deal. In Wilming-
ton, Hugh MacRae and other progressive members of the party supported it
because they wanted river improvements, which they considered essential to
growth, not just recovery. They especially sought aid for the Atlantic Intra-
coastal Waterway; approved by Congress in 1927, it would allow small pleasure
craft to move easily along the East Coast. Waterway boosters recognized that,
despite the construction of new local roads and interstate highways, access
to the area’s beautiful beaches and bays remained limited. The newly created
Emergency Conservation Work Program, with its preference for conservation
and heritage projects, offered another way to expand the Cape Fear tourism
industry without intensive local investment.
In September 1933, MacRae and other members of the Wilmington Cham-

ber of Commerce lobbied North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds with
plans to establish a Civilian Conservation Corps project in New Hanover
County. The detailed map they attached to the memorandum shows a large
parcel situated along the proposed “Inland Waterway.” One area, to be reserved
for “Public Recreation,” had spaces allocated for boating, hunting, fishing,
camping, and tennis, while a “Demonstration Forest” showcased state-of the
art conservation techniques. The plan also called for “a colony of farmers and
fishermen,” where relocated tenants would grow crops on truck farms, sup-
ply and staff a dairy, and tend an apiary.20 Like MacRae’s colonies in nearby
Pender County, this one reflected a desire to convert barren land into pro-
ductive space. But even it functioned as a tourist attraction; according to the
proposal, vacationing urbanites would be able to visit the tenants, observe live
demonstrations, and interact with authentic rural folk. When federal officials
chose the Cape Hatteras State Park project instead, the chamber reluctantly set
its plan aside for a future date.
The CCC did open a recruiting center in Wilmington, but of several re-
gional projects, there is only one worth noting for our purposes: Penderlea, a
resettlement homestead initiated by Hugh MacRae just north of Wilmington.
MacRae had established in the early 1900s multiple immigrant colonies, which
he considered experiments in “human engineering” as well as agriculture.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act drastically reduced the immigrant flow into the
United States, however. By 1930, MacRae had shifted his focus back to native-
born white farmers. As the Depression worsened, he organized the Associated
Southern Committees on Rural Development and repeatedly testified before
Congress on the efficacy of his earlier ventures. When Section 208 of the Na-
tional Industrial Recovery Act mandated federally funded subsistence home-
steads, he was ready with a complete set of blueprints for a “farm-city.” In 1934,
officials for the Department of the Interior purchased forty-five hundred acres
of MacRae’s land for the Penderlea project and appointed him manager. Blacks
did not fit into MacRae’s plans. While a few could find “a place of usefulness
and social progress,” he still sought to “make the negro incidental instead of
the controlling factor” in the southern workforce. Far more than profit was at
stake: “Where the population consists of seventy-five Negroes to twenty-five
whites, there our Anglo Saxon civilization in the end is doomed ultimately
to decay,” he argued. The black men he employed through the CCC were re-
stricted to digging ditches and received even lower wages than the most un-
skilled white laborers, who earned twenty-five cents per hour. When that work
ended, blacks left Penderlea for good.21
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 189
Excluded from most rural relief projects, blacks fared little better in Wilm-
ington. In 1931, the Civilian Works Administration, forerunner of the Works
Progress Administration, partially funded construction of a five-mile scenic
drive around Greenfield Lake, as well as several other short-term projects.
White officials assigned black men to pave city streets, grade the grounds of the
new Williston High School, which had opened in 1931, and clear trash from the
base of Point Peter and area cemeteries. Aware that black women also needed
jobs, the CWA funded a mattress factory housed in a storefront, but it only had
room for sixteen employees, who stuffed pine straw into ready-made cloth cov-
ers. There were few alternatives, since most jobs were still reserved for whites.
Even so, local employers manipulated the racial fears of their white employees.
When the United Textile Workers of America attempted to organize workers at
the Delgado Mill, managers threatened to replace them with black scabs, and
when the International Longshoremen’s Association briefly unionized black
dockworkers in the 1930s, their white counterparts undercut their collective-
bargaining efforts.22
Economic competition between poor blacks and whites prompted fresh
outbreaks of organized racist violence, including an especially gruesome 1933
lynching in nearby Pender County. As sheriff ’s deputies looked on, a white
mob surrounded Doc Rogers’s home in Willard, set it afire, and killed him in
a fabricated gun-battle. Lynchers then tied Rogers’s body to a truck, dragged it
all around the rural community as a warning to other blacks, and finally circled
the courthouse square in an act symbolizing the supremacy of local norms.
Rev. Aaron Johnson was only five months old at the time, but his mother and
siblings witnessed the dragging, and many of their black neighbors saw Rog-
ers’s mutilated corpse, which had been strung up and left hanging in a tree.
Johnson perceptively describes how he came to possess what historian Alison
Landsberg calls “prosthetic memories” of the lynching: “You see, Doc Rogers’
story has been told over and over again throughout Willard for seventy-six
years now. It is as old as I am. It is embedded so deeply that my mind has al-
ways held it as memory—not as story. This catastrophic event seared into Wil-
lard’s collective memory like a weld. If you were an infant like me, it eventually
caught up with you like a nasty north wind forcing you to choose one of two
paths—hatred or forgiveness.”23
In Wilmington, news of the Rogers lynching galvanized the black commu-
nity. Previously, black leaders had been accustomed to expressing their views
about racial inequality in private conversations and written exchanges with
sympathetic whites. After Doc Rogers’s death, leaders of the black Chamber of
Commerce organized a series of public meetings to discuss a coordinated push
for civil rights.24 Their efforts revitalized the city’s NAACP chapter, which had
dwindled in size and stature after the initial burst of activity following World
War I.
Marketing the Past to Create a Prosperous Future
Buffeted in the 1930s by a poor economy, persistent racial violence, and a new
push for civil rights, Wilmington’s white civic leaders made a concerted effort
to assert again the port city’s reputation as a good place to live and work. In
1933, for example, Louis Toomer Moore penned a strongly worded letter to the
editor of Carolina Magazine that rebutted an article critical of Wilmington. The
offending piece, titled “The Sleeping City by the Sea,” insisted that “big busi-
ness in Wilmington does not exist,” and declared that “even the Negroes seem
different, more affable and simple, not absorbed into the drive of progress.”
In reply, Moore cited the multimillion-dollar annual payroll of the Atlantic
Coastline Railroad, the volume of fertilizer exported from the port, the gallons
of petroleum distributed, and the presence of a new Ethyl-Dow plant, which
extracted bromine from sea water. Similar articles in the Raleigh News and
Observer followed, as well as essays in numerous other publications, including
the State Magazine. No matter what his specific topic, Moore always touted
some aspect of Wilmington’s distinctive past, praised its flourishing present,
and forecast its glorious future. Moore even coined a new name for the city—
“The Port of Opportunity.”25
Moore likely had a personal need to defend Wilmington. Born in 1885 to
Roger Moore, the former Klan leader, and Eugenia Beery Atkins, he traced his
ancestry back on both sides to multiple founding families. After graduating in
1906 from the state university at Chapel Hill, he worked briefly for the Wilm-
ington Dispatch, but then dutifully took his place at the helm of his father’s
building supply firm. When he married Florence Hill Kidder in 1916, he joined
one of the South’s wealthiest lumber families. Significantly, his bride had an
equally distinguished pedigree and respect for Wilmington’s heritage. Indeed,
history was the Moores’ joint passion. Louis was a prominent member of the
Wilmington Historical Commission, which had been established in 1929, and
he regularly used his journalism skills to document important historic sites
and write applications for highway markers. He was also a popular speaker.26
Meanwhile, Florence served as an officer in the North Carolina Society of Co-
lonial Dames, which her mother had helped to found. Their historic residence
at Dock and Third, like the Sprunt mansion on Front Street, served as a veri-
table heritage factory in the 1930s.
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 191
Moore knew from his stint at the Dispatch the way a good image helped
to tell a story. Each Sunday after church, his daughter recalled, “It was a rit-
ual . . . we would drive out and take pictures.”27 Nearly one thousand examples
of his work survive, and when interpreted using the methods of visual culture,
they reveal his preoccupation with several readily recognizable themes. The
first I call “Progress.” These pictures capture the busy riverfront, especially its
Champion Compress, modern wharves, steamships, and warehouses. Others
document the railroad, airport, truck farms, lumber yards, utilities, streetcars,
bridges, paved roads, and similar indicators of a robust economy. Together
with images of downtown shops, restaurants, real estate agencies, insurance
firms, churches, schools, and new, whites-only subdivisions, Moore’s photos
combated the idea that Wilmington was a “sleepy,” backwards-looking place.
A second theme, “Location,” showcased the area’s temperate climate and abun-
dant opportunities for outdoor leisure activities. These photographs show peo-
ple swimming, hunting, golfing, boating, or sunbathing at Wrightsville and
Carolina beaches. The third theme, “Heritage,” concerns Wilmington’s proud,
anti-tyrannical past, which he conveyed with images of symbolic buildings,
monuments, and markers. Some of these sites commemorated local support for
American independence, like the Harnett Monument or the Burgwin-Wright
house, while others venerated the Confederacy’s Lost Cause, such as the grave
of Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a renowned spy who drowned off the coast of Fort
Fisher when her steamship floundered while running the blockade.28
Black Wilmingtonians figure prominently in many of Moore’s shots. Like
the photos of meaningful places, especially Orton plantation, his portraits ro-
manticized race relations. One typical image centers on a dark skinned, elderly
woman. (See figure 4.5.) Frozen on a deeply shadowed sidewalk beside an old
brick wall, she stands just off-center, hands clasped loosely before her waist.
She wears a long, flowered dress, a large white apron, a loose cardigan, and a
hat. She looks directly into the camera, but her glasses hide her eyes, and she
has no expression on her face. There are no clues as to her spatial or temporal
location. Moore’s private notation reads, “Tillie in front of Tileston School,”
but without that, no one would even know her name. In another example, a
black woman washes clothes in her yard. Three dresses hang on the clothesline
behind her; she stirs the iron pot with a wooden stick; a galvanized tub sits
on an upended crate beside her; a washboard peeks out above its rim. A third
example, captioned “200 block of Chestnut Street,” centers on a mature black
man wearing a long, white apron over his clothes and carrying a basket. He
looks off into the left distance, eyes averted from the camera, as if intent upon
his destination. An impressive, white-columned house (owned in the 1930s
by the exclusive Cape Fear Club) looms in the background, a visual clue to
the subject’s domestic occupation. In these and a host of other images, Moore
consciously portrayed local blacks as loyal, hardworking servants. Whether on
the docks, in the fields, at the city market, or in their own domestic environ-
ments, Wilmington’s blacks are just as contented serving their white employers
as their enslaved ancestors served their white masters. Force is not needed,
Moore implies, for harmony and civility reign here.
Other oldtime, white, elites shared Moore’s effort to package 1930s race rela-
tions in a nostalgic wrapper, including Frances Latham Harriss, whose medium
was a series of so-called slave narratives that she created under the auspices of
the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Scholars have long urged caution when
using FWP interviews to understand the actual experience of enslavement,
although the very biases they reflect make them ideal for studying race, place,
and memory. Harriss, like most FWP interviewers, was white, well educated,
and affluent. Deeply engaged in the history of her community, she knew her
elderly black informants and chose them based on their relationships to elite
white, slave-owning families. Most important, she disregarded FWP instruc-
Figure 4.5. Taken by Louis Toomer Moore, ca. 1935, this image shows a woman identified as
“Tillie in front of Tileston School.” Moore photographed numerous black persons going about
their work in Wilmington. Tillie actually stands in front of the historic Burgwin-Wright slave
quarters, where she lived. She is the same person interviewed by Frances Latham Harriss for the
WPA. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 193
tions to record their testimonies verbatim. She undoubtedly believed her con-
tributions would be compiled into some sort of heritage publication like the
North Carolina state guide then under way. To this end, she used her control
over the interview setting to transform individual black memories of the past
into collective white ones.29
How Harriss manipulated memory is seen in Mr. Emeline Moore’s narra-
tive, which includes the following: “My folks belonged to Colonel Taylor. He
an’ Mis’ Kitty lived in that big place on Market Street where the soldiers live
now (Wilmington Light Infantry), but we was on the plantation across the
river mos’ of the time.” As here, Harriss inserted parenthetical information
throughout the document and rendered his speech in a fabricated form of dia-
lect. Her leading questions are absent, yet they can be inferred by his replies.
“I don’ know exactly how old I is, but dey say I mus’ be eighty. No mam, I ain’
got nothin’ in no fam’ly bible. Where’d I git a fam’ly bible? My mammy (with a
chuckle) had too many chillum to look after to be puttin’ ’em down in no bible.”
In a revealing passage, she acknowledged the limits of Moore’s factual knowl-
edge: “I’d know a lot about slave times only I was so little. I have heard my
mammy say she had a heap easier time in slavery than after she was turn’ loose
with a pa’cel of chilluns to feed. I married as soon as I could an’ that’s how I got
this house. But I can’t work and I disremembers so much. The Welfare gives
me regerlar pay, an’ now an’ then my friends give me a nickel or dime.” Aware
of his precarious economic situation, Harriss solicited from Moore a particular
recollection of the past, and he readily obliged her: “Sometimes when I jes sets
alone an rocks I wonder if my mammy didn’t have it lots easier than I does.”30
Another of Harriss’s invented “slave narratives” echoes Moore’s. It begins:
“‘La! Miss Fannie, what you mean askin’ me what I knows about slavery! Why
I was bawn yeah’s after freedom!’ With a sweeping, upward wave of a slender,
shriveled brown arm to indicate the wide lapse of time between her advent
and the passing of those long ago days. The frail, little body might have been
any age between sixty and a hundred, but feminine vanity rose in excited pro-
test against the implication of age suggested by the question.” The informant,
identified as “Tillie, Caretaker, Cornwallis Headquarters,” is the same person
that Louis Toomer Moore photographed. The two women knew each other
well, as the familiar “Miss Fannie” attests. Harriss served as an officer in the
Wilmington chapter of the North Carolina Society of the Colonial Dames of
America, which rented and interpreted the historic Burgwin-Wright house
where Cornwallis stayed and Tillie lived. In a lengthy aside, Harriss explained
to the reader: “Tillie is one of the landmarks of Wilmington. She was one of the
servants in the house of which she is now caretaker . . . and the heirs have kept
her on allowing her to live in the old slave quarters in the back garden. . . . She
makes the bold statement that she can tell you something about everybody in
Wilmington. That is, ‘eve’body we knows.’” Her emphasized “we” tells us that
Tillie astutely grasped the real purpose of Harriss’s interview.
Although Harriss admitted that it took “several conversations in passing”
to “coax” Tillie’s memory back “to the time when as a very young child she
remembered incidents of slave times which she had heard from her mother,”
the black woman eventually related the following: “My mother belonged to the
Bellamys, an’ lived on their plantation across the river. . . . Did any of the col-
ored people leave after freedom? Of co’se they did’n.’ Were’nt no place to go to.
None of us was ’customed to anybody but rich folks. . . . I never has lived with
none but the bes.’ My mother always said, ‘Tillie, always tie to the bes’ white
folks. Them that has inflooence, ’cause if you gits into trouble they can git you
out.’ I’ve stuck to that. I’ve never had any traffic wid any but the bluebloods and
now look at me. I’m not able to work, but I got a home an’ plenty to eat. An’
I ain’t on no relief, an’ Tillie can sho’ hold her head up.” Like Emeline Moore,
Tillie had no actual memories of slavery. She simply provided what the white
woman wanted to hear: the Bellamys were good masters, slavery was a benefi-
cial institution, not a brutal one, and Tillie’s mother and the other freedmen
willingly stayed put during Reconstruction because they recognized their own
deficiencies. Cannily, Tillie went on to link her mother’s faithfulness to “Mis’
Bellamy” with her own attachment to “bluebloods” like Harriss in 1937. And
Harriss eagerly accepted Tillie’s reassuring tale of persistent black loyalty and
voluntary subordination. Her fabricated slave narratives, then, like Moore’s ar-
ticles and photos, romanticized race relations in a way that vindicated white
supremacy in her own time, as well as in the past.31
The desire to bolster Wilmington’s contemporary reputation led another
group of writers to revisit the revolution of 1898. With this topic, too, we can
see the attempt to minimize in Wilmington’s official narrative the historic use
of violence. William Lord De Rosset’s Pictorial and Historical New Hanover
County and Wilmington, NC (1938), for example, links the “heroism and deter-
mination” of the Cape Fear patriots in the 1760s and 1770s to the “Sufferings of
RIGHT” their descendants endured in the 1860s and 1870s, and then provides
several pages narrating “The Wilmington Race Revolution, The True Story
from Official Records.” That event, he argued, stemmed from “unprincipled
white Republicans” whose “scurrilous influence supplemented with recogni-
tion given the negroes through minor political offices . . . made the darkies im-
pudent and insolent.” Significantly, De Rosset’s account publicly admitted that
the community’s established elites had been planning “the break” from “mis-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 195
government” for “a whole year” and stated that Alex Manly’s editorial merely
brought “the situation to its climax.” Local blacks, in other words, had been
so misled by outsiders, had become so menacing, that Wilmington’s true civic
leaders had to assert themselves for the common good. Thanks to the revolu-
tion of 1898, “white supremacy again became a recognized and acknowledged
fact,” and “the feeling between the races has been friendly and cooperative”
ever since. In fact, he concluded, in 1938, “Leaders of the white element are
interested in the progress and advancement of the negroes of the community
and never turn a deaf ear to any worthy suggestion or appeal of the colored
citizens.”32
Other books of the period advanced a similar interpretation of the massacre
and coup. These included the Works Progress Administration’s North Carolina:
A Guide to the Old North State (1939), which claimed that “carpetbagger rule”
finally ended when “Red Shirts” reluctantly but honorably “redeemed” the city
government in 1898. Designed to promote heritage tourism, the guide included
Wilmington in two different driving tours and enjoyed wide circulation.33
However, the work most revealing of shifting local attitudes was a thirty-two-
page pamphlet titled The Story of the Wilmington Rebellion. Self-published in
1936 by Star journalist Harry Hayden, it acknowledged the illegal conspiracy to
overthrow the city’s duly elected government and attributed the coup to Hugh
MacRae and his eight partners, all of whom it identified by name. In Hayden’s
revisionist telling, the “Secret Nine” were calm, dispassionate civic leaders who,
when blacks began to riot, dutifully stepped in to quell the violence and restore
order. Indeed, Hayden urged 1930s readers, especially the city’s white youth, to
emulate their progressive, noble example.
Widely cited by historians of the 1898 coup and massacre, more so than
Fulton’s and Chesnutt’s works, Hayden’s “authentic account” must be used care-
fully for it, too, is cast as a work of fiction. The setting is an imaginary “mansion
among the pines,” and the narrator is its elderly occupant, a pipe-smoking, for-
mer Confederate gunner named Jessie Blake. In the opening paragraph, Blake
hosts dinner for two young men, both World War I veterans. When one of the
men recounts an embarrassing encounter with an armed “Nigger” trooper in
France, Blake, an “unreconstructed rebel,” decides to regale his guests with
“the inside story” of the 1898 “insurrection” so they may learn the proper re-
sponse to black assertions of equality. Blake begins by describing the humilia-
tions Cape Fear whites endured during Reconstruction, relates conversations
he “overheard” in late 1898, and retrieves a scrapbook containing newspaper
clippings that he reads to them in full. I have validated many of these items
with real texts, such as the “White Man’s Declaration of Independence” and
Alfred Moore Waddell’s Collier’s article. The fictional Blake also cites Woodrow
Wilson’s History of the American People, Harry Thurston Peck’s Twenty Years of
the Republic, and Virginius Dabney’s Liberalism in the South, actual works that
serve to legitimate Blake’s (Hayden’s) “authenticated account” for the 1930s-era
reader. The violence and coup occurred, he explains, because outsiders “had
stirred up racial strife by misleading ignorant Negroes into believing that the
day of social equality with the whites had finally dawned for them.” But, Blake
scoffs, “any fool can see that there was not then, nor is there now, such a thing
as social equality even among the white citizens themselves.” Noting several
recent events, specifically a 1933 Durham conference in favor of black suffrage
and a 1933 lynching in High Point, Blake asserts that “the Negro,” while still of
necessity a “ward” of the white man, “has evolved somewhat higher than we are
inclined to admit” and “is entitled to justice, which he is not getting altogether
in the South.” To solve the contemporary Negro Problem, his guests must free
blacks from their economic and political “bondage” and eschew “the barbarous
practice of lynching.” Otherwise, Blake opined, “vain indeed is the whole idea
of White Supremacy.”34
Many people read the pamphlet, which enjoyed great legitimacy thanks
to its white, well-connected author. Further validation came with positive re-
views by the Journal of Southern History, the Charlotte News, and the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, among other publications. In Wilmington, the Star ran two
articles praising Hayden’s work and highlighting its warm reception locally.
J. Allan Taylor annotated his personal copy in such a way as to convey his
approval; he was even moved to add information Hayden omitted, such as
the statement that “[Federal commissioner] Bunting was captured by Hugh
MacRae and myself at the Beverly Scott house.”35 What Hugh MacRae thought
remains lost to history, but he, too, likely sanctioned Hayden’s arguments, es-
pecially his recommendation to eschew lynching. The Story of the Wilmington
Rebellion nicely supported that era’s white efforts to construct the city as a ra-
cially harmonious place, where civility governed social relations and violence
was an aberrant tactic used only for self-defense.
The timing of Hayden’s pamphlet was no accident. I believe it functioned as
a kind of public rebuttal to an essay written by another North Carolina journal-
ist, Wilbur J. Cash. Between 1929 and 1934, Cash wrote a series of articles for H.
L. Mencken’s American Mercury that skewered progressive North Carolinians’
assertions of a racially, politically, and economically liberal New South. One of
these, “The Mind of the South” (October 1929), won him a publishing contract
with Knopf for the eventual (1941) book of the same name. Another essay,
“Close View of a Calvinist Lhasa” (April 1933), denounced Charlotte as “a cita-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 197
del of bigotry and obscurantism” and castigated Wilmington as an exponent of

the “old kultur.” Wilmingtonians, Cash asserted, were characterized by “great
defeatism”: “The Goth, they know, is upon the Flaminian Way. . . . [T]hey un-
derstand with a great certainty their world will end. Meanwhile, they will not
think on it, they will not fret themselves with contending against the inevitable.
They will doze in the Sun, they will pull their jugs, they will make love to their
charming women, they will cultivate serenity and a kind of elaborate, but still
somehow homespun Tar Heel grace, thanking the inscrutable God that the day
of wrath is at least not yet.”36
When the two texts are read side by side, Hayden’s Wilmingtonians stand
in stark contrast to Cash’s. The “older generation” was never defeated: in 1898,
“the leading white citizens” recognized that Negro Domination was “retarding
the city’s progress” and took decisive action to ensure its vibrant future. No
“Calvinist Babbitt,” Hayden’s Hugh MacRae is a “level headed Scotsman” and
a “prominent citizen who operated a large cotton mill,” a sure sign of progress.
More important, Hayden’s primary character, “Gunner Jessie Blake” is no “sav-
age,” despite Cash’s derisive use of that term. The former Confederate, though
admittedly “unreconstructed,” specifically denounces “the barbarous practice
of lynching,” which he calls a “throwback to barbarianism” and a “reversion
to the primal.” Wilmingtonians were not backwards, but forward thinking,
especially where the needs of “their Negroes” were concerned. After the posi-
tive publicity generated by Hayden’s pamphlet, white elites in Wilmington pro-
moted other examples of their racial civility, especially Williston High School
and Community Hospital, two facilities built for blacks at considerable expense
during an economic crisis.37 But when local blacks demanded real justice in the
1940s, the “savage ideal” alleged by Cash resurfaced.
World War II: “We Are Striving . . . to Give the Negro Equal Protection”
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 offered white elites another opportunity
to revive the local economy and burnish their progressive identity. Specifi-
cally, they boosted Wilmington as the best physical location for a new ship-
yard for the emergency fleet. The newly formed New Hanover Defense Council
included oil and gasoline dealer Bruce Barclay Cameron, now mayor; Hugh
MacRae, still president of the Tidewater Power Company; and Louis Toomer
Moore of the Chamber of Commerce. All three men played significant roles.
MacRae personally courted Homer L. Ferguson, president of Newport News
Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, corresponding with him at length and
urging him to visit. In December 1940, Ferguson finally brought a team to
Wilmington, and the council wined and dined the shipbuilders. Apparently,
the deal was struck in a duck blind on Hog Island in the middle of the Cape
Fear River: Ferguson agreed to open a federally subsidized shipyard just south
of downtown, and local property holders, including the city itself, agreed to
donate the land. By war’s end, the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company’s
(NCSC’s) fifty-seven-acre Wilmington facility had produced 243 vessels, em-
ployed nearly thirty-thousand employees, and pumped an estimated fifty mil-
lion dollars in wages into the local economy.38
Once news of the contract broke, people swarmed into Wilmington look-
ing for work. In 1940, census takers recorded 33,407 inhabitants within the city
limits. About 51 percent of them (17,057) were black. At the peak of shipyard
production in 1943, the urban population had swollen to more than 120,000,
and the number of blacks had increased proportionately. The newcomers
rented every available room they could find, and developers once again rose
to the challenge of housing them. Two federally funded communities resulted:
Hillcrest, an apartment complex, and Maffitt Village, a collection of wood-
frame duplexes. Primarily intended for shipbuilders, these projects were lo-
cated adjacent to the shipyard, and each had a Jim Crow section. Many of the
residents, however, were the families of black and white noncommissioned
officers at Camp Davis, a military training facility located in Pender County
about thirty miles north. The nearest town to Camp Davis had less than 40
occupants, so its 20,000 soldiers regularly made the trip into Wilmington to
partake of urban pleasures. Nearly 6,000 of them were black men. Both they
and their black counterparts in the shipyards found the white-majority com-
munity of Wilmington unwelcoming.39
Racist discrimination at World War II shipyards has been well documented.
Although some black men worked as riveters, welders, riggers, drillers, ship-
wrights, or anglesmiths, most were assigned to perform heavy manual labor.
They received less pay than their white counterparts, toiled in dirty, frequently
unsafe conditions, suffered regular harassment, and had no opportunity to
advance. At the NCSC yard, blacks comprised almost 30 percent of the work-
force. They had segregated locker rooms and cafeterias, but integrated crews
were common, and tensions between the races increased with every day. Soon,
name-calling and verbal threats escalated into fistfights and general brawls.40
One of the first large-scale wartime episodes of violence ostensibly resulted
from local Jim Crow ordinances pertaining to public transportation. Hugh
MacRae’s Tidewater Power Company operated the city’s small fleet of buses.
Each one had only fifteen Jim Crow seats. According to Hurtis Coleman, a
black soldier stationed at Camp Davis, that number was not only too few to ac-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 199
commodate the number of black men who needed to get to camp for duty, but
those seats often filled with white soldiers, who had priority. Any soldier arriv-
ing back at camp late faced the brig, so blacks repeatedly requested additional
service but to no avail. Imagine the scene, then, when Coleman and a group of
black soldiers waiting on a hot summer day in 1941 found themselves stranded
yet again. Angry and frustrated, they overturned several buses stopped at the
corner of Grace and Second in protest. White police arrived on the scene and
brutally quelled the disturbance. Eventually, MacRae’s managers added an-
other bus to the Camp Davis route and dedicated it for black use only, but
discrimination, hostility, and violence toward black soldiers only increased.41
No sooner had the bus fracas ended than an even more violent confrontation
occurred. It took place on a humid August night, after a fight at a “juke joint”
in Brooklyn spilled out into the streets. The Star blamed a group of “drunken”
black soldiers, who, it said, went on a spree, knocking “boys off bicycles and
beating every civilian in sight.” When the white police arrived, the neighbor-
hood exploded into a “riot” in which some three hundred to four hundred
“uncontrollable” blacks participated. From the size of the estimated crowd, it
must have included a large number of civilians. In the end, nine blacks (five
soldiers and four civilians) received injuries severe enough to warrant hospi-
talization. And oral interviews with black soldiers indicate regular episodes of
white-on-black violence as the months passed.42
The situation in Wilmington reflected general trends in the South and in
North Carolina: nearly every white community in proximity to a military train-
ing camp for black soldiers responded with organized racist violence; in some
places, such as Durham and Monroe, the level of white brutality generated
national attention. Deeply concerned, University of North Carolina sociologist
Howard Odum initiated a research project in the summer of 1942 to explore
the problem. He concluded in his now-famous book, Race and Rumors of Race,
that white violence stemmed partly from revived fears of miscegenation. As the
draft proceeded, many whites insisted that black men were innately incapable
of self-control, would never be made fit for battle, and could not be trusted to
obey their white officers. Rumors related to this stereotype held that uniforms
emboldened black lust, misleading the “brutes” who wore them into thinking
they were entitled to white women, who wartime propaganda portrayed as
prizes. Odum also cited numerous rumors concerning “uppity” black civilians,
who whites thought to be hoarding ammunition and gathering weapons. With
white men overseas, maids and cooks supposedly expected “a white women
in every [black] kitchen by Christmas,” while stevedores and sharecroppers
wanted one “for every bedroom.”43 Just as their ancestors did in the past, then,
members of the “Greatest Generation” imagined a general black insurrection

and employed violence in the early 1940s to suppress it before it began.
Fueling white fears of a domestic race war was a very real increase in black
civil rights activism. As historian Timothy Tyson has argued, the rhetoric of
the war generated a “global revolution in racial consciousness.” A. Philip Ran-
dolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the
foremost advocates for civil rights at that time, connected the quest for free-
dom abroad with struggles at home, declaring: “No clear thinking Negro can
long afford to ignore our Hitlers here in America.” In North Carolina, an anti-
union state, the NAACP led the push for full citizenship. During the war years,
the number of branches doubled and membership statewide rose to nearly
ten thousand. Wilmington’s black civic leaders revitalized their chapter in late
August 1941 by organizing public meetings to protest white police officers’
brutal response to the Brooklyn melee. Thousands of outraged black voices
demanded that the city hire “Negro policemen” for the “Negro districts.” They
also demanded equal access to Greenfield Lake and other municipal facilities,
which were restricted to whites only.44
At the same time, black workers at the NCSC shipyard actively participated
in a union drive. Under the auspices of the Wagner Act, representatives of
the Congress of International Organizations came to Wilmington in early 1941
to fight unfair labor practices, including wage discrimination. A black ship-
builder vividly recalled the labor conflicts, saying “Wilmington always wanted
to keep wages down. No, you talk about a Right to Work Law, that’s just to keep
wages down. You do all the work, but you get less wages. And so Wilmington
has always been against organized labor.”45 His choice of words is instructive.
To his mind, it was not just the NCSC but Wilmington itself that oppressed
black workers. Like other black residents at other times, he knew that a small,
integrated group of white political, business, and civic leaders controlled the
city, and he anthropomorphized Wilmington as a result.
Among this elite circle, Bruce Barclay Cameron wielded great influence. Of
Scottish ancestry, he descended from a ship captain who settled in Wilmington
around 1798. One of the wealthiest men in the state, thanks to his oil-jobbing
business, he served as mayor in the 1940s and as a director of NCSC. Like most
local businessmen, he deplored the thought of organized labor and fought back
against the CIO by creating a company union called the Cape Fear Shipbuild-
ing Association. More important, he hired Richard Shew “to get rid of all CIO
men.” Under Shew’s direction, white men coerced black men with threats of
dismissal, blacklisting, and forced expulsion from Wilmington. When those
tactics failed, they resorted to physical violence. Testimony at a trial in 1942
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 201
revealed that CFSA organizers had been given “free reign by the company”
and that Cameron offered substantial rewards to “every person participating
in efforts to keep the CIO out of the yard.”46
As local race relations deteriorated and negative publicity increased, white
officials at the shipyard decided to name the next vessel for John Merrick,
founder of the North Carolina Mutual Association, and they urged Governor
J. Melville Broughton to use his christening speech to send a clear message to
black listeners. Dozens of black guests, invited just for this special, commemo-
rative event, crowded around the shipway. With Merrick’s daughter, Martha
Donnell, standing close by, Broughton praised the former slave’s many accom-
plishments, but he quickly shifted to Merrick’s philosophy of life, which he
illustrated with a direct quote: “In the same speech, mindful of the fact that
there were radical Negro leaders in his day even as there are today, more intent
on stirring up racial strife than in building constructively, Merrick said, “Now,
don’t the writers of the race jump on the writer and try to solve my problem.
Mine is solved. I solved mine by learning to be courteous to those that courtesy
was due, working and trying to save and properly appropriate to what I made.”
Broughton wanted contemporary blacks to “be courteous” to whites, a def-
erential posture he considered essential to ending racial strife and “building
constructively.” He either missed or ignored the views that Merrick actually
held. The “be courteous” quote came from a speech that black attorney R. Mc-
Cants Andrews had included in his popular 1921 biography of Merrick; it was
the only written example of Merrick’s thought that survived, Andrews said,
and it dated to the 1890s, a time when the “Negro had not yet developed a
race consciousness. . . . He was so thoroly [sic] dominated and overshadowed
that nothing on earth gave him a feeling of security.” The reader, he cautioned,
“should judge it according to the time and circumstances,” not as an object
lesson. Someone, Broughton or one of his aides, extracted the quote without
concern for either Andrews’s interpretation or Merrick’s actual reputation for
activism. Indeed, after the “courtesy” reference, Broughton never mentioned
Merrick, the man, again.47
The real subject of Broughton’s speech was whites’ violence against blacks.
“Forty five years ago, in the city of Wilmington where this launching is being
held, there occurred the most serious race riot in the history of North Caro-
lina.” Since that time, a “record of racial harmony has been made in this state
unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled in any state in the American union.” In
fact, whites in Durham had viciously attacked the majority-black Hayti neigh-
borhood just three months earlier, as the audience well knew. The governor did
acknowledge that “delicate situations” existed in some places, but he attributed
them to groups “who are seeking to use the war emergency to advance theories
and philosophies, which if carried to their logical conclusion, would result only
in a mongrel race (a condition abhorrent alike to right-thinking citizens and
leaders of both races).” Broughton’s language cleverly positions segregationists
and accommodationists as “right-thinkers” and their opponents as “wrong-
thinkers” who could safely be ignored.
He repeatedly used the pronoun “we” to include his white constituents and
to exclude everyone else, especially when he proposed his solution for wartime
race problems: “We are striving in North Carolina to give the Negro equal
protection under the law, equal educational advantages, the full benefits of
public health, agricultural advancement, decent housing conditions and full
and free economic opportunity. This is our honest and determined purpose;
and it is being carried out.” In this schema, blacks were not part of “we,” nor
were outsiders or newcomers. Only “we” would determine the needs and wants
of “our” blacks and provide what “we” considered best for everyone. Broughton
then returned his audience’s attention to the business at hand: “In the launch-
ing of this ship . . . it is fervently hoped that the life and character of this great
man may be brought freshly to the minds of both races; that in the light of his
wholesome philosophy and successful career we may find a path of harmony,
success, victory, and peace through mutual respect and cooperation.”48 And
with a blast of champagne, the white-figured, steel-encased memory of John
Merrick slid into the river.
As they exited the shipyard, black Wilmingtonians who attended the
launching learned what would happen to those who resisted the racial status
quo. At the gates, they encountered a large, agitated group of blacks just exit-
ing a city bus. The latecomers had boarded the bus much earlier, intending
to attend the launching, but they were held captive for over an hour as white
police officers brutally beat one of their number for allegedly violating the Jim
Crow ordinances governing seats. They described how Mrs. Mamie William-
son boarded in Brooklyn and took the only empty seat right behind the driver,
J. D. Holloway. At the next stop, a white man entered, and Holloway told her
to get up. When Williamson insisted “that she had not done anything but that
if the driver would give her money back she would get off and get another
bus,” he drove to the police station, where two officers boarded “and with the
driver’s help” threw her bodily from the bus. Holloway then locked the door,
forcing the rest of the passengers, all of whom were black, to watch. “Women
and children screamed at the top of their lungs” as the policemen assaulted
Williamson, first as she lay on the ground, then standing as other officers held
her arms. They finally dragged her inside the police station, leaving the pris-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 203
oners on the bus for nearly forty-five minutes, until an officer “with a drawn
revolver” boarded and ordered the driver to take them to the shipyard.49 What
had happened to Williamson next they did not know. Given the assault they
had witnessed, they feared the worst.
In the days to come, black Wilmingtonians learned her fate. Williamson
engaged Aaron Goldberg, an attorney with the Wilmington NAACP, to assist
with her defense. The case received significant coverage in the press, and black-
authored accounts differed sharply from white ones, especially in the way they
described Williamson’s mistreatment. In response to the publicity, Governor
Broughton asked Mayor Bruce Cameron to investigate whether the police had
acted improperly. Cameron dutifully supplied a copy of the police report, which
had been filed by the two offending white officers, N. J. Wolff and William Leitch,
and other official documents, all of which blamed Williamson and downplayed
the violence. Cameron also offered his own summary: “she was fighting and
kicking and when she attempted to bite Mr. Wolfe [sic] on the hand he slapped
her.” Officer Leitch “slapped” her, too, causing her “to lose her bridgework in a
scuffle,” but “they used only such force as was necessary to subdue the prisoner
and keep her in custody.”50 At trial, the police stuck by this narrative despite
nearly thirty black witnesses who testified that they beat Williamson “unmerci-
fully.” Striving to give equal protection under the law, just as Broughton’s speech
decreed, the judge convicted her of multiple counts, from violating the Jim
Crow ordinance to resisting arrest, then suspended her two-year sentence. The
leniency, he explained, owed to her “previous good behavior.”51
“City of a Million Azaleas”
After World War II ended, Wilmingtonians futilely sought a return to “nor-

malcy.” As the shipyards closed, black and white workers left the community
in droves, and unemployment soared among those who remained. Many busi-
nessmen pointed optimistically to the new Port of Wilmington, located several
miles downriver; the state assembly, acting once again in concert with Cape
Fear boosters, had created the North Carolina Ports Authority in 1945 specifi-
cally to increase international commerce. The Atlantic Coastline Railroad had
expanded its operations, too, but fertilizer production and cotton exports, the
city’s economic mainstays, had declined sharply.
Meanwhile, white soldiers returned home to their families, churches, and
workplaces and found that domestic relations in Wilmington had shifted.
Black and white women alike found employment during the war, and an in-
crease in textile manufacturing locally ensured their continued presence in
the workforce, where they competed with men for skilled work. Although the
wartime population rapidly declined, many newcomers decided to put down
roots. Civic leaders staged several public celebrations to honor local veterans
and reunify the community around common values; however, persistent racial,
economic, and social tensions made them disconcerting events. Black veterans
felt especially frustrated. Having fought for democracy overseas, they resented
continued discrimination and oppression at home.
With the aid of a new, all-black VFW post, a handful of activists organized
to assert black civil rights on behalf of the larger black community. Led by
Rev. Rufus Irving Boone, pastor of Central Baptist Church, and Tom Jervay,
now publisher of the city’s black-owned newspaper, the Wilmington Journal,
the Negro Citizens’ Council blocked the closing of Maffitt Village, a federal
housing project built for black shipbuilders, won the appointment of a black
administrator to the Community Hospital board, and pressed for increased
voter registration. White residents initially supported these efforts—celebrated
them, even—as proof of their own liberalism and progressivism, but their pa-
tronage quickly abated. Boone, for example, periodically entered whites-only
restaurants to see if the staff would serve him (they often did). Then one night,
he awoke to a flaming cross on his lawn. What historian Jason Sokol found
throughout the Southland applied to Wilmington, too: “A peculiar concep-
tion of individual freedom animated many white Southerners—the freedom to
segregate oneself by race, regardless of what others desired.” Indeed, it seemed
that World War II had been a battle for that specific liberty.52
Worried about declining revenues and rising black activism, Wilmington’s
white leaders devised yet another way to boost the port city: an Azalea Festival.
According to local folklore, Dr. W. Houston Moore got the idea one April day
in 1934, when he noted the dazzling azalea bushes planted at Greenfield Lake
by the WPA. In fact, the city of Charleston had launched its Azalea Festival that
very same year, and the nine-day event was well publicized. Wilmington civic
leaders tabled the scheme during the Depression and war years, but it gained
new purchase in 1946, when a young veteran named Hugh Morton volunteered
to help the aged Moore achieve his vision. First, Morton raised enough money
to plant 175,000 azaleas around the lake and along Community Drive, which
connected it to the city. He then convened an Azalea Festival Committee. They
chose April 1948 as their target date, elected Morton the festival’s first presi-
dent, and adopted a new marketing slogan for Wilmington, the “City of a Mil-
lion Azaleas.” Soon, azaleas blossomed everywhere. Morton even encouraged
homeowners to do their part by planting bushes in their yards and gardens.
He cultivated a different kind of beauty when he recruited actress Jacqueline
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 205
White to be the Azalea Queen. Thousands of people watched as she opened the
first festival on Thursday, April 9, attended her coronation at Lumina Pavilion
on Friday night, and turned out for a grand parade on Saturday. With its hotels,
shops, and restaurants overflowing with tourists, Wilmington seemed once
again poised for prosperity.53
No one felt more gratified than Hugh Morton. Now one of North Caro-
lina’s most famous citizens, he was also Hugh MacRae’s grandson. As a college
student, he made a name for himself photographing university events for the
school paper and the yearbook, and during the war, he served as a newsreel
cameraman with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. But instead of a career in photo-
journalism, Morton came home to work at the Oleander Development Com-
pany, one of the many MacRae family businesses. He also took a special inter-
est in the old Linville Improvement Company. When his grandfather proposed
to sell the vast MacRae holdings around the Linville resort to the National
Park Service, Morton intervened: “all the timber on a 5,500 acre tract will not
yield as much income as several rich crops of tourists,” he argued. Just as Mac-
Rae had extended the streetcar system out to Wrightsville Beach, so Morton
would build a switchback road up the famed Grandfather Mountain. Just as
MacRae manufactured a lure called Lumina, which he placed at the end of the
line, Morton imagined a jaw-dropping view from a man-made bridge at the
summit. Realizing this dream, Morton knew, required considerable business
acumen, good money sense, and a charismatic personality. The Azalea Festival,
which had made a nice profit, showed that Morton had all three.54
The festival became a source of great place-based pride to many residents,
especially the white civic leaders who created it. For example, when asked in the
1990s if there was “any particular phase of Wilmington that you have found an
interest in,” Kenneth Sprunt initially demurred, saying, “I have interest in a great
many things and I’m afraid I’m a Jack-of-all-trades and a master of absolutely
none.” But then he immediately said, “one of the first things I did from a civic
standpoint was the first treasurer of the Azalea Festival. . . . Henry [Rehder] was
very active in all that and Mr. Houston Moore whose idea it was to have the
Azalea Festival, was active for a little while until he died. Anyway we had a lot
of fun doing that. I think we put on a good show, I really do. It was a decent fine
show.”55 Hannah Block felt a similar pride about her contributions. A former
New York City nightclub singer, Block came to Wilmington in 1936 when she
married into a prominent Jewish family. She soon earned acclaim in her own
right as organizer of the Miss North Carolina Pageant, which took place at Lu-
mina every year. “You know what the secret was?” she asked. “Teaching them
the good old Southern charm, softness. . . . That’s everything that they won on.
But of course, they had to be pretty.” Because of Block’s knack for grooming
young women, Hugh Morton recruited her to direct the Azalea Festival beauty
contest, coach the Azalea Queen, and outfit and train the Queen’s Court. “Beu-
lah Meiers and I decided to elaborate on the [beauty] pageant. . . . [W]e wanted
something elegant and very southern so she would design and make the gowns.
We would bring in a famous star from Hollywood and the girls that were with
her were college queens. . . . That is how we built it up. It was elegant.”56
Still one of the port city’s biggest moneymakers, the Azalea Festival suc-
ceeded because its first organizers shared a common vision. Like their counter-
parts in New Orleans, who marketed the “Crescent City” as a desirable tourist
destination, they developed sophisticated new strategies of place promotion,
invented new traditions, reduced the complexity of local culture to a few
deeply resonant, mythic themes, and altered urban spaces into entertaining
sites for the consumption of southern culture and identity.57 Their timing was
perfect. At the end of the 1940s, the American economy entered a boom phase.
Even blue-collar families had the means to buy suburban homes with futur-
istic appliances and sleek automobiles that zoomed them away on vacations.
Every year, thousands of them visited the Cape Fear, where ancient live oaks,
antebellum mansions, and sandy beaches offered an antidote to the emergent
Populuxe aesthetic. Wilmington’s civic leaders expanded the existing tourism
infrastructure to meet the demand. Besides more hotels, motels, and restau-
rants, they erected billboards along major highways, created a Visitors’ Bureau,
and published new guidebooks to local attractions.
Over the years, they revised the festival to highlight Wilmington’s most dis-
tinctive characteristics, and historic photographs once again provide compel-
ling evidence of persistent communal values. In fact, the hundreds of publicity
pictures taken during the late 1940s and early 1950s reveal four themes that
defined the city’s “authentic” culture for tourists and locals alike. The first is
beautiful, genteel, white women. This theme is especially evident in the floats,
a majority of which carried female riders garbed as southern belles or wearing
bathing suits. A second, related theme concerns brave white men who defend
our liberties. White veterans wearing VFW hats, for example, drove the tractors
that pulled the floats; military men marched in ranks in the parade; the USO
and US Army Reserve had dedicated floats of their own; and armed National
Guardsmen escorted the Queen and her court. Another prominent motif is
the leisurely, comfortable lifestyle of this location; it is represented by floats ad-
vertising the wide range of consumer products available, including national
and local brands (Chesterfield cigarettes, GE appliances, Sylvania televisions,
Buttercup ice cream, Culler’s Hickory Pit barbeque) as well as services (Wilm-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 207
ington College, Rehder’s Florists) and references to outdoor activities (boating,

swimming, sunbathing). Finally, the parade demonstrated community pride
and strong civic leadership as seen in the presence of the Civitan Club, Kiwanis,
Optimists, Jaycees, and Lions Club, among other organizations.58 Although
obviously modified, the motifs displayed in the Azalea Festival correlate nicely
to the traits established in the colonial era (geographical boosterism, pride in
a revolutionary heritage, deference to elite leaders, and white supremacy).
In keeping with the postwar era’s space-age ethos, festival organizers stra-
tegically simplified references to Wilmington’s colonial and Confederate past.
In choosing a female celebrity for Azalea Queen, for example, they searched
for someone capable of symbolizing elite, white southern womanhood. Long
after 1948, when actress Jacqueline White served as the inaugural Queen, Hugh
Morton held her up as the “ideal”; words used to describe White—“beautiful,”
“charming,” “poised,” “gracious”—invoke the myth of the antebellum south-
ern lady. One of Morton’s photographic portraits of White shows her seated
beneath a massive live oak on the grounds of Orton, “King” Roger Moore’s
plantation. Dressed in a full-skirted, tiny-waisted dress, she stares off into the
distance, dwarfed by the ancient tree and transfixed by the history surround-
ing her. During the actual festival, however, White actively played the role of
southern hostess, opening the flower show, greeting dignitaries, and presiding
over the parade. Like the plantation mistress of old, the Queen had to radiate
southern femininity and hospitality. To reinforce her function as a paradigm,
in 1949 the festival committee added an Azalea Princess and an entire court of
young women chosen from local high schools. Dressed in long gowns, wear-
ing crinolines, and carrying baskets of flowers or parasols, their costumes and
deportment, as Hannah Black admitted, deliberately suggested the continuity
of female gender roles from 1860 to the present.
As scholars have shown, constructions of femininity never occur in isola-
tion. White womanhood in the mid-century South still required the opposing
presence of idealized white manhood, at a minimum, but also the denigration
of black femininity and masculinity. Thus, white men are plainly visible in fes-
tival photographs, where they are overwhelmingly associated with male civic
groups or the military and thus linked to historic conceptions of male citizen-
ship, chivalry, honor, and national identity. Black men and women, by contrast,
are absent from images of festival participants, and very few can be seen even
among the bystanders. Notwithstanding its mass audience and various mod-
ern, forward-looking elements, the Azalea Festival overwhelmingly affirmed
white Wilmington’s commitment to uphold traditional southern hierarchies of
class, gender, and race. (See figure 4.6.)
Figure 4.6. Parade float carrying the 1952 Azalea Queen and her court. Note the full-skirted, crinolined
gowns and leghorn-style hats, evocative of the Old South. Note also the armed escort in foreground and
the predominantly white audience. Like other parades, pageants, and festivals, the Azalea Festival used
familiar symbols of cultural heritage, but it repackaged them to suit the modern tourist. Courtesy of
New Hanover County Public Library.
Several photos suggest that race relations especially lingered as a source

of white concern. Figure 4.7 shows the official 1953 Kiwanis Club float, which
featured four men in blackface, the “Kiwanis Minstrels.” One of them wears
a top hat and a bold, yellow plaid suit; the other three wear outlandish red-
and-white striped suits with oversized red bow ties. Confident that viewers
would recognize their minstrel characters, the white men publicly portrayed
blacks as ignorant buffoons tolerable only for their entertainment value. The
Kiwanians’ own place in society, derived by way of cultural inversion, is as
the community’s enlightened governors. That such a prominent organization
represented itself this way confirms the prevalence of racist attitudes among
white civic leaders and their conviction that audience members (whom they
imagined as white) shared their views. And this was not an isolated occur-
rence, for the Kiwanians repeated their minstrelsy in other years. At a time
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 209
Figure 4.7. In this photo, the Kiwanis Minstrels perform for the crowd during the 1953 Azalea Festival
Parade. Using racially demeaning caricatures that date back to the antebellum era, the three men in
stripes represent the Interloctor, Bones, and Tambo (holding a tambourine), with the top-hatted man
representing the dandified, free black character, Zip Coon. In addition to blackface, the men wear wigs.
Although in decline, professional minstrel shows continued to appear in many communities, including
Wilmington, through the civil rights era. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
of rising black activism, they and other whites sought reassurance in racist
caricatures from the past.
“An Atmosphere of Hypocrisy”
The city’s white-constructed reputation for racial harmony received a serious

challenge in 1951, when Helen Edmonds, a historian and professor at North
Carolina College, an all-black institution, published The Negro and Fusion Poli-
tics in North Carolina. Using rigorous social science methodologies, her work
refuted white claims of “Negro Domination” in the 1890s with precise data
showing low levels of black office-holding and voting. Though the Wilmington
revolution garnered only seventeen pages of text, her larger argument left only
one explanation for the violence: racism. One imagines Louis Toomer Moore
spluttering with rage as he read the book. In a series of scathing letters to her
editor at the University of North Carolina Press, the president of the univer-
sity, prominent newspaper editors, and politicians, Moore blasted her version
of the past. He claimed that the events of 1898 had been “forgotten” by both
blacks and whites, called her work “a calumniation against this community,”
and declared she had “resurrected ill-will, misunderstanding, resentment, and
eventual bloodshed.” Moore also cast aspersions on Edmonds’s credentials,
dismissing her as “a Negress,” “a female writer,” and an outsider. Other Wilm-
ingtonians shared Moore’s concerns. Professional scholars, however, uniformly
praised her work. A respected white historian of North Carolina’s free blacks,
Rosser H. Taylor, especially recommended her “excellent account of the Wilm-
ington race riot.” As a consequence, Moore’s campaign proved little more than
the depth of his underlying sensitivity. “Racial harmony and good will still
prevail here,” he insisted. In fact, there was deep suspicion and mistrust below
the surface of 1950s Wilmington race relations.59
Whites’ relegation of blacks to the lowest paid, most dangerous, and de-
meaning menial jobs particularly belied any claims about “good will.” In 1950,
blacks comprised almost 36 percent (16,112) of the city’s 45,043 residents, but
notwithstanding their minority status, they formed the majority of families liv-
ing in poverty. Consider these sobering statistics: The median income for black
households was $1,072 compared to $2,241 for white ones. Fully 80 percent of
all blacks lived in households with incomes less than $2,000 per year, and 44
percent made do on less than $1,000. Vinder and Dorothy Chadwick’s situa-
tion was very typical for this decade. The family resided in the Jervay Housing
Project on South Eighth Street, where they raised four children. Their daugh-
ter, Rosa, born in 1948, delicately conveyed their struggle: “Neither of them
finished high school and my mother worked as a domestic for 75 cents an hour
and my dad worked for years at Municipal Golf Course. . . . So they worked
hard and they, it made a good living for us and, like I said, I never felt deprived,
but yet I felt like, you know, if I could finish high school, if I could go to college,
then, you know, I could be a professional. . . . [O]f course, we all want more for
our children than we have for ourselves and they felt the same way and though
they didn’t finish, they pushed.” To help make ends meet, Chadwick worked
after school, as did many of her peers. Meadow George Lemon III also went
to a job after classes at Williston ended. Lemon lived in Brooklyn with his
father, whose gambling problem kept the household teetering on the edge of
financial ruin. The tall, lanky youth began to consider basketball a way out of
poverty. Coach E. A. “Spike” Corbin at Williston and Earl Jackson at the Boys’
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 211
Club helped Lemon with his game; in 1952 he graduated, tried out for, and
successfully joined the Harlem Globetrotters. Most blacks, however, viewed
education as the path to economic security—if not for themselves, then for
their children.60
Dr. Hubert Eaton was by far Wilmington’s most vocal advocate for black
access to education. A native of Fayetteville, he was chief of staff at the segre-
gated Community Hospital. An avid tennis player, he won numerous national
trophies in the 1940s and 1950s, and the racism he experienced in the white-
dominated sport led him to sponsor a talented young athlete, Althea Gibson,
who resided with his family, attended Williston Industrial High School, and
broke the color line at Wimbledon in 1951. But Eaton did not confine his activ-
ism to athletics. He had long been active in the NAACP and, with the local
chapter’s support, he filed several suits to fight discrimination against black
patients and medical personnel at the whites-only James Walker Memorial
Hospital. His most famous civil rights effort, however, was the fight for school
equalization.61
Wilmington had more and better public schools for black youths than many
communities of its size. Yet these schools were older, less well-equipped, and
far more crowded than the white ones. Public elementary-aged children at-
tended Peabody, Williston Graded School, or the James B. Dudley School.
Older children had one choice only: Williston Industrial High School. Built
in 1938, it remained an important source of communal black pride despite nu-
merous problems stemming from inadequate, unequal public funding. Princi-
pal Booker T. Washington, named for the Wizard of Tuskegee but no relation,
presided over a dedicated staff of intelligent, talented men and women. Wil-
liston teachers taught more students per capita than their white colleagues,
worked longer hours (besides more students, they considered regular home
visits with parents essential to student success), and earned far less money.
According to alumni like Lethia Hankins, teachers took pains to combat white
supremacy by promoting self-discipline and self-assurance: “We were taught
that at Williston, you must excel, you have no choice. You have got to if you
want do anything better than what you’re doing now. So we grew up with that
[belief]: You’ve got to do it.” Reinforcing that message, academic subjects in-
cluded Chaucer and chemistry along with carpentry and auto repair. Despite
their access to a rigorous liberal arts curriculum, students had no library on site
and used old textbooks and equipment handed down from their white peers.
They even caught their own frogs and crayfish for dissection in biology.62
Frustrated by these conditions, which his own children endured, Eaton and
a colleague, Dr. Daniel Roane, worked with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund
to replicate the winning strategy behind Blue v. Durham Board of Education,

the January 1951 case that compelled the Bull City to equalize black and white
schools. For several months, Dr. John T. Hoggard, chair of the all-white New
Hanover Board of Education, rebuffed the NAACP’s claims, dismissing Eaton
and Roane as outsiders and insisting that “our Negroes” liked their schools just
fine. But when lead attorney Oliver P. Hill threatened to file suit in federal court,
Hoggard agreed to hold a public meeting to gauge the true extent of black par-
ents’ dissatisfaction. Eaton later said the proceedings suffered from “an over-
abundance of politeness” and “an atmosphere of hypocrisy.” At one point, City
Attorney Cyrus D. Hogue Jr. took the floor and chastised Eaton and Roane for
disrupting “53 years of good race relations.” Hogue knew of the 1898 revolution
from his father, who had been a participant, and he understood how collec-
tive memories of violence always floated just below the surface of daily life in
Wilmington. “However innocuous his intention,” Eaton explained, “the state-
ment was inescapably interpreted as an effort to intimidate—to warn that it [an
organized massacre] could happen again.” The NAACP suit proceeded anyway,
and Eaton and Roane won. The official investigation that summer proved that
New Hanover’s white schools received far more resources than the black ones.
The county school board eventually approved a three-million-dollar bond issue
for school improvements, with one million earmarked for black schools.63
Buoyed by this success, which occurred three years before the Brown de-
cision, Wilmington’s black activists pushed for additional changes, but their
efforts were often stymied by the inability of black newcomers and oldtimers
to agree on strategy. The coordinated, mass movement that we associate with
the civil rights era did not yet exist. In the early 1950s, Wilmington’s black resi-
dents, like their counterparts in Greensboro, Birmingham, and Baton Rouge,
divided into competing factions. On one extreme were certain pillars of the
community, often descendants of old, elite black families, who preferred not
to challenge Jim Crow. Unable to envision success and perhaps afraid to lose
the privileges they had gained, they were often intractable. A larger and more
influential group, which included several prominent Old Wilmingtonians
among them, followed the North Carolina Way. That is, they advocated for
reform but allowed white civic leaders to set the pace and scope of change.
Rev. Edwin Kirton, an Episcopal priest who had grown up in Jamaica, led this
bloc; though seen by whites as an outsider at first, he achieved prominence
through his ecclesiastical relationships with white Episcopalians, whom he
trusted and respected. Other moderate activists included Rev. Irving Boone,
pastor of Central Baptist Church; Booker T. Washington, principal of Wil-
liston Industrial High School; Robert Chestnut, who owned a service station
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 213
and auto supply store; and Crummell Howe McDonald, grandson of builder
Alfred Howe and principal of Gregory School. The radical activists included
Burdell Harvey, a postal worker who led the local NAACP chapter, and Rev. J.
Ray Butler, minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Both men had close ties to the
working poor. They understood this population’s fear of retaliation and knew
the North Carolina Way merely perpetuated white supremacy. Radicals like
Eaton and Roane, by contrast, had little contact with the mass of ordinary black
Wilmingtonians and often reviled them, blaming their seeming “passivity” on
“the ghosts of 1898.” These divisions within the black community, exacerbated
by Wilmington’s long heritage of racist violence, strongly shaped the course of
events here.64
In many communities, the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion ruling focused attention on desegregation, but once it became clear in
North Carolina that matters would remain in the hands of local school boards,
people in Wilmington focused on another, more pressing problem—the econ-
omy. In 1955, officials of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad announced plans to
move their corporate headquarters to Jacksonville, Florida, which it considered
a more strategic location. There were nearly fifteen hundred ACL employees in
Wilmington with an annual payroll of nearly seven million dollars. The loss of
so many jobs was a major blow. Hundreds of white employees transferred to
Jacksonville over the five-year relocation period, including many of the city’s
middle- and upper-class whites. Hundreds more whites eventually found jobs
in other cities. Meanwhile, there was an immediate and disproportionate loss
of unskilled black jobs. Unlike white executives and skilled mechanics, black
men in the railroad yards and black women in domestic service had few op-
tions for reemployment. Many black households were still reeling from the re-
cent closing of Alexander Sprunt and Company’s Wilmington complex, which
had employed hundreds of stevedores, draymen, and compress workers. Fertil-
izer, creosote, and other mainstays of the local economy had also declined. By
the end of the decade, these disruptions began to fuel a new kind of conflict
between the races, but this time, the result was a surge in direct action by black
residents. The “politeness” and “hypocrisy” deplored by Eaton were coming to
an end.65
The mass media aided the transformation in local blacks’ sense of racial
consciousness. In keeping with the postwar consumer culture, Wilmington
stores sold televisions for as little as a ten-dollar down payment. By the mid-
1950s, fully 80 percent of New Hanover County residents had access to a set or
owned one.66 With people across the nation, they watched in amazement as
the Montgomery bus boycott unfolded, as Martin Luther King Jr. and members
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) explained passive

resistance, and as white opposition to civil rights grew increasingly violent. In
2006, Rosa Chadwick Handley recalled how the flickering images she saw af-
fected her awareness of racial oppression: “I remember the, uh, the Little Rock
situation and watching that on TV and, uh, feeling, uh, scared really, you know,
like, you know, how could this happen, you know, is this gonna happen here
and what are we supposed to do when—you know, how are we supposed to
act? So it- it- it- it impacted me really negatively because it was kind of a fear
that, you know, something could change where I was.”67 Only nine years old
in 1957, the adult Handley still struggled to put into words the emotions she
felt upon seeing white soldiers barricading a school and white adults jeering
at black children like her. Through television and newsreels, she and dozens of
other black Wilmingtonians began to identify with blacks in other places, to
see themselves in similar situations, and to imagine a collectivity they had not
necessarily seen before.
Handley’s vivid memory of that broadcast in 1957 affirms the power of what
Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memories.” Violent moving pictures can not
only cause a person to react physically (covering the eyes, squirming, recoil-
ing), but they imprint themselves on the brain through retinal object persis-
tence. Furthermore, the visceral discomfort has two interesting psychological
results: first, it can produce a sense of empathy in a viewer by allowing him or
her to experience virtually what the on-screen person felt; second, if the reac-
tion produced by the virtual experience is strong enough, the viewer may take
on a personal, deeply felt memory of the on-screen event even though he or she
was not actually present. Handley’s interview acknowledges this process in a
single, seminal sentence: “Is this gonna happen here and what are we supposed
to do when—.” She began with a question (“Is this gonna happen here”), but
answered it herself by posing a second, even more terrifying question (“and
what are we supposed to do when—”), one so horrible to contemplate that she
stopped speaking mid-sentence. For Handley and many of her neighbors, the
jolt of self-recognition that came from watching television was as great and
traumatic as if they had been at Central High themselves. In recording the ex-
istence of a nationwide system to suppress black resistance to white supremacy,
the mass media conjured anew black Wilmingtonians’ localized vulnerability.
With regular access to newspapers, radio, and television, black youths at
Williston avidly discussed their views on national civil rights events in classes,
in hallways, at club meetings and athletic games. In 1958, a small group of
black teenagers entered the public library downtown and demanded equal
access to the facility. Another group participated in a demonstration against
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 215
discriminatory hiring practices at the Wilmington Pepsi bottling plant. These

and other exercises in civil disobedience made a powerful impression on sev-
enteen-year-old Joseph A. McNeil. At the time, McNeil was president of the
Catholic Youth Organization at St. Thomas Catholic Church and a member
of the city’s NAACP Youth Council, which was led by fellow parishioner and
NAACP chapter leader, Burdell Harvey. McNeil and his Williston classmates
imagined a different racial future. At their graduation ceremony that May, they
pointedly refused to shake Superintendent Herrick M. Roland’s hand as they
crossed the stage. “I left the community [to attend North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical College] with these thoughts in my head: I am a leader,” he re-
called. Eight months later, on February 1, 1960, McNeil changed U.S. history by
sitting down at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter with three friends
and ordering a cup of coffee.68
Over the next six months, blacks like McNeil staged sit-ins in sixty-nine
communities in thirteen states, including North Carolina. The phenomenon
was not nearly as spontaneous as it appeared at the time. As members of their
hometown NAACP Youth Councils, the Greensboro Four knew that sit-ins
had taken place in St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and several other cities in the
1950s, including nearby Durham. They knew this, moreover, from their previ-
ous interactions with an experienced direct-action organizer, Floyd McKissick,
a prominent Durham lawyer and leader of the statewide NAACP Youth Divi-
sion. McKissick not only gave McNeil and his classmates legal advice, he con-
tacted black civil rights activists in movement centers across North Carolina,
South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. In each town, black college students at-
tended formal training and strategy sessions. Black churches provided crucial
support and organization. Members hosted meetings, organized phone trees,
made coffee and sandwiches, raised money for bail, housed out-of-town sup-
porters, and even participated in the sit-ins. They succeeded in large measure
because of the replicable systems used.69
The Wilmington sit-ins began in March 1960. Years later, Bernard Robin-
son recalled his participation: “cars would come pick us up from the churches
and drive us downtown. . . . Put us out around a restaurant that we were going
to quote-unquote attack.” In 1960, Robinson was thirteen and living with his
grandmother, Viola, who worked at Pickert Sporting Goods. He recounted
how she came home one day and told him, “Mr. Pickert told me if I didn’t stop
you from going on them sit-in demonstrations that I was gonna lose my job.”
Pickert likely saw Robinson in a group of protestors and recognized him. But
“she was strong and she wanted to be in that [the movement],” so she said,
“Well, he’ll just have to fire me” and went back to work the next day. With his
grandmother’s approval, Robinson continued his involvement, becoming the

first black person arrested.
He had gone with a group into the Walgreen’s on Front Street, where, he
remembered: “Now, they said I hit a white woman. Now, when she came up
to me, we were sitting at the counter. They poured ammonia on the counter
and she came up behind me at the time with a sign telling me it was closed.
So when the ammonia hit me, I jerked back like this [demonstrates] and that’s
what everybody do with ammonia. And she claimed that I struck her! So that
time, the police came and got me and I was the first person to go in the police
station.” Two ministers came to bail him out, one from First Baptist and one
from St. Stephen’s. “And then they had to get me civil rights lawyers. That’s
when I met Floyd McKissick and Lisbon Berry.”70
Blacks from other communities in the lower Cape Fear came into Wilm-
ington to participate. James Randall was a high-school student living in rural
Bolton, North Carolina. “We didn’t have any real facilities to integrate because
we just had a little general store. But we did most of our shopping in a town
about twenty-five miles away, a town called Wilmington. . . . And we decided,
some people in my town decided, that we should participate directly in these
activities.” As the number of nonviolent demonstrators grew, white residents
became more aggressive. They sprayed Randall and his fellow demonstrators
with insect repellant, verbally harassed them, and eventually resorted to physi-
cal violence.71 After several weeks of such treatment, the sit-in’s black leaders
reluctantly brought the protests to an end.
“The Port City of Progress and Pleasure”
In 1952, city editor Fenwick C. Cole regaled readers of the Wilmington Star
with a brief history of the paper’s famed masthead. “For many, many years,
prior to 1927, The Wilmington Morning Star carried in its masthead this slogan:
‘A Home Newspaper—Clean, Constructive, Reliable.’ But in that year, just 25
years ago, this paper offered a prize of $10 for the best slogan representative of
the Star and Wilmington.” Cole did not explain why a new slogan was needed,
yet many residents undoubtedly remembered 1927 as the year of the first Pi-
rates Festival, an event of great significance to the city’s history and tourism
industry. It was a year during which Wilmingtonians cast off their old identity
and embraced an exciting new one. “Hundreds of catchy phrases poured in,”
Cole observed, and on March 11, the selection committee, headed by the presi-
dent of the Chamber of Commerce, chose “Port City of Progress and Pleasure”
as the one that best captured the city’s civic identity. More important, Cole
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 217
continued, “These lines still mean ‘Wilmington.’” Only yesterday, he reported,

John Farrell, executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had said, “I like
that slogan. It really fits. It means just as much today as it did 25 years ago, and
it will mean the same for the future.” Without a trace of irony, leading citizens
agreed that the slogan captured the exuberant energy and consumerism of the
Atomic Age just as readily as it had the spirit of the Jazz Age.72
In the 1950s as in the 1850s and the 1750s, Wilmington’s “progress and plea-
sure” still depended on decisions made by individuals descended from a few
wealthy, interconnected families. The MacRae name, for example, remained
prominent. Hugh MacRae had died in 1951; he had long outlived Nelson, his
only son, but his grandsons and namesakes, Hugh MacRae Morton and Hugh
MacRae II, continued the family legacy. In a 1995 interview, MacRae II ex-
plained: “I did what many Wilmington boys did. . . . Most of my friends who
had family businesses came home and went into these businesses, like Robert
Bellamy and Bellamy Drug, Walker Taylor and Walker Taylor Insurance, Allen
Strange and Allen Strange Insurance. It just seemed natural for me to come
home and join my grandfather in his real estate development and investment
business.”73
In a similar fashion, Bruce B. Cameron Jr. and his brothers inherited their
father’s petroleum and automotive businesses in 1944. As the 1950s progressed,
the Cameron brothers diversified by investing in the local television station, a
Pepsi-Cola distributorship, and real estate; in 1955, they acquired half of what
is now Figure Eight Island, which they developed as an exclusive resort for
white tourists, and they constructed several subdivisions on land west of the
city, along Oleander Boulevard. These suburbs were located conveniently near
Hanover Center, the area’s first shopping center, which had been built in 1956
by Hugh MacRae II, who had married the Camerons’ sister, Rachel.74 Other
prominent descendants of Old Wilmington families included Wallace Murchi-
son, Lawrence Sprunt, and George Rountree II, grandson of George Davis.
Members of Wilmington’s traditional elite still dominated the Chamber of
Commerce, which undertook an important survey of the city’s major assets in
the 1950s. John Harper Fox, the chamber’s treasurer at that time, said members
were struggling to adjust “the old ways” of boosting the economy with what
he called “the new ways coming on the scene.” The survey helped oldtime and
emerging leaders set shared priorities for the future. “We found out the river
was the most important thing we had and then, of course, for the town to grow,
you have to have power available in large quantities and . . . then Wachovia came
in. We started getting big banks . . . not just the ones we had.”75 The Chamber
of Commerce charged a large body, the Committee of 100, to implement the
survey’s recommendations. Banker Emsley Laney, a newcomer and one of the

original members, described it as “a group of self-appointed business people . . .
who were interested in seeing this community grow and prosper.” Thanks to
aggressive recruitment efforts, which included incentives like tax breaks and
cheap land, industrial giants like DuPont, Corning, and General Electric even-
tually built plants on the city’s periphery. Although water and commerce re-
tained their importance in the local economy, new ventures were increasingly
geared to service industries and skilled manufacturing. Most of the jobs and
profits created by these initiatives, moreover, went to educated whites.76
Concerned about the workforce of the future, Wilmington’s business lead-
ers worked diligently in the late 1950s to transform the local junior college
into a comprehensive institution of higher education. In 1961, Wilmington
College moved from its cramped downtown location in a historic building
to a modern campus in the suburbs. As enrollment grew, the president, John
T. Hoggard, formerly chair of the local Board of Education, authorized J.
Marshall Crews to hire additional faculty and staff. “I had the job of dean of
the college,” Crews explained in a 1999 interview. “W. C. Blackburn . . . he
and I used to work together. He would call me and say, How about letting so
and so scoot in, he seems good. I said, Okay. [Then] I called him and said,
how about hiring a teacher [in the public schools]? He said, Okay.” Because
of this hiring system, most of the early faculty members were locally known
whites. Since black students were relegated to a branch of the blacks-only
Fayetteville State University, no blacks were hired except for certain menial
positions. After Wilmington College began granting baccalaureate degrees
in 1963, more and more white outsiders joined the faculty, but their numbers
remained small.77
Despite these developments, the local economy still depended heavily on
the seasonal tourist trade. In the late 1950s, when the Chamber of Commerce
did its survey, downtown Wilmington had limited offerings for visitors be-
yond the Colonial Dames’ Burgwin-Wright House (Cornwallis’s Headquar-
ters) and the New Hanover County Museum, both of which were staffed by
history enthusiasts rather than professionally trained curators, archivists, or
preservationists. The city’s prized, antebellum houses, like the Bellamy Man-
sion, were falling apart, and despite Louis Toomer Moore’s best efforts to save
them as “community heirlooms,” over five hundred live oaks had fallen victim
to road-widening efforts. The Harnett and Davis monuments along Market
Street, designed and placed in the middle of Market Street in carriage days,
barely drew a glance from passing motorists. Perhaps paradoxically, pleasure-
seeking tourists of this era demanded modern conveniences alongside historic
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 219
traditions, and rest and relaxation as well as fun and excitement.78 The wildly
popular Azalea Festival brought that conclusion home every April. The ques-
tion was how to attract tourists all year round. To do that, Wilmingtonians
needed additional sites that showcased their authentic heritage. They also had
to develop the sort of hotels, restaurants, and attractions that affluent Ameri-
cans expected. All of these new projects, moreover, required a stable and inex-
pensive pool of unskilled labor.
Local boosters’ conception of Wilmington’s authentic heritage proved to
be elastic. In 1958, James S. Craig Jr., an executive at the local, Cameron-
owned television station, got the brilliant idea to bring the USS North Caro-
lina to Wilmington as a floating museum and war memorial. The battleship
was the first American vessel to reach Pearl Harbor after the Japanese at-
tack, and it became the most decorated ship of the war. Yet it had no actual
relationship to either Wilmington or North Carolina. What resonated with
supporters was the way the vessel called to mind the NCSC shipyard, the
painful sacrifices locals made during World War II, and Wilmington’s pa-
triotic, anti-tyranny narrative. At the same time, they understood how the
proposed museum could generate revenue from visitors, especially veterans
and their families. Water and commerce, blood and violence: the battleship
brought these strands together once again. In 1961, Hugh MacRae Morton
spearheaded a statewide “Save Our Ship” campaign that used television, ra-
dio, and print media to raise the $330,000 needed. Morton also planned the
celebration that began when the USS North Carolina entered the mouth of
the Cape Fear River on October 2. Eleven tugboats guided her up the chan-
nel, and dozens of private boats trailed behind. Despite the day’s rainy, cold
weather, nearly 125,000 people gathered along the Wilmington waterfront to
watch the tugs steer her into a specially built slip. She opened for tours less
than two weeks later.79
As part of their new heritage-tourism project, Wilmington’s white civic and
business leaders took a hard look at the downtown core. They did not like
what they saw. Along the waterfront stretched seventy-four acres of vacant,
deteriorating commercial and industrial property—structures associated with
the ACL Railroad and Alexander Sprunt and Company. In their place arose a
Hilton hotel, a parking deck, and an office building for the Cape Fear Technical
Institute, which offered vocational training programs for the area’s developing
industries. The City Council also authorized the creation of an urban historic
district in 1962. Its boundaries reflected the deliberations of a special taskforce
and made Wilmington an early leader in the national historic preservation
movement. For the first time in its history, the city enacted zoning ordinances
that divided the downtown into commercial, residential, and mixed-use areas.
It also established an architectural review board to enforce new restrictions.
Property owners eagerly stripped away asphalt to reveal cobblestones, spruced
up old architectural ironwork, restored ancient facades, and hired liveried driv-
ers to give antique carriage rides. The stage was set for the cultural reconstruc-
tion of an “old” place.80
The first test of the city’s new historic look came with the Azalea Festival
of April 1963. As always, the event’s organizers combined nostalgia and prog-
ress, but the early 1960s festivals overlapped with the Centennial of the Civil
War and so incorporated overt Lost Cause narratives. That year, for example,
they held the Azalea Queen’s coronation pageant in a large, public hall with
a painted set designed to look like the plantation house at Orton—or maybe
Tara; it hardly mattered which white-columned, Old South manor tourists
saw reflected in it. Audience members now paid to see the Friday night spec-
tacle, and if they missed it, there was another one the next night. The other
big draw was the Saturday morning parade with its array of southern beaux
and belles. Although the day proved unseasonably cold and rainy, marshals
Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne of Car 54, Where Are You? buoyed spirits, as
did James Drury, star of The Virginian, who rode along with a mounted color
guard. The restored historic district formed an elegant backdrop.
Williston’s all-black ensemble marched in the parade that year. Federal
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare desegregation mandates had
compelled organizers to accept them into the historic, whites-only event.
Louise Fulton Outler recalled that Williston band director Robert Floyd
carefully managed the students’ appearance and behavior, perhaps to counter
long-standing stereotypes by black-faced performers. “Our buffs [bucks] had
to be polished clean and white. Buffs with orange soles. You couldn’t leave
any white paint. And he never let us shake our butts, if you will. We would do
a little cutting up that he let us do. . . . Then the people would follow us. We’d
have half the community following us.”81 Like the Kuners of old, the visible
presence of the band moving through Wilmington’s public streets implied to
visitors and locals alike that relations between the races were harmonious.
The festival was merely a tourist fantasy, however. When the parade ended,
reality returned.
The sight of black youth marching in the 1963 Azalea Festival signaled both
how far Wilmington had come and how far it had yet to go. Because of the
economic transformations wrought by the Chamber of Commerce and the
Committee of 100, the city attracted a growing population of educated, white
liberals who considered themselves racial progressives. Smiling broadly on the
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 221
reviewing stand was Mayor O. O. “Red” Allsbrook, a liberal Democrat. Liberal

members of the City Council stood nearby, including Greek-born business-
man James T. Batuyios, proof of the American Dream’s vitality, and Hannah
Block, a Jewish transplant to the city and the first female council member.
As historian William Chafe has shown, liberal whites in North Carolina often
“perceived existing race relations as unjust” and prided themselves on their
willingness to discuss new solutions to old problems. Yet Wilmington’s growth
had attracted even more social and political conservatives to the region than
liberals. This group helped elect an extreme white supremacist, Wilmington at-
torney Alton Lennon, to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he remained
from 1957 to 1973.
The ongoing conservatism of the city’s power structure could also be seen in
the extensive military presence at the festival in 1963. Along with local police,
over a thousand National Guardsmen and federal troops from nearby bases
marched in the parade, while two Navy destroyers, a nuclear submarine, and
several Coast Guard vessels floated in the Cape Fear. This awesome military
display demonstrated that southeastern North Carolina supported the Ken-
nedy administration’s effort to contain communism and expand American
influence abroad. Wilmington’s white businessmen, as usual, welcomed new
global markets: gross tonnage at the Port Authority was soaring, and the state
legislature, meeting in special session aboard the USS North Carolina, had just
amended the city charter to allow construction of a second facility. Viewed in
the context of local history, the sight of so many white men in uniform implied
as well the possibility of organized racist violence. Would the police power of
the state be used to promote integration, as at Oxford, Mississippi, or to block
it, as in Albany, Georgia? In April 1963, no one knew for sure.82
“Polite Bickering”
In May 1963, the national struggle over civil rights escalated. Thousands of
miles away from Wilmington, North Carolina, the Southern Christian Lead-
ership Conference had been engaged in a series of nonviolent protests that
aimed to desegregate public spaces in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Martin Lu-
ther King Jr., arrested along with other demonstrators, had issued his “Letter
from a Birmingham Jail,” but black support for the project was flagging in the
face of police brutality and white employers’ retaliation. In response, a member
of King’s staff, James Bevel, proposed a controversial plan to recruit children.
King reluctantly assented, hoping the action would “subpoena the conscience
of the nation to the judgment seat of morality.” On May 2, over a thousand
young people aged six to eighteen marched from the movement’s headquar-
ters at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church into the white downtown shopping
district; nearly nine hundred were arrested, and news coverage of the children’s
bravery compelled thousands of adults to gather outside the church the next
day. This time, with the city’s jails full to capacity, Police Chief Eugene “Bull”
Connor issued orders to disburse the protestors with high-pressure firehoses
and canine units. The brutal violence captured by the media transformed the
civil rights movement. President Kennedy called segregation “a serious moral
issue for all Americans” and contended that urban disorder would continue
until blacks received their full civil rights. With such a sympathetic supporter
behind them, blacks across the South organized hundreds of demonstrations,
signaling solidarity with Birmingham.83
In the port city, the violence in Alabama prompted diverse reactions. Black
residents held multiple public meetings to share their outrage, their fear, and
their bewilderment. White residents, imagining an uprising of armed blacks,
did the same. To diffuse the tension, Mayor Allsbrook formed the Wilming-
ton-New Hanover Bi-racial Committee, which he charged to “seek honorable,
moral, and practical means of avoiding the strife and ill-will which has beset
other communities.” The five black members appointed were: Episcopal priest
Rev. Edwin Kirton, activist Dr. Hubert Eaton, businessman Robert Chestnut,
North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company agent Leland M. Newsome, and
Dr. Leroy W. Upperman. The five whites were: Herbert McKim, architect and
current President of the Chamber of Commerce; Rev. Edward Connette, pas-
tor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church; and three prominent businessmen,
Robert A. Little, Richard L. Burnett, and William R. Burns. But where the
committee ostensibly looked to the future and racial cooperation, other groups
harked to the past and white supremacy. The Cape Fear Chapter of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), for example, hosted special commemo-
rative events to connect their Confederate Memorial Day observance to the
ongoing centennial of the Civil War. In effect, the UDC and their supporters
answered black demands for desegregation with the heritage of states’ rights.84
By the summer of 1963, even more black Wilmingtonians were ready to
join the national movement. In June, they thronged the streets in reaction to
the murder of Medgar Evers. Once again, students from Williston Senior High
held a series of public protests downtown. Led by Leo Shepard, head of the
local NAACP Youth Council, they marched in front of theaters and stores,
held sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters, and staged a rally outside the
courthouse. Hubert Eaton recalled June 12 as an especially contentious day:
“Wilmington police arrested 134 people, including one white youth, at a sit-in
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 223
at a downtown cafeteria. They were carried out of the establishment singing

‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ and were charged with trespassing. Police turned
sixty-two youths over to the juvenile authorities.” On a different day, he wrote,
“43 arrests were made in downtown Wilmington: 11 at the Boucan Room, a
fashionable restaurant, 12 at the Friendly Cafeteria, and 20 at the Dixie Restau-
rant.”85 White business owners complained loudly to the City Council, believ-
ing that black protests frightened tourists away. In July, the Bi-Racial Com-
mittee formed a Public Accommodations subcommittee to mediate between
the protesters and the merchants affected. Another subcommittee examined
discriminatory hiring practices at local grocery stores. They made little head-
way. In August, a dispirited group of teen-aged activists watched King deliver
his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, which had been designed by one
of Wilmington’s own, architect Henry Bacon.
Most blacks considered the Bi-Racial Committee a failure. Like their coun-
terparts elsewhere, the white members sought to restore the customary civili-
ties that had long guided race relations. After nearly six months of what Eaton
drily termed “polite bickering,” he and three of his colleagues resigned in pro-
test. The four young men appointed as replacements, all nominated by Kirton,
readily followed the elder man’s conciliatory lead. This reconstituted commit-
tee soon adopted a new set of four functions. The first two, to create “better
understanding between the races” and serve as a negotiating body, promised
change, but the second two preserved the status quo. According to city coun-
cil’s official minutes, they were:
3) To seek peaceful and lawful solutions to community problems, to

uphold the right of private businessmen to select their customers, to
discourage mass demonstrations, boycotts, and mob pressures, and to
urge all citizens to and especially our youth to become better trained
and qualified for employment;
4) To encourage businesses serving the public to adopt voluntarily a
policy of open public accommodations, to encourage employment of
qualified people without regard to race, and to encourage all citizens
to eliminate discrimination based on race, creed, or color.
Incensed, Eaton, Newsome, Chestnut, Upperman and other members of the

Business and Professional Men’s Club wrote a public letter saying, “The step-
by-step plan you propose is an insult and brands us as second-class citizens,
something we have tried to overcome for 100 years. We cannot go along with
this or any other scheme which denies us the respect that all decent human be-
ings should be accorded.” The Star, by contrast, praised the committee’s work,
saying it “reflected the continuation of good relations between the races here.”86
White notions of what constituted “good relations between the races” var-
ied. Klan activity surged in North Carolina in the 1960s, and New Hanover
County remained an important stronghold with its four Klaverns. Under in-
vestigation in 1965, Sherriff Marion W. Millis admitted that he and at least six
of his deputies were members and that as many as 25 percent of his force sym-
pathized with the organization. This news shocked whites at the other end of
the ideological spectrum, especially self-described race liberals like Mayor O.
O. Allsbrook and Chamber of Commerce president Herbert McKim. Yet even
the most liberal of Wilmington’s civic leaders were slow to embrace equality. To
their minds, shaped by their local culture and heritage, black rights were still
gifts to be bestowed, and they expected blacks to be patient until white society
was ready.87
Thanks to monuments, movies, and popular representations in the media,
we are apt to think of the civil rights movement as a “Won Cause,” the inevi-
table, triumphant corrective to Reconstruction’s failures and the Lost Cause
narrative that sustained Jim Crow. In fact, large numbers of whites resisted
racial progress. Recent studies like Jason Sokol’s There Goes My Everything,
show that in many southern communities, whites simply could not accept
that “their Negroes” wanted equality. To do so was tantamount to admitting
they did not really know their black servants and employees; that segregation
was not then nor ever had been a beneficent system; that they and their an-
cestors had been in the moral wrong all these years. For this silent majority,
feelings of confusion, anger, and betrayal frequently led to resentment and
resistance.88
Midcentury changes in the physical landscape help explain white Wilm-
ingtonians’ negative reactions to civil rights reform. In the 1950s and 1960s,
the growth of industries on the city’s periphery fueled the expansion of outer
suburbs, new schools and churches, and shopping centers. These develop-
ments and the automobile culture that facilitated them reoriented white sub-
urbanites’ attention and resources away from residents in the city center.
There, blacks clustered in declining neighborhoods shaped by decades of
Jim Crow segregation and workforce discrimination. Restrictive covenants,
implemented in the early years of the century, had prevented blacks from
purchasing property. Ethyl Thomas Gerald grew up on the north side of town
between Bladen and Hyatt streets. “There was a gentleman that owned a lot
of houses in there,” she remembered. “His last name was Schutt’s. Schutt’s,
spelled S-C-H-U-T-T apostrophe S. We lived there until I graduated.”89 Ab-
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 225
sentee white landlords often failed to make needed improvements, and the
all-white City Council provided minimal services. In the area where Gerald
lived, main residential streets remained unpaved as late as 1965, and nearly
50 percent of the dwellings were rated “dilapidated.” The once-celebrated
Robert R. Taylor Homes complex, built along North Fourth Street in 1938,
showed the signs of municipal neglect as well as age. On the south side of
town, adjacent to Dry Pond, a newer, federally subsidized complex, Robert
S. Jervay Place, built in 1950–51, provided accommodations for about 250
black families. In both complexes, high poverty rates, accelerated by the loss
of black jobs in the 1950s, fostered increased drug use, and crime became
commonplace. White residents certainly knew about these problems: not one
but three historic, white churches downtown closed in the 1960s due to sub-
urban congregants’ concerns about their safety when driving through black
neighborhoods on Sunday mornings. Unable to see the structural causes of
the growing black underclass, whites locked their car doors and, deploring
the restiveness of the black underclass, wondered when law and order would
return.90
Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, coupled with expanding social wel-
fare programs for racial minorities and federal enforcement of school deseg-
regation, fueled a vicious white backlash across the South. In Wilmington and
vicinity, cross burnings and Klan rallies provided visible signs of white resis-
tance to further change. Alarmingly, when nineteen black students, includ-
ing Hubert Eaton’s daughter, Carolyn, successfully integrated Wilmington’s
schools in the fall of 1964, the news media reported that several white students
at New Hanover High bought guns in order to stage an anti-black “blood bath.”
Although the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation conducted a full inquiry,
signaling the possibility of federal intervention, threats of organized violence
against blacks began to grow.
Evidence suggests that local Republicans encouraged the use of extralegal
force. Despite the national party’s law-and-order rhetoric, which attracted
many disaffected Democrats, one of the most prominent organizers in Wilm-
ington, Royce B. McClelland, was a known Klansman. A retired army colo-
nel who had settled in the area, McClelland and other arch-conservatives de-
nounced civil rights as a communist plot to be fought at the grassroots level.
Other elements of the Republican platform also appealed to local white voters.
Their anti-communism, for example, led to their support of an expanded mili-
tary, which would ostensibly benefit the Cape Fear region’s economy. Though
Wilmington remained a Democratic stronghold in 1964, the elections that year
showed the shift underway. Lyndon Johnson barely squeaked out a victory in
New Hanover County, winning it by a mere 450 votes. Similarly, moderate

Democrat Dan K. Moore won the gubernatorial election, but Republicans won
control of the New Hanover County board of commissioners for the first time
since the Fusion era. A new redemption movement appeared to be in progress,
this time led by a reformulated party of Lincoln.91
“A Tide of Blackness Moving Down the Street”
Many local blacks looked forward excitedly to Thursday, April 4, 1968, when
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was scheduled to speak at Williston High School.
When word came that he had cancelled his trip to stay in Memphis with
striking sanitation workers, his Wilmington supporters were crushed. Then
came the horrific news that he was dead. Elijah Richardson vividly recalled
the angry agitation that marked the morning of April 5. He and many other
black youths were shocked to discover that schools and businesses opened as
usual and that flags remained at full staff: “Now, that Friday when we went to
school [Williston], students were at total unrest at 8:30 at the bell. Teachers
were also thoroughly disgusted and did not care if you came to class or not.
This was the first time that I had a high opinion of my black teachers and I
would like to praise Mrs. L. S. Williams as being a person that I would not
have thought would have dismissed classes and said, ‘Let’s go to the gymna-
sium and have a prayer.’ So all the classes started between 9:00 and 9:30 and
we went to the gym and had a meeting and decided that the entire school
would march downtown to the courthouse.” Richardson noted with pride
that after the march he and a group of fellow students went to New Hanover
High School, the white school, and forcibly lowered its flag to half-mast. “At
first we had complications with the school’s officials. They said, ‘What are you
doing? You’re trespassing!’ But we were determined.”92
Bertha Todd, then librarian at Williston, offered a different memory of the
day’s events:
That’s when I learned my first bit of riot control. The students were upset.
They wanted the flag lowered. They felt as if there should be a memorial
service at school that morning and they simply rioted. A few of us took
it upon ourselves to try to work with these students and encourage them
to return to their classrooms, or, better still, we finally decided to have
an assembly. . . . And of course that had a calming effect on the students
and we were given permission to, those who wanted to attend, we were
given permission to go down to the courthouse, and I remember being in
that group, with some teachers, singing We Shall Overcome. Well, by the
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 227
time we walked back to school, I believe, the superintendent permitted

the students to return home for that particular day.93
Richardson’s memory highlights the militancy and agency of the students,

while Todd’s stresses the authority of school staff and Superintendent Hey-
wood Bellamy, who sought to maintain order. However it happened, the pro-
cession of nearly two hundred Williston blacks to the courthouse on North
Third Street proved anything but cathartic.
As news spread Friday evening of riots in many American cities, Chief of
Police H. E. Williamson put his department on alert, called in every available
officer, and posted his men throughout the city. That night, armed, white police-
men in full riot gear went around ordering groups of black residents to disband.
Around 11:00 p.m., a large crowd of perhaps one hundred black youths gath-
ered in a vacant lot near the southside Jervay housing project. Led by twenty-
five-year-old Frank “Funny One” Hans and Willie “Monkey” Ballard, they de-
cided to march silently through the city streets. The demonstrators wanted to
show the white community that King’s assassination had not terminated the
civil rights movement. When they reached the courthouse, police attempted to
disburse them. Instead, they sat down on a sidewalk and began to chant, “We
shall not be moved. We shall not be moved.” At one point, Ballard apparently
declared, “We’ll sit here all night if we have to.” After a heavy rain began to fall,
police cars trailed multiple groups of marchers back to their neighborhoods.
Despite the weather, incidents of rock throwing and vandalism occurred that
night. More ominous, arsonists set fire to a grocery store in Dry Pond.94
Black youth continued their uprising throughout the weekend. In a 1971 in-
terview, “Funny” Hans insisted, “There were no middle class, elderly, or clergy
involved.” Nor was there a clear sense of purpose or direction, just anger. “A lot
of them were just there to say afterwards that they were part of it. They didn’t
really know why they were there,” he concluded. Rev. Kojo Nantambu, by con-
trast, said local blacks “felt it was an injustice that after two days [King’s] killer
had not been caught yet.” In 1968, Nantambu was a sixteen-year-old Hoggard
High School student named Roderick Kirby. He watched the violence unfold
on Saturday night: “They started tearing up white-owned stores, burning up
the stores, looting them. . . . Man, there were so many brothers and sisters
that if the police had known at the time and responded they couldn’t have
done nothing with them. It looked like a tide of blackness, you know, pouring
down the street, man.”95 Panicked, Mayor O. O. Allsbrook called the governor
and requested the militia. Two platoons of soldiers outfitted with M-R rifles
arrived around 10:30 p.m. The young rebels were not daunted. Instead, they
firebombed three white-owned grocery stores and looted them.
The violence intensified the next day, Palm Sunday, when suburban whites
made their routine drive into town for church. Sometime around 12:30, blacks
in Dry Pond began to pelt passing automobiles with rocks, bottles, and bricks.
“We wasn’t bothering nobody, just hanging out on Eight and Dawson,” recalled
an anonymous informant. “The next thing I knew the brothers were throw-
ing bricks. . . . I saw one brother throw a brick into a white woman’s face. She
opened her door and fell into the street. She screamed, ‘Oh my God! I can’t see!
I can’t see!’ They dragged her husband out of the car and robbed him.” Minutes
later, gangs of black youths began to assault white-owned businesses in the
neighborhood. Brigadier General C. B. Shimer immediately ordered armored
personnel carriers fitted with .30-caliber machine guns to be deployed. “The
National Guard come in there with half-tracks. I threw a Molotov cocktail at
one of them. They shot tear gas canisters at me, but they missed because I ran
through my back door. The smoke came inside and caused my momma and
everybody to run out of the front door.” Local police in full riot gear also used
tear gas, so much so that “extra supplies were trucked in.”
Mayor Allsbrook finally called an emergency meeting of municipal officials
at City Hall and summoned “Funny” Hans, Raymond King, and “Monkey”
Ballard to attend. Also present were black members of the Bi-Racial Commit-
tee, as well as the local representative to the state’s Good Neighbor Council,
an interracial committee that had been formed in 1961. The older men urged
the young militants to stand down “because the longer the disturbances lasted
the greater the chances were for white retaliation.” Ballard bravely insisted that
King’s death was merely the “spark, not the reason for the trouble.” Although
he and his companions agreed to do what they could to quell the disorder,
they declared that “an explosive situation” would remain as long as blatant
discrimination against black residents persisted. That night, as helicopters
with searchlights circled overhead, black militants firebombed three grocery
stores in three different neighborhoods. After King’s televised funeral service
on Tuesday morning, the violence finally subsided. According to news arti-
cles, there were two hundred arrests, twenty-one reported injuries, and about
$200,000 worth of property damage.96
Black Power
A few weeks later, members of the school board decided to close Williston as
a secondary school and reassign its 906 black students to the two all-white
institutions, New Hanover and Hoggard. Black Wilmingtonians today still see
this May 1968 decision as a form of retaliation for King’s assassination protests,
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 229
which had been led by Williston alumni. In a 2006 interview, Heywood Bel-
lamy, then superintendent of schools, explained things this way: “You can’t just
close a school, a high school. You’ve got to have a public hearing and make a
finding that in the plans for that school system it’s in the best interest of the
school system to close that building. And of course they didn’t close it. They
changed the grade level. And the changing of the grade level at that level of
the desegregation process would have increased desegregation by something
like fourteen percent.”97 Speaking decades later, Bellamy sought to distance
himself from the Williston decision. “They,” the all-white school board, not
he, had responsibility to determine what was in “the best interest of the school
system.” At the time, however, he fully agreed with the board. Neither he nor
his colleagues foresaw the violent consequences to come.
Board members likely felt they had few options. Since 1954 the New Hanover
County school board had used so-called freedom-of-choice plans to sustain
token desegregation. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, however, required affirmative
action plans for integration and authorized the Department of Health, Educa-
tion, and Welfare to serve as enforcer. HEW had already declared Wilmington
out of compliance with its 1965 guidelines. In April 1968, just days after the
King violence, HEW agents again visited the port city to assess the degree of
change. This time, they issued an ultimatum: besides equalizing the proportion
of blacks at each public school, the board had to upgrade all formerly black-
only schools to meet modern educational standards. Williston alone, HEW
said, required $200,000 of improvements to keep operating as a high school.
White outrage over HEW’s decision was palpable. As scholars have shown,
conservative southerners viewed desegregation mandates as yet another epic
battle over federal authority and the principle of local control—a second Re-
construction, as it were. M. H. Vaughn, chairman of the New Hanover County
commissioners, expressed this sentiment when he derided HEW as “blackmail-
ing carpetbaggers from the federal government.” A pro-segregationist parents’
organization called Save Our Schools (S.O.S.) rallied local white opposition,
but the Supreme Court’s May 27 ruling in Green v. New Kent County unequivo-
cally declared freedom-of-choice plans unconstitutional. When Judge Alger-
non Butler of the U.S. District Court for Eastern North Carolina ordered New
Hanover County to integrate, board members knew they were beaten.98
Unforgivably to activists like Hubert Eaton, the all-white board met in closed
sessions without consulting the black community, which had long considered
Williston a uniquely meaningful place. “They associated the building with fond
memories. They felt they were being deprived by its closing and resented it,”
Eaton recalled. Because they had had to perform essential maintenance and
finance school equipment during the Jim Crow era, black Wilmingtonians
also had a “proprietary investment” in Williston they could never recover. Nor
did the all-white board give adequate attention to what would happen in Sep-
tember. Whereas some black teachers were reassigned along with their stu-
dents, others were abruptly laid off. At New Hanover High School, staff had to
squeeze the Williston students into already crowded classrooms and schedule
them for classes at the last minute. They made no provisions for black student
government officers, elected in the previous spring, or black athletes, who had
to try out for the recently all-white teams. Longstanding black student orga-
nizations and clubs vanished overnight. Cherished traditions like the cotillion
ended. Only memories remained.99
To add further insult, the white students, staff, and faculty at New Hanover
High actively treated the black students as interlopers. One of the reassigned
black teachers at the time declared, “They weren’t made to feel at home here.
Some things were done but even the kids saw through it. They were totally
phony actions. . . . They also wondered about the social activities they had in
the school [Williston], if they could get them started here. They didn’t know
the proper channels. So there again the hostess didn’t play the part she should
have played.” A former Williston student, Benjamin Wonce, recalled that white
and black students initially stayed apart, but then “this thing of tension be-
gan—if you step on my foot, you’re white and ‘I’m going to beat you up,’ and if
you step on my foot, I’m black and I’m going to beat you up.”100
Principals C. D. Gurganus and John Scott turned to the mayor, Luther M.
Cromartie, and other white civic leaders for help, but the situation steadily
worsened during the 1969–70 school year. Because of continued reassign-
ments, black students by that time comprised less than a third of the popula-
tion at each high school. They endured repeated verbal insults, threats, and
escalating violence. Some blacks started altercations of their own accord, but
many were fighting in self-defense. White administrators, however, seemed to
paint with a broad brush, labeling all assertive black youths “troublemakers”
and suspending far more black students than white ones. As in larger cities
like Little Rock and New Orleans, white adults who opposed desegregation
regularly milled around school parking lots and athletic fields, harassing black
youths as they entered and left the building. The year ended with a near riot
precipitated by the election of white candidates to nearly every student-class
office. Larry Reni Thomas later described the scene: “At Hoggard, a shouting
match with blacks on one side of the gym and whites on the other occurred.
Almost immediately afterwards, fist fights between the two groups developed.
Finally the Sheriff ’s Department was called to the scene.” A similar fight took
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 231
place at New Hanover. While the hostilities briefly abated during the summer,
they flared again through the fall and winter of 1970.101
As Christmas 1970 approached, a group of black students suspended from
Hoggard and New Hanover began to discuss a citywide school boycott. Ac-
cording to historian Kenneth Janken, they acted independently. Some were
familiar with black nationalist ideas and proudly wore clothes and emblems
associated with black power. They also knew that school boycotts were part of
a nationwide strategy to compel whites to allow black participation in the inte-
gration process. Disappointed by the perceived indifference of local black civic
leaders to their plight, the students asked Rev. Eugene Templeton, the thirty-
three-year-old white minister at the predominantly black Gregory Congrega-
tional Church to help them build support. A newcomer, Templeton served on
the board of the local agency responsible for Head Start and several other Great
Society initiatives that targeted urban blacks. Gregory, the church of David
Bryant Fulton, had a long-standing reputation for progressivism, and Temple-
ton carried forward that legacy, joining his congregation to the United Church
of Christ and its Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ). Templeton not
only gave the students a place to meet, he wrote to Rev. Leon White, head of
the UCC-CRJ in Raleigh, for assistance with the boycott.102
The situation changed dramatically when Ben Chavis arrived in Wilming-
ton on February 1, 1971, to assume leadership of the boycott and expand its
reach. Sent by Rev. White, Chavis was a UCC-CRJ organizer with extensive
field experience gained in Virginia and North Carolina. Widely regarded by
UCC-CRJ officials as an advocate of nonviolence, he had once been leader of
an aggressively militant, albeit unofficial, Black Panther chapter in Charlotte.
In fact, the Charlotte group became so violent and undisciplined that the Oak-
land Headquarters of the Black Panthers denounced Chavis and his followers
as impersonators. Eventually, state and federal agents clamped down on the
group, and Chavis returned to his home town of Oxford to regroup. But racial
violence blossomed there, too. In the spring of 1970, three white men murdered
Henry “Dickie” Marrow, one of Chavis’s close friends, and injured William
Chavis, a cousin. When an all-white jury acquitted the white killers, blacks
in Oxford erupted. Chavis was everywhere at once: leading protest marches,
speaking on television, getting arrested for weapons violations. The FBI had
him followed even after he joined the nonviolent UCC. By the time he arrived
in the port city, Chavis had a reputation as a “real” revolutionary. When he
showed up wearing a fur coat and driving a white El Dorado Cadillac, the for-
mer Williston students eagerly welcomed the twenty-three-year-old activist.103
Another militant activist also came to the port city sometime in late January
or early February 1971: Leroy Gibson, leader of an extreme white-supremacist

group called the Rights of White People, or ROWP. A former Marine Corps
sergeant at Camp Lejeune, Gibson had been drummed out of the service for his
racist activities, but he had not left the area. On the contrary, in the late 1960s
he amassed a large following that rivaled local Klaverns. After the MLK riots
and the HEW integration ultimatum of 1968, Gibson’s ROWP made substantial
headway in Wilmington, where they enjoyed the support of A. C. “Red” Beall,
former chair of the New Hanover County Commission and publisher of The
Hanover Sun, a tabloid-style newspaper that provided a voice for persons op-
posed to black civil rights. Besides news of ROWP meetings, Beall and other
Sun writers sounded familiar themes of the American Revolution, calling for
open defiance of federal courts and promoting “anti-tyranny” vigilantism. In
1970, Beall also ran a regular column by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that
purportedly alerted local readers to the presence of communists in the federal
government. Aided by this sensationalist press, Gibson and his followers suc-
cessfully played upon the region’s distinctive heritage, urging local whites to
defend their traditional “rights,” or racial privileges, with organized violence.104
Chavis similarly connected the students’ specific grievances to the broader
struggle for black freedom. At a press conference held on Tuesday, February 2,
Chavis announced that all black students would walk out of “the slavemaster’s
classrooms” and promised that, unless their demands were met by noon the
following day, “we as black students would take further action.” The implied
threat of a black uprising galvanized the white community. That night, the
city’s Ministerial Union hosted a hastily organized public meeting at Gregory.
School superintendent Heywood Bellamy spoke for about thirty minutes,
during which time he stressed to the crowd of about one hundred the need
for students “to express dissent through the proper channels,” that is, to their
principal, and then to him and on up to the board. An older black woman
immediately challenged Bellamy’s advice, saying the formal grievance process
“was not a reality,” that her complaints and repeated requests for a formal hear-
ing concerning her child, who had been suspended, had been ignored. Other
angry black parents demanded to know when black coaches would be hired
and when black studies courses, such as the ones they had at Williston, would
be offered. At one point, Bellamy ceded the podium to George Clark, a mem-
ber of the school board and a prominent Republican. Chavis asked when the
students’ demands would be met and, as Clark hemmed and hawed, the room
erupted into catcalls, loud booing, and jeers. As the audience grew louder and
more restive, Bellamy and Clark made a swift exit.105
ROWP members attended the Gregory meeting. They had been keeping
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 233
close tabs on the black students since Thursday, when the boycott began. At
night, carloads of white men drove by Gregory Church, throwing bottles and
shooting guns into the air as they passed. One of the boycotters, Kojo Nant-
ambu, described the group as “a vigilante organization of white people here,
basically made up of nothing but poor white people” and recognized them as
residents of “Sunset Park, a lot from Winter Park, some from around the [Hugh
MacRae] park area.” These neighborhoods, developed as segregated, middle-
class, streetcar suburbs during the mid-twentieth century, primarily housed
blue-collar whites by the late 1960s. With a stagnating local economy and a
national recession beginning, many whites watched their own standard of liv-
ing decline at the same time that court-ordered affirmative action programs for
blacks began. For Nantambu, the animosity directed at him and his classmates
owed little to the boycott and everything to what scholars now call the “wages
of whiteness.” “Well, it’s a known fact,” he explained. “Poor whites hate us more
than upper-class whites because of the fact that they’re being treated the same
way and they feel like their color gives them a superiority over us, and they hate
to be treated the same way as us. So they feel like they have to lash out their
hostilities and violence toward us rather than their own people. That’s what
that situation is.”106
A student demonstration on Wednesday, February 3, sparked what the
Morning Star called “a wave of violence” that rippled across the city. It began
with a peaceful march from Gregory to Hemenway Hall, where the school
board offices were located. About 250 young people stood outside, chanting
and raising their fists in a public show of black solidarity. (See figure 4.8.) Bel-
lamy refused their request to come out, and they eventually moved on to hold
a second demonstration in front of City Hall.107 As evening fell, a series of
altercations began. Armed white vigilante groups roamed the streets in cars
and on foot. They especially harassed the students at Gregory Church and the
Templetons, who lived in a house next door. Benjamin Wonce recalled that,
“the Wednesday night after we made that statement, the first firing was fired
upon the church. And we called the police immediately. Ben Chavis himself
was the one who talked to the police. He talked to them outside the church.
He said we were receiving fire. There were bullet holes in the church. How
can—they wasn’t going to accept it: ‘Well, we don’t believe it.’ Now, Thursday
night, the same thing happened.” Also on Thursday night, unknown persons
dynamited two construction cranes being used to erect a new Wilmington
Housing Authority apartment building in Brooklyn. The ROWP escalated its
use of sniper fire in black neighborhoods, and the Fire Department responded
to eight cases of arson. Concerned about what might happen over the weekend,
Figure 4.8. This Wilmington Star-News photo captures the February 3, 1971, demonstration by
school boycotters outside the Hemenway Building, which housed the New Hanover County
School Board. Ben Chavis is the man wearing the fur coat. Note the number of people using the
“Black Power” salute. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.
Templeton and Chavis asked officials on Friday to impose a citywide curfew,

but they declined. Instead, Chief Williamson ordered his men to cordon off the
area around the church and stake out Dry Pond. The police did not, however,
offer protection to the boycotters or act to stop the drive-by shootings they
endured.108
Full-fledged rioting apparently commenced the night of February 4–5 and
continued for at least five days. Memories of the events differ wildly, and no
impartial investigation or study was ever conducted. Period news accounts
document looting, arson, rock- and bottle-throwing, Molotov cocktails, gun-
fire, assaults, death threats, roaming gangs, telephone hazing, and multiple
deaths. Throughout the week, Gibson and his ROWP supporters held public
rallies at Hugh MacRae Park, a site that explicitly linked their racist violence
with the white-supremacy massacre and coup of 1898. This time, some blacks
responded in kind. Nantambu later offered this account of the chaos:
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 235
We were just defending the church and defending the rights of the stu-
dents to be in the church. There wasn’t nothing about us going out attack-
ing anybody. . . . When Chili [Marvin Patrick] got shot, kinda knocked
the doors of the church down getting in because everybody tried to get
out of the way. All the girls in the church were hollering and screaming,
and the brothers were running around. We calmed everybody down and
tried to get some order. We told everybody to lay up under the bleachers,
to stay down. We made sure the brothers got out a little bit further on the
perimeter. We sent them out about two blocks apiece to make sure the
white folks didn’t come through there.109
On Saturday, the Board of Trustees of Gregory Congregational Church—in-

cluding Nantambu’s own grandfather—decided to evict the boycotters from
the church; a large group of them refused to abandon the site, however, and
stayed with Rev. Templeton and his wife, Ben Chavis, and several other adults
in the parsonage.
For nearly a week, the Dry Pond neighborhood endured extreme violence.
Several white-owned businesses were deliberately firebombed. (A few were
deliberately torched by their owners for insurance money.) White men in
military uniforms roamed the streets, but it was unclear to residents whether
they were peacekeepers or spectators or participants in the fracas. Black sol-
diers from Camp Lejeune and black “brothers of the street” came to guard
and defend the student boycotters. During one altercation, white police shot
and killed Steve Mitchell, one of the black student protesters “in self-defense,”
and soon after, Harvey Cumber, a white storeowner, died of wounds received
when he attempted to fire on black militants. Shocked by news reports, many
residents simply could not fathom the depth of anger and frustration they wit-
nessed. George W. Harrison, for example, believed that local blacks were “be-
ing used as dupes and tools of the communists.”110 White moderates, includ-
ing Mayor Cromartie and Chief of Police Williamson, initially theorized that
blacks started the violence “in retaliation for the riot which happened here in
1898.” They also insisted publicly that few actual residents, black or white, were
involved, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. On Sunday morning,
February 7, Cromartie finally declared a state of emergency and asked the gov-
ernor to call in the state’s National Guard. When the six hundred armed sol-
diers arrived that night, some semblance of order returned.111
Although the rioting ended, black disaffection and militancy persisted. The
Gregory students and their many supporters had fallen apart, dejected and
demoralized by the astonishing turn of events that followed their boycott. Ben
Chavis tried to reorganize them and keep them focused on long-term solu-
tions to systemic problems black people faced. In March 1971, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference sent its southeastern North Carolina field
organizer, Golden Frinks, one of the state’s best known civil rights activists.
Calling himself a “creative militant,” presumably to distinguish his confron-
tational but still nonviolent methods from Chavis’s, Frinks organized another
school boycott that spring, encouraged local blacks to demand the reopening
of Williston Senior High, and led a mass “march against repression” to Raleigh
to garner publicity for his reinvigorated “Wilmington Movement.” Hubert Ea-
ton denounced Frinks as an outsider, insisting that any effort to restore an all
or mostly black school would be a terrible step backward. Rev. Kirton took a
different tack, implausibly arguing that black youths’ discontent could best be
addressed through improved literacy programs. For his part, Chavis supported
Frinks’s efforts, yet he continued to advocate for greater militancy.
After a brief respite, racial violence quickly resumed. Mass fights between
white and black students occurred regularly at Hoggard. At Williston, now an
integrated junior high, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old black youths stormed
the building, ransacked its classrooms, smashed windows, vandalized the caf-
eteria, and assaulted at least one teacher in an effort to take back control of
“their” school. At New Hanover, a group of fifteen to twenty black students
purportedly attacked and beat a single white student during a similar mass
take-over effort. Their parents, teachers, ministers, and other community lead-
ers still kept their distance; however, growing numbers of black adults in their
twenties and thirties joined Frinks’s Wilmington movement, extending it to
their workplaces, to local stores, and public spaces. Others joined the Black
Youth Builders of the Black Community (BYBBC), which Kojo Nantambu
formed to keep Wilmington activists tied to the nationalist struggle. Larry
Reni Thomas, who graduated from Williston in 1968–69, interviewed numer-
ous young black militants in 1978. He concluded that the “black retaliation”
that began in February reflected a new racial identity born of the white back-
lash against integration. Black Wilmingtonians of his generation, catalyzed by
white adults’ aggression toward black youths, refused to be “scared rabbits” any
longer and asserted themselves in the only language they felt whites under-
stood: violence.112
Some whites insisted that the best way to meet black militancy was with an
even greater show of force. Angry mobs of white supremacists continued their
intimidation campaign, sometimes holding rallies, sometimes organizing car
caravans through black neighborhoods, sometimes deliberately picking fights
with black residents. Judge John Walker, chief magistrate of the North Carolina
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 237
Superior Court, stopped his entire courtroom one day in March with an “hour-
long harangue” against Chief of Police H. E. Williamson, who he felt had been
derelict in his use of force: “Maybe we should have brought in Lt. Calley to go
in and clear the place up!” Apparently other elected officials agreed, including
Councilman John Symmes and City Attorney John J. Burney, who arranged to
have Williamson fired for negligence. As the white clamor for more law and
order grew louder, conservative civic leaders forced out key moderates, in-
cluding Mayor Luther Cromartie. In some ways, another municipal revolution
occurred.113
This rightward shift in municipal governance certainly reflected the specific
circumstances of the 1971 riot, but it also resulted from a broader restructuring
of American political life at that time. Scholars have documented the rise of a
powerful counter-counterculture that resented the progressive changes of the
mid-1960s and fueled Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 presidential campaign.
Further, the values advanced by the “great silent majority” and its leaders had
a pronounced regional cast, what historian Bruce Schulman has called “South-
ernization.” These included a preference for states’ rights, low taxes, deregula-
tion, evangelical Protestantism, and traditional family values, all of which had
close associations with the Old South and its cultural heritage, including its
racial order. In short, conservative attitudes long suppressed by the triumph of
liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s had resurfaced.114
The municipal takeover by local “law and order” interests helps explain
what happened to the Wilmington Ten, a group of mostly city residents who
gained international fame in the 1970s as political prisoners. Their saga, which
ended only with their 2012 pardon, began in March 1972, when police arrested
a seventeen-year-old black youth, Alan Hall, for an alleged assault. After multi-
ple visits from white authorities, Hall confessed to a quite different crime—the
February 6, 1971, firebombing of Mike’s Grocery Store, a white-owned business
in Dry Pond. He claimed, moreover, that he was following orders from Ben
Chavis, whom he implicated in the bombing along with multiple other black
protesters. Hall was actually a willing pawn in a deliberate plot to extinguish
black political dissent. Eventually, the police arrested sixteen individuals, of
whom ten were finally charged: Ben Chavis, the primary target; Reginald Epps,
Jerry Jacobs, James “Bun” McKoy, Marvin “Chili” Patrick, Connie Tindall, Wil-
liam “Joe” Wright Jr., and Willie Earl Vereen—all former Williston students
and boycott participants; Wayne Moore, a local activist with the SCLC; and
Ann Shepard, a thirty-five-year-old social worker at Gregory Church and the
only white person.115
The case against the Wilmington Ten focused national attention on the port
city’s racial problems, especially as a theatrical atmosphere began to surround

the legal proceedings. During the probable-cause hearing in April 1972, for
example, supporters of the accused held a mass vigil outside the New Hanover
County Courthouse, where they waved signs saying, “We Shall Avenge 1898”
and “African Power.” In June, the initial trial ended abruptly when the lead
prosecutor feigned illness in order to secure a new, less sympathetic judge and
jury. Then, when the time came to impanel a second jury for the new trial, offi-
cials changed the venue to Burgaw, a small community some thirty miles away,
because, they said, they doubted their ability to find twelve impartial Wilming-
tonians. While on the stand, the prosecution’s star witness, Allan Hall, not only
contradicted himself numerous times but, during a particularly challenging
cross-examination, he jumped the rail to attack Chavis. The majority-white
(ten-to-two) jury also heard testimony from a veritable parade of more than
forty witnesses, including a dozen white police officers. Meanwhile, the daily
presence of white riflemen on the roof of the courthouse signaled the state’s
hard-line stance against further public protests.
To many observers, conviction for charges of arson and conspiracy appeared
certain, despite largely circumstantial evidence. For her role as an accessory,
Ann Shepard received a sentence of fifteen years; the black men, by contrast,
aged eighteen to twenty-four, received sentences ranging from twenty-nine
to thirty-four years in prison. All major news outlets covered the story, and a
series of unsuccessful appeals quickly followed. Over the years, the UCC-CRJ
worked tirelessly with various black power and left-liberal organizations to
build public awareness of the miscarriage of justice that had occurred. After
Hall and two other prosecution witnesses recanted their testimony in 1976,
admitting to accepting inducements, Amnesty International declared their
conviction and imprisonment a human rights violation. Still, the Wilmington
Ten remained in jail.116
Wilmingtonians responded very differently to the convictions and sentences.
Blacks generally viewed the whole affair as a gross travesty of justice. “They
wanted to blame somebody for 1971,” Benjamin Wonce insisted, “and the only
part of the community they wanted to blame was the black community.” While
some liberal whites agreed with this position, most whites at the time applauded
the trial’s outcome. That local and state officials conspired to frame the Wilm-
ington Ten, especially Chavis, in order to suppress further civil rights activism
has been confirmed by recent scholarship, especially Kenneth Janken’s exhaus-
tively researched book, The Wilmington Ten. Additionally, evidence indicates
that “law and order” interests, eager to wrest power from Democrats in the
upcoming November 1972 election, deliberately used the Wilmington Ten to
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 239
send a message to traditionalist white voters. And it worked: thanks in no small

measure to the September trial, Cape Fear Republicans won control of the New
Hanover County Commission, sent two representatives to the North Carolina
Assembly in Raleigh, and helped put James Holshouser in the Governor’s Man-
sion, Jesse Helms in the Senate, and Richard Nixon back in the White House.117
“A Bright Future Ahead”
In the trial’s immediate aftermath, Wilmington’s white civic leaders, now led
by an ultra-conservative mayor, John Symmes, initiated yet another cam-
paign to restore the city’s reputation. This time, notably, they commissioned
a study of race relations. Members of Wake Forest University’s Commission
on Race Relations came to town, interviewed residents, and concluded that
there was a profound power imbalance that stretched far back in the city’s
past. The report offered several recommendations on how to redress the situ-
ation, yet there is little evidence that city fathers followed their advice. In
truth, they remained fixated on the local economy. A special Star-News re-
port called “Focus 1972” captured their booster spirit: “An area beset with
growing pains looks back with awe at what has been accomplished and girds
itself for the continuing effort to make this the best place to live, work, and
play.” Predictably, the insert made no mention of the violence that had oc-
curred a few weeks earlier. Looking forward, it predicted more jobs at Du-
Pont’s Brunswick County plant, where employees made double-knit fabrics
like Dacron, an increasingly popular choice for wearing apparel. The county
airport was also expanding, as was the port authority, which expected a large
growth in new “container ships.” John Fox, now chairman of the Wilming-
ton Industrial Development Corporation (formerly the Committee of 100),
foresaw “a bright future ahead.”118
In the historic district, yesterday figured prominently in many residents’
plans for tomorrow. After the Bellamy house burned in a massive 1972 fire, a
group of heritage-minded citizens formed the Bellamy Mansion, Inc., to effect
a complete restoration of the venerable old structure. Similarly, in 1973 two
savvy real estate developers purchased a block of derelict nineteenth-century
buildings along the waterfront and began transforming them into an integrated
commercial complex called the Cotton Exchange. Meanwhile, Hugh MacRae
II’s Oleander Construction Company pushed forward with plans to build the
area’s first indoor shopping center, which he christened Independence Mall.
Through preservation, adaptive reuse, and evocative naming practices, promi-
nent citizens signaled their ongoing desire to capitalize on the city’s unique
heritage. And despite their recent racial crisis, they and their political leaders
still constructed a lily-white version of the past, one that reinforced their con-
tinued power and privilege.
Black counter-memories fostered a different sort of collective meaning and
civic purpose. When June Nash, a sociology graduate student from New York
University, visited Wilmington in 1972 to research the “response of blacks to
the violence directed against them,” she found a vibrant sense of black his-
tory. With the help of journalist Tom Jervay, with whom she resided while
in town, she not only interviewed people who had experienced the violence
of 1968 and 1971, but also that of 1898. “White citizens,” she noted, “had very
little to tell me about the [1898] riot. ‘We’d just as soon forget it, the town
librarian said, adding, ‘I heard the river was full of bodies.’” Another white
informant, who had been a little girl in 1898, told Nash, “My father and a
good many neighbors had to patrol the town with guns. We were ready to go
with one heirloom, clothes for the baby, and food. . . . We stayed quiet. The
servant heard gun fire and jumped out the window and ran home [laughed].
I don’t recall anything else. It’s something that came and went and then it was
all over.” Nash’s black informants, by contrast, who either “lived through the
[1898] riot or heard about it from their parents and neighbors,” persuaded
her that memories of “the massacre reshaped the fundamental outlook and
expectations that gave meaning to their behavior” in the present. Although
Nash changed the names of people to protect their identities, internal evi-
dence reveals one to have been Garnet Hargrave and another, Felice Sadgwar.
They and other affluent, well-connected blacks uniformly blamed “ignorant,”
“poor whites” who came “from outside the city” for racist violence, insisting
repeatedly that “the better class of whites” protected elite black families and
eventually stopped the massacre.
This interpretation surprised Nash, who had read Charles Chesnutt’s, Da-
vid Bryant Fulton’s, and especially, Helen Edmonds’s books, as well as pri-
mary sources available to her locally. The “riot generation,” Nash concluded,
“screened themselves from the truth” in order to maintain their privileged class
position “within the white established code of conduct” that dominated race
relations in the port city. Though the “riot generation” attempted to pass their
version on to succeeding generations, they failed. As the twentieth century
advanced and white elites continued to meet black elites’ accommodation with
violence and discrimination, “defeatism” and “resentment” took root. Thus,
Nash argued, when the “Black Power Ideology” arose in the 1960s, black youth
rejected the “survival techniques” of their elders and embraced a broader na-
tional consciousness.119
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 241
What Nash did not explore, but now seems plainly evident, is that black
youths also rejected their local history, at least what little they knew of it. In
almost every account of the school integration crisis of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, interest in the black past looms large. At Williston, students had
long benefited from specialized lesson plans emphasizing a black historical
perspective; multiple alumni recalled content pertaining to George Wash-
ington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other
nationally significant individuals. But as scholars like James O. Horton and
David Blight argue, this sort of past, the kind that celebrates the accom-
plishments of exceptional individuals, while intended to foster a positive,
collective black heritage, actually distorts the majority black experience to
fit America’s triumphal master narrative. The black power movement, by
contrast, offered a nationalist, separatist, and Pan-African past, which black
youth found very appealing, for it supplied militant role models and a critical
perspective on their present situation. This need for a new, more usable past
explains why, after the closure of Williston in 1968, reassigned black students
obsessed over Reverend King’s memory and demanded that courses in “black
studies” be added to the curricula at Hoggard and New Hanover High. When
the boycotters met at Gregory in January 1971, they immediately held classes
in black history, and when the teenagers listed their demands in February,
“black studies” appeared yet again. Every day, they passed monuments dedi-
cated to elite white men who had owned slaves. The activism of local blacks
like David Walker, Louis Sheridan, David Bryant Fulton, Abraham Galloway,
Alex Manly, or even Hubert Eaton remained unacknowledged in the city’s
shared, public spaces. The black experience of white violence, by contrast,
was well memorialized. Stories of failed slave rebellions and decapitated
heads on posts still circulated freely in the 1970s; so did tales of white-sheeted
night riders, descriptions of black bodies “choking” the Cape Fear, and ac-
counts of lynchings and police brutality. Over time, the resulting narrative,
what Mariel Rose called a “cultural schema of violence,” negatively shaped
how many black residents experienced race relations in the port city.120 For
militant blacks, the power of place forced them to look elsewhere for an af-
firmative identity.
Forgetting versus Remembering
By the early 1980s, Wilmington’s history was publicly contested terrain. During
the 1971 boycott and at opportune moments throughout the 1970s, youthful
black activists had deployed the black counter-narrative of 1898 to critique the
white power structure. In response, white Wilmingtonians engaged in a kind

of deliberate collective forgetting of their most famous “revolution.” Beverly
Tetterton, who started work in the local history collection at the New Hanover
County Public Library in 1980, acknowledged the “code of silence” and “lock
and key policy” that prevailed under the library’s “grand dame,” Katherine
Howell. Thus, when a scholar named Leon Prather tried to access primary
sources pertaining to the 1898 violence and coup, he found himself repeatedly
rebuffed. At the time, Prather was a professor of history at Tennessee State
University; he had learned about 1898 while researching a 1979 book on North
Carolina politics during the Progressive Era. Though he was both a black man
and an outsider, he managed to access more evidence than anyone since Helen
Edmonds, and his thesis that the Secret Nine orchestrated the revolution in
order to cement their economic and political power electrified the city. For
blacks, Prather’s book, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre
and Coup (1984), “became the letter of the law,” Tetterton recalled, “mainly
because a black man had written it. ‘A black man with a PhD has written this.’
And I don’t think they would have trusted a white historian, not at that time
anyway.” Whites had a different reaction. “A lot of people, I would say, I don’t
know exactly, but I would say 100% white came in to the library and wanted to
see the book. . . . And some of them were people whose families were involved
in it, and that were descended from the Secret Nine. And so there was quite a
do about it.” Later in her interview, Tetterton reemphasized white elites’ con-
sternation: “It was more alarm that somebody had gone and done this and this
was in print. Every book that we bought and put on the circulating shelf was
stolen.” That another sharply critical book had also appeared that year added
fuel to the fire—Hubert Eaton’s self-published memoir, Every Man Must Try.
Now elderly, Eaton sought to secure his legacy as a civil rights activist and
encourage others to continue the struggle. His account also portrayed Wilm-
ington as a deeply racist city led by an entrenched white oligarchy, and he, too,
named names. Eaton’s oligarchs, however, were still living.121
Meanwhile, the economy started to rebound and a corresponding in-
migration altered the complexion and culture of the municipal power struc-
ture. In the 1970s, the total population of Wilmington declined from 46,169
to just about 44,000 persons by 1980. But then the trend reversed itself, and
by 1990 more than 55,000 persons inhabited the port city. Blacks, however,
comprised a distinct minority (less than 26 percent of city residents), of whom
a third lived below the poverty line. These shifts largely reflected the same
demographic patterns that characterized other parts of the South: expansion
of the military and the development of affluent, white-dominated retirement
Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990 243
and resort communities. More distinctive was the growth of the University of
North Carolina at Wilmington, which brought in predominantly white faculty
and professional staff, and the emergence of the local film industry, which at-
tracted another crowd altogether.
Wilmington’s reputation as a good place to make movies began, appropri-
ately, when director Frank Capra Jr. saw a photograph of Orton plantation
on the cover of a magazine in 1983. At the time, Capra sought an antebellum
mansion that could serve as the setting for his new film, Firestarter. Capra’s
staff contacted the site’s owners, Lawrence and Kenneth Sprunt, the grandsons
of businessman-historian James Sprunt, and soon worked out a deal. Over the
course of shooting, Capra and partner, Dino De Laurentis, pumped more than
five million dollars into the local economy. More important, they liked the look
of the area so much that they decided to build a studio in Wilmington. Mem-
bers of the Committee of 100, still an active organization, offered the movie
moguls financial backing, cheap land, low taxes, and other incentives. More
films quickly followed, including the cult classic Blue Velvet (1986), which was
shot at a historic building downtown.122 White newcomers from Hollywood
poured into the area (even Dennis Hopper ended up buying property to reno-
vate), and a new, liberal coalition began to emerge.
The black middle class expanded, too, albeit slowly, and more people of
color won elections and appointments to positions of real authority. Luther
Jordan, for example, the son of a black funeral-home director, joined the City
Council in 1977 and won reelection in the 1980s. Hubert Eaton became chair
of the Board of Trustees at the university in 1981, and Joe McQueen, a for-
mer deputy under Marion Millis, became the first black New Hanover County
Sherriff in 1982. Many locals confidently pointed to these changes as proof that
the tensions of a decade ago were gone forever. Blacks and whites alike once
again shifted their discourse about race. In Wilmington as elsewhere, talk of
“integration” gave way to an appreciation of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.”
Of course, old ways of feeling and believing continued to surface. In 1987, the
Klan held a parade downtown, and the NAACP organized protest marches
when a white cop killed a young black man. Still, the changes of the 1980s
prompted a reconsideration of Wilmington’s troubled past. By 1990, it was time
for a new sounding.123
CHAPTER FIVE
Soundings
In 1996, some Wilmingtonians approached city councilwoman Katherine Bell

Moore to solicit her support for a centennial commemoration of the 1898 vio-
lence and coup. They intended the event to promote racial reconciliation and
considered Moore’s involvement crucial to its success. Her Wilmington roots
went deep: her great-grandfather, a freedman, came to the port city during
Reconstruction and became a business owner; his descendants followed suit,
establishing a pattern of economic and civic leadership that persisted through
time. By 1996, Moore had achieved national honors as a minority business-
woman and local fame as a political activist. Her advocacy for the poor, po-
lice reform, and children helped her secure a seat on the City Council, where
council members repeatedly elected her mayor pro tempore, a position that
required her to preside in the mayor’s absence or incapacity. Yet notwithstand-
ing her political influence, the centennial planners also sought her input be-
cause her great-uncle, lawyer Armond W. Scott, had been banished during the
revolution of 1898. They did not know it at the time, but Moore shared more
with Armond Scott than genes. Believing that she, too, had become a target
for retaliation from the city’s white establishment, Moore declined their invita-
tions to participate.1
Though the 1998 commemoration did eventually occur, this effort to re-
construct Wilmington as a racially progressive city contrasted sharply with an
increasing vilification of Moore in the public arena. Regardless of whether her
activism made her a target, her allegations of increasing white persecution in
the years just before, during, and after the commemoration echoed those of
activist blacks in previous eras. Further, the public rhetoric surrounding Moore
mirrored prior instances of white resentment of black advancement. In early
2001, for example, police charged Moore’s daughter with a parking violation,
but the local newspaper focused on reports by white witnesses that Moore
called the white officer a “poor cracker.” In another incident, the media stressed
Soundings 245
how Moore purportedly taunted white police officers by referencing her higher
salary and telling a bystander, “they can’t stand the way we live.” To Moore’s
supporters, her success exemplified the American Dream and Wilmington’s
racial progress; to her critics, she was the ungrateful beneficiary of misguided
affirmative action policies. Both sides of the very public debate over Moore, in
other words, deployed racialized, place-based tropes and collective memories
to make their case.
Such an acrimonious dispute necessarily moved into Wilmington’s most
meaningful public spaces. Demonstrations occurred outside City Hall (site of
the 1898 coup), where protestors held signs saying “Poor Trash Votes Count,
Too,” and “No Moore Racism.” Her opponents even staged a rally in December
2002. This event occurred after a white police officer lost his job when an in-
vestigation determined he and his partner had improperly arrested Moore for
driving while impaired, despite two negative breath-alcohol tests. In sympa-
thy, the Wilmington Professional Firefighters Association hosted a public “pig
picking” at Hugh MacRae Park, the 1970s site of white-supremacist rallies, to
raise money for the fired officer. According to the Star-News, “more than 300”
people attended, a sure sign of the “strong support” the white community af-
forded the police and their tactics. Moore, by contrast, lost her customers, filed
a fifteen-million-dollar lawsuit against both the Police Department and the
City of Wilmington, and became an even greater object of public ridicule. (The
editor of The Star-News called her “delusional.”) She finally fled to Florida.2
Like a sounding, a measure of the depth of water, the controversy over
Moore reveals the uneasy nexus of race, place, and memory that existed in
Wilmington at the time of the 1898 centennial. Many communities experi-
enced similar discord in the 1990s, a decade marked by numerous “culture
wars,” including battles over the state of race relations. Nor were Wilmingto-
nians unusual in seeking to ameliorate racial tensions through public history
projects. The placement of a memorial to Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue
in Richmond, Virginia, the opening of a voting rights museum in Selma, Ala-
bama, and the formal commemoration of a race “riot” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are
just a few examples from that decade. The 1998 commemoration in Wilming-
ton cannot be understood apart from either this national context or residents’
perennial struggles over their collective past. From the beginning, the centen-
nial’s planners intended their project to “heal the wound” by “telling the story”
of 1898 and “honoring the memory” of the tragedy with social and economic
justice initiatives in the present. But despite the commemoration’s successes,
key stakeholders among the white elite never even accepted its conservative
goals, while public support for the more revolutionary ones never coalesced.
My aim has been to understand these outcomes in hopes of furthering

authentic public history projects elsewhere. Professionally trained public his-
torians have endeavored since the 1980s to prompt social change by engaging
American audiences in a more analytical, self-reflective evaluation of our
common past. This activist goal defines the field and sharply separates con-
temporary practitioners, who range from exhibit designers to park rangers
and professors, from their comparable predecessors in earlier eras. We have
been stymied, however, by the divide that separates ordinary Americans’ and
professional historians’ understandings of the endeavor called history. Most
people consider history a product, a fixed story based on immutable facts. For
professional historians it is a process, a way of thinking critically about the
past that changes to reflect the evolving methods of the academic discipline.3
In hindsight, I realized how this dichotomy reinforced disagreements over
the meaning of race and place in 1998. During the commemoration, compet-
ing notions of history and long-submerged collective memories all became
public, each conflict sounding differently the depth of racial inequality at
the turn of the twenty-first century. And when the resolution to these con-
tests finally came, it had important consequences for the city and for public
historians.
“An Unflattering Story” Resurfaces
While Katherine Moore navigated city politics in the early 1990s, Phil Gerard
explored “[a]n unflattering story about race riots, murder in the street, [and]
the breakdown of civil disorder.” Then director of the creative writing pro-
gram at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, he spent several years
gathering information for Cape Fear Rising, his fictional account of the city’s
infamous revolution. As he slowly pieced together what occurred in November
1898, he realized how unsettling the novel would be for some white Wilmingto-
nians. Several readers of the draft advised him to change the names of certain
characters based on actual historic personages. Gerard recoiled at the thought.
Yes, he knew that individuals with the same surnames still lived in Wilmington
and still wielded tremendous power; one of them sat on the Board of Visitors
of the university. Yet historical fiction was a time-honored genre, he reasoned.
He stayed true to his creative vision. After the book’s publication in February
1994, he received threats against his family, threats about his job, threats that
he should leave town—or else. He did not recant: “A novelist’s job is to make
people look hard at truths they would rather turn away from,” he argued. “My
novel is just one version of the truth. Others, I hope, will offer theirs. Civic
Soundings 247
memory is precious. A community is built on stories—even the ones that do

not make us proud.”4 Framed as a hard look at “the truth,” Gerard’s work would
strongly influence the centennial commemoration to come.
Like David Fulton and Charles Chesnutt, Gerard grounded his account in
real history. An actual, historic map of Wilmington forms the novel’s end pa-
pers. Meaningful places are clearly marked: MacRae’s house on Market Street,
Thalian Hall, Oakdale Cemetery, and others. Gerard studied 1897 fire insur-
ance maps and walked the streets to depict the historic landscape accurately.
Similarly, he framed each chapter with an epigraph taken from a historic text.
These include populist leader Benjamin F. (Bennie) Keith’s memoir, the 1897
Wilmington city directory, and period newspaper articles. Only some of the
epigraphs come from authentic, period texts, however, and the reader needs
extensive expertise to identify the fake ones. Indeed, the inability to distinguish
fact from fiction was the chief source of anxiety for Gerard’s critics. Though
he studied letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, marriage and death re-
cords to determine “what was going on inside [the Secret Nine’s] hearts and
minds,” Gerard necessarily invented their personalities, their motivations, and
their dialogue.5 Moreover, he interwove his fictionalized representations of real
Wilmingtonians and events with wholly imagined ones.
Analysis of major characters and themes helps explain Gerard’s intentions
for Cape Fear Rising and readers’ divergent reactions to it. His protagonist, Sam
Jenks, is an imaginary white journalist who comes to Wilmington in August
1898 to make a fresh start. His desire to fit in, to find a new home and a new
identity, resonates with every transplanted newcomer. In interviews, Gerard
attributed Jenks to his own sense of bewilderment upon his arrival in the late
1980s. Over and over, he heard conflicting stories about the events of 1898,
and he became convinced that “nobody will ever know for sure exactly what
events occurred that bloody time.” Hence, Gerard decided to explore in his
novel a more universal set of questions: how does a person react when every-
one around him is doing something wrong? At what point must he, the indi-
vidual, take responsibility to make it stop?6 Jenks is the character surrounded
by wrongdoing—in this case, a virulent form of racism.
To help us empathize with Jenks, Gerard gave him multiple flaws. He intro-
duces Jenks as a passenger on a train bound for Wilmington, much as Charles
Chesnutt introduced Dr. Miller. It is August 1898. We learn that Jenks is a
failed Spanish-American War correspondent who feared bloodshed, missed
Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, spent weeks in a drunken stupor,
and returned home to find that his wife miscarried their first child. Riddled
with guilt, he promised her to be a better, stronger (sober) man, and wrote his
distant cousin, Hugh MacRae, to beg a job. He thus arrives in the port city in
a desperate state. Dependent for his livelihood on MacRae and other white
elites (especially Alfred Moore Waddell), he covets their wealth and power, the
opulence of their homes, the deference of their women and black servants.
Like other newcomers, Gerard’s Jenks quickly develops an attachment to
the city’s distinctive sense of place. He likes everything: its busy waterfront
and sandy streets, “the pinewoods, the ocean. The way the air smells of the
river. I mean, you can smell this place,” he declares to his wife, Gray Ellen.
“Isn’t it beautiful here? . . . I just want us to make a life here.”7 To do that, Jenks
learns he must write the news the way the elites want it told, spinning the facts
to boost Wilmington’s reputation. Here lies the chief source of tension in the
novel: Jenks is torn between his desire to advance, on one hand, and his sense
of personal and professional ethics on the other.8 As MacRae reveals plans for
the coup and massacre to him, Jenks wrestles with his conscience, which is
sometimes voiced by Gray Ellen, sometimes by fellow reporter Harry Cala-
bash. After the November 10 revolution occurs, Jenks must decide whether to
report what he observed (that white elites viciously attacked innocent blacks)
or produce an imagined fiction (that white elites suppressed a vicious black
uprising). Although he makes the right (ethical) decision, it costs him his live-
lihood. In an important scene, Waddell and MacRae, representing the Old and
New Souths, jointly banish Jenks from the community. They claim it is because
Jenks cannot “control his wife,” who has challenged social conventions repeat-
edly, but the reader knows this is a pretense. They evict him because living in
Wilmington requires a full commitment to white supremacy, and Jenks cannot
supply that. To the contrary, he has confronted his own prejudice by novel’s end
and resolved to end it.9
A story about the perennial “truth” of racism, Cape Fear Rising necessarily
features a black character of equal narrative weight to Jenks: Ivanhoe Grant.
Grant comes to Wilmington on the same train that carries Jenks; like the white
journalist, he struggles to find his place in local society. So fair he “could pass
for a white person even in daylight,” he is disinherited from whiteness’s privi-
leges in a way reminiscent of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the disinherited son of
an Anglo-Saxon lord, yet more like a militant Union general (Grant) than a
chivalrous knight. The extensive keloids Grant bears from an earlier whipping
symbolize psychic scars from years of white oppression. They also serve as a
mnemonic for his divine mission. Having had a conversion experience during
his near-death from lynching, Grant believes he is Nat Turner reincarnated, a
self-ordained preacher called to lead a black revolution against white suprem-
acy. Because the city’s black elite disavow violence, he concentrates on rousing
Soundings 249
the black masses. In a particularly dramatic moment during a public meeting,

Grant reveals himself to be the grandson of one of the enslaved men whose
heads were mounted on posts in 1831. However, his belligerent, anti-white, re-
taliatory persona is actually an “invention,” as Gray Ellen Jenks discovers when
she nervously accompanies him into the swamp the night of November 10.10
Grant’s true character, his essential decency, is reinforced hours later, when
Grant has the opportunity to shoot a drunken, pistol-waving Sam Jenks and
deliberately misses. In fact, it is Grant’s act of mercy and his command (“Work
it out for yourself. Write the story”) that fully rouse both Jenkses from their
bigotry.
Gerard’s fifteen other major characters are the ones that agitated Wilming-
ton readers. One of them, Hugh MacRae, orchestrates the violence and coup.
Gerard’s fictional MacRae is “restless,” “energetic,” a virulent racist, and a man
with animal appetites. (In his introductory scene, MacRae “devours” a fruit
compote, “attacks” his pork loin, and “slurps” his coffee; his “thinning blond
hair” is often “mussed” or “disheveled,” belying his attempts to control it with
pomade.) Here, we can see how Gerard inverted the 1890s literary trope for
black men: MacRae’s civilized exterior cannot hide the beast within. During
the massacre, MacRae “fired and reloaded his own pistol so many times he lost
count,” and during the coup, he felt “wildly alive.”11 His fictional co-conspirator,
J. Allan Taylor, is equally bellicose; early in the novel, he anticipates the blood-
shed, thinking, “Now, instead of poring over endless balance sheets in a dreary
office, he would be out in the open air maneuvering among other men of ac-
tion.” On the day of the revolution, it is Taylor who orders the Wilmington
Light Infantry to open fire, Taylor who forces a black man to run a gauntlet,
and Taylor who oversees the banishment campaign.12 Gerard’s Waddell, by
contrast, is a languid, aristocratic figure, yet even he has a barbaric nature, for it
is the ferocious imagery of his speech that spurs on the paramilitary Red Shirts,
and it is he who leads the mob to destroy the Record, and he who threatens his
spirited, young wife into submission. (Gerard also implies that his Waddell, an
old man in 1898, ordered the 1831 slave decapitations that open the novel and
reference historic “Negro” Head Road.) The other major white, male characters
(William Rand Kenan, Walker Taylor, George Rountree) are far less vicious,
though still potentially violent.
In all cases, Gerard took pains to make his characters more than one-di-
mensional caricatures. His Taylor, for example, is depicted as a pious Presby-
terian, offended by cursing in the sacristy, and his Rountree is a real “law and
order” type, who relies on his wife to lay out proper clothes. “I tried to shape
their characters according to what they said and did,” Gerard later explained.
After reading through their collected papers, he said: “I came to loathe them
and admire them, to like and detest them. . . . They came to life for me as real,
complex human beings—just like us. The men who carried out what I came to
regard as a massacre were not villains. Mostly they were decent family men, ac-
tive in their churches, who believed that what they were doing was right—even
though some of them committed acts that were shameful, cowardly, violent,
and criminal.”13
The historic black persons, who left fewer traces in the records, proved
harder to vivify, though they are just as richly wrought. We feel Alex Manly’s
love for his fiancée, Carrie Sadgwar, his commitment to racial uplift, and his
close bond with his brother, Frank. We meet city alderman and school prin-
cipal John Norwood, lawyer Carter Peamon, and saloonkeeper Tom Miller.
They share the pages with dozens of other characters, white and black, real
and imagined, major and minor: Mike Dowling, commander of the Redshirts;
James Sprunt; Gabrielle De Rossett Waddell; Rev. J. Allen Kirk; Waddell’s cook,
Bessie, and her daughter, Saffron Jones; Jenks’s neighbor, Callie Register; and
coroner David Jacobs, to name just a few. Gerard interwove their myriad sto-
ries to show that the tragedy of 1898 resulted from multiple intersecting “vec-
tors of ambition.” Yet many readers drew different conclusions.
The eager participation of so many whites in the violent revolution led
some reviewers to conclude that Wilmington in 1898 was “a twisted society,” a
“wicked” place, where “white supremacy was a goal widely shared.” Indeed, ele-
ments of the final chapter and epilogue forcefully make this point. In them, the
banished Jenkses flee north, to their hometown of Philadelphia. The implica-
tion of this setting—the City of Brotherly Love—is that Wilmington was a City
of Brotherly Hatred. No wonder the book sparked outrage locally. According
to Star-News reporter Ben Steelman, many white Wilmingtonians denounced
the novel, written by an outsider from “the North,” as “troublemaking and
carpetbagging.” Walker Taylor III detested the association of his heroic grand-
father with such a “dreadful occurrence,” and said his daughter worried about
the stigma her son, Walker Taylor V, might face in the future.14 Others bristled
on behalf of the maligned elite. One woman quaintly observed, “He labels his
book fiction, then proceeds to use real names . . . even to the point of thinking
up stuff for them to say. This is not a very nice thing to do! I think we should all
just ignore this book.” For generations, white residents believed that elite civic
leaders had saved the town from “Negro Domination” and stopped the violence,
attributing the conflict, as George Rountree II did, to “the strange chemistry
of the period.” Gerard’s book challenged both myths at once. Reporter Chuck
Twardy spoke for many readers when he said that, after reflecting upon the
Soundings 251
novel, “the old apology—that people did not know any better ‘back then’ is off-
base. They knew. And although they might have convinced themselves of the
white supremacy claptrap, simple greed for power and money underlay it.”15
Far more was at stake than control of Wilmington’s history. The Cape Fear
Rising controversy reflected a profound disagreement over the state of race
relations in the 1990s. Those who applauded the novel called it a “catalyst to
the healing of strained race relations” and declared Gerard “courageous” for
urging the community to “grieve” and “put this behind us.”16 These and other
comments indicate the awareness among some residents that a stark racial
divide existed in the port city. Further, Gerard’s fictionalized account offered
for public scrutiny an explanation for the rift: prominent whites in the 1990s
(the MacRaes, Taylors, Rountrees, and numerous others) inherited wealth and
power that their ancestors unjustly derived by terrorizing black residents and
exploiting their labor. Moreover, his account implicated thousands of ordinary
whites who colluded with the city fathers to maintain a system passed down
by their own nameless, faceless ancestors. Consider this passage from the con-
clusion: “According to Harry, by the time it was all over, a thousand Negroes
fled the county, most of them skilled workers of professionals. A thousand
people, Sam reflects—one for every armed [white] man who helped take the
city. Where were the other seven thousand whites? Couldn’t they stand up to
a minority with guns?” After pondering his fellow whites’ immoral behavior,
Sam “can’t help feeling it is not over” and confidently envisions a day when the
wicked city will redeem itself: “Someday, he must go back. It will be different.
A year from now, ten years, twenty. He will return and claim it.”17 Yet it is an
ambiguous ending, much like the one in Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition.
For Wilmington was not different “ten years, twenty,” after 1898—instead,
Jim Crow became so firmly entrenched that it took decades of civil rights ac-
tivism to overturn. Many locals knew from firsthand experience that white
Wilmingtonians had fought “the Second Reconstruction” tooth and nail, that
their battle persisted through the 1970s, and that white supremacists helped
fuel the New Right’s rise in the Cape Fear in the 1980s.18 For these readers,
Wilmington’s modern race problem resulted from its long, racist history, which
Gerard’s book corroborated. Meanwhile, their opponents repudiated the exis-
tence of white racism and attributed modern racial tensions to unscrupulous
blacks and their misguided white supporters (especially outsiders).
Scholars have been closely studying how white Americans’ views on race
relations changed at the end of the 20th century. According to sociologists like
Eric Porter, an interpretation emerged with the New Right that the 1970s had
been “an era of excess when it came to questions of race and racial identities.”
By the early 1980s, millions of ordinary whites apparently felt that society had
done all it could do to end racial discrimination; that in the absence of scien-
tific notions of biological inferiority and legal obstacles to advancement, any
disparities that existed owed to blacks’ persistent cultural, social, and moral
deficiencies; and that black activists should “just get over it.” At the same time,
the corollary belief became widespread that affirmative action policies did not
promote equality; they harmed it by putting unqualified blacks into positions
they did not merit. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bakke v. University of Cali-
fornia (1978) accelerated this conclusion when it coined the phrase “reverse
discrimination” to describe racial preferences. Soon, like their counterparts in
earlier eras, white Americans often complained that blacks were unfairly tak-
ing “their” jobs.19
These views were very evident in Wilmington. In a 1994 survey of local at-
titudes toward race relations, 60 percent of white respondents acknowledged
that discrimination against blacks existed, but 44 percent said that “reverse
discrimination” was an even bigger problem. White respondents also tended to
believe that law enforcement officers were “impartial” and that school integra-
tion had been “unsuccessful.” By contrast, 43 percent of black respondents felt
police were tougher on blacks than whites, while 53 percent said discrimina-
tion against blacks existed in stores; 73 percent felt discrimination existed in
hiring practices, and 46 percent considered news media reporting very biased
and unfair.20
Adding to the ideological debate over racism were the very real economic
disparities that existed between whites and blacks. Despite significant increases
in per capita income in the Cape Fear region, the earning gap between white
and black households greatly expanded at the end of the twentieth century.
In 1980, the mean income for local black households was $11,236 compared
to $20,121 for whites, a difference of $8,885. In 1990, the mean for blacks had
risen to $20,387, but the mean for whites was $37,517, a difference of $17,130.
Moreover, the disparity widened further thereafter. By 2000, median black
household income was $33,661, for whites $57,443, and the gap was $23,782.
Rising disparities in housing, education, and health also marked the end of the
century. This situation was by no means unique to Wilmington. Most major
cities in the United States had very similar problems, although race differently
affected large, southern metropolitan areas like Atlanta and New Orleans. Al-
though few Wilmingtonians were in a position to see or interpret local statis-
tics, one had merely to contrast the gentrified elegance of South Third Street
with the crumbling infrastructure at Jervay, a historic public housing project
several blocks south. Visible signs of inequity were everywhere.21
Soundings 253
Blacks’ political marginalization reinforced perceptions of economic dis-

parity. As noted, Katherine Moore was the sole black person on the city council
in the 1990s. Initially appointed to serve out someone else’s partial term, she
won election on her own merits three times. Only a handful of other blacks
held political or municipal office: Joe McQueen, sheriff of New Hanover
County, and Luther Jordan, who represented the region in the state legislature,
are notable examples. The county commissioners were white, as were all the
school board members, the chief of police, the city manager, the city attorney,
and most magistrates. To a certain extent these circumstances reflected local
demographics: whites comprised 80 percent of the county’s population in the
1990s.22 As the suburbs continued to fill with affluent white transplants, the city
implemented an aggressive annexation policy to compensate for its declining
tax base. Annexation in the 1990s thus accomplished what gerrymandering did
in earlier periods: it further diluted urban black voting strength. The same pro-
cess affected black communities in cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston,
Richmond, and Raleigh. In the port city, however, blacks had unique traumatic
memories of political disfranchisement. What Hubert Eaton in the 1950s and
Ben Chavis and Kojo Nantambu in the 1970s identified as an “1898 mental-
ity”—feelings of powerlessness, disengagement, and alienation—flowed deep
and wide.
The phrase should not be seen as a narrow reference to the famed 1898
massacre and coup, however. Following literary theorists, I see “1898” as a
trope, a kind of narrative shorthand that different constituencies have clearly
used in different ways. Scholars like Gregory Smithers and Kimberly Wallace-
Sanders argue that “slave breeding” and “mammy” also served as powerful,
deeply contested tropes, but there are many others. By the 1990s, “1898” clearly
connoted for some Wilmingtonians a four-hundred-year-old pattern of white
authorities using violence to keep blacks subordinate. Kenneth Janken has
shown how Wilmington’s black nationalists and their allies deployed 1898
first to connect the student boycotters’ specific grievances to systems of black
oppression elsewhere and then to expose what had really happened to the
Wilmington Ten. In their hands, 1898 was a deliberate part of political con-
sciousness-raising efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. It became an effective trope,
moreover, because it signified so many perennial concerns, including police
brutality, discrimination in the criminal justice system, unequal access to edu-
cation, housing, and jobs, and political suppression. For many city residents,
these concerns transcended a specific date, having always been characteristic
of life in the port city.23 But for other residents, 1898 stood for something ir-
regular and irrelevant to living persons.
Confronting “Dangerous Memories”
Dismayed by their community’s persistent racial problems, a small group

of Wilmingtonians began in November 1995 to discuss solutions. Compris-
ing blacks and whites, newcomers and oldtimers alike, they shared a stated
desire to create “greater connectedness, meaning, and future opportunity” in
the place they called home. One of the original members, a nationally known
white historian, described them as “academics from UNCW, leaders in the
black community, and civil rights activists.” All were aware of the recent trend
in American life to revise celebratory master narratives of national and local
history. Examples of revisionist projects abounded—from the official apology
and reparations issued to Japanese American internees in 1988 to the contro-
versies surrounding the Smithsonian’s proposed Enola Gay exhibit in 1994.
While these and other history wars raged, the group began planning a series of
public events designed to answer questions raised by Gerard’s novel, to com-
memorate what actually happened in 1898 during its centennial year, and to
promote racial healing in the port city. Their long-range social-justice goals
manifested in the name they initially chose for their effort, the Wilmington
Alliance for Community Transformation (ACT).24
As one of their first steps, ACT members contracted with a black consul-
tant to “take the pulse of racial tensions” in Wilmington. The man they hired,
Isaiah Madison, had excellent credentials for the job: a civil rights lawyer who
participated in a school desegregation suit, a former professor of political sci-
ence, a minister, and past executive director of the Durham-based Institute for
Southern Studies, he operated at that time a nonprofit organization dedicated
to grassroots economic redevelopment. Madison spent considerable time re-
searching Wilmington before his arrival in early June 1996. His initial two-day
visit, though brief, included several preliminary commemoration-planning
meetings and four open conversations about race, which he facilitated. Very
quickly he concluded that “both black and white Wilmingtonians are suffering
a lot more psychic pain and trauma today than were inflicted by the 1898 riot
and coup alone.” Besides the proposed commemoration, controversial topics
included “resistance to school integration, the call for neighborhood schools,
the movement to annex predominantly white areas, charges of police abuse
against blacks, and the continuing ‘arrogance’ of the current white-dominated
power structure concerning racial issues.” Not surprisingly, he found signifi-
cant inter- and intra-racial conflict. Whereas affluent, highly educated whites
and blacks wanted “social reconciliation,” low-income, less-educated blacks
and whites demanded “economic opportunity.” To address these problems,
Soundings 255
Madison offered ACT recommendations ranging from a candlelight vigil, a

physical monument to the victims of 1898, and community dialogues to the
establishment of a fund for small-business loans and job-training programs for
minorities. Above all, he said that success required the creation of “a genuine
community of memory,” one that “will remember stories not only of suffer-
ing received, but of suffering inflicted—dangerous memories, for they call the
community to alter ancient evils.” Confronting the city’s dangerous memories
was the only way to achieve healing, he argued.25
ACT had little time to consider Madison’s careful report because an unusu-
ally stormy hurricane season had just begun. In early June, a tropical wave
observed off the coast of Africa intensified over the course of three weeks
such that, when it made landfall as Hurricane Bertha on July 12, the damage
exceeded more than $250 million. I arrived in Wilmington just days before
Bertha came ashore. The 105-mile-per-hour winds brought down mature trees
and snapped power lines, while the pounding waves and an eight-to-ten-foot
storm surge twisted piers, smashed boats, and eroded the shore. New Hanover
County lost hundreds of structures, chiefly in the areas around Wrightsville
Beach and Topsail Island. Additional hurricanes followed, including Fran, a
Category 3 storm that slammed into the Cape Fear River headland on Sep-
tember 6, just a few weeks after I began classes at the university. Fran caused
nearly $2.55 billion worth of destruction, making it the state’s worst single eco-
logical disaster to date.26 The beachfront looked like a war zone. Emergency
crews arriving on the barrier islands found few signs of life: the nearly 500,000
residents and tourists had evacuated inland as far as Raleigh. In Wilmington,
temporary shelters overflowed with refugees. In many neighborhoods, includ-
ing mine, downed trees and wires, fallen signs, and windblown debris greatly
complicated vehicular movement, while the massive power outage prompted
city officials to impose a curfew to preclude wandering and looting. National
Guard troops arrived to maintain order and assist with disaster relief. FEMA,
the Red Cross, United Way, and the Salvation Army, among other groups, also
stepped in to assist thousands of affected persons, especially the poor. Food
Stamp recipients, for example, who had already spent their monthly allot-
ment, required financial help replacing spoiled items. With nearly hundreds
of local businesses closed, some indefinitely, the number of residents out of
work skyrocketed. Tempers flared, fueled by stress and anxiety, oppressive heat
and humidity, and additional thunderstorms. Nor did the crisis ease for many
Wilmingtonians until many months after the storm.27 Talk of commemora-
tion, economic justice, and racial reconciliation thus began amid inauspicious
circumstances.
Wilmington’s business and political elite worried that the unvarnished story
of 1898 would only damage further the city’s hopes for redevelopment. Dur-
ing the early fall, ACT cochair Bolton Anthony recalled a series of what he
termed “back channel” meetings wherein several city leaders expressed their
concerns. Some feared that public acknowledgment of the white conspiracy
would generate “ill will” between the races. Others predicted retaliatory black
violence and rioting. In sum, the establishment wanted assurances that the
commemoration would not “get out of hand” and asked Anthony about plans
for “damage control” should early events “blow up.”28 Municipal officials were
not the only ones worried, either. What ACT proposed, an honest recognition
of the city’s racially oppressive past, directly challenged a new wave of selective
remembering by Old Wilmingtonians.
Writer Susan Taylor Block led the 1990s nostalgia craze. A native daugh-
ter of the Cape Fear, she grew up in the 1950s–60s in what she describes as a
“Mayberry-like pocket of Wilmington”—the all-white Winter Park neighbor-
hood. By birth and marriage she connects to several of the city’s most histori-
cally prominent families. Starting in the early 1990s, she published a series of
works celebrating the contributions of local white elites, such as The Wrights
of Wilmington (1992); Van Eeden, about Hugh MacRae and his colonies (1995);
and Along the Cape Fear (1998), one of Arcadia Publishing’s ubiquitous his-
toric photograph collections. Though the city was majority black for most of
its history, Block’s books at that time ignored the black experience except for
a handful of individuals (including “Prince Moreau”) presented in the loyal-
slave mode.29 The omission is striking: to be clear, my point is that her oeuvre
even neglects the uncontentious history of black Wilmingtonians, that is, free
black artisans, churches and fraternal organizations, the Community Hospi-
tal, Althea Gibson’s success at Wimbledon, or Michael Jordan’s childhood. In
the main, her Wilmington is a charming, ageless place populated by a close-
knit cadre of white visionaries, artists, and eccentrics. And this traditional
meta-narrative resonated with many readers. Indeed, the sales of her books,
the popularity of her blogs, and her numerous imitators suggest a widespread
inclination for what theorists call “historical amnesia,” not just nostalgia. By
ignoring or misrepresenting the experiences of blacks in the past, some people
(whites especially, but also some blacks) consciously or unconsciously seek to
evade considerations of racial inequality today.30
A similar kind of selective remembering can be seen in Samuel D. Bissette’s
Voices of the Cape Fear, a set of oral interviews he conducted in 1994–95 and
disseminated to the public through print and Web media. As a savings-and-
loan officer and an active member of multiple civic organizations from the
Soundings 257
1940s through the 1970s, Bissette knew nearly everyone who was anyone in
Wilmington in the second half of the twentieth century. When this generation
began to pass away, he conceived the idea, he said, to capture “local events and
history” from “people who had contributed substantially to the cultural and
business life of the area.” Despite this broad purpose, Bissette interviewed only
a select group of thirty-four individuals who were white, affluent, and well
connected through Old Wilmington networks. These demographics, coupled
with the content of the transcripts, which focus on efforts to boost the city’s
reputation after the Atlantic Coastline Railroad left in 1955, point to a narrower
aim: to commemorate how Bissette and his informants, all members of the
Committee of 100, saved the city from stagnation. Their memories of Wilm-
ington, not surprisingly, are positive; they remember a tight-knit community, a
place with problems like poverty and crime, to be sure, but where civic leaders
always offered a helping hand and where hard work, ingenuity, and equal op-
portunity prevailed. Although the civil rights movement, desegregation, and
the trials of the Wilmington Ten preoccupied the city during the period cov-
ered by the interviews, these events are missing; black Wilmingtonians receive
no mention save one person’s passing reference to the 1971 riots. Elite, white
experiences are universal. Elite, white “voices of the Cape Fear” speak for all.31
The ACT project also threatened to upset black nostalgia, which centered
on Williston High School, the “greatest school under the sun.” The Williston
Alumni Association, formed in 1969, began as an effort to ease the collec-
tive grief that followed the high school’s dramatic closure and reassignment.
According to Melvyn Thompson, one of the group’s original leaders: “They
talked about things they wanted for the students and different kinds of courses
they thought were needed, the course of study and working along with the
Board. . . . At that time [1969] they had no voice and that [the association]
would be their voice.”32 Here we see an activist agenda, with alumni organiz-
ing to preserve elements of Williston’s distinctive curriculum by transferring
them to the newly integrated schools, but their nonviolent efforts evolved into
student-led protests and then race riots and martial law. By the 1990s, the as-
sociation hosted a series of commemorative events designed to mitigate the
palpable sense of loss that still pervaded the black community. Whether at class
reunions, fundraisers, or the annual Christmas party, alumni from the 1930s
through the 1960s gathered regularly to construct shared memories of clubs,
teachers, and classes.
Members of the association felt they embodied black Wilmington’s “best,”
those who had triumphed despite de jure and de facto segregation. Henry
Perry (class of 1955) echoed a common refrain in his oral interview: “Well,
when I hear the word [Williston] . . . it just brings back memories, you know,
I mean good memories. And even though we had hard times and we knew we
weren’t being treated the way we should have been treated, we still had a nice
time. Some things you have to adjust to. . . . I’m not saying it was right, but we
adjusted. And some of us, most of us excelled for Williston. Most of them at
Williston, they excelled.”33 Not all had wholly positive memories of Williston.
In oral interviews, alumni acknowledged that lighter-skinned students typi-
cally received preferential treatment from black teachers and administrators;
they also noted profound class tensions between affluent “East Side” and poor
“West Side” blacks. As Craig Dosher observed in his study of Williston, Wilm-
ington’s blacks “were not immune to the petty prejudices of the segregated
society and region in which they lived.” Still, what brought Williston alumni
together in the 1990s was their sense of a shared, place-based identity that
transcended their individual experiences. Attached to the physical building
was the collective memory of a time (the mid-twentieth century) marked by
black achievement: when the Williston Glee Club traveled the East Coast to
acclaim; where debutantes swirled across the gymnasium floor; when most of
the senior class went to college; where even the darkest, poorest child knew
his Chaucer. Though willing to acknowledge hard times, many consciously
preferred to focus on the good ones.34
By early 1997, the original ACT members had defined a strategy to suit the
challenging circumstances they faced. First, they adopted a new name, the
“1898 Centennial Commission,” and a specific yet ambitious triad of goals—“to
tell the story, heal the wound, and honor the memory.” The group understood
the need to be inclusive, so they solicited representatives from as many dif-
ferent segments of the community as possible. They organized four standing
committees (Education, Memorial, Reconciliation, and Economic Develop-
ment) and decided that each should be cochaired by one black person and one
white. They found it nearly impossible to recruit members from two extreme
poles of Wilmington society, the old-time white elite and the old-time black
working class. Isaiah Madison and several others on the Executive Council met
with George Rountree II, for example, but he refused to participate at that time.
They also approached other descendants of white elites involved in the mas-
sacre and coup, including Hugh MacRae II and Walker Taylor III. Still angry
over Gerard’s book, old white families continued to disavow any project that
might cast their grandfathers in a negative light. Additionally, some white elites
rejected the underlying premise of the commission’s Economic Development
Committee.
In creating this body, the commission unleashed a very public confrontation
Soundings 259
over two different but related topics. One concerned what some locals called a
“true” accounting of the economic damage wrought by the revolution of 1898
on the black community. Among long-time residents, both blacks and whites
grew up hearing that white supremacists not only took black lives, but scores
of black homes and businesses.35 In general, blacks tended to believe this sto-
len property narrative, and whites did not. The debate, if it can be called that,
actually had a long history. Based on oral accounts, David Fulton’s 1900 novel,
Hanover, or, The Persecution of the Lowly, vividly depicted the illegal seizure
of black property, as did Harry Hayden’s 1936 account. But Helen Edmonds’s
1951 book refuted it, while Leon Prather’s 1984 study deliberately deferred to
folklore.36 Complicating matters was a second, closely related topic, that is,
the historic appropriation by whites of black bodies, persons, souls. To many
Wilmingtonians, the commission’s pursuit of economic-development aid for
minorities legitimized the argument, widespread in the 1990s, that contempo-
rary blacks deserved reparations for the cumulative effects of slavery and Jim
Crow.
In important ways, then, the commission connected economic justice for
specific descendants of 1898’s known victims to economic justice for black
people in general. One of the loudest proponents of reparations, Inez Camp-
bell-Eason, was cochair of the Memorial Committee, a great-granddaughter
of a black coal dealer who had been forced out in 1898, and a member of the
Friends of David Walker, a local civic organization founded by black national-
ists in the 1970s to promote black arts and culture.37 Campbell-Eason spoke
for many residents, white and black, who considered reparations a legitimate
pursuit, but there were far more opponents. No actual records existed to prove
individual claims of illegal taking in 1898, critics said, and generic compensa-
tion for slavery seemed to them patently ludicrous. Soon, the commission’s
leaders had to take a stance. If as part of the healing process they formally
sought restitution for the loss of black life and property in 1898, then they
would alienate powerful whites in government, business, and politics. If they
ignored or tried to curtail demands for compensation, then they would lose
credibility with an important part of the black community. Ultimately, they
made a fateful decision. In an official statement, the commission concluded
that, while “many African Americans had their livelihoods and property un-
justly taken away, seeking reparations or other acts of redress . . . is something
best left to the descendants of those whose property was taken.”38 Soon after
the announcement, Campbell-Eason quit the commission.
For guidance through such treacherous ideological waters, commission
members looked west to landlocked Tulsa, Oklahoma. That city had experi-
enced a horrific “race riot” in 1921. During two days of organized racist vio-
lence, thousands of armed whites killed at least one hundred black people and
reduced the entire segregated section, some thirty-five city blocks, to ashes
and rubble. For many decades afterwards, whites publicly accused blacks of
rioting, while privately they celebrated their organized massacre, just as elites
in Wilmington had held annual celebrations at Lumina. By the 1990s, however,
the racial climate there had changed. In June 1996, Tulsans staged a moving
ceremony to observe the seventy-fifth anniversary of the tragedy. The event
received national news coverage, which reflected very positively on the city’s
contemporary reputation.39
Intrigued, members of 1898 Commission invited the mayor of Tulsa and
other dignitaries to visit in March 1997. By this time, the Executive Council
had filed papers of incorporation and sought tax-exempt status as a nonprofit
organization. Acting under a new name, the “1898 Foundation,” the group
not only hosted a public forum to discuss the Tulsa model at the Cape Fear
Museum, but they organized a special, closed-door meeting between Tulsa’s
elected officials and Wilmington’s.40 The Oklahomans tried to convince their
counterparts that they, too, could have a meaningful, peaceful commemora-
tion. Records indicate that they especially tried to assuage persistent fears of
an angry, retaliatory black uprising. As outsiders, they did not appreciate how
white residents’ selective memories of black violence in the 1970s, 1870s, and
1770s were working to suppress social change in the 1990s. To the contrary,
the Tulsans repeatedly stressed to the foundation the importance of redressing
economic problems. How the foundation could do that without elite support
remained unanswered.
News coverage of the Tulsans’ visit disappointed those close to the founda-
tion. Members considered accurate reporting and positive publicity essential
to the success of such a large-scale, citywide program. The editor of the Star-
News had earlier promised his full support, and so days before the Tulsans’
scheduled public forum, the foundation’s executive director, Bolton Anthony,
sent the Star-News a press package with detailed information about the 1921
Tulsa riot, that city’s 1996 observance, and the two politicians who were visit-
ing. When the assigned reporter arrived at the forum, however, he was unpre-
pared. Claiming he had received the packet only hours earlier, he declined to
interview the Oklahomans. In fact, his article offered little information about
Tulsa, but instead speculated on the reasons why Katherine Bell Moore and
George Rountree II did not attend.41 By singling out the absence of these two
individuals, the Star-News’s coverage implied that neither black nor white old-
timers supported the commemoration effort and thus that it was likely to fail.
Soundings 261
Several other articles conveyed similar doubts about the foundation’s efforts.
As in the past, the city’s leading paper seemed to support the status quo.
Soon after the forum, I joined the foundation as its public-historian-in-res-
idence. From August 1996 to May 1997, I held a one-year visiting appointment
at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where I taught courses in
American and public history. Several colleagues from the History Depart-
ment were members of the foundation. At this time, the commemoration ef-
fort was already being buffeted by competing collective memories of 1898 and
the general public’s lack of accurate, factual information. Leon Prather’s 1984
book, We Have Taken a City, was long out of print, having been published by
a small academic press in limited quantity. Moreover, the single copy at the
city library was kept in the Local History Reading Room, where materials did
not circulate. Foundation members were exploring the possibility of a grant
to reprint the Prather volume, but they also wanted something shorter and
more accessible to non-academic audiences. My first assigned task, then, was
to produce a brief interpretive essay and bibliography to be used for educa-
tional purposes. Meanwhile, students in my public history seminar worked on
their final project, a walking tour of significant black heritage sites from the
colonial era to the present. When completed, both the essay and the walking
tour generated additional controversy for the foundation; not only did they
counter the dominant, white historical narrative of Wilmington, they did so
in a very public way.42
Dolores Hayden’s 1995 book, The Power of Place, informed both projects.
An architect and urban historian, Hayden called for a truly public public his-
tory; that is, she advocated for projects done with ordinary people, not for
them. The six real-life projects showcased in her book, all documenting the
history of minorities in Los Angeles, still serve as a how-to for academics and
other professionals seeking to reinforce a “sense of common membership in
an American, urban society.”43 In contrast to social historians in the 1960s
and 1970s, who wrote books and articles on the countercultural tendencies
of “inarticulate” groups as a way of facilitating political activism from below,
Hayden and other public historians at the turn of the twenty-first century
used exhibits, public art projects, documentaries, and websites to acknowl-
edge and celebrate the historic contributions of marginalized populations
while respecting their oppression. By partnering with community-based or-
ganizations and members of nonelite groups, they moved beyond additive
history toward genuine inclusivity and shared authority. The hope was that, by
recognizing the complexity of the past, public history could foster a stronger
sense of interconnectedness between the dominant and subordinate members
of contemporary American society. This perspective continues to shape many

professional public-history efforts today.
Though a newcomer to Wilmington, I recognized the civic alienation of
many black residents, as well as their hunger for their own history, especially
white acknowledgment of blacks’ central role in shaping Wilmington’s past,
present, and future. As hurricane recovery proceeded that fall and as plans for
the 1898 Centennial coalesced, I designed my spring seminar to apply Dolores
Hayden’s authentic public-history methods locally. My students worked with
several black Wilmingtonians, including a respected lay historian, and they
read works by African American scholars specializing in African American
public and urban history. They read Prather and Gerard, as well, but the 1898
Revolution was not the focus of the class. Rather, the goal was to understand
the challenges of public history through a hands-on project, a walking tour
of significant sites from the black past. The students had free rein to choose
the sites they wanted to study. They learned about the old slave market, David
Walker, the U.S. Colored Troops, the Sadgwar family, Williston High School,
Althea Gibson, and the Wilmington Ten. Only three sites pertained to 1898: the
Courthouse, Thalian Hall, and the location of the Daily Record. In good semi-
nar fashion, everyone shared his or her research in class. All of the students
but one were white; three were graduate students and, of these, one worked as
a librarian at the university. Together, their seventeen sites told a story of four
centuries of persistent white oppression and black resistance.
My work for the foundation took place at the same time. I ultimately pro-
duced two essays—a short summary and a somewhat longer piece that offered
more detail and analysis. Both documents attributed the violence and coup
to white racism; evidence in secondary and primary sources plainly showed
that “Negro Domination” was a fabrication because blacks had never held mu-
nicipal power, despite their numerical strength as voters. Besides the essays, I
attended foundation meetings and events, contributed to a promotional video
for the centennial, addressed the Chamber of Commerce on the foundation’s
behalf, planned two black history workshops for teachers in local schools, and
created a resource book that could be used to create lesson plans. Finally, after
classes ended, I worked with university colleagues to design the walking-tour
brochure and ready it for publication. By the time I left Wilmington for a ten-
ure-track job in July, reactions from the black community and the foundation
seemed quite positive.
Later, I learned that efforts to suppress these projects began soon after they
gained public attention. Bolton Anthony had created an 1898 Foundation web-
page to communicate with the broader community. He intended to upload
Soundings 263
my essays, but first sought the input and approval of the Executive Council.
In closed-door meetings, several white members attacked the short narrative,
dismissing it as “basically a one-sided, liberal/revisionist account of the moti-
vation of the riot as due entirely to white racism.”44 One of the leading critics
was a philosophy professor at the university who had resided in city for twenty-
five years. A former Health, Education & Welfare worker from New York, he
came to Wilmington in 1974 and got to know the families of two members
of the Wilmington Ten during the post-conviction hearings. By 1996, he was
considered by many whites to be an expert on the city’s race relations.45 He and
a colleague alleged errors of “historical fact,” “omission,” interpretation,” and
“terminology.” They called the essay “provocative” and insisted that “alternative
interpretations” be included, specifically citing the dominant, white narrative
that Negro domination had led to a breakdown of law and order, political cor-
ruption, and economic stagnation.
In other words, they wanted an essay that legitimized white violence and
exonerated the instigators of the revolution by rendering their actions under-
standable, if not exactly laudable. By contrast, the historians on the council
supported my work, saying the essay’s conclusions were as “neutral” as could
be expected given the nature of the largely white-authored, surviving sources.
Similar conflicts occurred everywhere in the 1990s as laymen’s and laywomen’s
notions of “heritage” collided with what Paul Boyer calls the “norms of histori-
cal research and argument.” In this case, the historians’ professional authority
tipped the scales. The Executive Council approved both essays at a September
2, 1997, meeting, and the foundation published both texts on its website. Still,
some members of the foundation continued to seek a “more balanced” history,
one that accorded the white establishment’s collective memory equal validity
with scholarly inquiries.46
While reflecting larger, national debates over history and memory, some
of the disagreements within the foundation likely stemmed from a significant
change in the organization’s philosophy and leadership. In July, Bolton Antho-
ny’s black cochair, William Fewell, formally resigned. An attorney and presi-
dent of the local NAACP chapter, Fewell had been an ardent supporter of the
commemoration, but professional and personal demands meant that he could
seldom attend meetings. In his place, the council invited Bertha Boykin Todd
to serve. They chose Todd, a former Williston librarian and school administra-
tor, because she had what Anthony called “skills and contacts” deemed critical
to the commemoration’s success. Her perspective on local race relations may
have been equally important. In her memoirs, Todd said she found solace in
Booker T. Washington’s injunction to “cast down your bucket where you are.”
Though committed to equal rights, her approach in the past was more accom-
modationist than militant, as when she attempted at the behest of white school
officials to diffuse student protests in 1968 and 1971. According to Anthony, the
foundation’s new catchphrase, “Moving Forward Together,” was her “watch-
word.” Anthony also credited her for setting a tone “which allowed bridges to
be built with the political and business communities.” This overt, conciliatory
stance toward the white establishment can best be seen in the formal statement
she drafted: “No one living in Wilmington was a participant in the events of
1898. Consequently, none among us bears any personal responsibility for what
happened. But among us, no matter our race or history, whether we have ar-
rived here only recently or come from families that have called Wilmington
home for generations—all among us are responsible for 1998. On each of us
falls personal responsibility to make our community one where economic jus-
tice and racial harmony flourish. Surely this is a challenge we are willing to
accept.”47 The council adopted Todd’s language that fall. The members consid-
ered it neutral, but many black residents found it overly partial to the white es-
tablishment. By absolving all living Wilmingtonians of any responsibility from
any wrongdoing in the past, the statement seemed to negate the historic roots
of contemporary white racial privilege.48
Yet conciliation was essential. To achieve the foundation’s goals, the Execu-
tive Council needed elite money and influence; to get money and influence,
they needed elite approbation. In August 1997, members of the council met
with Wilmington Excellence, a leadership group chaired by Walker Taylor III.
Todd and Anthony also courted the officers of the Chamber of Commerce.
Both agencies, the council felt, were critical to “molding public opinion.”49
Additionally, they accepted an offer from the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington chancellor, James Leutze, to serve as an intermediary between the
foundation and the establishment.
In September, Leutze hosted what turned out to be a pivotal meeting for
the foundation. Held at the chancellor’s house, a stately neoclassical mansion,
it brought Todd and Anthony together with the mayor, the chief of police, the
city manager, and several other prominent white Wilmingtonians, including
a member of the university’s Board of Visitors. Anthony later noted that my
essays, which had been posted to the foundation’s website, quickly came under
consideration; he called the conversation “adversarial” and said that someone
urged Leutze, a U.S. naval historian, to fix the problem by writing a “less pro-
vocative” narrative himself.50 Eventually, the group proposed to Todd and An-
thony a different solution: the creation of an “oversight” panel comprised of
representatives from both municipal and county government.
Soundings 265
From Anthony’s account of this meeting, it appears that its real purpose
was to determine who owned Wilmington’s past—oldtimers or newcomers,
whites or blacks, amateurs or professionals? Tellingly, the city’s leadership said
they now wanted to “be directly involved” in the commemoration, not “held
at arms’ length.” Todd and Anthony brought the proposal back to the council.
Some members feared elite control of the commemoration, but the cochairs
argued that the proposers sincerely desired to see “the story” of 1898 properly
told and that they truly supported the goal of economic justice. Additional
negotiations followed. In the end, the foundation capitulated. The members
voted in October 1997 to expand the Executive Council to thirty-six persons,
with three representatives appointed by the city, three by the county, and three
by the chamber. Interestingly, there was a black Chamber of Commerce; how-
ever, there is no evidence that its members were included.51 It was an important
turning point in the commemoration’s development.
Soon thereafter, a decidedly positive interpretation of Wilmington’s black
history emerged. Foundation members organized a series of four public lec-
tures designed “to celebrate the contributions” made by black Wilmingtonians
to local, state, and national history. One speaker, for example, highlighted the
superb craftsmanship of antebellum slaves and free blacks who built the Bel-
lamy mansion, while others stressed the Reconstruction-era political career
of freedman Abraham Galloway, the achievements of local blacks during the
1890s, and the role of black soldiers during World War I. About thirty to fifty
people attended each program. To reach as broad an audience as possible, the
foundation arranged for delegates from black churches to attend and take the
information back to share with fellow congregants at a later date.52 This grape-
vine system quickly spread what amounted to a conventional American Dream
narrative featuring exceptional, industrious blacks who succeeded (for exam-
ple, earned their freedom, became legislators, businessmen, and war heroes)
by dint of their individual talent, drive, and courage. Despite good intentions,
the lectures sidestepped the suffering of thousands of Wilmington slaves who
died in bondage, their descendants who lived behind the veil for generations,
and the history of collective resistance that local blacks mounted to their op-
pression, especially in the twentieth century. In short, they assimilated black
Wilmington’s history into the city’s white master narrative rather than subvert-
ing the master narrative itself. Though some blacks protested this selective,
celebratory approach to the past, their desire for what Manning Marable called
an authentic black history remained unanswered.53
A somewhat authentic narrative appeared in the form of the Wilmington,
North Carolina’s African American Heritage Trail, the brochure my students
produced. In October 1997, I returned to lead a special, abbreviated version of

the tour to announce the brochure’s availability to the general public. Numer-
ous colleagues at the university remained committed to that project, to the
commemoration, and to telling the authentic story of Wilmington’s violent
racial past, despite the growing opposition. Dr. Marguerite S. Shaffer, then di-
rector of the university’s public history program, managed the tour’s launch
event, which included media coverage from the local television station and
newspaper. About 150 people processed as a body from place to meaningful
place. At each site, the student who researched it explained its significance. Af-
terwards, everyone gathered at the Cape Fear Museum for a reception, where I
acknowledged the many people who contributed to the project and expressed
my hope for an honest, inclusive public history for Wilmington. Within weeks,
word came back that white employees at certain sites had deliberately removed
the brochures from public spaces. To test the situation, a member of the His-
tory Department went to a prominent art museum and asked for a copy, know-
ing that a box of them had been delivered earlier; she was told, “No one here
knows anything about a brochure.”54 In the black community, people generally
praised the trail, although members of several congregations rightly wanted to
know why their churches were omitted, and some lamented the absence of sites
related to the civil rights era.55
The contest to control Wilmington’s historical narrative, especially its black
history, became full-blown during the centennial year. The foundation had
planned an impressive series of events designed to “Tell the Story, Heal the
Wound, and Honor the Memory.” They began with a January 1998 kick-off
event that six hundred people attended, including Governor Jim Hunt and
representatives from state, county, and city governments. An exhibit exploring
the 1898 coup and massacre opened concurrently at the Cape Fear Museum.
Thanks to the foundation’s publicity committee, Wilmington was one of fifty-
five American cities chosen to participate in the National Days of Dialogue on
Race Relations, and the port city’s media coverage proved both extensive and
positive.56 However, a dramatic event in February indicated that all was not
well.
A series of talks called “Wilmington in Black and White” had been sched-
uled to take place at a historic church in Brooklyn during Black History Month.
The February 11 program, entitled “Different Perspectives on the Causes of
1898,” paired Dr. John Haley, an African American professor of North Carolina
history, and George Rountree II, a white attorney whose grandfather partici-
pated in the 1898 revolution, served in the General Assembly, and authored the
state’s disfranchisement clause of 1901. Almost two hundred people crowded
Soundings 267
into the church to hear what Rountree, previously an opponent of the com-
memoration, would have to say. He began by insisting he had always supported
black equality and recalled a beloved “childhood mammy” as proof of his pro-
gressive racial attitudes. He described his grandfather as “the product of his
times” and refused to apologize for his behavior in 1898 or thereafter. To the
contrary, he praised his ancestor as a community leader, devoted family man,
and moral exemplar. During the question-and-answer period, several blacks
in the audience directly challenged Rountree’s memories and tried in differ-
ent ways to get him to acknowledge the great wrong that historical evidence
proved his grandfather and his counterparts had inflicted. Kenny Davis, for
example, a black member of the foundation and an avid local historian, praised
his grandfather’s achievements, which he said the violence of 1898 “snuffed
out.” Astutely, Davis proclaimed that the “past of Wilmington’s black com-
munity . . . was not the past Rountree preferred.” Rountree stood his ground.
When calls for reparations rang out, he said he bore “no responsibility for what
had occurred a hundred years ago” and favored “private charity” to address
modern economic disparities. In that moment, quoting the foundation’s own
statement, he alienated many of the very people the foundation hoped to aid.
As the “black versus white/history versus memory” format of the program sug-
gested, George Rountree II seemed to represent Old Wilmington’s white elite
and to voice their version of the city’s past. His inability to see how he (and
they) had personally benefited from the 1898 violence (let alone slavery and
Jim Crow) stunned and infuriated many listeners, white and black. Although
the Star did not cover the story, news of the event spread quickly by word of
mouth.57
Another sign of the escalating contest over Wilmington’s racial past oc-
curred in March. Months earlier, the History Department had opened a na-
tional search to fill the position vacated when the person I replaced in 1996–97
resigned. I had applied for the job, became a finalist, and received a job offer
from the department chair. Before we could sign a contract, a person outside
the search process intervened to redirect the outcome—in effect, I experienced
a form of what is termed “academic mugging.” Though the initial mugger was
a member of the department, the challenge to my appointment quickly ex-
panded to involve members of the senior administration, members of the busi-
ness community, especially the blue-ribbon panel formed to advise the founda-
tion, and a member of the Board of Visitors. While I cannot know everything
that transpired, emails and other evidence confirm that at the heart of these
events were competing reactions to my 1898 essays and my students’ brochure.
In continuing to label these projects “controversial” and “provocative,” critics
essentially impugned my scholarly objectivity. Like Phil Gerard, whose novel

about 1898 sparked an intervention during his tenure bid, I stood accused of
unprofessional conduct, of deliberately distorting the facts about Wilmington’s
past to suit my personal ideology, and of being incompetent, as a newly minted
PhD. Though colleagues vouched for my integrity (and their own in seeking to
hire me), the administration compelled the department to abandon the search
and eliminate the position.58
I relate these events because they indicate how far the struggle to control
Wilmington’s past stretched and how this struggle reflected competing views
on history and the public historian’s professional role both within and outside
the academy. Some readers will recall the very public “History Wars” that oc-
curred at this time. A subset of the broader culture wars, these included battles
over National History Standards for schools, the Smithsonian’s proposed Enola
Gay exhibit, and the Columbus Quincentennial. These and other disagree-
ments revealed a stark dichotomy that Smithsonian curator James Gardner
explained this way:
The Public’s View of History The Historians’ View of History

a fixed story an ambiguous, messy, provisional past
answers questions
knowable, objective truth contingency, meaning, interpretation,
critical analysis
a linear/Whiggish view of the a nonlinear view that sees negative
past that celebrates achievement as well as positive, failure as well as
progress.
But besides this “great yawning gap” between Us and Them (or Them and Us),
the decade also saw intra-disciplinary tensions between different kinds of aca-
demic historians and between academic historians and public historians.59
Traditional scholarly culture vests authority for the past in the individual
academic historian—the proverbial Sage on the Stage and Page. In that model,
the historian eschews the contemporary fray, ignores the general public, and
writes peer-reviewed books and articles aimed primarily at specialists in the
same field. This ideal came under attack in the 1990s, after historian Peter
Novick challenged traditional notions of objectivity and postmodern scholars
introduced French linguistic theories and sociological concepts of collective
memory. The same moment (marked by what is now called “the cultural turn”)
saw an unusual growth of public history programs, like UNCW’s, which pro-
Soundings 269
claimed the renewed relevance of applied history in the face of growing public
criticism of isolated, Ivory Tower academics.
Whether working in museums at historic sites or on university campuses,
professionals who identify as public historians tend to value interdisciplin-
ary approaches to the past, to present their research in widely accessible for-
mats (not scholarly monographs or journal articles), and to believe they share
authority with the public. A sizeable subset, moreover, considers the past “a
source of empowerment and political mobilization” in the present and con-
structs their scholarly projects accordingly. In retrospect, I can see that these
goals and methods, which undergirded my work and which numerous col-
leagues at the university shared, were not widely understood. Thus, some
members of the general public, viewing history as a fixed story, saw a deliber-
ate distortion of long-established facts; some academics, seeing history as the
product of exhaustive, individualized study, saw cursory investigation instead
of rigorous, scholarly inquiry. Unfortunately, the theory and praxis behind the
essays and the brochure were never made explicitly apparent.60
Which side would prevail in Wilmington’s history war became evident
when the foundation’s social justice objective yielded to the city’s traditional
booster ethos. In 1997, the foundation’s Economic Development Committee
had been charged to explore viable means of economic redress for the residents
of Brooklyn, who statistical evidence showed had suffered disproportionate
losses from the 1898 attack and the de jure segregation that followed. Early con-
versations centered on a cooperative grocery store, educational scholarships,
and minority business loans. As the commemoration began to garner posi-
tive, national attention, the committee decided that heritage tourism offered
a better solution. Wilmington had long capitalized successfully on its historic
cultural resources: by adding the story of 1898 to the cultural landscape the
city could attract new audiences, and the economic benefits (more business,
more jobs) would trickle down, helping not only Brooklyn but the community
as a whole. Members of the Cape Fear Convention and Visitors Bureau loved
the idea; so did the Black Chamber of Commerce. Local activists, however,
immediately voiced opposition; Williston alumna Linda Pearce, for example,
insisted publicly that black residents deserved to choose their own economic
initiatives, rather than having their interests determined for them.
The clincher was an April 1998 visit from Caletha Powell, director of Na-
tional Institute for Tourism Training and Research, described as “a for-profit
consulting firm” in New Orleans. As it happens, Powell had graduated from
Fayetteville State University and knew at least one Wilmingtonian on the Eco-
nomic Development Committee. During Powell’s two-day visit, foundation
members took her on several black-heritage tours, including one derived from
my students’ brochure; the tours allowed her to inventory the local “asset base”
and determine what would interest black tourists. She eventually submitted
a detailed report claiming that tourism would create new jobs and business
ownership opportunities for area minorities.61
Powell’s optimism reflected her work in New Orleans. In the mid-1990s,
tourism generated billions of dollars of revenue in the Crescent City, having re-
placed petroleum production and the port authority as the community’s lead-
ing source of income. As scholars like Kevin Gotham and Michael Crutcher
have shown, the benefits of the tourism industry have overwhelmingly accrued
to select, elite whites. In a process dating back to Reconstruction, white civic
leaders in New Orleans carefully manufactured an “authentic” tourist experi-
ence that consistently cast black residents as exotic, Africanized Others and
treated black spaces, places, and folkways as saleable items. By the World’s
Fair of 1884, New Orleans’s boosters were aggressively marketing the Big Easy
to white conventioneers as a sensual playground. From Storyville to Congo
Square, from jazz and gumbo to Mardi Gras and voodoo—all of the things
American tourists came to associate with the city’s racialized Creole culture
were, in fact, modified and marketed to suit middle-class, white travelers’ quest
to escape the ordinary. In the 1970s, a new corporate-driven model of tourism
brought international hotel chains, mall-like shopping centers with upscale
brands, and fast-food restaurants into historic enclaves like the Vieux Carré.
Low-income families experienced significant physical and economic displace-
ment. In the famed Faubourg Tremé, black residents fought hard to mitigate
the transformation of their neighborhood, but had little success. Powell’s orga-
nization, established in 1991, attempted to shift the dynamic by developing mi-
nority-owned shops, sites, hostelries, and eateries that chiefly catered to black
tourists. She could not have known that 90 percent of the blacks in New Or-
leans’s service-sector tourism industry clustered overwhelmingly in low-paid,
dead-end, hospitality jobs. And they were the lucky ones. In the 1990s, blacks
made up 84 percent of New Orleans’s poor population, with 43 percent of them
living in extreme poverty. What Powell did know was that black heritage tour-
ism was growing significantly in the 1990s. Consequently, her recommenda-
tions made good sense in Wilmington, which already had a strong tourism
infrastructure, as well as a history of black vacationing at Seabreeze and Shell
Island.62
Buoyed by these prospects, the foundation made one more push that sum-
mer to secure elite approval and involvement. One of the original white mem-
bers of the Executive Council, independent filmmaker Francine De Coursey,
Soundings 271
persuaded Frank Capra Jr. to host a special meeting at his Screen Gems Stu-
dio in Wilmington. Invitations for the event, cosponsored by the white and
black chambers of commerce, went out to more than two hundred corporate
sponsors. Sixty people attended. The foundation ostensibly intended the pro-
gram, titled “Remembering 1898: A Corporate Overview,” to inform repre-
sentatives of major corporations of the foundation’s work to date. In reality, it
was a thinly veiled bid to solicit contributions. Hugh MacRae II, president of
the Oleander Company, offered a talk called “Why Corporate Leadership Is
Needed.” MacRae’s presence showed how successful the foundation’s persis-
tent courtship and revised strategy had been. He also made a ten-thousand-
dollar donation around this time to help cover administrative costs for the
foundation’s Executive Council. With his words ringing in their ears, attend-
ees left for a wine-and-cheese reception with information packets containing
“fund raising goals.”63
The foundation’s own fiscal challenges exacerbated public conflicts over
various elements of the commemoration. From the start, finding money for
day-to-day operations proved difficult. By early 1998, the organization had two
paid staff who shared a single, half-time secretarial position. The executive
director, Bolton Anthony, also received a salary. Anthony came to his position
having been a grant writer for the North Fourth Street Partnership, Inc., a
joint effort between the university and the city intended to revitalize Brooklyn’s
historic black business corridor. He spent considerable time writing grants to
cover the foundation’s myriad projects, and he managed the finances of the
organization. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation provided the largest single
contribution, two grants totaling more than fifty thousand dollars. Additional
assistance came from the city of Wilmington (fifteen thousand dollars) and
several other philanthropic agencies. Yet there was never enough money for
the scope of work envisioned by the Executive Council. Then, several thorny
issues arose: compensating certain volunteers who dedicated more time than
others and quelling rumors in the black community that foundation funds
were being misappropriated by whites. Anthony came under particular fire.
Viewed by many black residents as a white outsider and a tool of the (to them)
officious university, he struggled to balance his commitments to the North
Fourth Street Partnership with those of the foundation. In January 1998 he
reluctantly resigned as cochair of the Executive Council, yet stayed on as proj-
ect administrator. Despite the appointment of a replacement, the perception
continued to grow that whites “were making all of the money off the com-
memoration.”64 In retrospect, the council’s need for funding required it to ap-
peal repeatedly to the economic, political, and cultural establishment, and in
doing so the council placed itself in a dependent position that reinforced the
very racial tensions members were trying to ease.
As the actual centennial anniversary approached, the community roiled in
anticipation. Some residents still feared a violent black uprising; others (both
cynical and not) predicted a kind of mass kumbaya. In October, the univer-
sity partnered with the foundation to host a town-gown symposium designed
to disseminate academic scholarship on the 1898 massacre and coup and
validate the interpretation forwarded by the foundation. Over one thousand
people attended and heard papers by distinguished scholars including John
Hope Franklin, the keynote speaker. It was not a conventional symposium. In
marked contrast to typical academic conferences, attendees from the general
public often stood and applauded presenters whose papers they particularly
liked. Similarly, at several points, audience members gathered in scheduled
breakout sessions during which they asked presenters questions and discussed
what they had heard. Historian Melton McLaurin, the principal organizer, later
described the overall mood as “thoughtful” and “reflective” with “little anger
evident.” In some sessions, however, black sadness and bitterness were pal-
pable, and I heard black voices call out for reparations more than once.65
A few weeks later, another crowd gathered at Thalian Hall for a special per-
formance. First, they watched a moving play commissioned by the foundation.
Called No More Sorrow to Arise and written by a local white woman, Anne
Russell, it offered a dramatic reenactment of the violent massacre and coup.
Afterwards, the audience heard proclaimed a “People’s Declaration of Racial
Interdependence,” which cleverly recast the original White Man’s Declaration
of Independence into a manifesto for integration and multiculturalism. Many
rushed to sign it and declare publicly their support for the new Wilmington
and its new racial order. Outside in the lobby, a white newcomer watched in
amazement as “the integrated audience of theater goers shook hands with
other and hugged each other.” Clearly, she noted, “something important was
afoot.”66
On November 10, 1998, the precise centennial anniversary of the massa-
cre and coup, Wilmingtonians convened one last time at Thalian Hall for a
moving ceremony in which the mingled voices of white and black choirs rose
heavenwards like a prayer. No black-instigated violence ever occurred. On
the contrary, the city seemed momentarily suffused with love and fellowship.
McLaurin concluded that “white Wilmingtonians had arrived at a more com-
plex, and far more accurate, perception of the past.”67 Soon after the ceremony,
however, someone painstakingly removed the official state historical marker
for Alex Manly, editor of the Daily Record, from its place on Seventh Street.
Soundings 273
Such markers “are not light,” noted LeRae Umfleet, a historian in the state Of-
fice of Archives and History. “They’re iron-cast [sic]” and require considerable
effort to cut down. As the 1998 commemoration formally came to a close, the
marker disappeared from view, its theft a metaphor for ongoing efforts to sup-
press or forget the city’s racist past.68
Race, Place, and Memory in the Twenty-First Century
That disagreements over Wilmington’s racial history in the 1990s so clearly

resounded with debates over contemporary race relations underscores how
the color line, which W. E. B. DuBois declared “the problem of the twentieth
century,” still shapes everyday life. Redrawn, to be sure, the line now seems to
divide those who consider racism dead and those who find racism very much
alive, albeit in a different form. For the former group, the civil rights movement
and the ensuing Supreme Court decisions successfully leveled the playing field
for whites and nonwhites, thus making contemporary American society a
color-blind meritocracy. As proof they often point to notable individuals like
Oprah Winfrey, Wilmington’s own Michael Jordan, and, after 2008, Barack
Obama. The latter group, by contrast, asserts the persistence of structural bi-
ases that still privilege whites despite the civil rights era’s many legal rulings.
Scholarship of the recent past frequently supports this view. In the aptly titled
There Goes My Everything (2006), for example, historian Jason Sokol exposed
ordinary white southerners’ extreme resistance to civil rights legislation and
their profound feelings of loss, bewilderment, denial, and anger when forced
to comply. Prevalent throughout the nation, this mindset, which could not
imagine the benefits of integration for whites, only the detriments, explains for
many observers why inequality continues to the present; as one black Wilm-
ingtonian explained to sociologist Leslie Hossfeld, most whites “don’t do any
more than they have to.” Some critics of modern race relations go even further
and allege the rise since the 1980s of extralegal efforts to roll back minority
gains through the mass unemployment, incarceration, and disfranchisement
of nonwhite Americans. The existence of this “new Jim Crow” is denied by
aforementioned meritocrats, black and white alike, who tend to attribute social
problems like joblessness to individuals’ moral failings. These perspectives are
so divergent as to be virtually irreconcilable. What DuBois envisaged as a veil
has become an iron curtain.69
Ending this separation requires not only the kind of coalition politics rec-
ommended by ethicists like Mary Elizabeth Hobgood, but historical accuracy
and inclusivity in our shared public places. The academic discipline of history
purportedly rests on exhaustive research and rigorous, objective analysis. It

was not until the post-civil rights era, however, that mainstream, white aca-
demic scholars widely applied these standards to the study of black Ameri-
cans. Further, white inquiry into black history has shifted steadily from an
initial focus on the everyday experiences of various black populations to more
theoretically grounded explorations of race and racism. The two subjects are
not the same, as black scholars like DuBois have long argued, though they are
necessarily related. Today, the collected evidence points inescapably toward
one conclusion: racist oppression is imputed to the whole of white society,
not just southern planters or midwestern Klansmen or Hollywood or the legal
system. But, though contemporary scholars now recognize the centrality of
blacks and the destructive processes of racial formation to our national story,
their discoveries are still not widely present in the public sphere.70
My analysis of race, place, and memory in Wilmington was intended to
explain what happened during the 1998 commemoration, and that goal led me
backward to explore how racial formation proceeded in this typical southern
city. Contrary to the establishment’s official narrative of this community’s ra-
cially “progressive” past, whites constructed and then maintained their racial
privilege through a variety of communal strategies, especially organized vio-
lence, which took myriad forms over time. Blacks always resisted their oppres-
sion, often using identical strategies to assert their own humanity, individual-
ity, and inalienable rights. One of the mechanisms shared by whites and blacks
was collective memory, a place-based tactic used by both races to achieve re-
lated, yet oppositional ends. Another strategy was coalition politics. Some-
times, Wilmington’s elite whites legitimized and augmented their supremacy
by reaching out to certain “elite” blacks, and sometimes ordinary blacks dimin-
ished it by working with white “race traitors.” Though whites still remain firmly
in power, black successes have accumulated slowly over the centuries, moving
this community closer and closer to racial equality. The 1998 commemoration
offers visible proof of the strides that have been made and the biracial projects
that are possible.
Even so, the 1998 commemoration was not an authentic public history en-
deavor. First, the effort’s leaders never managed to involve the most disfran-
chised members of the community; in unfortunate but understandable ways,
the foundation actually marginalized certain black voices, giving preference to
middle-class, educated blacks and whites and to white elites. The commemora-
tion did successfully reinterpret the “riot” of November 10, 1898, as a bloody
massacre and political coup, and it widely publicized the names of the white
elites responsible. That was a significant victory for Wilmington’s black com-
Soundings 275
munity in and of itself. That the Secret Nine coldly orchestrated the massacre
and coup to provide a rationale for their personal, place-based goals (boost-
ing Wilmington’s and their own familial fortunes) remained unstated and un-
examined. Second, the commemoration minimized the elite-led revolution’s
position within long-standing local and national patterns of white-organized
violence against black persons. Like many public history projects involving
race, then, this one stopped short of confronting what James O. Horton and
Lois E. Horton call the “tough stuff of American memory”: the persistent bru-
talization, exploitation, and exclusion of millions of people living in a society
dedicated to democracy and liberty. This omission even seemed to characterize
the study circles, which attempted to “heal the wound” through frank conver-
sation across the racial divide. While black and white participants alike re-
ported being positively transformed by the candid discussions, their individual
epiphanies never translated into any talk of collective action in the political or
economic spheres.
Finally, the initial products of the commemoration did little to enlighten
the general public. Soon after the Thalian Hall ceremony ended, a new book
appeared on library shelves. Historians David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Ty-
son compiled the university’s symposium proceedings into an edited volume,
Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998).
Despite its title, Wilmingtonians are actually peripheral to most of the essays,
and the book is directed at an academic audience. While Tyson did produce a
special commemorative essay for the Raleigh News and Observer, the Wilm-
ington Star-News remained conspicuously quiet. With limited access to ac-
curate information, ordinary people continued to debate what had really hap-
pened in 1898 and what those events had to do with their own experiences of
race. Viewed in this context, the furor surrounding Katherine Bell Moore’s
allegations of retribution and police intimidation makes sense.
In 2000, the North Carolina legislature authorized a comprehensive study
intended to answer questions about 1898 once and for all. The Office of Ar-
chives and History of the Department of Historic Resources, tasked with the
monumental and politically charged undertaking, eventually assigned it to
a staff historian, LeRae Umfleet, in 2003. A white woman, she headed up a
large team of mostly graduate students who uncovered an amazing array of
new sources and offered startling details. Nevertheless, the final report, made
available for free through the department’s website in 2006, hewed to the
dominant white narrative: it portrayed the violence as an aberrant event in an
otherwise progressive city’s history. “A mob mentality set in on the day of the
takeover,” declared Umfleet in an interview. “Violence wasn’t part of the ini-
tial plan.” Umfleet continued to work on the report, however, and published
a revised version, A Day of Blood, in 2009. It argues that the “riot was not
an isolated, spontaneous incident but was the result of a series of events that
were directed and planned by upper-class, white businessmen,” yet elsewhere
the study still attributes the “riot” to anonymous Democratic Party leaders in
Raleigh and the statewide campaign. It does not explore who these business-
men really were or how they benefited materially, although it does provide
ample evidence of the devastation they wrought. Several other articles, the-
ses, and essays about Wilmington have also appeared, as well as Leslie Hoss-
feld’s book, Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington,
North Carolina (2005). Her work is significant for it directly connects 1898 to
multiple other “riots,” including the ones in 1968 and 1971. There are also at
least two popular websites dedicated to debunking the conclusions raised by
these scholarly works. Still, ordinary people continued to press for accessible,
meaningful interpretations.71
In 2008, the city finally erected a memorial to the victims of 1898, yet its
function as a meaningful site for collective memory remains unclear. The ten-
year delay owed primarily to the foundation’s difficulty raising funds. That
problem, in turn, stemmed largely from the location along a busy highway.
Early on, foundation members sided with city officials who favored a free par-
cel donated by the state and situated along an extension of the Smith Creek
Parkway, which brings motorists from I-40 directly into downtown. Like the
modern memorials studied by Derek Alderman and Owen Dwyer, this one
is better situated to boost the city’s image to visitors, investors, and tourists
than to expand the historic consciousness of locals. Supporters of this site,
like Lethia Hankins, councilwoman and cochair of the foundation after the
commemoration, imagined the memorial as both “a reminder of the tragic
event” and a symbol proclaiming “the city’s inclusiveness and tolerance.” But
there were many opponents. Some critics, both black and white, deplored the
very idea of a memorial, insisting the money would be better spent on hous-
ing or job training for the urban poor. Others feared that, by giving white-
supremacist violence a physical, tangible presence, the memorial would keep
black hostility and grievances alive. Interestingly, these concerns have been
raised at other sites, as well, especially the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where
Reverend King’s legacy is represented and contested. In Wilmington, the me-
morial’s physical place mattered, too. Many black residents wanted it built in
Brooklyn near the intersection of North Fourth and Harnett streets, the sacred
spot where the first black victims died. Thomas Wright, the black state legisla-
tor who then represented Wilmington, supported this idea, and his influence
Soundings 277
gave donors cause to be wary. Perhaps to ease the tension, the City Council
authorized renaming the parkway for Martin Luther King Jr., but this act only
aggravated matters further. As in dozens of other American communities, the
renaming pitted those who revered the black, national, civil rights hero against
those who esteemed a white, local, “founding father” figure.72
As a work of public art, the memorial’s structure, symbolism, and content
also fostered disagreement. The initial design called for a complete ring of
eleven, sixteen-foot tall, bronze oars, each bearing an explanatory panel, and
encircling two low, curved walls with additional text. Artist Ayokunle Odeleye
said he intended the oars to represent the general West African belief that
human souls travel from this world to the next by water; yet he also wanted
it to recall the specific “African Americans who lost their lives in the violence
of 1898.”73 While many residents appreciated the Pan-Africanist imagery, de-
tractors considered the spiritual reference too obscure for the average person
to discern, too anachronistic to black, urban life in the 1890s, and too sani-
tized to depict the trauma caused by the massacre and coup. There are even
complaints that the nonfigurative, a-humanistic forms, which read visually as
giant kayak paddles, especially if viewed from the seat of a moving car, hail
Wilmington’s reputation as a vacation destination. Ultimately, though the his-
tory of November 1898 is now permanently fixed in the cultural landscape,
limited resources forced the city to reduce the number of oars and text panels
to six (See figure 5.1). On the bright side, the parkway renamed for Martin
Luther King Jr. conceptually encourages visitors to link the events of 1898
to the civil rights movement and its objectives. On most days, however, the
contemplative, self-reflexive mood at the site is negated by the lack of seating
and the din of vehicular traffic that pervades the memorial park. There is also,
I think, a disjuncture between the dominant message of the sculpture (the
victims are with the ancestors), the historic events it was supposed to com-
memorate (the violent massacre and coup), and the contradictory contem-
porary interpretations that locals ascribe to it (“it shows how far the city has
come” versus “it’s a joke.”) Completely detached from Wilmington’s current
racial problems, the memorial’s incomplete circle symbolizes the unfinished
work of the foundation.
Wilmington still needs an authentic, inclusive public history, one that not
only acknowledges the “tough stuff,” but engages all residents in creating a
usable past, the kind that, in historian Carl Becker’s famous 1931 assertion,
“enlarges and enriches the collective specious present.” Though it took decades,
Becker’s pragmatic sense of history’s function—to advance contemporary so-
ciety—eventually suffused the field of public history, influencing its practitio-
Figure 5.1. Wilmington’s controversial 1898 Memorial, erected in 2008. This view shows the six
bronze oar sculptures standing in an arc. Artist Ayokunle Odeleye intended the oars to represent
the West African belief that human souls travel from this world to the next by water. Also visible
are two low, curving walls that bear text panels and the nearby parkway. Courtesy of Dell Upton.
ners’ research projects in the 1970s and shaping its publications, professional
associations, and degree programs thereafter. The most important revelation
of recent years is the knowledge that subordinated populations must be able to
produce and promulgate their own public, historical narratives if they are to
have agency and equality. But the challenges to this work are immense. Many
white Americans find accurate, unvarnished accounts of our racialized past
perplexing, offensive, or distressing because they contradict positive notions
of self and society. This discomfiture is one reason why, despite momentous
events like the 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American
History and Culture, “black history” generally remains marginalized in black
neighborhoods, clustered in the black-studies section of chain bookstores, or
treated as a separate tour at historic sites.74
The task in Wilmington, as elsewhere, is to convince white people that the
black experience is not peripheral or antithetical, but relevant and meaningful
to their own lives. Studies show that most ordinary Americans have a rudi-
mentary understanding of what history is and does. People typically encounter
the past in their leisure time (watching television, on vacation, during family
Soundings 279
holidays) and so experience history that is simple, personal, teleological, and

celebratory. As Barbara Franco has argued, they use “unspoken ranking sys-
tems” to order the disparate, conflicting narratives they encounter. In terms
of race, people may find it difficult to understand how two such diametrically
opposed interpretations of the past as whites and blacks have can coexist. The
black one must be false, they reason, or it must reflect a dishonest agenda for it
plainly contradicts what they know to be “true.” People cannot help but think
this way. The master narrative of America has long represented white people as
virtuous and the white-figured nation as a bastion of democracy and equality.
The national story many white Americans know has a happy ending: despite
bad periods when slavery and Jim Crow existed, the long civil rights movement
ended racism for good; the better angels of white Americans’ nature ultimately
prevailed.75
These unspoken ranking systems also persist in social relations. Notwith-
standing their egalitarian impulses, Americans frequently espouse elitism.76
In many American towns and cities, certain families still hold sway because of
this mindset: the Kennedys, the du Ponts, the Daleys, and the Gettys among
others. In Wilmington, an example of such thinking appeared in July 2009,
when someone (undoubtedly a newcomer) emailed the Star Online to ask,
“Who are the Camerons?” The reporter’s lengthy answer recounted several
generations’ worth of Cameron contributions and recognized the tremendous
influence and power they still wielded. Four months later, a visitor to the Star
website posted this comment in response:
YEAH!!!! I like the fact that [Bruce] Cameron fought to keep jobs in
Wilmington (Railroads). In an economy like today’s, our community
must challenge the corporate foundations to “come here” and “stay here.”
It is refreshing to know that our industry leaders also have a History of
both Supporting Our Troops and Supporting the Arts [uppercase in origi-
nal]. But, most importantly the Camerons have a history of supporting
the children of our community (Community Boys and Girls Club). It is
leaders like the Camerons we should listen to on the tough social issues
like transportation and healthcare. They have a history of caring for both
this community’s employment and its people.77
Here the writer imparts to the Camerons a kind of civic virtue earned chiefly
through their role as business leaders, but “most importantly,” she says, through
their history—a word she uses three times. Underlying her comments are the
assumptions that elites are best suited to solve “the tough social issues” of “this
community”; that white elites like the Camerons have knowledge and skills the
masses lack; that they have inherited from their ancestors a place-based ability
to intuit what locals truly need. Other Wilmingtonians admit that a handful of
people “run” the city, but are more prosaic about elite power. Melvyn Thomp-
son, for example, put it this way: “Seemed to be, like, being a [black] man
working at the country club, I knew how Wilmington ran. I used to work at the
country club and now I work downtown at the Cape Fear Club. . . . I know the
Sprunts, the Wright family, the few running Wilmington. They are still run-
ning Wilmington, and I know that.” Another black resident insisted that “this
is a white man’s town. . . . I’ll tell you who runs Wilmington. The Camerons, the
Sprunts, the Kenans, the Wises, that’s where the chancellor [of the university]
lives, and the Raeford Trasks, all them people like that.” Conventional com-
munity histories perpetuate these assumptions by celebrating leading white
families and universalizing their experiences. Authentic histories rest on a dif-
ferent assumption: that the masses are fit to lead themselves.78
As this book developed, various examples of authentic public history proj-
ects have emerged. I am most heartened by the Museums Respond to Ferguson
effort, which began in 2014 as a series of monthly Twitter chats that, inspired by
protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere, encourage museums to tackle
controversial topics regarding race and social justice. Then there are Whitney
Plantation (2014), a historic site of conscience that confronts the violence of
slavery, and Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project, which
documents the experiences of a historically black neighborhood in Chicago
since the 1970s. These join pioneer projects like Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram
Park (1992), with its sculptures of water cannons and attack dogs, brutal re-
minders of the violence directed at black protestors and, of course, the Power
of Place’s Grandma Mason installation in Los Angeles (1988–89). What unites
these disparate efforts and makes them authentic is that they engage mem-
bers of their local black communities as equal partners in their interpretation
and that they make the destructive processes of racialization integral to the
past, not aberrant or peripheral. Even Wilmington has seen new projects that
lean toward authenticity, especially a 2015 documentary, Wilmington on Fire,
which incorporates the views of local black historians and black nationalists
like Larry Thomas.79
Wilmington is a microcosm of America. Its residents’ real revolutionary
spirit lies just below the surface, suppressed too long by an outmoded narrative
that says certain kinds of racist violence, labor exploitation, and political exclu-
sion are acceptable, even essential to community success. Historical analysis
shines through the murky depths of the distorted past, allowing us to see how
racism developed and changed forms over time, where its ill effects still linger,
Soundings 281
and thus, how it might be finally eradicated. For ethicist Mary Elizabeth Hob-
good, the problem is that too many white Americans remain blind to modern
racism, especially the way white privilege simultaneously benefits and harms
them. She contends that such people are “morally damaged, spiritually im-
poverished, and physically at risk by a society that is structured to give unfair
advantages to the few, while it disregards everyone’s need for respect, affection,
just communal relations, and a healthy ecosphere.”80
It is an old idea. Thomas Jefferson famously brooded over the positive and
negative effects of slavery on white masters, though he did not worry enough
to free his own bondsmen and women. A product of the Enlightenment, Jef-
ferson understood that humankind’s ultimate goal was the achievement of
eudaemonia, a Greek word describing the state of highest human flourishing
possible, that place where all people can achieve their fullest potential. He even
enshrined the idea in the Declaration of Independence, translating the search
for eudaemonia into the humbler phrase “pursuit of happiness.” Through the
centuries, white society merely paid lip service to this ideal. In limiting the po-
tential of millions of fellow humans, our forebears limited their own personal
development, fostered thousands of unjust communities, and hindered the
democratic progress of the nation. Justice remains possible, however. History
shows that what works are “subversive micro-practices at multiple sites of op-
pression.”81 Authentic public history projects can help. At the micro-level, they
can reshape our neighborhoods, cities, states, and other places where blacks
and whites make shared meaning of the past. At the macro-level, the power of
place can reshape race relations and our collective future.
NOTES
Introduction
1. On the hurricanes’ impact, see coverage in the Star-News from September 5 to Octo-
ber 6, 1996. Small notices telling people impacted by the disaster where to go for aid lasted
well into November. See also Platt, Salvesen, and Baldwin, “Rebuilding North Carolina,”
249–69.
2. Many scholars have critiqued the tendency of modern public history projects to rein-
force class, gender, and racial hierarchies even as their producers claimed to subvert the status
quo. See, for example, Lerner, Why History Matters, 199–211, and Shackel, Memory in Black
and White, 11–12. Scholars in other disciplines often make the same point. See, for example,
Crutcher, Tremé, ix.
3. Stanton, Lowell Experiment, 12; Horton, “Slavery as American History,” Slavery and Public
History, 46–51.
4. Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, xxi.
5. Shackel, Memory in Black and White, 11.
6. Hayden, The Power of Place, 16.
7. Wallace, “Visiting the Past,” 137–61; Handler and Gable, New History in an Old Museum,
5; Bruggeman, Here, George Washington Was Born, 14–19; and Bunch, Call the Lost Dream
Back, 62.
8. Cognitive mapping remains underutilized by historians. Examples of works that have
shaped my thinking and approach are: Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond Culture”; Franklin and
Steiner, eds., Mapping American Culture; and Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape.
9. Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street. Studies relevant to Wilmington include: Brown and Kim-
ball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” 296–346, and Tangherlini, “Remapping Ko-
reatown,” 149–73.
10. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory.
11. Lewis, “Connecting Memory, Self, and the Power of Place,” 347–71. My previous work
focused on the intersections between ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and place: Mulrooney,
Black Powder, White Lace.
12. Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,” 154–73. Kolchin particularly notes the tendency of white-
ness studies scholars to accept and explain their own subjectivity, a position at odds with histo-
rians’ pursuit of objectivity. On white Americans’ views on race since the civil rights movement,
see Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions,” 50–74. On the emergence of a new racial
284 Notes to Pages 7–18
domain, see Alexander, The New Jim Crow. On the national resurgence of white privilege dur-
ing and since the 1970s, see Kinchloe, “Southern Place and Racial Politics,” 27–46. For a cogent
argument against privilege, see Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege.
13. Marable, Living Black History, xx.
14. Minutes of the North Carolina Governor’s Council, June 04, 1740–June 05, 1740, in Saun-
ders, ed., Colonial and State Records, 458.
15. Ottaway and Shields, Report to Wilmington, NC; Nash, “The Cost of Violence,” 153–83;
and Madison, “The Racial Climate in Wilmington, NC: June 1996.”
16. My interpretation differs from the two published accounts of the commemoration:
McLaurin, “Commemorating Wilmington’s Racial Violence of 1898,” and Bellamy, ed., Moving
Forward Together.
Chapter 1. Rising Tide, 1739–1840

1. On the region’s early history and settlers, see: Clifton, “Golden Grains,” 365; Heitzler,
Goose Creek, 67, 160, and 272–74; Bolton, Founders, 30; Ashe, History of North Carolina 1: 191,
202; Ashe, Biographical History of North Carolina 2: 294–95; Moore, History of North Carolina,
43; and “Petition . . . Concerning George Burrington’s Misdeeds as Governor,” in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 3: 122.
2. Wood, This Remote Part of the World, 18, 177–79; Webber, “First Governor Moore,” 1–23;
Gregg, Crane’s Foot, 177–95; Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 7; Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 38;
Ready, Tar Heel State, 8.
3. Outland, Tapping the Pines, 20–21.
4. The origins of Carolina risiculture are an ongoing subject of scholarly debate. See, for
example, Carney, Black Rice, 1–8, and Rucker, The River Flows On, 94–96, and compare to Eltis,
Morgan, and Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History,” 1329–58.
5. Meredith, Account of the Cape Fear Country 1731, 18–19.
6. Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 4; Crow, Escott, and Hatley, History of African
Americans, 4–5; and Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 70–71.
7. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 10–15, passim.
8. Andrews and Andrews, Appendix VI, Journal of a Lady of Quality.
9. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 9–10.
10. On the petition and bill, see Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 13; and “Act,” in Watson, Society
in Early North Carolina, 184.
11. Minutes of the North Carolina Governor’s Council (May 20, 1740), in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 4: 448–53; and Minutes of the Upper House of the North Carolina
Assembly, (February 4–28, 1740), Colonial and State Records 4: 470–92.
12. Nathaniel Rice, Eleazer Allen, Edward Moseley, and Roger Moore, Memorandum by
Members of the North Carolina Governor’s Council to the Board of Trade of Great Britain
Concerning a Dispute in the Council (July 3, 1740), in Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Records
4: 462–70.
13. Minutes of the North Carolina Governor’s Council (June 4–5, 1740), in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 4: 58; and Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 53.
14. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 17–18; and James Murray to John Murray, November 10,
1750, in Murray, Letters from a Loyalist, 75–76. Consciousness means different things to schol-
Notes to Pages 19–28 285
ars in different disciplines. My approach to civic and racial identity (as distinct kinds of cultural
identity) is grounded in an anthropological understanding of culture as the product of shared
knowledge and in postmodern theories regarding intersubjective discourses and standpoints.
In this respect, my work deviates sharply from that of many historians, who favor the methods
of historical materialism. Some of the texts that have shaped my thinking include: Douglas
and Isherwood, World of Goods; Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures; and Berger and Luckmann,
Social Construction of Reality.
15. Watson, Society in Early North Carolina, 65–75, passim; Millett, Scottish Settlers, 60–61;
Meyer, Highland Scots, 24–28, 122–29; MacRae, History of Clan MacRae, 248–55.
16. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, 531–32.
17. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 41–44; Gorn, “Gouge and Bite,” 36; and Mobley, ed., The
Way We Lived, 193. Common whites apparently viewed hand-to-hand fighting as a way to assert
one’s privileges as a free white male, and so the use of weapons was “unmanly.”
18. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 22, 31; Wood, This Remote Part of the World, 38–39.
19. Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 20–22; Wood, This Remote Part of the World,
38; Leftfield and Stoner, “Brunswick Town Colonowares,” 10; and Canipe, “Black Wilming-
ton,” 2.
20. Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, November 17, 1715–January 19, 1716, in
Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Records 23: 62–66.
21. Morris, Southern Slavery, 209–8.
22. An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, Acts of the General Assembly, 1741, in Saunders,
ed., Colonial and State Records 23: 198–99.
23. Ibid.
24. Morris, Southern Slavery, 161–71; Instruction for Our Trusty and Welbeloved [sic]
George Burrington, December 14, 1730, in Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Records 3: 106; Kay
and Cary, “Planters Suffer Little,” 291–93; Ready, Tar Heel State, 75–77; and Bassett, Slavery and
Servitude, 65.
25. Fischer, Suspect Relations, 1–2, 85–87, 148–49; and Coleman, “Janet Schaw,” 169–93.
26. John Brickell, “The Present State of North Carolina, 1737,” in Butler and Watson, eds.,
North Carolina Experience, 203–4; Bassett, Slavery and Servitude, 30; Kay and Cary, “Planters
Suffer Little,” 297; and Wood, This Remote Part of the World, 164 and 287n84. Using court re-
cords, Wood concluded, “Slave executions in the Lower Cape Fear appear to have been more
disproportionately severe that in other parts of North Carolina.”
27. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 13–32; Gomez, “A Quality of Anguish,” 84–85; Ready, Tar Heel
State, 72; Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 21–22.
28. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 14.
29. Watson, “North Carolina Slave Courts,” 30–31.
30. Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 136.
31. Gomez, “Quality of Anguish,” 6–10; and Rucker, River Flows On, 4–9.
32. James Moir to Philip Bearcroft, April 22, 1742, in Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Re-
cords, volume 4, 605–6.
33. Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 130; Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 196.
34. On the shout and its persistence along the North Carolina coast, see Parrish, Slave Songs,
54; Schaw, Journal of a Lady, 171; Wood, This Remote Part of the World, 201; Johnson, Antebel-
lum North Carolina, 540; and Stuckey, Slave Culture, 108–12.
35. Quoted in Wood, This Remote Part of the World, 138.

36. On Kunering in Wilmington and coastal North Carolina, see: Jacobs, Incidents in the
Life, 118–19; Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences, 200–202; Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Planta-
tion,” 5; Moore, “John Kuners—Wilmington’s Colonial Christmas Celebrants,” ca. 1968, copy
of typescript, in author’s possession; and Sampson, “Kunering, Koonering, or JCanoes, Etc.,” in
author’s possession. Academic studies include: MacMillan, “John Kuners,” 53–57; Reid, “John
Canoe Festival,” 345–70; Walser, “His Worship the John Kuner,” 160–72; Ping, “Black Musical
Activities,” 139–60; and Fenn, “A Perfect Equality,” 127–53. See also: Cassidy, “Hipsaw and John
Canoe,” 45–51; Craton, “Decoding Pitchy Patchy,” 14–44; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 67–71; Kay and
Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 183–86; Levine, Black Culture and Consciousness, 13; and Nis-
senbaum, Battle for Christmas, 285–91.
37. Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities,” essay commissioned by the Brit-
ish Museum, www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/Delburgoessay.pdf (accessed October 2017); and
White, “It Was a Proud Day,” 13–50.
38. Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg conducted fieldwork among the Nagos’ descendants
for several decades. See especially Ottenberg, Masked Rituals of the Afikpo, 12. On the Papaws
(Nagos) in Jamaica, see Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 38 and 41–43; also Mullin, Africa in
America, 285; and Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies,” 63.
39. Thompson, African Art in Motion, 144, 199.
40. Obi, Fighting for Honor, 77–121; Rucker, River Flows On, 104–9; Ottenberg, Masked Ritu-
als, 164; and Ottenberg, “Afikpo Masquerades,” 94.
41. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory,” 327–38; Halcrow, Canes and Chains, 55.
42. Watson, “Impulse toward Independence,” 319; Brewer, “Legislation Designed to Control
Slavery,” 155–57; Forret, “Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy,” 782–824; and
Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle, and Disorderly,’” 97–110.
43. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 34.
44. Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 117.
45. Moore, The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies (1765), full text at North
Carolina History Project Encyclopedia, www.northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/ (ac-
cessed October 2011).
46. “An Article from the North Carolina Gazette Concerning Resistance to the Stamp Act
in Wilmington and New Bern,” November 2, 1765, rpt. November 20, 1765, in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 7: 123–25. Compare the original to the interpretations in Ready, Tar
Heel State, 93–94, and Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 94.
47. Nelson, William Tryon, 31–32.
48. “An Article from the North Carolina Gazette Concerning Resistance to the Stamp Act
in Wilmington and New Bern,” November 2, 1765, rpt. November 20, 1765, in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 7: 123–25.
49. See scholars’ accounts, such as Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 42. Lee contends that “the
rioters acted with restraint” and upheld the “rules of violence” in order to “maintain their aura
of virtue and legitimacy.” Houston is quoted in Spindel, “Law and Disorder,” 1–16. Stuart is
quoted in “An Article from the North Carolina Gazette Concerning Resistance to the Stamp
Act in Wilmington and New Bern,” November 2, 1765, rpt. November 20, 1765, in Saunders, ed.,
Colonial and State Records 7: 123–25. For context, see Gilje, Rioting in America, 38.
50. Hugh Waddell et al. to William Dry, February 15, 1766; John Ashe to William Tryon,
February 19, 1766; and William Tryon to Jacob Lobb or Constantin Phipps, February 19, 1766,
all in Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Records 7: 177–79. See also Wheeler, Reminiscences and
Memoirs, 39; Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 5: 161; and Watson, Wilmington
to 1861, 77.
51. Wheeler, Reminiscences and Memoirs, 39; Ready, Tar Heel State, 95.
52. Watson, “Impulse towards Independence,” 324.
53. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials, 12–13; Rose, “Pocomoke,” 543. According
to Rose, the earliest known reference to “Negroe Head Point” is in a 1777 deed. For the place
to be so well known in 1777 that it could function as a landscape fixture, its antecedent event
must have happened years earlier. Only one known slave insurrection can be confirmed before
1777, and that is the 1767 incident. On that event, see Wood, This Remote Part of the World,
164. In 1768, a slave named Quamino was executed and his head “affixed upon the point near
Wilmington.” This phrasing suggests that the place name was not yet widely used, but it per-
haps marks the beginning of a pattern of fixing heads in the same location. On Quamino, see
Watson, “North Carolina Slave Courts,” 34.
54. Howard’s address is reprinted in Higgenbotham and Price, “Was It Murder,” 596–601.
55. Lennon and Kellam, eds., Wilmington Town Book, 203.
56. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 3: 196 and 199–200; Lipscomb, ed., Let-
ters of Pierce Butler, 24; Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness,” 90; Minutes of the Lower House of the
North Carolina General Assembly, January 25, 1773–March 06, 1773, in Saunders, ed., Colonial
and State Records 9: 470; and Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 80–81.
57. On the non-importation of slaves, see minutes for December 17, 1774; January 21, 1775;
and especially March 6, 1775 (Harnett’s exemption) in Proceedings of the Safety Committee, 7,
15, and 22; and Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 83–84.
58. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements, 462; Rucker, River Flows On, 38.
59. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 16–17; Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness,” 84–85; Watson, “Impulse
toward Independence,” 325.
60. Proceedings of the Safety Committee, 31. The names of the patrollers are given for each
area and they include a number of recognizable elites (John Ashe Jr., Samuel Swann, and so
forth), not common whites.
61. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness,” 84.
62. Ibid., 86–87.
63. Crow, Black Experience, 75.
64. For descriptions of black foragers, see Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 198–200, and for forag-
ers in the Cape Fear region, 202. Also see the lengthy account of Craig’s activities in and around
Wilmington in Sprunt, Chronicles, 114–15.
65. Lessing, “Historic Buildings of America,” 641–48. Lessing offers a gripping account of
Harnett’s capture and death, which was passed down from generation to generation and sur-
vives in various modern accounts.
66. Early accounts were recorded by Archibald Maclaine Hooper, son of George Hooper,
William “the Signer” Hooper’s brother. Archibald became a prolific writer of local colonial his-
tory books and articles. See Sprunt, Chronicles, 258.
67. Cornelius Harnett, Yorktown (PA) to William Wilkinson, Wilmington, March 3, 1778,
in Saunders, ed., Colonial and State Records 13: 374. He placed the ad for Sawney’s return in the
Pennsylvania Gazette, February 26, 1778. Previous letters to Wilkinson in this same volume
concerned labor problems at the rum distillery in Wilmington. Harnett agreed to look for a
distiller, but advised Wilkinson to purchase slaves in North Carolina, as prices were 150 percent
cheaper in North Carolina.
68. Lepore, Name of War, ix.
69. Sprunt, Chronicles, 122; Lessing, “Historic Buildings of America,” 647.
70. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 185–99, passim, but especially 196.
71. Brewer, “Legislation Designed to Control Slavery,” 164. On the expansion of hiring-out
practices after the revolution, see Bishir, Bullock, and Bushong, Architects and Builders, 101;
Canipe, “Black Wilmington,” 28; and Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 5.
72. Canipe, “Black Wilmington,” 23; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 98.
73. Fischer, Suspect Relations, 125–29.
74. For statistics on free blacks, see Canipe, “Black Wilmington,” 23, and Hinks, To Awaken
My Afflicted Brethren, 12–13. The Walker-Howe family’s history has been well documented, and
Hinks examined it to determine if Anthony Walker was abolitionist David Walker’s father. He
was not.
75. “Petition of the Incorporated Mechanical Society,” in Schweninger, Southern Debate, 26.
76. Haller, “‘And Made Us to Be a Kingdom,’” 132; Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 90.
77. Grissom, History of Methodism, 222–23.
78. Haller, “‘And Make Us to Be a Kingdom,’” 141.
79. Jones, Experience and Personal Narrative, 11; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 107.
80. Walker, Appeal. The race of Walker’s mother is not known.
81. Ibid.
82. Eaton, “Dangerous Pamphlet,” 323–34. For evidence concerning Cowan’s fate, see
Rachleff, “Document: David Walker’s Southern Agent,” 100–103, and Hinks, To Awaken My
Afflicted Brethren, 137–38.
83. Eaton, “Dangerous Pamphlet,” 331–32.
84. Clegg, Price of Liberty, 16–17.
85. Yanuck, “Thomas Ruffin,” 461–62 and 467; Greene, “State v. Mann Exhumed,” 700–755.
86. Eaton, “Dangerous Pamphlet,” 331.
87. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 163.
88. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 66.
89. North Carolina Star, September 22, 1831, rpt. in “Insurrections in North Carolina,”
LEARN North Carolina, www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4573 (accessed July 10,
2010). According to this article, Davey was owned by a Mr. Morrissey of Sampson. He attempted
to recruit a “free mulatto,” who informed authorities. They captured Davey in early September
and had already tried and convicted him when this article went to press in mid-September.
90. Moses Ashley Curtis, “Hysteria in Wilmington,” rpt. in LEARN North Carolina, www.
learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/5295 (accessed July 10, 2010). The names of the four
executed Wilmington men come from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Nat Turner’s Insurrec-
tion,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861. See Hunt, Life and Times of Thomas P. Hunt, 144–48, for
a vivid description of the hysteria in Wilmington. Hunt, a Presbyterian minister, manumitted
his slaves in 1827 and advocated colonization.
91. Forbes, Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath, 3. On the cultural construction of
whiteness in this era, see: Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Lott, Love and Theft; Heneghan, White-
washing America.
92. G. T. Bedell, “Prince Moro,” Christian Advocate (Philadelphia), vol. 3 (July 1825): 306–7,
rpt. in Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/nc/omarsaid/support1.html (ac-
cessed July 12, 2010). James Owen represented Bladen County in the North Carolina House
from 1808 to 1811, commanded the state militia during the War of 1812, and was thereafter
elected to the U.S. Congress. His brother, John Owen, served as governor. See “General James
Owen,” in Wheeler, Historical Sketches, 43.
93. Recent secondary works that reexamine Moro’s life, his writings, and their meaning in-
clude: Osman and Forbes, “Representing the West,” 331–43; Turner, Islam in the African Ameri-
can Experience; Diouf, Servants of Allah; and Austin, Muslims in Antebellum America, which
includes translations of Said’s Arabic writings.
94. Bedell, “Prince Moro,” 307; Louis Toomer Moore, “Prince of Arabia,” Greensboro (NC)
Daily News, Sunday, February 13, 1927. To inquisitive whites, Said explained that the slips of
paper were “appeals to the neighbors not to take him from his good master.” On the use of tal-
ismans in West Africa, see Owusu-Ansah, “Prayer, Amulets, and Healing,” 481–84, and Diouf,
Servants of Allah, 129–31. On Said’s other Islamic practices, see Osman and Forbes, “Represent-
ing the West,” 337.
95. Thomas Fanning Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life for My Children,” rpt., Randall
Library Special Collections, library.uncw.edu/web/collections/manuscript/TFWdiary.html (ac-
cessed May 23, 2011). The word “Arab” was used to describe Said in an 1847 article. See Osman
and Forbes, “Representing the West,” 343. On Islamic or Arabic names in Wilmington and the
Outer Banks, including the Sea Islands, see Haller, “‘And Made Us to Be a Kingdom,’” 141, and
Diouf, Servants of Allah, 84. On Kebe, see Osman and Forbes, “Representing the West,” 335. On
Wilmington as home: “His good master has offered to send him to his native land, his home
and his friends; but he says ‘No,—this is my home, and here are my friends, and here is my
Bible; I enjoy all I want in this world” (Moro qtd. in Bedell, “Prince Moro,” 306–7).
96. On Sheridan’s early life, see Gatewood, “‘To Be Truly Free,’” 332–33; also see Clegg, The
Price of Liberty, 153–54; and Bishir, “Sheridan, Thomas (ca. 1787–1864),” in North Carolina Ar-
chitects and Builders, ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000448 (June 2010). Thomas Sheridan
was a carpenter of modest means whose life differed considerably from that of his brother,
Louis. Bishir suggests that the brothers shared the same mother, but had different fathers. Thus
Gautier provided for Nancy’s eldest son, but not to the same extent as Louis, his own offspring
and only heir.
97. Freedom’s Journal was the first African American–owned and –operated paper in the
country. It was run by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm in New York, and it is there that
Sheridan likely came in contact with them. By January 1828, his name appeared in the list of
the paper’s official agents (www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/). See also
Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 179.
98. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 143.
99. Gatewood, “To Be Truly Free,” 338; Clegg, Price of Liberty, 155.
100. Clegg, Price of Liberty, 137; also see Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 94–96.
Chapter 2. Port in a Storm, 1840–1880

1. Sprunt, Chronicles, 176. The 1840 Whig convention in Raleigh witnessed the statewide
debut of “The Old North State,” a song with lyrics penned by Judge William Gaston of Raleigh.
See “Old North State, February 1927,” This Day in North Carolina History, blogs.lib.unc.edu/
ncm/index.php/2006/02/01/this_month_feb_1927/.
2. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 101. On the Davis family, see Ashe, Biographical History 2:
71–81, passim; De Leon, Belles, Beaux, and Brains, 98; and “Judge Horatio Davis Passed Away
Sunday,” Gainesville (FL) Sun, June 4, 1900. For the De Rosset family, see Ashe, Cyclopedia of
Eminent Men 2: 250. On elite southern fathers, see Glover, “Education in Southern Masculin-
ity,” 68.
3. MacRae, History of Clan MacRae, 250–55. MacRae indicated in this text that his informant
was Donald MacRae, who provided genealogical information about the Wilmington branch
in 1898. The child born in 1841 was another son, named Walter Gwynn MacRae after the first
superintendent of the Wilmington and Raleigh Railroad. After Anna died, Alexander remar-
ried two more times but evidently had no more children after 1841.
4. MacRae, History of Clan MacRae, 250; Turnbull and Denslow, History of Royal Arch Ma-
sonry, 1087–89; Bordsen, “Scottish Attitudes,” 129–30; and Block, Cape Fear Lost, 29–31.
5. Information about the MacRae sons has been pieced together from various sources, in-
cluding: Sprunt, Chronicles, 193, 198, 335; U.S. Census, 1850 and 1860, Wilmington, NC, popula-
tion schedules; and Letters, 1852–June 1854, Hugh MacRae Papers.
6. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 110.
7. Bishir, North Carolina Architecture, 269–75.
8. Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 7–8.
9. On Wilmington’s reform impulse, see Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 146, and Byrne, Be-
coming Bourgeois, 87. For comparison to other southern urbanites’ reform activities, see Wells,
Origins of the Southern Middle Class, chaps. 4 and 6; Deal, “Middle Class Benevolent Societies,”
84–104; Kimball, American City, 46–49; and Morris, Becoming Southern, chap. 7.
10. U.S. Census, 1850, Wilmington, NC, population schedule and slave schedule. On life
insurance policies taken out on skilled Wilmington slaves, see Schemerhorn, Money over Mas-
tery, 93n76, and compare to Murphy, “Securing Human Property,” 615–52. On slaves in Rich-
mond industries, see Kimball, American City, 16–24 passim and especially chap. 5; on Charles-
ton, see Powers, Black Charlestonians, 10–12. Recent books that focus on urban slavery include
Whitman, Price of Freedom, and Gagnon, Transition to an Industrial South.
11. Gleeson, Irish in the South, 35–36; MacRae qtd. in Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, 7–8.
12. Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 106. On the Irish experience broadly, see Mulrooney, Black
Powder, White Lace.
13. Bodamer, History of Wilmington, passim.
14. Thomas Fanning Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life for My Children,” rpt. Randall
Library Special Collections, library.uncw.edu/web/collections/manuscript/TFWdiary.html (ac-
cessed May 23, 2011).
15. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 79, but also see 80–83.
16. For the location of the Wilmington slave pen, see McKoy, When Whites Riot, 137n33.
For descriptions of the pen, see Robinson, From Log Cabin to Pulpit, 24 and 42, and compare
to Johnson, Soul by Soul, 7–12, 118–34. Robinson identifies the owner as “Mr. Howard.” George
Kelley’s Kelley’s Wilmington Directory for 1860 features a full-page ad for W. C. Howard, naval
stores broker and auctioneer of “real estate, stocks, negroes.” Howard’s ad is the only one to in-
clude “negroes,” so he is likely the man Robinson meant. Bellamy was born somewhat later, but
the auctions he recalled happened the same way. Bellamy, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 14–15.
17. Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life”; Bishir et al., Architects and Builders, 155; and
Janet Seapker, “The Wood Brothers,” in North Carolina Architects and Builders, ed. Bishir.
18. Occupational information comes from Canipe, “Black Wilmington,” 24; U.S. Census,
1850, Wilmington, NC, population schedule; and Ping, “Black Musical Activities,” 142.
19. Wilmington Chronicle, August 18, 1847; Diary of Nicholas W. Schenk, Digital Collections,
Randall Library, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, library.uncw.edu/web/collections/
schenck/schenckintro.html (accessed January 11, 2014); Forret, “Slaves, Poor Whites, and the
Underground Economy,” 809–10; and Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, chap. 5.
20. Diary of Nicholas W. Schenk; and Ping, “Black Musical Activities,” 147. See also, Ryan,
Democracy and Public Life, 58–70.
21. Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 122; Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 173; and Pflu-
grad- Jackisch, Brothers of a Vow, 99–101.
22. On Bassadier, see Sprunt, Chronicles, 192–93; and Sprunt, Tales and Traditions, 14. On
Gautier’s involvement in the illegal slave trade, see Brodine, Crawford, and Hughes, Interpreting
Old Iron Sides, 54.
23. Ping, “Black Musical Activities,” 147, 150.
24. MacMillan, “John Kuners,” 54; Epstein, “Slave Music,” 195–212.
25. On signification, see Davies, ed., Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, 842. Because of
the great familiarity blacks took with whites, a Jamaican observer felt that “a perfect equality
seemed to reign among all the parties” and Elizabeth Fenn uses this quote as her title to sug-
gest a similar “equality” for antebellum North Carolina. The Jamaican, however, spoke from his
white perspective. It is doubtful that black participants felt equal when they knew their freedom
was so limited. See Fenn, “A Perfect Equality,” 138. Kuner lyrics cited in Jacobs, Incidents in the
Life, 118–19, and MacMillan, “John Kuners,” 55.
26. Reid, “John Canoe Festival,” 349–50. The “Hah Low” chant was noted by MacMillan
in his 1926 essay; however, MacMillan provides these lyrics: “Kuners come from Denby!” The
phrase “from Denby” is likely a corruption of “for ma lady,” as stated in Reid. Other songs and
dances are cited in MacMillan, “John Kuners,” 54; and Stuckey, Slave Culture, 70.
27. Rebecca Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation,” 5; Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences,
200.
28. “The State vs. Jacob Boyce” in Documentary History of Slavery, 224–27.
29. Block, Cape Fear Lost, 81.
30. In 1850, Donald MacRae appears in the federal census as a twenty-five-year-old bach-
elor boarding with Mrs. Sarah De Rosset; he was also a partner with his brother, John, and
a friend named John W. Dix in the merchant house of J. and D. MacRae & Co. In 1851, he
married Mary Savage, daughter of Connecticut-born Timothy Savage, cashier of the Bank of
the Cape Fear. Letters concerning Mary’s sudden death in Virginia in July 1852 reveal that,
because of the extreme summer heat, her body could not be shipped home for a funeral.
MacRae’s father-in-law insisted that her death was not caused by “the difficulty of the jour-
ney” and that Mary had not suffered. His missives reek of guilt, and reveal that MacRae had
opposed the trip, while the Savages encouraged it. Where MacRae and his young daughter
lived between 1852 and 1858 is unknown. They may have resided with Alexander Sr. in the
family home at Fifth and Orange. In 1859, he bought the former Robert Coffin Wood house
on Market Street that he occupied for the rest of his life. Norton died in 1859; by 1860, Donald
and Julia had an infant daughter, Agnes. The household also included two slaves, a thirty-
six-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman. MacRae’s father, Alexander, owned

twenty slaves who resided within the city limits in 1860. Information in this paragraph from:
U.S. Census, 1850 and 1860, Wilmington, NC, population and slave schedules; Campbell,
ed., Southern Business Directory, 398; Letters, 1852–54, reel 2, Hugh MacRae Papers; and De
Rosset, Pictorial and Historical New Hanover County, 34–35. The information concerning
John MacRae’s crippling injury comes from Diary of Nicholas W. Shenck, 105. On the views
of southern businessmen like MacRae in the late 1850s, see Towers, “Navigating the Muddy
Stream,” 180–98.
31. Bishir et al., Architects and Builders, 188–89.
32. Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life.”
33. Cecelski, Fire of Freedom, 7, 14–17.
34. Robinson, From Log Cabin to Pulpit, 78.
35. Ibid., 12–13.
36. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 129; Robinson, From Log Cabin to Pulpit, 118.
37. On Wilmington’s reaction to John Brown’s raid, see Blaser, “North Carolina and John
Brown’s Raid,” 197–201, and Bulla and Borchard, Journalism in the Civil War Era, 112.
38. Compare the description of Wilkings’s duel in Watson, Wilmington to 1861, 118, to the
period accounts found in the Wilmington Daily Journal, especially May 7, 1856, and “An Affair
Doomed to End with Bloodshed,” Raleigh News and Observer, May 25, 1956. On Whigs’ rejec-
tion of dueling, see Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 69–80. On North Carolina
Democrats’ push to promote universal white suffrage in the 1850s, see Edwards, Gendered Strife
and Confusion, 77–78.
39. Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life.”
40. Bellamy, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 6; U.S. Census, 1860, Brunswick County, NC,
slave schedule. Builder Rufus Bunnell qtd. in Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, xii. On
the rise of the “ultra” wing, see Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 9.
41. Wright, Address Delivered at the Celebration, 16.
42. Hooper had a town house on Third Street between Market and Princess that survived
until the 1880s. He also had a large plantation, Finian, on Masonboro Sound, but the British
burned the manor down in 1781. Harnett’s town house, called “Maynard,” was located a mile
north of Market Street. Harnett’s heirs sold Maynard to John Hill in 1784, and it was rechris-
tened “Hilton” by its third owner, John’s brother, William Henry Hill. It survived until 1892.
See: Claude Moore, “William Hooper, The Signer,” rpt. Wayne County, NC, Heritage Series,
files.usgwarchives.net/nc/wayne/heritage/hooper.txt; “William Hooper’s House,” Accession
No. 96.768.511, Lower Cape Fear Historical Society; Fonveille, Historic Wilmington, 23–24;
and Ashe, Biographical History 7: 179. On Mrs. Dickinson’s background, see “1858–1859, Mrs.
P. B. K. Dickinson,” in “Portraits/Biographies of Regents and Vice-Regents to 1874,” Mount
Vernon Ladies Association: A Brief History, www.mountvernon.org (accessed December
2012) and Mount Vernon Ladies Association, Annual Report, 1919, 58. A native Wilmingto-
nian, Alice Hill London Dickinson (1814–1881) married lumber magnate Platt K. Dickinson.
She was Ann Pamela Cunningham’s second appointment, but she resigned after only one
year. Mrs. Letitia Harper Walker succeeded her in 1859 and served until her death in 1908. On
the motivations of MVLA members, see Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 133–35. On historic
places as holy pilgrimage sites, see Bruggeman, Here, George Washington Was Born.
43. On revolutionary monuments and their meanings in 1850s Charleston and Richmond,
see: Dennis, Pencak, and Newman, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America, 290–91, and Kim-
ball, American City, 7–9, 197–98.
44. John MacRae actually stumped for John Bell and the Constitutional Union party in
1860. See Wood, “Port Town at War,” 28. Archibald MacRae, the U.S. Naval officer, had died
in 1855.
45. Waddell, Some Memories of My Life, 40, 49–51.
46. Sitterson, Secession Movement in North Carolina, 34; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 9.
47. Wood, “Some Recollections of My Life”; Ping, “Black Musical Activities,” 141; Wilm-
ington Daily Journal, January 16, 1861. In the aftermath of the fort takeover, the newspaper
reported that “citizens” met at the courthouse to discuss the events. Chaired by shipbuilder
Benjamin W. Beery, the assembly approved a document with a preamble and resolutions (much
like a declaration of independence) that thanked the Minutemen for their patriotic service and
communicated their motives for the attack on the fort to the general public.
48. On Davis, see Ashe, Biographical History 2: 71–75; and Sprunt, Chronicles, 271.
49. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 208–12.
50. “Speech of Mr. Davis at Thalian Hall,” in Buck and Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War
Documentary, 19–22; Sprunt, Chronicles, 219–22.
51. For a typical Progressive Era study, see Boyd, North Carolina on the Eve of Secession, 177.
See also “Ordnances and Resolutions Passed by the State Convention of North Carolina, 1861–
1862,” Documenting the South, docsouth.unc.edu/imls/ncconven/ncconven.html#nccon3 (ac-
cessed July 2010); and Sprunt, Chronicles, 269–71.
52. Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 11–14; Sprunt, Chronicles, 337–39, provides details
of the service rendered by all four MacRae men. See also Wood, “Port Town at War,” 162. On
Donald MacRae’s familial and business activities during the Civil War, see De Rosset, Pictorial
and Historical New Hanover County, 34–35.
53. Smith, “What Will Become of the Aristocrats of the South?” 37; Evans, Ballots and Fence
Rails, 7; and Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, chaps. 2 and 3, passim.
54. Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 5–15; Wood, “Port Town at War,” 139–40. Lowe’s em-
ployees were mostly white, working-class women.
55. Wood, “Port Town at War,” 162.
56. Meares, Annals of the De Rosset Family, 81; Sprunt, Chronicles, 294; Wood, “Port Town
at War,” 182; and Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 7–13.
57. Kelley’s Wilmington City Directory (1860); Bonham, British Consuls in the Confederacy,
462; and Berwanger, British Foreign Service and the American Civil War, 13–21. On British
blockade runners in Wilmington, see McKenna, British Ships in the Confederate Navy, chap.
2 and 203–40. On blockade runners operated by J. and D. MacRae & Co., see John W. K. Dix
to Donald MacRae, August 11, 1862, in Yearns et al., eds., North Carolina Civil War Docu-
mentary, 169. In this remarkable letter, Dix informs MacRae of intimate details concerning
the firm’s “foreign fleet” of five steamships. On the cotton embargo, see Dattel, Cotton and
Race in the Making of America, 169–76, especially his reference to the Wilmington Commit-
tee of Safety.
58. Wood, “Port City at War,” 162. Besides MacRae’s daughter from his first marriage, Mary,
he had when the war began a young daughter, Agnes; a son, Norton, died in 1860. Donald re-
turned to Wilmington in May 1861, just before the family moved west. Daughter Julia was born
at the summer house in December 1862, followed by another son, Hugh, in March 1865. On the
furnace, which operated as the Endor Iron Company, see: Haire and Symore, Sanford and Lee
County, 124; and Bishir and Southern, Guide to Historic Architecture, 266–67.
59. Sprunt, Chronicles, 286; Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 19–20.
60. Gould, Diary of a Contraband, 1–40, passim, and 133–34. Also see Hannon, “African
Americans in the Navy,” 360.
61. Quoted in Wood, “Port Town at War,”155. Slaves and free blacks in other ports used the
war as an occasion to push for their own freedom. For examples, see Kimball, American City,
248; Meekins, Elizabeth City, North Carolina and the Civil War, 54; and Jenkins, Seizing the
New Day, 24–29.
62. Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 17–18; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 252–61;
Wood, “Port City at War,” 14; and Sprunt, Chronicles, 413. On women in Wilmington, especially
the De Rosset women, see Smith, “What will become of the Aristocrats?,” 71–80. The historiog-
raphy of the war’s impact on Southern women and gender roles is extensive. Works I consulted
include: Faust, Mothers of Invention; Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; and Bynum,
Unruly Women. The Journal is quoted in Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 20.
63. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 16–18.
64. Details of both battles for Fort Fisher can be found in Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign,
chaps. 5–8.
65. See Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 20, and Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 391, 406,
and 414.
66. Burkhead, “Difficulties of the Pastorate of the Front Street Methodist Church,” 38–39.
67. Fonveille, Wilmington Campaign, 418–22.
68. Ibid., 428; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 23; and Waddell, Some Memories of My Life, 57.
69. On Hawley, see Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 55–57, and Wood, “Port Town at War,”
225. Mayor John Dawson and the town commissioners tendered their resignations to Hawley,
but he refused them, insisting they should keep their positions and duties provisionally, until
new elections could be held. In actual practice, federal authorities immediately began to direct
all municipal functions.
70. Bradley, Bluecoats and Tarheels, 8–27, passim.
71. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 38, 51, and 126; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 449–50.
72. Pearson, “Freedmen’s Bureau’s Health Care Activities,” 144–46.
73. Downs, Declarations of Dependence, 76, 89–90; Marten, Sing Not War, 70. Organized
racist violence in Wilmington is documented in the “Report of the Joint Committee on Re-
construction,” 271–78.
74. Reid, Freedom for Themselves, 185.
75. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 41, 65; and Cecelski, Fire of Freedom, 58.
76. Bradley, Blue Coats and Tarheels, 65.
78. Reid, Freedom for Themselves, 285; Lamb is quoted in Wood, “Port Town at War,” 214.
Lamb published a memoir in which he blamed the Confederate loss at Fort Fisher on Hoke,
whom he felt should have easily defeated the USCT. For a similar view, see Hamilton, Recon-
struction in North Carolina, 159. On the men of the Thirty-seventh, see Cecelski, Fire of Free-
dom, 50–53; and Bradley, Bluecoats and Tarheels, 64–65, 58.
79. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 59; Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 136; and Hahn, “Ex-
travagant Expectations of Freedom,” 90–91, 133–41.
80. Smaw, Wilmington Directory for 1865–66, 1–142, passim.

81. Kenzer, Enterprising Southerners, 35.
82. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 196n39.
83. Reid, Freedom for Themselves, 50–55.
84. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 93, noted that the Union League was publishing a news-
paper in Wilmington by November 1865; a more recent study showed two organized Union
League units by April 1865, when they participated in the Lincoln memorial parade. See Um-
fleet, Day of Blood, 198n66. Cecelski, “Abraham H. Galloway,” in Democracy Betrayed, 58, places
Galloway back in the port city in January 1866.
85. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 87–88. On Sampson and his family, see Conser, Coat of
Many Colors, 128, and Brown, Rising Son, 514–17. The 1860 U.S. Census population schedule for
Wilmington shows that John Sampson’s father, James D. Sampson, owned property valued at
an astonishing thirty-six thousand dollars. A carpenter by trade, the elder Sampson had been
emancipated by his elite owner and likely father, a member of the prominent Sampson fam-
ily of Sampson County. James designed and built a number of elegant homes in Wilmington
before the war. He also owned a number of enslaved artisans. John Sampson’s address is found
in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People, 540–43.
86. Andrews, The South since the War, 59–64, 78; Escott, Many Excellent People, 126–28.
87. For changes in municipal government, see Ruark, “Some Phases of Reconstruction in
Wilmington,” 96–99. On George W. Price Jr., see Bishir and Tetterton, “Price Family,” North
Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary.
88. Escott, Many Excellent People, 136–69; Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 7.
89. “Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,” xxxiii; Crow, Escott, and Hatley,
History of African Americans in North Carolina, 84; Cecelski, “Abraham H. Galloway,” 60.
90. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 128.
91. Marten, Sing Not War, 65.
92. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 98–102. On Klan activity in North Carolina, see Ready,
Tar Heel State, 252–55. On William Laurence Saunders (1835–1891), see Ashe, Biographical Dic-
tionary 4, 381–89. In 1871, Congress investigated Klan activity in North Carolina and called on
Saunders to testify; he refused to answer any of their questions. Later, he became secretary of
state in North Carolina, founding editor of the Colonial Records of North Carolina series, and
a trustee of his alma mater, the University of North Carolina.
93. On the pivotal April 1868 elections, see Cecelski, Fire of Freedom, 202–3.
94. Smaw, Wilmington City Directory for 1865–66, 189. Works consulted on the develop-
ment the Lost Cause include: Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy; Blight, Race and Reunion; and
Shackel, Memory in Black and White.
95. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 213–15. On Ladies Memorial Associations in North Caro-
lina, see Sims, Power of Femininity, chap. 1.
96. “Announcement for Sixth Session, 1878–1879,” Cape Fear Military Academy, Broad-
sides and Ephemera, Duke Digital Collections, library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/broadsides_
bdsnc041724/ (accessed December 15, 2016).
97. Quoted in Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 136.
98. Bellamy, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 34.
99. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 144–53, passim; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 225–
38; Cashman, Headstrong, 159–76; Bradley, “Report of Miss Amy M. Bradley,” 61–64.
100. Wilmington Star, April 14, 16, 17, 21, 1870; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 238; and
Cecelski, “Abraham H. Galloway,” 214–15.
101. Downs, Declarations of Dependence, 106–7.
102. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 147–48, 158; Umfleet, Day of Blood, 13.
103. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 106–9, 114–16, 161–65.
104. On Redemption, see Umfleet, Day of Blood, 13–14; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 167–
68; and Cody, “After the Storm,” 7.
106. Reilly, Wilmington, North Carolina, 88; Watson, Wilmington: Port of North Carolina,
113; Sprunt, Tales and Traditions, xxiii. Biographical information about Walter MacRae comes
from Connor, History of North Carolina 4: 155.
107. Navassa Guano Company Charter, August 5, 1869, digital collection, Cape Fear Museum,
www.capefearmuseum.com/collections/navassa-guano-company-charter-august-5-1869/ (ac-
cessed May 5, 2014); Haddock, Haddock’s Wilmington Directory, 162; Reilly, Wilmington, North
Carolina, 91; Navassa Almanac for 1875 (Raleigh: Edwards, Broughton & Co., 1875), Southern
Historical Collection; and Cecelski, Historian’s Coast, 114.
108. Killick, “Transformation of Cotton Marketing,” 145–48; Reilly, Wilmington, North
Carolina, 125.
109. Shuler and Bailey, “History of the Phosphate Mining Industry,” 30–37.
110. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 123; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 153.
111. Price, The Negro, or African American, 4–20. Price initially drafted this speech in April
1876 and delivered an early version in May to the people of Southport (Smithville) in prepara-
tion for the July 4 event. Afterwards, he had the speech published for greater dispersal. See
Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 450.
112. Price, The Negro, or African American, 20.
Chapter 3. Slack Water, 1880–1920

1. On the Sadgwar family see: Mulrooney, Wilmington, North Carolina’s African American
Heritage Trail, site 10; Sanborn Map Company, “Wilmington, North Carolina, 1889”; Uzzell,
“Descendants of David Elias Sadgwar”; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 456; McKoy, When
Whites Riot, 137n33; and Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 171 and 283. Julia Sadgwar is quoted in
Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 33.
2. Prior to the 1998 commemoration, Prather’s We Have Taken a City was the only in-depth
history of the massacre and coup. Post-commemoration works are: Cecelski and Tyson, eds.,
Democracy Betrayed, a collection of essays; the state’s “1898 Wilmington Race Riot—Final Re-
port, May 31, 2006”; Hossfeld’s Narrative, Political Unconscious; and finally, Umfleet’s Day of
Blood, the published version of the 2006 report. My study builds on these works and expands
them in a different way.
3. Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 283; Buck, Alain Locke, 37–52.
4. For population statistics, see: Umfleet, Day of Blood, 18; Reaves, Strength through Struggle,
138–39, 460–61, 465, 472–73; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 1–29, passim; Brown, Upbuilding
Black Durham, 1–53. Both Gilmore and Brown have strongly influenced my thinking about
race, gender, and class in post-Reconstruction Wilmington, a city’s whose black leaders, male
and female, were intimately connected to those elsewhere in the state.
5. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 10 and 13–24, passim; Sanborn Map Company, “Wilm-
ington, North Carolina, 1884,” and “Wilmington, North Carolina, 1889.” See also Schweninger,
Black Property Ownership, 179, 216–19. Wilmington especially seems to fit the pattern of black
businesses Schweninger described.
6. “The Howe Family,” in Bishir, ed., North Carolina Architects and Builders; Sprunt, Chron-
icles, 538; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 187–89.
7. “A Terrible Fire,” Wilmington Morning Star, February 23, 1886.
8. “A Public Meeting,” Wilmington Morning Star, February 23, 1886; “In the Burned District,”
Wilmington Morning Star, February 24, 1886; “The Fire,” Wilmington Morning Star, February
25, 1886; and “The Fire Relief Committee,” Wilmington Morning Star, March 6, 1886.
9. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina, 9–10; Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 7;
Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 107 and 113.
10. Clegg, Troubled Ground, 30–33; Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life, 6–7; Allen,
Without Sanctuary, passim.
11. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 142. A survey of the Morning Star revealed a large
number of lynching-related articles. Coverage for the month of July 1885 began on July 4 with
a report of “A Dastardly Crime” committed in Wadesboro, where a black man was “hanged to
a tree on Thursday night very near the spot where the dastardly crime was committed.” Similar
articles appeared every week, sometimes several days apart, along with reports of black “lar-
ceny,” “vagrancy,” “insanity,” arson, drunkenness, and disorderliness. Some of these negative
news items concerned poor or wage-earning blacks in the port city, but many did not.
12. Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 23; Hunt, Marion Butler, 57.
13. Keith, Memories, 62–78.
14. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 18; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 326.
15. Quoted in Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 241.
16. On Russell and his Ring, see Crow, Maverick Republican, 11–15, 23. On the Independents,
see McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 342–46; “No White Man Wanted,” New York Times,
March 30, 1891; “North Carolina Republicans,” New York Times, September 8, 1891; and Prather,
Resurgent Politics, 112–13.
17. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 24–255; Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 127–28.
18. See Prather, We Have Taken a City, 68–70, for the Manlys’ biographical info. Very few
copies of the Record exist, and its initial date of publication is unknown. I argue for 1891 for sev-
eral reasons. First, Manly published several short stories by David Bryant Fulton, who compiled
them into a single, self-published volume in 1892. Fulton’s 1899 novel about Wilmington states:
“Prior to the year 1892 there had been no genuine zeal among the colored people to establish
a colored newspaper in Wilmington. The Record was launched about that time; but not until it
was taken in hand by the famous A. L. Manly did it amount to very much as a news medium.”
See Thorne [Fulton], Hanover, 12. Second, Rev. Daniel J. Sanders left Wilmington in 1891 to be-
come president of Biddle University. When he departed, the Africo American Presbyterian left
with him, creating a publishing void in the port city. Third, internal evidence from a September
28, 1895, copy of the Record—the earliest extant copy of the paper—points to an earlier date.
19. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 2: 252–53; Reaves, Strength through
Struggle, 395; Thorne [Fulton], Recollections; Thorne [Fulton], Eagle Clippings; Lim, “David
Bryant Fulton,” 291–94; and Gleason, “Voices at the Nadir,” 31–32. See Umfleet, Day of Blood,
157, for literacy rates.
20. Daily Record, September 28, 1895.

21. Ibid. On the Negro Building, Washington’s speech, and their myriad meanings, see Wil-
son, Negro Building, 53–83.
22. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 37.
23. Ibid., 5; Clark, “Emancipation Day Celebrations,” 107–32.
24. Waddell, Address at the Unveiling of the Confederate Monument, 5–18, passim; Bishir,
“Landmarks of Power,” 144.
25. Maffitt, “Colonial Dames,” 501–6; Sims, Power of Femininity, 30–34; Cameron, “United
Daughters of the Confederacy,” 535.
26. Sprunt, Chronicles, 588–91. Sprunt believed Company A to be the first unit in North
Carolina, if not the South.
27. Killick, “Transformation of Cotton Marketing,” 143–69; Sprunt, Tales and Traditions,
preface.
28. Sprunt, Tales and Traditions, i–lxiv.
29. On Luola Sprunt, see Maffitt, “Colonial Dames,” 501–3, and Bishir, “Landmarks of
Power,” 145. Luola Sprunt shared her husband’s interest in Cape Fear history. Her father, Col.
Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, grew up in Fayetteville and had close ties to Wilmington. In
1884, he purchased “King” Roger Moore’s famed Orton Plantation and transformed the prop-
erty into a thriving peanut and rice farm that served as his family’s summer home.
30. Wagner, “Charles Chesnutt,” 11–332.
31. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 351; and Godwin, Black Wilmington, 19; Crow, Mav-
erick Republican, 62 and 72.
32. Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 128, 161; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 497–
99; Umfleet, Day of Blood, 29–30; and Prather, We Have Taken a City, 46–47.
33. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 34; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 536;
Umfleet, Day of Blood, 30.
34. My interpretation differs slightly from that of recent works, especially LeRae Umfleet’s
2009 volume, which attributes the coup to “local leaders of the Democratic party.” Primary evi-
dence clearly points to a small group of businessmen, the aptly labeled “Secret Nine.” Although
they voted Democratic, they were not party activists; to the contrary, they waited until after
the election to recruit Democratic officials and only certain ones at that. The Umfleet study
acknowledges the distinct agendas of the two groups at key points, but ends up misstating their
relationship on the basis of a single source, George Rountree’s reminiscences, written years
later. See Umfleet, Day of Blood, 34, 47, 73, and compare to 102–3. Once the coup was secure,
many individuals later claimed to have had a role in order to advance their own interests, in-
cluding Rountree, and the actual conspirators encouraged these narratives as a way to deflect
attention from themselves.
35. Keith, Memories, 86–93; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 505–9.
36. Several published sources, written by people who knew him, identify MacRae as the
instigator: Fisher, Biographical Sketches, 66–67; Hayden, Story of the Wilmington Rebellion, 6;
and Bjorkman, “Hugh MacRae, Builder of Human Happiness,” 12, Folder 140, Edwin Bjork-
man Papers. It was Fisher who in 1929 first identified MacRae in print as the leader of the
1898 revolution. Fisher also labeled MacRae a “sound money Democrat.” On sound money
principles in this era, see von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, 413–28. On Wilmington’s
Democratic leaders’ attitude towards industry, railroads, and banking, see Edmonds, Negro
and Fusion Politics, 221. On MacRae’s hostility toward Keith and the Wright board, see Keith,
Memories, 93. On MacRae’s endeavors at Linville, see Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway,
270–80; and McCurry and Chase, Bark House Style, 31–39. His business partnerships in the
1890s are revealed in Private Laws of the State of North Carolina, 205, 304–6; J. L. Hill Co.’s
Directory of Wilmington 1897, 14, 194; and “Hugh MacRae’s Activities,” in Sprunt, Chronicles,
675–77.
37. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 65–77. For details concerning MacRae’s early life, see
Hugh MacRae Papers, especially Hugh MacRae, Celo, Yancey County, to Donald MacRae,
November 11, 1885, and Donald MacRae Jr., Wilmington, to Hugh MacRae, Burnsville, May
24, 1886.
38. North Carolina Society of Colonial Dames, Register of North Carolina, 63. The register
states that “Mrs. Walter L. Parsley (Agnes MacRae)” was elected in 1899, which means she
began preparing her genealogy for submission to the Dames several years prior.
39. Hayden, Story of the Wilmington Rebellion, 6. Hayden is widely cited by scholars of the
1898 revolution as the first person to reveal in print the names of all nine men, and it is Hayden
who places the first meeting at MacRae’s home. Like Fisher, whose 1929 book he would have
read, Hayden makes MacRae the prime mover, with J. Allan Taylor his second. See also J. L. Hill
Co.’s Directory of Wilmington 1897, 109–259, passim; and Sanborn Map Company, “Wilmington,
North Carolina, 1897.”
40. Sprunt, Tales and Traditions, 10–58; Block, Cape Fear Lost, 32; Bellamy, Memoirs of an
Octogenarian, 133–34; On the July 1898 merger that produced the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad,
see Sprunt, Chronicles, 669.
41. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 620. For biographical information on these men,
see: J. L. Hill Co.’s Wilmington City Directory for 1897, 133; Sprunt, Tales and Traditions, 26; and
De Rossett, Pictorial and Historical New Hanover County, 37–39.
42. Journalist Harry Hayden’s 1936 pamphlet attributed the Vigilance Committee and its
intimidation tactics to the Secret Nine. But other accounts point to Group Six. Hayden had
good incentive to absolve Walker Taylor and other members of the WLI of wrongdoing. He was
himself a member of the WLI, having joined as a young man, and so had direct access in the
1930s to documents and members’ memories concerning the WLI’s actual role in the Revolu-
tion of 1898. For different perspectives, see: Umfleet, Day of Blood, 55–56; and Bell, “Enigmatic
Anger,” 35.
43. “Democrats to Organize,” Wilmington Messenger, August 17, 1898. An ad listing the
meeting locations appears on page 4. Articles about black households appeared all summer,
alongside articles about black crime.
44. “Opening the Campaign,” Wilmington Star, July 16, 1898. “The color line” is referenced
in several items, such as “White Men’s Rally,” Wilmington Star, August 4, 1898, suggesting its
development as a powerful metaphor had already occurred. On “black” crimes, see articles
in the Wilmington Star for July 16–29, also August 3, 4, 10–23, 1898, as well as the Wilmington
Messenger for July 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 31, and August 7–9, 1898. Lurid articles persisted right up
to the election.
45. Full texts of Manly’s and Felton’s editorials are in Umfleet, Day of Blood, 62–63. The
Wilmington Messenger was a morning paper, while the Daily Record was an evening paper.
Thus, Manly read the Felton piece, drafted his reply, and published his editorial all on the same
day, August 18.
46. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 343, 590–96.

47. “Trying to Buy Guns,” Wilmington Messenger, October, 9, 1898; Umfleet, Day of Blood,
66–67 and 214n102. Keith, Memories, 97.
48. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 58 and 214n102–3; also McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 649
and 619. The Businessmen’s Committee unveiled their new weapon at a November 1 demon-
stration to which numerous black and white guests were invited.
49. “Business and Politics. The Chamber of Commerce Declares against Negro Domina-
tion,” Wilmington Messenger, October 7, 1898. The notice ran regularly after that, always above
a reprint of the “Negro Defamer of White Women” piece concerning Manly’s editorial.
50. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 45, 47; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 623; “Republican
Convention,” Wilmington Star, November 3, 1898; and Keith, Memories. Lockey chaired the
New Hanover County Republican Committee.
51. McKoy, When Whites Riot, 43.
52. Waddell is a fascinating figure, one worth further study. Born and raised in Hillsboro,
he moved to Wilmington, “the old stamping ground of my ancestors,” in the 1850s. Through his
genealogy and those of his three wives, Waddell affiliated with numerous prominent families
(for example, his first wife and Donald MacRae’s first wife were sisters). See: Umfleet, Day of
Blood, 48–51 and 211n59; Clifton, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 102–3; and Waddell,
Some Memories of My Life. For a sense of Waddell’s attachment to his past, see his biography of
a famous Waddell ancestor, Colonial Officer and His Times.
53. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 68–69; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 641–43. Russell’s deci-
sion reached Wilmington by the evening of November 2, when Caleb Lockey, chair of the New
Hanover County Republican Committee, announced it at a special meeting in Wilmington. See
“Republican Convention,” Wilmington Star, November 3, 1898.
54. For examples of election-week events, see “White Man’s Rally, Red Shirts in Wilmington,”
Wilmington Messenger, November 3, 1898; “Big Demonstration,” Wilmington Star, November 4,
1898; “Board of Aldermen,” Wilmington Star, November 6, 1898; “Over in Brooklyn . . . Negroes
Making Trouble,” Wilmington Star, November 6, 1898; “White Government. Mass Meeting of
Citizens Held Last Night,” Wilmington Star, November 8, 1898. For descriptions of the Red
Shirts’ attack on November 5, see Umfleet, Day of Blood, 21n78.
55. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 71–73 and 218n46.
56. Prather, “We Have Taken a City,” 29; “Mass Meeting,” Wilmington Star, November 9,
1898. This article said the mass meeting had been called by a “group of representative busi-
nessmen of the city” who had met the night before (November 8). This fact discredits Harry
Hayden’s 1936 claim, often repeated, that MacRae added the last two resolutions to appease a
Red Shirt leader named Mike Dowling.
57. Prather, “We Have Taken a City,” 29.
58. “Remarkable Meeting,” Wilmington Messenger, November 10, 1898. The paper gave a
full account of the mass meeting on November 9, reprinted the entire declaration with its
resolutions, and went on to list every man who signed it, the composition of the Committee of
Twenty Five, the Colored Citizen’s Committee, the ultimatum they received, and the 7:30 a.m.,
November 10, deadline.
59. “Remarkable Meeting,” Wilmington Messenger, November 10, 1898. See also table 7,
“Committee of Colored Citizens,” in Cody, “After the Storm,” 128–29.
60. Cody, “After the Storm,” 33. Helen Edmonds interviewed Armond Scott in the 1940s. See
Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 176. The blaming of Scott began with “An Awful Calamity
Realized: Bloody Race Conflict,” Wilmington Messenger, November 11, 1898. Twice the article
specifically blames “A. W. Scott” for the violence (because he mailed the reply).
61. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 73–75; Harry Hayden, “History of the Wilmington Light Infantry
(1954),” Harry Hayden Papers, New Hanover County Public Library, Wilmington, NC; Con-
tested Election Case, 364.
62. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 697.
63. Ibid., 711–19; “Minutes of the Organizational Meeting of the Association of Members of
the Wilmington Light Infantry, December 14, 1905,” North Carolina Collection, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter, “Minutes of the WLI, 1905”). Taylor convened this
1905 reunion of the WLI members who participated in the November 10, 1898, events. He
asked each man to come prepared with a written “recollection” of their memories, which he
included in the minutes. He also brought several key documents, including the telegrams he
sent to Governor Russell.
64. “An Awful Calamity Realized,” Wilmington Messenger, November 11, 1898.
65. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 83, 94–95; J. D. Nutt recalled the WLI’s slow procession to Brook-
lyn in “Minutes of the WLI, 1905.” Bernice Moore’s phone call is noted in “An Awful Calamity
Realized,” Wilmington Messenger, November 11, 1898.
66. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 714. In 1936, J. Allan Taylor confirmed his and
MacRae’s presence in Brooklyn with a set of handwritten annotations on his personal copy
of Hayden’s pamphlet. Umfleet, Day of Blood, 93–96. Donald MacRae recalled his presence in
“Minutes of the WLI, 1905.”
67. “An Awful Calamity Realized,” Wilmington Messenger, November 11, 1898; Umfleet, Day
of Blood, 97–99.
68. Contested Election Case, 249; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 699–700; “A Revolu-
tion,” Wilmington Messenger, November 11, 1898.
69. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 703.
70. “BLOODY CONFLICT WITH NEGROES,” Wilmington Star, November 11, 1898.
71. “Order Is Restored. Military Parade Yesterday,” Wilmington Morning Star, November 12,
1898; “The City Pastors, Rev. P. H. Hoge’s Sermon,” Wilmington Morning Star, November 15,
1898; Umfleet, Day of Blood, 125–28.
72. “Nineteen Negroes Shot to Death,” New York Times, November 11, 1898; Albuquerque
Morning Democrat, November 11, 1898; “Riot at Wilmington, North Carolinians Take the Law
into Their Own Hands,” Columbus Daily Enquirer-Sun, November 11, 1898.
73. Keith, Memories, 113–15.
74. “Some Refugees,” Boston Daily Advertiser, November 15, 1898. See also “The Wilmington
Riots—Men Driven from the City Seek a Temporary Asylum in the Nation’s Capital,” New York
Times, November 15, 1898.
75. Sundquist, “Introduction” to Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 6; “To Suppress Race Wars—
Meeting of Colored and White People at Cooper Union,” New York Times, November 18, 1898.
76. The Trenton State Gazette had noted as early as November 11 that Republicans “May
Unseat Bellamy, A Congressman Who Was Involved.”
77. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 748–57; Wilmington Messenger, December 4, 1898.
78. Waddell, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 4; Umfleet, Day of Blood, 128, 135; Gilmore, Gen-
der and Jim Crow, 109–10; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 755.
79. Clegg, Troubled Ground, 32; Wilmington Messenger, December 20, 1898.
80. Contested Election Case, passim. The hearings lasted into April 1899. At that point, both
Dockery and Bellamy filed their briefs according to House Rules, but the Committee on Elec-
tions appears to have dismissed the case. Bellamy formally took his seat in 1899–1900. See
McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 757–58; and Umfleet, Day of Blood, 131–32.
81. “Act to Amend the Charter of the City of Wilmington,” Private Laws of North Carolina,
1899, 539; Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 191–92; Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow,
6–8, 98.
82. Hamilton, History of North Carolina 3: 300; Edmonds, Negro and Fusion Politics, 179;
Anderson, Race and Politics, 297; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 782; Gilmore, Gender
and Jim Crow, 120–26.
83. “Act to Amend the Charter of the City of Wilmington,” Private Laws of North Carolina,
1899, 591–96. One of the new members of the Board of Audit and Finance, Charles W. Yates,
was MacRae’s business partner. For additional information on the charter, see Gilmore, Gender
and Jim Crow, 124; McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 771–73; and Umfleet, Day of Blood,
137–38.
84. Hale, Making Whiteness, 3–9 and 23.
85. Ibid., 6.
86. Hale, Making Whiteness, 159–67, passim; Gleason, “Voices at the Nadir,” 29; and Thurber,
“Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology,” 87–108.
87. Hale, Making Whiteness, 24–31; Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 92–110.
88. Both authors have been studied by literary scholars, Chesnutt particularly so. Works I
consulted include: Yarborough, “Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism,” 225–52; Pettis, “Lit-
erary Imagination and the Historic Event,” 37–48; Roe, “Keeping an Old Wound Alive,” 231–43;
Sundquist, To Wake Up the Nations, 271–435; and Dickson, Black American Writing from the
Nadir, 30–32.
89. Thorne [Fulton], Hanover, introductory note and 6, 10, 17, 85; Crowder, John Edward
Bruce, 113–14; Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomberg, 41; and Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 92.
90. Thorne [Fulton], Hanover, 113–14.
91. Ibid., 117.
92. Sundquist, “Introduction” to Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, vii and xii.
93. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 30–35. See also Andrews, Literary Career of Charles W.
Chesnutt, 125–26. Carteret, for example, is often assumed to represent Thomas Clawson, city
editor of the Wilmington Messenger in 1898; however, the character’s age and youthful wife sug-
gest that Alfred Waddell was the actual model.
94. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 49.
95. Ibid., 59–62.
96. Ibid., 63–67, 328–29. A reviewer for the New York Times in 1901 was the first to assert the
“moral victory” of the Millers. See Yarborough, “Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism,” 233.
97. McDuffie, “Politics in Wilmington,” 762; Roe, “Keeping an Old Wound Alive,” note 1.
98. Quoted in Nash, “Cost of Violence,” 171. Nash does not name her oral informants, but
she provides enough information to identify this one.
99. Cristensen, Paradox of Tarheel Politics, 41; Webb, “Southern Politics,” 29–333; Lowery,
“Transatlantic Dreams,” 3–6.
100. Prather, Resurgent Politics, 259; Connor and Poe, eds., Life and Speeches of Aycock, 241.
101. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 2–3.

102. Connor and Poe, eds., Life and Speeches of Aycock, 161–63.
103. On Aycock and education, see: Godwin, Black Wilmington, 3, 18; and Leloudis, School-
ing the New South, xiv, 137–40. On Progressivism in North Carolina, see: Prather, Resurgent
Politics, 279–81; Kousser, “Progressivism—For Middle Class Whites Only,” 169–94; and Cooper
and Knotts, eds., New Politics of North Carolina, 1–2. These authors argue that Progressivism in
North Carolina was far less “progressive” than that term usually implies.
104. Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, Wilmington Up-to-Date, 3, 8, 20, 32.
105. Ibid., 10–12, 20, 31–32.
106. Cody, “After the Storm,” 92; Sprunt, Chronicles, 669–70.
107. Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 13–15. The promotion of Durham by DuBois, Wash-
ington, Frazier, and other black spokesmen began in earnest in 1912 and continued into the
1920s.
108. Cody, “After the Storm,” 126. The five cities with higher rates were Elizabeth City, Fay-
etteville, New Bern, Kensington, and Washington.
109. “Monument Unveiled,” Wilmington Star, May 3, 1907; “All Wilmington Honors Mr. Da-
vis,” Wilmington Star, April 21, 1911. “Organic memory” refers to the popular, late-nineteenth-
century belief that memories inhered in bodies and so could be inherited. See Otis, Organic
Memory, 1–30. For a related but different analysis of the Harnett and Davis monuments, see
Bishir, “Landmarks of Power,” 151–52.
110. MacRae’s business positions are documented in Hill’s Wilmington City Directory for
1907, 1, 22, 98, 385, and 422, and Fisher, Biographical Sketches, 63.
111. On Lumina see, Bishir, North Carolina Architecture, 449; and Hall, Old Times on the
Seacoast, 77–90.
112. Yancey, “Green Pastures for Southern Winters,” North Carolina Collection clipping file,
1976–89, vol. 3, 750. Yancey says this slogan, attributed to Hugh MacRae, was adopted by many
North Carolina agriculturalists.
113. MacRae II, interview, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear. MacRae’s peers recognized his
commitment to agriculture as early as 1929. See Fisher, Biographical Sketches, 64.
114. On MacRae’s colonies, see: Synnott, “Replacing ‘Sambo,’” 77–89; Synnott, “Hugh Mac-
Rae,” 53–65.
115. The term “human engineering” was MacRae’s. See Chater, “Making People into Folks,”
52–55; MacRae, “Vitalizing the Nation and Conserving Human Units,” 278–86; and Lowery,
“Transatlantic Dreams,” 288–324. I am grateful to Vince Lowery for sharing an early version
of this essay with me. For a local, commemorative perspective, see “MacRae’s Dream Settled
Area,” Wilmington Star, May 30, 1983.
116. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 496; Godwin, Black Wilmington, 19.
117. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 376 and 380.
118. Qtd. in Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 154.
119. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 20.
120. Menand, “Do Movies Have Rights?” 183; and Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,
81. On the Dixon novels, play, and film in Wilmington, see: “The Clansman, Again,” Wilm-
ington Messenger, October 8, 1905; “Clansman Comes Tuesday,” Wilmington Star, October 8,
1905; “Tom Dixon’s Mistake,” Wilmington Messenger, October 12, 1905; “Dixon’s Clansman,”
Wilmington Messenger, October 11, 1905; “The Clansman Here, Two Immense Audiences, A
Variety of Opinion” Wilmington Star, October 11, 1905; “The Birth of a Nation Seen by Large
Crowds,” Wilmington Star, March 31, 1916. Ads in the Star noted that special rates on all rail-
roads into Wilmington had been posted for the premiere. A full-page article describing how
Griffith filmed his “historically accurate” battle scenes helped drum up interest the week before.
See “Theatrical,” Wilmington Star, March 22, 1916.
121. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, 4; Regester, “Cinematic Representation of Race
in Birth of a Nation,” 177–79;
122. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 19.
123. Photographs can be found at the New Hanover County Public Library. The metal sou-
venirs are referenced in Umfleet, Day of Blood, 255n93. See “Minutes of the WLI, 1905,” for
evidence of written reminiscences and early reunions.
124. Wilmington Morning Star, April 17, 1917; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 345–52.
126. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 55–56.
127. Ibid., 56; Wilmington Morning Star, January 31, 1919.
129. Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, 5.
130. Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight, 151–55. Keith found detailed evidence of the
Wilmington unit’s activities in the APL files at the National Archives.
131. Pierce, interview, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear; Reaves, Strength through Strug-
gle, 14.
132. See Wilmington Dispatch for January 19, January 30, and February 8, 1919; and Reaves,
Strength through Struggle, 354.
134. Ibid., 201; Wilmington Dispatch, May 25, 1920; Wilmington Star, May 15, 1920; and God-
win, Black Wilmington, 23.
Chapter 4. Ebb and Flow, 1920–1990

1. Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, 17, 113, 120; Hale, Making Whiteness, 63.
2. Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, 30.
3. Hale, Making Whiteness, 62–63.
4. Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, 113.
5. Hale, Making Whiteness, 54; Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, 21. An “Appendix” to the
published version lists the full cast.
6. Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 114 and 122; Hill’s Wilmington City Directory for
1924, 1926, and 1928; Andrews, John Merrick, 150; and Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 202
and 318.
7. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 68–69.
8. Horowitz, ed., Inside the Klavern, 2–4 and note 3; Blee, Women of the Klan, 109; and
Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 92–97. On Grady’s connections to Wilmington, see “Henry
Alexander Grady,” in Makers of America, 243–49.
9. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 266; Godwin, Black Wilmington, 26.
10. Advertisement, Morning Star, June 14, 1906; Freland, Entering the Auto Age, 119–20.
11. Bruce B. Cameron, Jr. interview, July 3, 2001, Randall Library, Subseries: Oral History
Collection, Notables.
12. Brundage, Southern Past, 187–93; Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 69–115.
13. The event had its origins in a Festival of Lanterns that Hugh MacRae sponsored at
Wrightsville Beach in the 1910s. Apparently, local drycleaner Francis Paul O’Crowley per-
suaded MacRae to revive the old festival with a new, improved theme. Susan Taylor Block,
“The Feast of Pirates, 1927–1929,” blog entry, susan747.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/the-feast-
of-pirates-1927-1929/ (accessed January 5, 2012); Fisher, Biographical Sketches, 249; “Princess
Street, 200 Block,” Louis T. Moore Collection, New Hanover County Public Library Digital
Archives; Feast of the Pirates: Come Bury Your Cares, official program (1927), Online Pamphlet
Collection, Lower Cape Fear Historical Society, Online Image Collection, hslcf.org/index.php;
and Hook, Shagging in the Carolinas, 10.
14. All photos cited are from the Dr. Robert M. Fales Collection and Louis T. Moore Collec-
tion, New Hanover Public Library Digital Archives.
15. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal, 1, 4–9; Tidewater Power Company, “Wrights-
ville Beach: A Real Ocean Resort near Wilmington, North Carolina, Season 1930,” pamphlet,
North Carolina Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Cha-
pel Hill. Inside the brochure is a large advertisement for the “1930 Feast of Pirates, August 20,
21, 22, 23, 1930 and 200th Anniversary of the Founding of the City of Wilmington.” A big red
“X” is stamped over it, indicating that it was cancelled.
16. Burwell, “Lawrence Oxley and Locality Development,” 49–69; Reaves, Strength through
Struggle, 211–12, 403; Godwin, Black Wilmington, 48; and Kenzer, Enterprising Southerners,
35–36.
17. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal, 40–42; and Jolley, That Magnificent Army, 3.
18. Hill’s Wilmington City Directory for 1934, 499 and 518–19.
19. Kenneth Sprunt, interview by Sam Bissette, July 25, 1995, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape
Fear.
20. Jolley, That Magnificent Army, 14–15, 93.
21. Synnott, “Replacing ‘Sambo’,” 77; Bjorkman, “Hugh MacRae: Builder of Human Happi-
ness,” Folder 141, Edwin Bjorkman Papers. On Penderlea, see: Synott, “Hugh MacRae,” 53–65;
Cottle, Roots of Penderlea; and Conklin, Tomorrow a New World, chap. 7.
22. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 212; “Civil Works Service Project, Pine Straw Mat-
tress Factory, Wilmington, New Hanover County, NC: Dated Jan. 1934,” NCERA Photographs,
included in “Works Projects in North Carolina, 1933–1941,” exhibits.archives.ncdcr.gov/wpa/
women_1934_mattress.htm (accessed October 2017); Godwin, Black Wilmington, 29.
23. Newkirk, Lynching in North Carolina, 116–17; Johnson, Man from Macedonia, 5–6.
25. For examples of Moore’s work, see Clipping File [1900]–1975, Biography, North Carolina
Collection.
26. Ann Hewlett Hutteman, “Louis Toomer Moore,” (January 2000), Wilmington in Pic-
tures, New Hanover County Public Library online, www.tmpapps.nhcgov.com/lib/history/
LTMoore/ (accessed June 2007); Yackety-Yak, yearbook (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 1906), 97.
27. Hutteman, “Louis Toomer Moore.”
28. Louis T. Moore Collection. In analyzing Moore’s photographs, I modified the methodol-
ogy described in Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, appendixes A and B.
29. Frances Mabel Latham Harriss adopted the port city as her home after her marriage to
William Nehemiah Harriss, the product of an old Wilmington family, a prominent Democrat,
former mayor, and longtime clerk of the Superior Court of New Hanover County. A promi-
nent matron, she served many years as an officer in the North Carolina Society of the Colonial
Dames of America and was a noted local historian who published an edited version of Lawson’s
History of North Carolina (1937). Sources on her life and work include: Obituary for W. N. Har-
riss, Star-News, July 23, 1950; Hill’s Wilmington City Directory for 1913; and Annual Reports of
the North Carolina Society of Colonial Dames of America, 1920–22, North Carolina Digital Col-
lections, digital.ncdcr.gov/. My methodology derives from Grele, “History and the Languages
of History,” 1–18. Grele urges attention to the ways in which all oral interviews are shaped by an
interrelated set of structures. The first is the literary, linguistic, or grammatical structure that
unites the words used in the interview; the second is the set of social relationships (for example,
gender, race, class, age) that exist between the two parties; and the third is the “political field,”
or power struggle between the larger cultural contexts and historical traditions through which
each participant speaks.
30. “Emeline Moore, Ex-slave, 707 Hanover Street, Wilmington, NC,” interviewed by Mrs.
W. N. Harriss, Slave Narratives, 124–26. Harriss conducted several interviews for the WPA.
Although Moore’s does not have a date stamp, the others took place in 1937.
31. “Tillie, Daughter of a Slave, Caretaker, Cornwallis Headquarters, Corner Third and Mar-
ket Streets, Wilmington, NC,” Slave Narratives, 356.
32. De Rosset, Pictorial and Historical New Hanover County, 86–88.
33. North Carolina: A Guide, x–xii, xxix–xxxiv, and 247–57.
34. Hayden, Story of the Wilmington Rebellion.
35. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 58–60, and 180n12.
36. Cash, “Mind of the South,” 185–92, and “Calvinist Lhasa,” 433–51. On Cash, see Cobb,
Away Down South, 167–77.
38. Scott, Wilmington Shipyard, 10–18.
39. Wilmington, North Carolina, 1940 population schedules, Historical Census Browser,
University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/ (ac-
cessed January 15, 2013).
40. Scott, Wilmington Shipyard, 35–39; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 365.
41. “Buses and Segregation,” Wilmington Morning Star, December 2, 1991. Coleman recalled
the event in this 1991 article, part of a World War II anniversary issue. He lived with his family
in an apartment at Hillcrest; thus he needed to take the bus to Camp Davis and back every day.
Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 62, recounts the same story Coleman told in 1991 but
ignores the treatment of the protesters by white police.
42. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 62–63. Blacks stationed at nearby Montford
Point, the Onslow County training camp for the first black marines, recalled regular confronta-
tions with white police and civilians in Wilmington, as well as other Cape Fear communities.
See the interviews given by Herman Darden, Johnnie Givian, Carroll Reavis, Glenn White,
LaSalle Vaughn, Walter Thompson, Archibald Mosely, Melvin Borden, Oliver Lumpkin, and
Turner G. Blount, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Montford Point.
43. Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” 257–59; Odum, Race and Rumors of Race, x–xi.
44. Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” 256.
45. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 71.
46. Ibid., 68–70.

47. Ibid., 66; Andrews, John Merrick, 153–54.
49. Afro-American, August 7, 1943. The Afro-American’s account stresses the violence Wil-
liamson experienced and differs sharply from the version given by white police officers, which
form the basis of the accounts in Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” 270, and Hossfeld, Narrative,
Political Unconscious, 72.
50. Quoted in Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 72.
51. Afro-American, August 7, 1943.
52. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 45–54; Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 36.
53. For information about the Charleston Azalea Festival and Charleston tourism, broadly,
see Yuhl, Golden Haze of Memory, 257n161, and chap. 5. On the origins of the Wilmington
Azalea Festival, see: City of Wilmington, “An Ordinance Designating Property Known as
Greenfield Lake Park and Gardens as a Local Historic Landmark,” April 5, 2011, 1–47, www.
wilmingtonnc.gov/departments/city-manager/gtv8/city-council-archive (accessed October 12,
2015); and “The Seeds of Success,” Wilmington Star-News, April 8, 2007.
54. Morton is quoted in Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway, 286. See also Eklund, “Making
the Mountain Pay,” 28. Eklund cites family interviews to bolster his claim that, “Within the
family, it was well known that Morton had plans for Grandfather Mountain” long before he
acquired control of the property in 1952.
55. Kenneth Sprunt, interview in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear.
56. Hannah Block, interview in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear.
57. Gotham insists that tourism “is not exogenous to localities but is embedded within
broader patterns of metropolitan development and sociospatial inequality.” What Gotham
shows in New Orleans is equally evident in Wilmington: “the development of the city’s mod-
ern tourism sector coincides with the institutionalization of racial discrimination in all major
facets of social life and culture in the city.” See Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, esp. 5–19 and
70–95, passim.
58. Azalea Festival Collection, New Hanover County Public Library Digital Archives. There
are approximately two hundred images here of the festival’s main events.
59. Moore’s letters are reprinted in Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 76–83. On
Edmonds, see Dagbovie, “Black Women Historians,” 255; also see Rosser H. Taylor, review of
The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, Journal of Southern History 17 (1951): 566–67.
60. Godwin, “Wilmington and the North Carolina Way,” 98–99. Rosa Chadwick Handley,
April 12, 2006, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Williston. Other oral histories make
this point very clear. See for example: Johnny Sutton Fields, May 5, 2004; Sarah Spivey Mack,
September 16, 2004; Mildred Jones Floyd, May 18, 2004; Thelma S. Briggs, June 1, 2004; all in
Randall Library Oral History Collection, Community Hospital.
61. Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 390; Eaton’s life history can be found in his self-pub-
lished autobiography, Every Man Must Try.
62. Lethia S. Hankins, June 11, 2003; Henry F. Perry (with James MacRae), March 27, 2003;
Vernelle Best (with Ethel Gerald), November 7, 2002; Melvin Thompson, October 31, 2002;
Cornelia Campbell, March 20, 2003; Hannah P. Nixon (with Ennett, Nixon, and Ray) Decem-
ber 5, 2002; and Beatrice Sharpless Moore, July 8, 2003; all in Randall Library Oral History
Collection, Williston.
63. Eaton, Every Man Must Try, 41–52; Applebome, Dixie Rising, 226–27.
64. Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 54, 116; Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 57–97; Brown,
Upbuilding Black Durham, 332–42; Godwin, “Wilmington and the North Carolina Way,” 42–51,
75–77, 80, 92–93, 146–47; and Eaton, Every Man Must Try, 51.
65. On reactions to the Brown decision in North Carolina, including the development of the
Pearsall Plan, see Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 65–82, and Crow, Escott, and Hatley, History
of African Americans in North Carolina, 167–70. On the closure of Wilmington businesses in
the 1950s, see: Shah, “Killing the Golden Goose,” 16; and Killick, “Transformation of Cotton
Marketing,” 161–63.
67. Rosa Chadwick Handley, April 12, 2006, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Williston.
68. Gwendolyn Buckanen, “Greensboro 4: Joseph McNeil,” August 31, 2009, Star-News On-
line (accessed May 1, 2012). Interviews with Williston alumni corroborate youth interest in
the movement. For more on McNeil’s Wilmington roots, see Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights,
112–14; “Joseph McNeil Discusses Segregation and Sit Ins,” February 1, 2010, digital recording
of public lecture at Cape Fear Museum, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj2oMHFKNk8
(accessed May 1, 2012); and “Joe McNeil” in Hampton and Freyer, eds., Voices of Freedom, 56–57.
On the Greensboro sit-ins and their influence, see Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, 57–62,
and Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 115–21.
69. Morris, “Black Student Sit-In Movement,” 755–57.
70. Bernard Robinson, March 8, 2004, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Williston.
71. James (Samm) Randall, May 4, 2009, “Children’s Oral History Project,” African Ameri-
can Museum of Iowa, www.blackiowa.org/online-collection (accessed October 2017). A former
professor at Coe College, Randall moved to Iowa in 1969.
72. Fenwick C. Cole, “Quarter Century Ago City Adopted Present Day Slogan,” Morning
Star, March 16, 1952. The phrase “Published in the Port City of Progress and Pleasure” consis-
tently appeared below the title of the Wilmington News and the Sunday Star-News, but never on
the Morning Star masthead. In between the words of the slogan can be seen office buildings, a
smokestack, a biplane, and an oceangoing vessel, symbolizing the Port of Progress.
73. Hugh MacRae II interview, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear.
74. Bruce Cameron, August 1, 2001; and Bruce Cameron, August 15, 2001, Randall Library
Oral History Collection, Notables.
75. John Harper Fox, interview in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear; Obituary for John Harper
Fox, Chicago Tribune, October 14, 2004.
76. Emsley Laney, interview, August 25, 1995, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear. See also
Bissette’s interviews with Dan Cameron, William B. Beery, and John Fox, all of whom were
original members of the Committee of 100. See also Bernadette Hearne, “Railroad’s Exodus
Hurt Wilmington, Helped Committee,” Wilmington Morning Star, October 1, 1989.
77. On Wilmington college, see: Mary Dixon Bellamy, May 9, 2002; Betty Stike, January 19,
1999; Betty Stike, August 31, 2006; J. Marshall Crews, January 21, 1999; Thomas R. Lupton, July
22, 2002; Dorothy Marshall, July 16, 2002; Lela Pierce Thompson (with Georgia Bowden, Her-
man Johnson, and Eva Mae Smith) Part 1, May 25, 2005; Lela Pierce Thompson (with Georgia
Bowden, Herman Johnson, and Eva Mae Smith) Part 2, May 25, 2005, all in Randall Library
Oral History Collection, Voices of UNCW, Faculty and Staff. Also see William H. Wagoner
interview, June 12, 1995, in Bissette, Voices of the Cape Fear.
78. MacCannell, The Tourist, 82–89.

79. Ben Steelman, “Fifty Years Ago, Entire State Rallied to Bring battleship Here,” Star News
Online, October 1, 2011.
80. Shah, “Killing the Golden Goose,” 18–19; Evans, “Retaining Wilmington,” 146–47. On
the historic preservation movement, see Murtagh, Keeping Time.
81. Louise Fulton Outler (and Linda Pearce and William Crumy), Randall Library Oral His-
tory Collection, Williston. For other black interpretations of white reactions to the Williston
band, see the interviews in the same collection with Herman Johnson and Georgia Bowden;
and Emerson, “Education to Subordinate—Education to Liberate,” 172–74.
82. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 86–87, 99–100, 120; Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 6–8;
and Christensen, Paradox of Tarheel Politics, 147–56. On Alton Lennon, see Godwin, Black
Wilmington, 143, and Eamon, Making of a Southern Democracy, 50. The military presence is
documented in “Tentative Schedule of Azalea Festival,” Wilmington Morning Star, March 31,
1963, and “An Act to Revise and Consolidate the Charter of the City of Wilmington,” Senate Bill
602, North Carolina General Assembly, Chapter 1046 (1963 session).
83. Branch, Parting the Waters, 756–69; and Eskew, But for Birmingham, 246–71.
84. Eaton, “First Bi-racial Committee, May 28, 1963,” Every Man Must Try, photo montage
between pages 194 and 195; “Sub-Committee Reports Heard by Bi-Racial Unit,” Sunday Morn-
ing Star, August 4, 1963; and Godwin, Black Wilmington, 78, 144–48.
85. Eaton, Every Man Must Try, 155–56.
86. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 141, 148–55; Eaton, Every Man Must Try, 157.
87. Taylor, “Protest in the Port City,” 30n39; Wilmington Star, May 31, 1965; New York Times
October 27, 1965; and Godwin, Black Wilmington, 145–47.
88. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 387, 405–6; Sokol, There Goes My Everything, esp. chaps.
2 and 5.
89. Interview with Ethyl Thomas Gerald (with Vernelle Best), November 7, 2002, Randall
Library Oral History Collection, Williston.
90. Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 251.
92. Thomas, True Story behind the Wilmington Ten, 23.
93. Taylor, “Protest in the Port City,” 17–18.
94. Thomas, True Story behind the Wilmington Ten, 19.
95. Ibid., 20–21.
96. Ibid., 26–28, passim.
97. Bellamy qtd. in Taylor, “Protest in the Port City,” 20.
98. Eaton, Every Man Must Try, 98.
99. Ibid., 102; Godwin, Black Wilmington, 224; Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious,
88–89; and Applebome, Dixie Rising, 212–36.
100. Quoted in Nash, “Cost of Violence,” 179–80.
101. Nash, “Cost of Violence,” 180; Thomas, True Story behind the Wilmington Ten, 35, 37, 40.
102. Nash, “Cost of Violence,” 168; Thomas, True Story behind the Wilmington Ten, 38; Jan-
ken, Wilmington Ten, 8–16, 20–22; Applebome, Dixie Rising, 226; Godwin, Black Wilmington,
234–35.
103. Chavis supplied the February 1 date in a 2006 interview with Jennifer Taylor. See Taylor,
“Protest in the Port City,” 28. See also Janken, Wilmington Ten, 25–26, on Chavis’s arrival. On
Chavis’s activities in Oxford, see Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, 130–216, and compare to
Godwin, “Wilmington and the North Carolina Way,” 544–49 and 552–54.
104. Jon Nordheimer, “Anti-Negro Group Vexing Police in Wilmington, NC,” New York
Times, October 7, 1971. Gibson told Nordheimer that the ROWP “began as an anti-busing pro-
test in North Carolina” that “evolved into a militant organization when its membership decided
peaceful protest against the Nixon administration’s school policy was fruitless.” On Gibson and
the ROWP, see Godwin, Black Wilmington, 221, 227, and 240.
105. Milton Jordan, “Bellamy Appeals for Community Backing in School Disturbances,”
Wilmington Morning Star, February 3, 1971.
106. Kojo Nantambu, May 15, 1978, Interview B-0059, Southern Oral History Program On-
line Database, #4007.
107. “Wave of Violence Hits City Areas,” Wilmington Morning Star, February 4, 1971.
108. Interview with Wayne Moore and Benjamin Wonce, April 17, 2009, Randall Library Oral
History Collection, Notables; Waller, Love and Revolution, 130; Janken, Wilmington Ten, 28–30.
109. Kojo Nantambu, May 15, 1978.
110. “Letter to the Editor,” Wilmington Morning Star, February 5, 1971.
111. Taylor, “Protest in the Port City,” 29n38, and 34; Conser, Coat of Many Colors, 244; God-
win, “Wilmington and the North Carolina Way,” 555, 586–90.
112. Janken, Wilmington Ten, 45–47, 51–53; Godwin, Black Wilmington, 238–39; Thomas,
True Story behind the Wilmington Ten, 31, 48–49.
114. Schulman, The Seventies, xiv.
115. On Allen Hall, see Kojo Nantambu, May 15, 1978; Wayne Moore and Benjamin Wonce
interview, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Notables; and State of North Carolina v.
Benjamin Franklin Chavis, Marvin Patrick, Connie Tindall et al. (also known as the Wilmington
Ten Case), U.S. Department of Justice FOIA Reading Room, www.justice.gov/crt/foia (accessed
May 2012).
116. Eamon, Making of a Southern Democracy, 179–83; Mele, “Cyberspace and Disadvan-
taged Communities,” 294.
117. Godwin, Black Wilmington, 259; Janken, Wilmington Ten, 3.
118. “Focus 1972,” Star-News, February 27, 1972.
119. Nash, “Cost of Violence,” 158.
120. Emerson, “Education to Subordinate,” 155–56, 158; interviews with Vernelle Best and
Beatrice Moore, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Williston; and Rose, “Pocomoke,”
549–54.
122. Shah, “Killing the Golden Goose,” 80–82.
123. On the transformation of the city in the 1980s, see Godwin, “Wilmington and the North
Carolina Way,” 284–94. On the shift in Americans’ thinking about race from integration to
diversity, see Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions,” 50–74.
Chapter 5. Soundings
1. Hollis Kerfoot, “Mom Leads Trucking Company,” Wilmington Morning Star, Sunday,
March 25, 1986; Frank Maley, “Katherine Moore Achieves Success Despite Adversity,” Wilm-
ington Morning Star, June 6, 1992; “Obituary for William Grant Bell, Jr.,” Wilmington Morning
Star, October 19, 1982; Reaves, Strength through Struggle, 461–62; and Katherine Bell Moore,
“On Eagles’ Wings” (undated), www.oneagleswingsfearnoevil.com/index.html (accessed July
2012). In 2000, Moore self-published a fictional account of her time on the City Council, Under
Oath: Memoirs of An Honest Politician. In it, she claimed to have been the subject of police ha-
rassment for ten years, thus placing the onset of her public troubles around 1990. It and several
other items were posted to her website, which she has recently deleted.
2. Media coverage of Moore from 1998 to 2003 varied in objectivity and tone. Opinions on
her lawsuits were especially prominent in the press during the fall 2003 City Council elections.
Many items were collected into “Katherine Moore in the News: A Timeline of Events includ-
ing Star-News Articles, Transcripts, and Audio Clips of the Councilwoman’s Encounters with
the Wilmington Police Department,” Star-News Interactive Presentation, www.starnewsonline.
com/assets/swf/WM2801213.SWF (accessed July 2012). See also: Bettie Fennell, “Report to Be
Released; Councilwoman’s Arrest Investigation to Be Made Public,” Star-News, December 11,
2002; Todd Volksdorf, “Strong Support at Pig Picking,” Star-News, December 15, 2002. For
a sympathetic black perspective, see Johanna Thatch, “City in Turmoil; Cease Fired; Moore
Sues WPD for $15 Million,” Wilmington Journal, September 11, 2003. Thatch’s essay indicates
strong support for Moore in the black community at that time. Moore remained a member of
City Council through 2005. See “Is City Council Member Out of State Too Much? Some Say
Katherine Moore’s Time in Florida Could Affect Performance,” Star-News, January 11, 2005.
3. Gardner, “Contested Terrain,” 14–15. Knowledge of this gap emerged during the so-called
history wars of the early 1990s and garnered a lot of commentary from scholars. See: “History
and the Public: What Can We Handle?” 1029–1144; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the
Past, 1–13; “Roundtable Responses to . . . The Presence of the Past,” 13–40.
4. Philip Gerard, “The Truth behind the Fiction,” Network News, April–May 1994, in au-
thor’s possession.
5. Philip Gerard, “History through Fiction: Riot of 1898 Isn’t Behind Us Yet,” Opinion, Wilm-
ington Star, February 1994, in author’s possession.
6. Philip Gerard, “Writers on their Work,” Network News, April 1994, in author’s possession.
7. Gerard, Cape Fear Rising (hereafter CFR), 104.
8. Gerard establishes this tension in the first chapter. “[Jenks] had written Cousin Hugh,
asking for a job. They were only vaguely related, but Hugh put a lot of stock in family. ‘Come
down here and help us promote the place,’ he’d written. ‘Forget Chicago—Wilmington is the
city of the future.’” Later, while on the train to Wilmington, Jenks tells Waddell he is a news-
paperman, and Waddell offers Jenks some advice: “Bright young man might go far, he keeps
his head. Somebody who could tell the story of this place. Write it for the whole world” (CFR,
18 and 26).
9. Gray Ellen challenges white supremacy from the book’s opening pages, when she protests
the removal of fair-skinned preacher Ivanhoe Grant from the whites-only railroad car. The
most open-minded character in the book, even she does not come to accept blacks as fully
equal until the night of November 10. Appropriately for a book exploring a white, antiblack
massacre that reflected fears of miscegenation, her transformation hinges on her physical at-
traction to Ivanhoe Grant.
10. CFR, 381.
11. CFR, 59–63, 322–23, 349–50, 368.
12. CFR, 73, 349–50, 370.
13. Gerard, “History through Fiction,” Wilmington Star, February 1994.

14. Pama Mitchell, “Novel Spotlights 1898 Racial Clash,” Around the South, Atlanta Con-
stitution, March 6, 1994. Mitchell reported that “Taylor says he grew up knowing only that his
grandfather, Col. Walker Taylor, ‘had been called in as the great white father to keep the peace’
after martial law was declared.”
15. Chuck Twardy, “Wicked Wilmington,” Raleigh News and Observer, April 17, 1994.
16. Shirley Hart Berry, “Books Can Heal,” Wilmington Star-News, February 21, 1994; Mitch-
ell, “Novel Spotlights,” Atlanta Constitution, March 6, 1994.
17. CFR, 412.
19. Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions,” 50–74; Longoria, Meritocracy, 97–106; and
Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness, 229. What researchers in the 1980s called symbolic or modern
racism (to distinguish it from traditional, legalized forms that existed prior to the 1970s) be-
came known as structural or institutional racism in the 1990s and early 2000s. On this shift, see
essays in Katz and Taylor, eds., Eliminating Racism. For opposing views on the status of racism,
see: Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White; D’Souza, The End of Racism;
and Jacoby, Someone Else’s House; and contrast with Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness;
and Brown et al., Whitewashing Race.
21. Leslie Hossfeld, “African American Progress Report: 1970–2000, New Hanover County,”
Poverty Information Website of the Eastern North Carolina Poverty Committee, www.pover-
tyeast.org/toolkit/research/default.html.” Other southern cities had similar economic dispari-
ties. See, for example, Sjoquist, ed., Atlanta Paradox, 2–9, and Crutcher, Tremé, 96–126. On
conditions at Jervay, see Mele, “Cyberspace and Disadvantaged Communities,” 294.
22. Hossfeld, “African American Progress Report,” 1. Census figures show that whites
comprised 79 percent of the county population in 1990 and 80 percent in 2000. The actual
numbers, however, rose substantially from 95,020 whites in 1990 to 128,098; the black popu-
lation also rose, from 24,038 to 27,203, but declined as a percentage, dropping from 20 to 17
percent.
23. Smithers, Slave Breeding, 3; Wallace-Sanders, Mammy, 7, 74; and Janken, Wilmington
Ten, 63, 65, 74, 79.
24. The origins of the commemoration are documented in Bolton Anthony, “Confronting
Dangerous Memories: Wilmington’s Centennial Commemoration of the Coup of 1898” (1999),
draft report, in author’s possession, 3; and McLaurin, “Commemorating Wilmington’s Racial
Violence,” 38. For examples of early 1990s history projects that became national controversies,
see: Guilford, “The West as America,” 199–208; Linenthal and Engelhardt, eds., History Wars;
and Toplin, ed., Ken Burns’s The Civil War. Some scholars believe that the end of the Gulf War
in January 1991 deeply colored the way Americans perceived efforts to interpret their collective
past.
25. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 7; Rep. Bennie Thompson, “Honoring
the Life of Rev. Dr. Isaiah Madison,” Thursday, March 8, 2012, Congressional Record 158, no.
38, E356-E357, www.gpo.gov; Isaiah Madison, “Racial Climate in Wilmington NC,” report sub-
mitted to Wilmington Alliance for Community Transformation (June 1996), 1–18, in author’s
possession.
26. Platt, Salvesen, and Baldwin, “Rebuilding North Carolina,” 249–69.
27. On the hurricanes’ impact, see the Star-News from September 5 to October 6, 1996. Most
articles, grouped under the regular column heading “After the Hurricane,” focused on the plight
of affluent Wrightsville Beach and Topsail Island property owners; by early October, the num-
ber of articles had dwindled and the content shifted to the storm’s impact on inland property
owners engaged in agriculture (hog and tobacco farmers), the region’s other big industry. Even
so, small notices continued to appear well into November that informed the unemployed, the
homeless, and others affected by the disaster of where to go for help.
28. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 6.
29. These early ventures into the past catapulted Block to the forefront of Wilmington’s
local historians. In the late 1990s, she secured a contract with Arcadia Publishing to produce
photograph books using collections at the Cape Fear Museum. One of these, Along the Cape
Fear (1998) includes an image of Omar ibn Said (whom she presents as Prince Moreau) as well
as a portrait of Alex and Carrie Manly and their son (taken after their banishment, it implies
they suffered no harm). Other works, like Cape Fear Lost (1999), continue her nostalgic look
backward, as did her extensive blog, susan747.wordpress.com.
30. The negative repercussions of historical amnesia and nostalgia on policy-making have
been noted by many scholars. See, for example, Blight, Race and Reunion, 31–32; Eichstadt
and Small, Representations of Slavery, xviii; Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement in
American Memory, xiv; and van Balgooy, ed., Interpreting African American History and Cul-
ture, xiii. Similar criticisms have been noted about inaccurate or incomplete representations
of women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as and LGBTQ persons.
31. My interpretation is based on close reading of Bissette’s interviews as a whole body of
work and my attention to the political praxis between Bissette and his informants. Unlike a pro-
fessional oral historian, he was not interested in revealing what really happened or analyzing
the meaning his informants made of their lives. He already knew the answers to the questions
he posed; the informants were there to corroborate his interpretation of the past. On political
praxis in oral interviews, see Grele, “History and the Languages of History,” 1–18.
32. Melvyn Thompson interview, June 9, 2004, Randall Library Oral History Collection,
Williston; C. J. Clemmons, “Flashback to School,” Star-News, February 25, 2001.
33. James R. McRae and Henry E. Perry interview, March 27, 2003, Randall Library Oral
History Collection, Williston.
34. Besides the oral interviews with Williston alumni at Randall Library, see also: Dosher,
“Reactionaries, Reformers, and Remembrances”; Emerson, “Education to Subordinate—Edu-
cation to Liberate”; and Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 125–28. See Lewis, “Con-
necting Memory, Self, and the Power of Place,” 347–71, for similar findings about blacks in
Norfolk, Virginia.
35. See Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 125–49.
36. For a sophisticated treatment of the “myth of property seizure” narrative and its rhe-
torical function as a form of resistance to inequality and injustice, see Cody, “After the Storm,”
117–57. Cody found no evidence of widespread seizure; she found that property ownership by
blacks actually increased after the 1898 revolution, even as the myth intensified.
37. Inez Campbell-Eason descends from Isham Quick, a coal and wood dealer who family
tradition holds abandoned his business when he fled north to New York in 1898. Quick had
helped found the Sons of North Carolina in Brooklyn, NY, in 1895, and was part of the ex-
patriot community there that included David Bryant Fulton and other Wilmingtonians. See
Duckett, “Society of Sons of North Carolina Was Given Birth through Tragedy,” The New York
Age, November 30, 1940. Isham Quick’s daughter, Inez Quick Haggins, remained in Wilming-
ton. Her daughter, Cornelia Haggins Campbell, was Campbell-Eason’s mother. On Campbell-
Eason, see Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 51, fn 67; and obituary for Archie
Marvin Saunders, The Star-News, August 25, 2005.
38. McLaurin, “Commemorating Wilmington’s Racial Violence,” 46–47, 50–51; Anthony,
“Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 51; and Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious,
117–19.
39. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance, 216–26.
40. Bolton Anthony, “Report to the Executive Committee (February 14, 1997),” in author’s
possession. See also Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 10–11.
41. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 12; coverage in Star-News, March 14–16,
1997.
42. Mulrooney, ed., Wilmington, North Carolina’s African-American Heritage Trail (Wilm-
ington, NC: UNCW, 1997), digitalnc.org; and “1898: A Brief History,” and “The 1898 Coup and
Violence” (abridged), in author’s possession.
43. Hayden, Power of Place, 9.
44. Jim Megivern and Tom Schmid to Bertha Todd and Anthony Bolton [sic], Executive
Committee, 1898 Centennial Foundation, August 18, 1997, copy in author’s possession.
45. Jim Megivern interview, July 23, 2002, Randall Library Oral History Collection,
Notables.
46. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 14–17; Boyer, “Whose History Is It Any-
way?” in Linenthal and Engelhardt, eds., History Wars, 138.
47. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 15. Kenneth Janken makes a similar ob-
servation about Todd’s approach to racial equality in Wilmington Ten, 23–25.
48. Comments from Hossfeld’s informants reveal significant black dislike of the founda-
tion’s (Todd’s) statement. Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 109–11.
49. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 15–16.
50. Ibid., 17.
51. Ibid., 18.
52. Bellamy, ed., Moving Forward Together, 56. The four African American history programs
emphasized the years 1857, 1877, 1897, and 1919.
53. Marable, Living Black History, xx, 19–29.
54. Personal correspondence and emails, in author’s possession, and Anthony, “Confronting
Dangerous Memories,” 22.
55. The choice of sites reflected the research interests of the individual students and the
amount of research possible during a fifteen-week semester. Civil rights–era sites proposed but
not chosen included Hubert Eaton’s former residence, the Wilmington Journal office, and the
former Community Hospital building.
56. See, for example, “Dialogue on Race Nationally Recognized,” Star-News, January 14,
1998; Jocelyn K. Stewart, “A Look Ahead: Angelenos Broke Ground in 1995 by Setting Side
Day of Discussion for Race Relations,” LA Times, January 12, 1998; and “The Advisory Board’s
Report to the President, One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future” (September
1998), 157, https://clintonwhitehouse2.archives.gov/Initiatives/OneAmerica/america.html. (ac-
cessed August 2012). Besides listing Wilmington as a participant, this document described in
detail the nature of the dialogues that ensued.
57. Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous Memories,” 23–24, and McLaurin, “Commemorating
Wilmington’s Racial Violence,” 50–51. The next day, the opinion page of the Star-News featured
a generic Black History Month essay taken from the Associated Press: Barbara Ransby, “Ev-
eryone Needs Black History,” Star-News, February 13, 1998. No reference to the debate or to
1898 was made that day or in the days that immediately followed. Rountree made very similar
remarks in a Raleigh News & Observer interview in 2000 and in an oral history deposited at
Randall Library Oral History Collection, Notables. His interpretation of 1898 has been very
consistent.
58. Academic “muggings” occurred frequently enough that the Chronicle of Higher Education
ran an article about them: “Academic ‘Mugging’ Explained by Historians,” September 6, 1989,
chronicle.com/article/Academic-Mugging-Explaine/68079/ (accessed December 2016). In my
case, a recently arrived, nonvoting member of the History Department apparently alleged to
the UNCW administration that another finalist, who was a former student of his from a prior
institution, had been passed over unfairly. The individual impugned the integrity of the Search
Committee and questioned my character and scholarship, citing recent controversies over my
essays for the foundation and the brochure. The administration ordered the committee to revisit
the finalists’ dossiers. They complied and forwarded my name again. This time, the administra-
tion met with the entire History Department and issued an ultimatum: submit the dossiers of
the three finalists to an external committee or terminate the search. The department voted to
abandon the search. (Emails and correspondence between department head, Search Committee
members, and author, in author’s possession. I have withheld names to protect their privacy.)
59. Gardner, “Contested Terrain,” 12–18.
60. On the difference between public history and traditional academic history, see Gardner
and LaPaglia, eds., Public History, 3–40. To understand the transformation of the discipline of
history in the 1990s, see Novick, That Noble Dream; Bonnell and Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cul-
tural Turn; Fox-Genovese and Lasch-Quinn, eds., Reconstructing History; and Tosh, Pursuit of
History.
62. Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 15–16; and Edwards, “A Color Line in the Sand.”
64. Ibid., 38–39; Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 106; McLaurin, “Commemorat-
ing Wilmington’s Racial Violence,” 46.
65. Program and notes from sessions, in author’s possession.
66. Amy Williamson, “City Must Find Racial Healing,” Memories of 1898, Star News, No-
vember 18, 1998.
67. McLaurin, “Commemorating Wilmington’s Racial Violence,” 53.
68. Quoted in Johannes Lichtman, “Revising the Revisionists” (July 10, 2012), The Rumpus,
therumpus.net/2012/07/revising-the-revisionists/ (accessed August 22, 2012). In this interview,
LeRae Umfleet indicated that, while researching the coup and massacre in the early 2000s, she
heard regularly from people who claimed to know where the sign was kept and who had taken
it down. The state later replaced it, but the original one never surfaced.
69. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, xi; Longoria, Meritocracy, 101–17; Sokol, There Goes My Ev-
erything, 356–57; Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 129, 157–60; Marable, Living Black
History, 215. The assertion of a “New Racial Domain” in the United States is associated with
Marable, Great Wells of Democracy, 41–42. Similar arguments have been advanced by Marc
Mauer and Michele Alexander, among others. On the rise of “color-blindness” among white
Americans, see Doane and Bonilla-Silva, White Out, and Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists.
On racial formation theory, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.
70. Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege, 64; Holt, “Explaining Race and Racism,” in Imagined
Histories, 107–19; and Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered, 17–47.
71. Umfleet qtd. in “Panel Issues Report on Riots,” The Robesonian, June 27, 2006. The “1898
Wilmington Race Riot—Final Report, May 31, 2006” is available in a series of pdfs, www.his-
tory.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/report/report.htm. Compare Umfleet, Day of Blood, xix and 45–46,
73, 102–3. The anti-revisionist websites are “The Cape Fear Historical Institute,” www.cfhi.net/
index.php, and “1898 Wilmington: Debunking the Myths,” www.1898wilmington.com/Home.
shtml.
72. Bellamy, ed., Moving Forward Together, 14, and Anthony, “Confronting Dangerous
Memories,” 29–31. News coverage of the memorial and the debates surrounding it was exten-
sive. For examples, see: Victoria Cherrie, “1898 Memorial Park Proposed as Parkway’s Gateway
to City,” Star-News, July 6, 1999; “Unity Lost in Squabble Over Park,” Star-News, March 10, 2002;
Si Cantwell, “Housing, 1898 Park are Questioned,” Star-News, March 12, 2002; Si Cantwell,
“Changes to 1898 Memorial,” Star-News, February 11, 2003; Si Cantwell, “After 1898,” Star-News,
May 24, 2004; Angela Mack, “1898 Memorial: Labor of Love to Begin,” Star-News Online, Oc-
tober 12, 2007; Tyra M. Vaughn, “Wilmington’s 1898 Memorial Nears Completion,” Star-News
Online, July 11, 2008; Sam Scott, “1898 Memorial Finally Takes Shape,” Star-News Online, July
11, 2008; and Chelsea Kellner, “Dedication of 1898 Memorial Intended to Bridge Community
Divide,” Star-News Online, November 8, 2008. For context and comparisons regarding con-
temporary civil rights memorials, their use to foster a city’s progressive racial reputation, and
the intra-community conflicts they reveal, see Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials,
25–70, passim, and Rushing, Memphis, 81–93.
73. The American-born artist is a public art specialist and professor at Kennesaw State Uni-
versity. His website includes images of his original drawings for the 1898 memorial and photos
of its fabrication and installation: odeleyesculpturestudios.com (accessed May 2014).
74. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 221–36. Becker was one of multiple historians
that rejected traditional historicism, the sense that the past is so alien that it is a fallacy to try to
apply its lessons to present-day problems. Though historicism prevailed at mid-century, a more
pragmatic view of history’s purpose arose in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the emergent
fields of social history and applied history, which both sought to promote social change. Today,
the National Council of Public History still recognizes the ongoing commitment of many pub-
lic history practitioners to “ideals of social justice, political activism, and community engage-
ment.” On the long struggle to bring black history into the mainstream via the mode of public
history, see Wilson, Negro Building. My argument for the essential role of black public history in
dismantling structural racism is shared by others. See, for example: Berlin, Horton, and Blight
essays in Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History; Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back; and
van Balgooy, ed., Interpreting African American History and Culture, xiii–xvii.
75. Franco, “Communication Conundrum,” 155. For additional insights concerning ordi-
nary white Americans’ attitudes toward history, especially black history, see Rosenzweig and
Thelen, Presence of the Past, 147–76. On white Americans’ views of the civil rights movement,
see: Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials, passim; Gill, “Recalling a Difficult Past,”
29–48; Tyson, “‘Ask a Slave,’” 41–42, 48–55; and Gallas and Perry, “Developing a Comprehensive
and Conscientious Interpretation,” 16–28.
76. Longoria, Meritocracy, 75–88; Henry, In Defense of Elitism.
77. “Who Are the Camerons?” My Reporter, Star-News Online, July 24, 2009. The comment
quoted above was posted on November 30, 2009.
78. Melvyn Thompson interview, 2004, Randall Library Oral History Collection, Williston;
Hossfeld, Narrative, Political Unconscious, 140 and 159.
79. Aleia Brown, “Another Case for Museums as Public Forums,” History@Work (blog),
April 15, 2015, ncph.org/history-at-work/another-case-for-museums-as-public-forums/ (ac-
cessed October 12, 2016); “Project Showcase: Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History
Project,” History@Work (blog) July 11, 2016, ncph.org/history-at-work/project-showcase-forty-
blocks-the-east-garfield-park-oral-history-project/ (accessed October 12, 2016); Dwyer and
Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials, 30–35; Hayden, Power of Place, 139–87; and Wilmington on
Fire, directed by Christopher Everett (Speller Street Films, 2015), Vimeo.
80. Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege, ix.
81. Ibid., 2.
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Abbott, Joseph C., 99, 104 Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, 131, 162, 203, 213,
Academic mugging, 267, 315n58 257
Act Concerning Servants and Slaves (1741), Automobile age, 180–86
22–23 Avant, Frank, Dr., 166, 173
Activism, 204, 212–13, 238, 241 Aycock, Charles Brantley, 158, 159
Advertising campaigns, 151 Azalea Festival, 10, 204–7, 208, 209, 221
Affirmative action programs, 229, 233, 245, 252
Agrarian Myth, the 117 Bacon, Henry, 223
Agricultural production, 14, 41, 57, 104, 164–65, Bakke v. University of California, 252
184 Ballard, Willie “Monkey,” 227–28
Allen, Eleazar, 17 Bassadier, Philip, 66
Allen, John, 48 Bassett, John Spencer, 147
Allsbrook, O. O., 224, 227, 228 Beadle, W. H. H., 90–91
American Colonization Society, 49 Becker, Carl, 277–78, 316n74
American Dream, 245, 265 Beery, Benjamin W., 61, 131
American Missionary Association, 99, 102 Bellamy, Heywood, 227, 232
American Negro Slavery (Phillips), 175–76 Bellamy, John Dillard, Jr., 63, 102, 127
American Protective League (APL), 171 Bellamy, John Dillard, Sr., Dr., 74–75
American Revolution, 8, 39, 75–76, 126 Benjamin Banneker Literary and Library As-
Ames, John Worthington, 91, 93 sociation, 114
Andrews, R. McCants, 201 Bernard, Claude, 148–49
Andrews, Sidney, 96–97 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 241
Anthony, Bolton, 256, 263, 264, 271, 312n24 Bevel, James, 221
Anti-miscegenation laws, 25 Bi-racial Committee, 222, 223, 228
APL. See American Protective League Birth of a Nation, The, 167–68, 179–80
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, An Bissette, Samuel D., 256–57, 313n31
(Walker, D.), 8, 47–48, 49 Black Codes, 95, 98
Arson, 45–46, 138, 227 Black community, 2; blame placed on, 238;
Asbury, Francis, 46 divisions within, 213; justice desired by, 147;
Ashe, John Baptista, 33, 35, 57 lynching influence on, 189–90; sense of loss
Ashe, Samuel A’Court, 78 felt in, 257; victory for, 274–75
Ashley, Samuel S., 99 Black elites, 240, 248–49
Atlanta Exposition address of 1895, 120 Black history, 5, 240–41, 265–66, 274, 278
344 Index
Black Lives Matter, 6 Cameron, Rebecca, 68–69

Black Panthers, 231 Campbell, Simon, 46
Black Pioneers, 41 Campbell-Eason, Inez, 259, 313n37
Black Power, 228; clothes and emblems of, 231; Canby, E. R. S., 97
rise of, 240; salute for, 234; Walker, D., awak- Cantwell, John L., 80
ening, 47–48 Cape Fear, 11, 12, 33, 40, 72; entrepreneurs of,
Black remembrance, resistance and, 26–32 106; founders of, 75; heroic traditions of, 174;
Black Youth Builders of the Black Community leaders of, 17–18; network of counties in, 50;
(BYBBC), 236 power in, 13; proximity to catastrophe, 77;
Blair, John, 167 trauma in, 42
Blight, David, 241 Cape Fear Minutemen, 78, 293n47
Block, Hannah, 205–6, 221, 313n29 Cape Fear Rising (Gerard), 246–50, 311n8, 311n9
Block, Susan Taylor, 256 Cape Fear Steam Engine Company, 114, 141, 145
Blue v. Durham Board of Education, 212 Capra, Frank, Jr., 243, 271
Board of Aldermen, 127, 129, 143–44, 150 Carver, George Washington, 241
Board of Audit and Finance, 105, 129, 150 Cary, Lorin Lee, 15
Boone, Rufus Irving, 204, 212 Cary’s Rebellion, 13
Boosterism, 79, 94, 161, 179 Cassiday, James, 56, 80
Boycott, by schools, 231–33, 234 Caswell, Richard, 75
Boyer, Paul, 263 Cecelski, David, 92
Bradley, Amy Morris, 102–3 Centennial commemoration (1998), 1–2, 10, 244,
Bragg, Braxton, 87, 175 247
Brickell, John, 25 Centennial Foundation (1898), 2, 10, 254, 258
Bridgers, Roger Rufus, 106 Chadburn, William H., 135
Broughton, J. Melville, 201–2 Chamber of Commerce, 129–31, 135, 160–61, 170,
Brown, George Washington, 147 216–17, 220–21. See also Colored Chamber of
Brown, John, 73, 77, 88 Commerce
Brown v. Board of Education, 213 Champion Cotton Compress, 107, 117–18
Bruce, John Edward, 153 Chavis, Ben, 231, 234
Bruggeman, Seth, 4 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 146, 152–53, 155–57,
Brutality. See Violence 251
Bullock, Thomas J., 169 Chestnut, Robert, 213–14, 222
Bunch, Robert, 82 Chronicles of the Cape Fear (Sprunt, J. L.), 168
Bunting, Robert H., 144, 149 CIO. See Congress of International
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Organizations
Lands, 90, 95, 102 Citizenship, 4–5, 183; black aptitude for, 150;
Burgwin, John, 41 for blacks, 9; denial of, 71; gender, race and,
Burkhead, L. S., 86 66; methods for gaining, 57; push for, 200;
Burnett, Foster F., 173 redefining of, 98; responsibilities of, 169;
Burney, John Jay, Sr., 184 restrictions to, 149
Burrington, George, 13, 24 Civic identity, 3, 4–5, 12, 284n14; Chamber
Butler, Benjamin, 85 of Commerce choosing, 216–17; collective
Butler, J. Ray, 213 memory asserting, 163; crafting of new, 96;
BYBBC. See Black Youth Builders of the Black embracing of, 62; as place-based, 32; reflective
Community of racial heritage, 70; renouncing of, 55; as
shared, 115; shift in, 31; threat to, 45; of whites,
Calhoun, John C., 74 173
Cameron, Bruce Barclay, 180–81, 197, 200–201, Civil disobedience, 215
279 Civil rights movement: activists asserting need
Index 345
for, 204; agitation for, 152; fear increasing of, 126; as symbolic, 153; touch social issues
activism for, 200; legality acceptance of, 118; in, 279–80; values of, about race, 22. See also
push for, 189–90; struggle over, escalated, 221; Black community
violent opposition to, 214, 232 Complexion, 24–25
Civil War, 9; demands of, 85; inevitability of, Confederacy, 81–82; blame for failure of, 129;
78; lack of vindication from, 57; liberation of destruction of property of, 87; loyalty to, 82;
prisoners of, 89; opportunities provided by, Memorial Day, 101, 102; symbols of, prohib-
82–83; reflection on meaning of, 101; relief ited, 92; veterans of, 123
efforts after, 88 Congress of International Organizations (CIO),
Civil War, The, 11 200–201
Clansman, The, 167 Connette, Edward, 222
Clark, Henry T., 82 Consciousness, 3, 201, 240, 276, 284n14
Class, 4, 6, 28 Constitutional Union Party, 77
Clawson, Thomas, 133 Corbin, Jean, 27
Cognitive mapping, 31, 283n8 Cotton, embargo on, 82–83
Cole, Fenwick C., 216 Counter-memories, 113, 122, 168
Coleman, Hurtis, 198–99 Cowan, Jacob, 48
Collective identity, 12, 65 Craig, James, 41, 42
Collective memory, 3, 274; becoming public, Cromartie, Luther M., 230, 235, 237
246; of black achievement, 258; civic identity Cruden, John, 41
asserted by, 163; competing versions of, 261; Crutcher, Michael, 4, 270
concepts of, 268; constructing, 32; images Cultural heritage, 3
lingering in, 117; influence of, 7; as organic, Culture wars, 2
163, 303n109; as place-based, 137; reshaping Currency Act, 34
of, 100; resistance encouraged by, 101; trauma Curtis, Moses Ashley, 50
and, 189; white efforts towards, 123; of whites,
127; of Wilmington Revolution of 1898, 161 Dancy, John C., 126
Colored Chamber of Commerce, 178–79, 186, Darwin, Charles, 109
189–90 Davis, George, 57, 78, 79, 123, 163
Colored Citizens Committee, 140, 300n58 Davis, Jefferson, 82
Color line, 151, 157, 211, 273, 299n44 Davis, Kenny, 267
Colston, Raleigh Edward, 101 Davis, Spurgeon, 169
Commerce: altering of nature of, 57; enterprises Davis, Thomas Frederick, 57
vital to, 161; importance of, 218; increase in, Dawson, John, 82, 88, 91, 294n69
203; pursuit of, 174; racial discrimination Day of Blood, A (Umfleet), 128, 276
influencing, 135; violence and, 15, 136, 176 De Bow, J. D. B., 60
Committee of 100, 217, 220, 243, 257 Decoration Day, 9, 122, 123, 124
Committee of Safety, 77–78, 80, 82, 287n60 De Coursey, Francine, 270–71
Committee of Twenty Five, 143, 144, 300n58 Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot
Common whites, 285n17; complaints from, of 1898 and Its Legacy, 275
32–33; free blacks competition with, 44, 84; Democratic Executive Committee, 131, 132, 135
as offended, 69; proslavery ideology of, 55; Democratic Party, 76–77; biracial Republican
protests of, 45; taunting of, 132 Party replacing, 98; law suits against, 149;
Community: building bridges with, 264; as leadership of, 104; relief sought from, 117;
built on stories, 246–47; control of white, 84; victory of, 126, 138; white control of, ensured,
direction of resources for, 121; gratitude sent 150; white supremacy campaign of, 128
to black, 115; guardians of, 66; heritage of, 169; Democrats, 9, 73–74, 103, 105, 145
origins of, 4; pride in, 207; reassurance for, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
94; reunification of, 204; revolutionary spirit (HEW), 229, 263
346 Index
Depression of 1893, 117, 118 Epistemological crisis, 126

Depression of 1929, 186 Equality, 2, 291n25; agency and, in historical nar-
De Rosset, Armand, 57 ratives, 278; continued lack of, 115; demands
De Rosset, William Lord, 80 for, 8; for freedmen, 95; improper notions of,
Desegregation, 220, 229 91; promoting of, 45, 54; of protection, 203;
Dickinson, Alice Hill London, 76 pursuit of, 167; resistance to, 102; as reward,
Dickinson, Platt K., 60, 61 171; in schools, 211; slow embrace of, 224, 274;
Disfranchisement, 159, 273 striving for full benefits of, 202; support for,
Diversity, 6–7, 109, 243 91; urge to fight for, 120
Dix, John W. K., 81, 83 Equal Rights League, 95
Dixon, Thomas, 167 Equiano, Olaudah, 31
Dosher, Craig, 258 Erambert, Louis, 74
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 71 Essentialism, 150, 152
DuBois, W. E. B., 152, 274, 303n107 Evans, William McKee, 91, 99
Dudley, Edward B., 50, 125 Evers, Medgar, 222
Dudley, James B., 114 Every Man Must Try (Eaton), 242
Eaton, Hubert, Dr., 211, 222, 242 Fanning, Phineas, 62

Economy, 32, 71; agricultural production de- Farmers Alliance, 117
pendency of, 184; boom in, 206; business relo- Faust, Drew Gilpin, 85
cation causing decline in, 213; change in, 62; Feast of Pirates Festival, 181–82, 183, 184, 185,
immigration associated with, 242; as leisure- 185–86, 216
based, 177; resources for, 33, 189; sustaining of, Felton, Rebecca, 133
187; tourism depended on by, 218; transforma- Femininity, 30, 153, 207
tion of Wilmington, 170; Wilmington future, Fennell, Hardy L., 129, 131, 181
130; Wilmington Revolution and Massacre of Fennell, Henry G., 131
1898 damaging, 258 Ferguson, Homer L., 197–98
Eden, Charles, 13 Fifteenth Amendment, ratification of, 103
Eden, Richard, 64, 72 Fillmore, Millard, 76–77
Edmonds, Helen, 209–10 Film industry, 10, 243
Education, 54, 58; for blacks, 90, 97, 102; curricu- Fire: of Wilmington in 1840, 62; of Wilmington
lum for, shifted postwar, 101; economic secu- in 1886, 115. See also Arson
rity through, 211; focus on, 166; higher level Firestarter, 243
of, 10, 178, 218; as human right, 159; modern Fishblate, Solon H., 139
standards for, 229; power in, 111; as race prob- Fitzpatrick, John, 62
lem solution, 167; rights recognized through, Flanner, Joseph H., 73
158; school reassignments compromising, 230; Fonvielle, Chris, 86
segregation in, 101–3; shift toward progressive, Fortune, T. Thomas, 146–47
167; slaves prohibited from, 48 Foster, Flavel, 135
Elitism, 279 Fourteenth Amendment, ratification of, 100, 103
Ellis, John Willis, 78, 80 Franklin, Benjamin, 14
Ellis, Mark, 171 Franklin, John Hope, 272
Elmes, Arthur Fletcher, 173 Free blacks, 43–44, 84
Emancipation, 55, 57, 121–22 Freedmen: employment restrictions for, 108;
Emancipation Proclamation, 89, 121 equality for, 95; as incompetent, 99; mistreat-
Emergency Conservation Work Program, 187–88 ment of, 93; new system of laws for, 97; role
Emergency Relief Administration, 186 models for, 102
English Riot Act, 34 Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (1865), 88
Entrepreneurs, 58–60, 106, 180–81 Freedom, 19–20; lack of financial, 118; levels of,
Index 347
for slaves, 40; purchasing of, 43; reaction to, Harnett, Cornelius, 35, 39, 40, 65, 75–76; death
89–90; as sacred, 79; slaves declaration of, 89; of, 41–42; monument for, 122–23, 163
struggles in quest for, 200 Harrison, George W., 235
French, George Z., 104, 119, 135, 144 Harrison, William Henry, 56
Frinks, Golden, 236 Harriss, Francis Latham, 192–94, 305n29
Froelich, Louis, 81 Harriss, William N., 127
Fugitive Slave Law, 78 Harvey, Burdell, 213
Fuller, Samuel, 72 Hawley, Joseph R., 88
Fulton, David Bryant, 119, 152–54, 231, 259, Hayden, Dolores, 5–6, 261
297n18 Hayden, Harry, 299n39
Fusionists, 127, 130, 143, 150. See also Republican- Hazel, Roger, 46
Populist coalition Hedrick, John Jackson, 87
Here, George Washington Was Born (Brugge-
Galloway, Abraham, 71–72, 95–96, 99, 104–5 man), 4
Garnet, Henry Highland, 47 Heritage, 219; appearance as proof of, 150; au-
Gastonia strike (1929), 185 thority bolstered through, 126; civic identity
Gautier, Joseph R., 53–54 reflective of racial, 70; of community, 169;
Gautier, Thomas Nicholas, 66 different notions of, 263; movement for, 122;
Gender, 6, 66. See also Femininity; Masculinity passing on of memories of, 58; powerful
Gerald, Ethyl Thomas, 224–25 invocation of white, 136; racial violence as, of
Gerard, Phil, 246–50, 268, 311n8 Wilmington, 213; recognition of, 97; revering
German Volunteers, 62, 66, 80 of, 65; Sprunt, J. L., connoting, 125; of Wilm-
Gibson, Leroy, 232, 234 ington as place-based, 112
Gilchrist, William, 129 Heritage tourism, 4, 180–86, 269
Gilje, Paul, 35 HEW. See Department of Health, Education, and
Gillis, J. M., 58 Welfare
Gilmore, Glenda, 129 Hierarchies, 3, 19, 108, 151, 207
Glover, Lorri, 57 Hinks, Peter, 47
Goldberg, Aaron, 203 Hiring-out system, 19, 23, 43, 45, 107, 288n71
Gotham, Kevin, 270 Historical amnesia, 256, 313n30
Gould, William B., 83–84, 90, 98 History: agency and equality in narratives of,
Grady, Henry, 180 278; of black advancement, 162; celebration
Grafflin, Christopher L., 106 of contributions to, 265; competing views on,
Grainger, Joshua, 16, 75, 98 268; experience of, as simple, 279; intercon-
Green v. New Kent County, 229 nectedness through public, 261; reinterpreting
Griffith, D. W., 167–68, 179–80 of, 76; understanding the endeavor called,
Griggs, John, 148–49 246; wars of, 254, 311n3
Hofstadter, Richard, 117
Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 150–51, 174 Hoge, Peyton, 145
Hall, Allan, 237, 238 Holden, William W., 91, 98, 100, 103, 105
Hamilton, J. G. de Roulhac, 92 Holloway, John, 140
Hammet, William, 45 Hooper, William, 39, 75–76
Handley, Rosa Chadwick, 214 Hoover, J. Edgar, 232
Hanover, or, the Persecution of the Lowly (Ful- Horton, James O., 241
ton), 152–54, 259 Hossfeld, Leslie, 276
Hans, Frank “Funny One,” 227–28 Houston, William, Dr., 35
Hargrave, Alfred, 95 Howard, Martin, 38
Hargrave, Carrie G., 186 Howard, Oliver Otis, 90
Hargrave, Garnet, 158 Howe, Alfred Augustus, 63–64, 95
348 Index
Howe, Anthony, 104 Janken, Kenneth, 231, 238

Howe, Job, 40 Jefferson, Thomas, 281
Howe, John Harris, 121 Jervay, Tom, 240
Howe, John T., 119, 140 Jim Crow system, 7, 112; as arbitrary, 156; expan-
Howe, Mary Washington, 108–9, 166–67 sion of, 149, 158; increase in resistance to,
Howe, Robert, 44 166–67; influence of, 162; profound influence
Howe, Valentine, 114 of, 251; public transportation ordinances of,
Howe, Washington, 118 198–99; as sustained, 224
Human engineering, 165, 188, 303n115 John Canoes (Jonkunoos, Jonkuners). See
Humiliation, 46–47, 90, 100, 156, 157 Kuners
Hurricane Bertha, 1, 255 Johnson, Andrew, 90, 93, 98
Hurricane Fran, 1, 255 Johnson, Lyndon B., 225–26
Johnson, Walter, 47, 63
ibn Said, Omar (Moro), 51–53, 53, 55 Johnson, William A., 129
Identity: as authentic, 181; consumption of, Johnson-Reed Act, 188
206; denying of, 176; embracing new, 216; Johnston, Gabriel, 16, 17
experience of place needed for, 168; inferiority Jones, Calvin, 49
and, 157; merchants as, 60; Methodism as, 45; Jones, Tom, 47
Papaw-Nagos, place and, 31; in past compared Jordan, Luther, 253
to present, 5; physical moorings attached to,
151; as progressive, 174, 197; retaining of, 27; Kansas-Nebraska Act, 73
as Revolutionary, 8, 76; as shared, 9, 258; shift Kay, Marvin L. Michael, 15
in black, 98; source of, 18; of Wilmington, 56, Kebe, Lamine, 53
125. See also Civic identity; Collective identity; Keith, Benjamin Franklin, Jr., 117, 128, 180
Racial identity Keith, Jeanette, 171
Immigration, 61–62, 66, 242 Kellogg, William, Jr., 95, 104, 108
Independence, 26, 39–43, 72, 76, 82 Kenan, William Rand, 143
Independence Day, 122 Kidder, Edward, 59
Industrial activity: influence of, 57; new develop- Kidder, Florence, 122
ments around, 106; new era of progress in, King, Martin Luther, Jr., 213–14, 221, 223, 226–27,
121; suburbs expanded through, 224; for 276–77
wartime production, 80–81 King Cotton, 55
Industrial Development Corporation. See Com- Kirton, Edwin, 222
mittee of 100 Kiwanis Club, 208
Industrialization, 107, 112 Kiwanis Minstrels, 208, 209
Inferiority, 71, 126, 152, 154, 157, 252 Knights of Labor, 118
Insurrection: of black youth, 227–28; expecting Ku Klux Klan, 99, 100, 121, 179–80, 224, 295n92
of, 40; fear of, 48, 84, 272; preparation for, 48, Kuners, 28; decline of, 121; interpretation of per-
135; racial violence suppressing, 200; rumors formance of, 69–70; scaling back of, 77; songs
of, 93, 171; of slaves, 37–38, 287n53; slave wa- of, 67–68; violence projected by, 31
termen as tool for, 15; suppressing of, 103–4;
target of, 128. See also Wilmington Rebellion Ladies Memorial Association, 100–101
Integration, 152, 159, 229 Lamb, William, 85, 92
Intimidation campaign, 171, 236 Landsberg, Alison, 6, 168, 189, 214
Intolerable Acts, 39 Lathrop, Edward S., 129
Latimer, Zebulon, 72
Jackson, G. H., 98 Laws: abolition of discriminatory, 97; establish-
Jacobites, 19, 136 ing of, 33–34; public sentiment as primary,
Jacobs, Harriet, 50, 67 145–50; for slavery, 22–25
Index 349
Leadership: achievements of black, 114–15; of Market, the, 8, 20, 64–65

American Revolution, 126; belief of, 215; in Marriage, as interracial, 24, 154, 167
Cape Fear, 17–18; commemoration involve- Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt), 152–53,
ment of, 265; of Democratic Party, 104; as 155–57, 166, 251
elite, from past to present, 176; importance of, Marten, James, 90
18–19; for independence, 76; indifference to- Martial law, 142, 146
wards black, 231; passing of, 66; racist attitude Martin, Josiah, 39
of, 208–9; reassurance from, 86; revitalization Masculinity, 20, 30, 58, 66, 207
of civic, 200; shared priorities of, 217; status Mask, Thomas R., 155
positions of, 148; strong civic, 207; whites as Masters: compensation for, 23–24, 78–79; fear
not worthy of, 70; Wilmington loss of, 105 of, 81; hiring-out system revival by, 43; power
Lee, Robert E., 73, 89, 102 of, over slaves, 49; property returned to, 93;
Lee, Wayne, 43 punishment of, 88; slavery influenced by, 281;
Lennon, Alton, 221 violence as response of, 47
Lepore, Jill, 42 McClelland, Royce B., 225
Liberty, 37–38, 77, 85, 204, 275 McDonald, Crummell Howe, 213
Lillington, Alexander, 75 McDonald, Flora, 19
Lincoln, Abraham, 77, 79, 80, 89–90 McKim, Herbert, 222
Locke, Alain, 178 McKinley, William, 144, 147
Lockey, Caleb, 135 McKoy, William ‘b., 136
Lonely Road, A (Avant), 166 McLaurin, Melton, 272
Long, Edward, 29–30 McNeil, Joseph A., 215
Lost Cause narrative, 101, 220, 224 McQueen, Joe, 253
Lowell Experiment, The (Stanton), 3 McRae, James F., 48
Lumina, 164 Meares, Gaston, 80, 100
Lynching, 9, 112, 116, 133–34, 189, 297n11 Meares, Thomas D., 131
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of
MacRae, Alexander, 56, 58, 59, 61–62, 70, 290n3, 1775, 76, 122
291n30 Media: assaults publicized by, 203; civil rights
MacRae, Donald, 56, 80, 88, 106, 291n30; busi- movement transformed by, 222, 224; false as-
ness interests of, 82–83, 118; convictions of, sertions by, 134; inflammatory reports in, 132;
70–71; as industry man, 129 influence of, 6, 112; lack of intrigue from, 260;
MacRae, Donald, Jr., 143 racial consciousness aided by, 213; targeting
MacRae, Hugh, 128–29, 139, 164–65, 197, 298n36; of, 244–45; Wilmington Revolution of 1898
death of, 217; home of, 130; Penderlea project response from, 145–46; Wilmington Ten law
and, 188; real estate developed by, 171 suit covered by, 238
MacRae, John, 56, 70, 80, 83, 93 Melton, John, 135, 141, 144
MacRae, Roderick, 19 Memories, 1; of American Revolution, 75; of
MacRae, Walter G., 106 black disorder, 168; community of, 255;
Madison, Isaiah, 254 honoring of, 245; manipulation through, 117;
Making Whiteness (Hale), 150–51 passing on of heritage, 58; place transformed
Manipulation, 117, 137, 200 by, 5; as positive, 257; as prosthetic, 214; races
Manly, Alexander, 119, 133, 134, 139, 140–41, 146, connected by, 126; as reflection, 5; tough parts
297n18 of American, 275; of white supremacy, 168. See
Mann, John, 49 also collective memory; Counter-memories
Manning, Pierre B., 129 Meredith, Hugh, 14–15
Manumission, 27 Meredith, William, 45, 46
Marable, Manning, 7, 265 Merrick, John, 178
Marginalization, 66–67, 118, 253 Methodism, 45, 46
350 Index
Miscegenation, 155, 199 No More Sorrow to Arise (Russell, A.), 272

Missouri Compromise (1820), 51 North Carolina Freedmen’s Convention, 96–97
Moir, John, 27 North Carolina Monument Association, 122
Moore, Alfred, 68, 137 North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company,
Moore, James, 33, 35, 75, 137 178
Moore, Katherine Bell, 244–45, 253, 275, 311n1 North Carolina Shipbuilding Company (NCSC),
Moore, Louis Toomer, 197, 210 198
Moore, Mary Rebecca, 33 North Carolina Society of the Colonial Dames,
Moore, Maurice, 13, 75 122, 125, 163
Moore, Maurice, II, 33, 35 North Carolina Way, 159, 177, 212–13
Moore, Roger, “King,” 17, 57, 99–100, 132, 138 Norwood, John G., 114
Moore’s Creek battle, 75, 137 Novick, Peter, 268
Morrison, Cameron, 180 Nutt, Henry, 61
Morton, Hugh MacRae, 204–5, 219
Moseley, Edward, 17 Oakley, Julia E., 100
Mumford, Kevin, 4 Obama, Barack, 6
Municipal appointments, for blacks, 96, 98, 103, Objectivity, 268, 283n12, 311n2
127, 145, 243 O’Crowley, Paul, 184
Municipal governance, 139, 237 Odeleye, Ayokunle, 277, 278, 316n73
Munson, H. H., 91 Odum, Howard, 199
Murray, James, 17, 28 Oppression: of black workers, 200; experience
of, 150; resentment towards, 204; resisting of,
NAACP. See National Association for the Ad- 70; respect for, 261; as source of suffering, 68.
vancement of Colored People See also Racial discrimination
Name of War, The (Lepore), 42 Orsi, Robert, 6
Nantambu, Kojo, 227, 233–35 Owen, James, 51–53, 56, 289n92
Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Oxley, Lawrence, 186
Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina
(Hossfeld), 276 Pageant of the Lower Cape Fear, The, 174–75, 177
Nash, June, 240 Panic of 1837, 62
Nash, Solomon W., Jr., 104 Papaw-Nagos, 29, 30, 31
National Association for the Advancement of Parades: during antebellum civic celebrations,
Colored People (NAACP), 159, 168, 173, 190, 65–67; during Azalea festivals, 206–9; by
211, 215 black fire companies, 114; by black youth
National Industrial Recovery Act, 188 during 1968 protest marches, 227–28; during
Navassa Guano Company, 106, 129 Decoration Day celebrations, 123–24; during
NCSC. See North Carolina Shipbuilding Emancipation Day celebrations, 121–22;
Company during Feast of Pirates festival, 182; by Ku
Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, The Klux Klan, 100–103, 180; in Kuner festivals,
(Edmonds), 209–10 28–32, 67–68; during Nat Turner rebellion,
“Negro Domination,” 8, 112, 129, 250, 262 50; during November 19, 1898 massacre and
Newark riots (1968), 4 revolution, 141–44; by paramilitary Red Shirts
New Deal, 187 during 1898 campaign, 138; as part of 1971
New Negroes, 179 school boycott, 233; as performances of racial
New Right, 10, 178, 251 and civic identity, 6; during Reconstruction,
Newsome, Leland M., 222 96; during Stamp Act rebellion, 34–35; by
New South, 107, 129, 175 Union troops, 87; by Williston High School
Newton, 16–17 band, 220; during WWI, 169, 173
Nixon, Richard, 237 Parmele, Edward G., 144
Index 351
Parsley, Agnes MacRae, 129, 299n38 Pride, 101, 115, 165, 205, 207
Parsley, Eliza Nutt, 123 Progressive era, 79, 163
Parsley, Lizzie, 101 Progressivism, 160, 204, 231, 237
Parsley, Oliver G., 58–59 Prohibition Era, 181
Parsley, Oscar G., 131 Propaganda, 199
Parsley, Walter L., 129, 131 Prosperity, 11, 135; hope for, 107; in Progressive
Partisan purposes, 4 Era, influence on, 163; from tourism, 205;
Patres familias, 18 war and, 176; white supremacy as key to, 160;
Peace Conference, 78–79 Wilmington marketing past for, 190–97
Peculiar institution, 61, 64, 70, 75 Protests, 72, 92, 199, 216, 221–23, 227–29. See also
Penderlea, 188 Riots; Sit-ins
People’s Party, 117, 118 Public history projects, 245–46, 280, 283n2,
Phillips, Ulrich B., 175–76 312n24
Pierce, Marilyn Devany, 172 Public sentiment, as primary law, 145–50
Pirates, 13, 181–82 Public services, reform for, 128
Place, 109; attachment to, 5, 93, 248; civic iden-
tity based on, 32; collective memory based Quince, Parker, 177
on, 137; identity needing experience of, 168; Quince, Richard, Sr., 36
memories transforming, 5; Papaw-Nagos, Quincy, Josiah, 39
identity and, 31; power of, 5, 10, 122, 241, 281;
pride based on, 205–6; race and, in 1998, 246; Race, 4; community values about, 22; conversa-
race relations importance of, 115; symbolism tions surrounding, 150; discourse of, shifting,
of, 160; values based on, 148; Wilmington 243; education as solution to problem of,
heritage based on, 112 167; fear from, 170; gender, citizenship and,
Plessy v. Ferguson, 150 66; hierarchies of, in Wilmington, 108; laws
Polanco, Meika, 4 shaping ideas of, 24; memories connect-
Police, 119, 144, 202, 228, 237 ing, 126; perennial truth regarding, 248;
Politics: biracial vision for, 110; black organiza- perspective of, shifting, 1; place and, in 1998,
tional power of, 105; blacks excluded from, 96; 246; privilege of, 274; theoretically grounded
commemorative context within, 126; disagree- exploration of, 274; unity of, 173; uplifting
ments surrounding, 77; slavery influence on, of black, 145; violence role in construction
73; violence in, 99; Wilmington Ten influence of, 25; Wilmington residents according to,
on, 238–39 109
Polk, Leonidas L., 117 Race and Rumors of Race (Odum), 199
Populists, 9, 118, 136, 144 Race relations, 6; civilities guiding, 223; as dan-
Porter, Eric, 251 gerous, 112; debates on contemporary, 273;
Powell, Caletha, 270–71 defining of, 178; deterioration of, 201; dis-
Power, 3, 49; balance of, 120; in Cape Fear, 13; agreement over, 251; distrust and suspicion
championing of regulatory, 158; democrats regarding, 210; as harmonious, 220; lingering
seeking, 74; in education, 111; greed for, 154, concern of, 208; local attitudes towards,
251; imbalance of, 239; of place, 5, 10, 122, 241, 160, 252; military discipline influence on,
281; political organizing, 105; weapons show- 43; place importance in, 115; reality of, 152;
ing, 143; white-dominated structure of, 254; repressive system of, 12; shaping of, 89; study
white elites struggle with, 16–17; Wilmington of, 239; traditional system of, 64; as unjust,
structure of, 221. See also Black power 221; urbanization influencing slavery and, 61;
Power of Place, The (Hayden), 261 white officials refusing changes in, 98; white
Prather, Leon, 242, 261 preference for, 108
Price, George W., Jr., 89–90, 98, 109–10, 118, “Race riots,” 1, 112, 141, 178, 259–60
296n111 Racial caste system, 38, 182
352 Index
Racial discrimination: in advertising campaigns, Rice, 14, 43, 105

151; commerce influenced by, 135; in employ- Rice, Nathaniel, 17
ment opportunities, 188–89; in hiring prac- Rights of All, The, 54
tices, 223; humiliation from, 156; in medical Rights of White People (ROWP), 232, 233–34,
facilities, 166, 172, 173; psychological damage 310n104
from, 157; surrounding income, 210, 252; in Right to Work Law, 200
workplace, fight against, 200 Riots: as celebratory, 141; control for, 226; deaths
Racial harmony, 161, 201, 209, 264 during, 234–35; generation of, 240; motivation
Racial identity, 3, 31, 45, 62, 236, 284n14 of, 263; prevention of, 38; as severe, 234; as
Racialization, 7, 245, 280 staged, 128; state of emergency declared in re-
Racial violence, 91, 99; frequency of, 199; heri- sponse to, 235; understanding of, 276; during
tage of, 1–2; humiliation and loss from, 90; Wilmington Stamp Act, 65. See also English
increase in, 37; instigating of, 131; insurrection Riot Act; Newark riots; “Race riots”
suppressed by, 200; justifying of, 43; by local Rituals, 27–28, 30, 121
militia, 172; by Moore, R., 138; as organized, Rivera, Thomas, 108
7; possibility of organized, 221; in schools, Roane, Daniel, Dr., 212
230–31, 236; as social control mechanism, Robertson, William F., 131
148; as spectacle, 112; vulnerability to, 116–17; Robinson, Peter, 72
as Wilmington heritage, 213; Wilmington Robinson, William H., 72
Revolution of 1898 as planned, 142 Romano, Renee, 4
Racism: contributions to structural, 7 Roosevelt, Theodore, 158
Raiford, Leigh, 4 Rosen, Hannah, 4
Railroads, 56–57, 64, 162. See also Wilmington Rountree, George, 139, 149
and Weldon Railroad ROWP. See Rights of White People
Randolph, A. Philip, 200 Ruffin, Edmund, 69
Rankin, Robert G., 77–78 Ruffin, Thomas, 49
Reconstruction, 7, 9, 57; achievement of, 89; Ruger, Thomas H., 93
Democrats incensed by, 103; failure of, 224; Rushing, Wanda, 4
for mass consumption, 168; optimism from, Russell, Anne, 272
109 Russell, Daniel L., Jr., 118, 126, 138, 142, 150
Reconstruction in North Carolina (Hamilton, J. Rutherford, Allan, 90
G.), 92
Redemption movement, 226 Sadgwar, David Elias, 111
Reid, Richard, 92 Sadgwar, Frederick C., 111, 113, 118, 140
Reparations, 259, 272 Sampson, James, 64
Republican Party, 9, 73, 96, 98, 144 Sampson, John P., 96
Republican-Populist coalition, 112, 118–19 Sanders, Daniel J., 114
Resistance, 2; as armed, 163; black remembrance Sasser, Leonidas B., 129
and, 26–32; as collective, 265; collective Saunders, William L., 100
memory encouraging, 101; consequences of, Schaw, Janet, 27, 40
11–12; to equality, 102; to Jim Crow system, Schofield, John M., 89
increasing, 166–67; to marginalization, 66–67; Schomberg, Alfonso, 153
to oppression, 70; organizers of, 35–36; as Schulman, Bruce, 237
passive, 214; signal of, 92; of silent majority, SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership
224; white elites crushing black, 172; to white Conference
supremacy, 134, 173 Scott, Armond W., 140, 244
Reverse discrimination, 252 Scott, Egbert, Dr., 169
Revolutionary spirit, 77, 126, 137, 163, 280 Scott, J. W., 147
Reynolds, Robert Rice, 188 Seabreeze, 179
Index 353
Secession, 70–77, 78, 79, 80 regulations for, 33; system manipulated by, 19;
Secret Nine, 130–31, 136, 139, 242, 275, 298n34 as threatening, 29; Wilmington as center for,
Segregation, 9; in all public space, 149; in 20; work settings for, 61
education, 101–3; in employment opportuni- Slave trade, 39, 63, 78–79
ties, 108; as identity problem solution, 151; as Slave Trader character, 30–31, 67
illegitimate, 154; as moral issue, 22; neighbor- Slave watermen, 15, 26
hoods shaped by, 224; as residential, 162; Sloane, Hans, 29
triumph despite, 257; WLI enforcing, 172. See Smaw, Frank D., Jr., 94
also Desegregation Smith, William S., 17, 131
Selective remembering, 256 Social Darwinism, 150
Self-respect, 26–27, 51 Social ranking systems, 3, 126
Shackel, Paul, 5 Social reforms, 51, 60–61, 99, 158
Sharecropping, 117, 165 Society of Friends, 49
Shenck, Nicholas, 65 Sokol, Jason, 204, 224, 273
Sheridan, Louis, 8, 53–55 Solidarity, 91–92, 233
Sheridan, Thomas, 54, 289n96 Sons of Liberty, 35, 36
Sherman, William T., 86 Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Shew, Richard, 200 (SCLC), 214, 221
Shipbuilding, 170, 197–98 Southernization thesis, 237
Shober, Francis, 114 Sprunt, James L., 79, 85, 106–7, 125, 168, 174
Simmons, William, 179–80 Sprunt, Luola Murchison, 126, 298n29
Sit-ins, 7, 215, 222–23 Stanton, Cathy, 3–4
Slave code (1715), 15, 22–24 State v. Mann, 49
Slave patrols, 26, 50, 73 Steelman, Ben, 250
Slave runaways, 72; ads for, 42, 84, 287n67; Stono Rebellion (1739), 25
atrocities of, 41; increase in, 40; masters com- Structural racism, 7
pensation for, 78–79; policy shift concerning, Stuart, Alexander, 34, 35
84; as soldiers, 86; treatment for, 23; units Suffrage, 95, 104, 149
formed by, 41; violence towards, 26; white Symmes, John, 239
elites challenged by, 42–43
Slavery, 5, 39; as abomination, 54; adapting to, Tales and Traditions of the Lower Cape Fear,
13; disparities created by, 186; expansion of, 1661–1896 (Sprunt, J. L.), 125
5, 79; influence of, on masters, 281; justifica- Taney, Roger, 71
tion for, 69–70; laws for, 22–25; legal status Taylor, J. Allan, 129, 131, 143
of, 78; politics influenced by, 73; as sin, 45; as Taylor, John Douglas, 131
unnatural, 38; urbanization influencing race Taylor, John Edward, 114
relations and, 61; as vital institution, 77. See Taylor, Rosser H., 210
also Urban slavery Taylor, Walker, 131, 146
Slaves: atrocities committed by, 43; as common Tea Act (1773), 39
laborers, 20; court system for, 22; declared Teller, William, 98
free, 89; dependence on labor of, 81; desire for Templeton, Eugene, 231
acquiring of, 63; education prohibited for, 48; Terry, Alfred, 87
escape attempts of, 26, 83; execution of, 50; Thalian Hall, 70, 71
forms of protests of, 72; gifts for, 68; insurrec- Theft, 85
tion of, 37–38, 287n53; killing of, 24, 37; legal There Goes My Everything (Sokol), 224, 273
protection for, 23; levels of freedom for, 40; Thirty-seventh U.S. Colored Troops (USCT),
MacRae, A., owning, 61, 291n30; methods for 88, 91
purchase of, 63; placement of, 21–22; power of Thomas, Larry Reni, 230, 236
masters over, 49; property distributed to, 88; Thompson, Melvyn, 280
354 Index
Thompson, Richard Ferris, 30 with, 222; of opposition to civil rights, 214,

Tillman, Ben, 136 232; pattern followed by, 128; as political, 99;
Todd, Bertha Boykin, 226, 263 in public, 34; race construction role of, 25;
Toomer, Sam, 46 as real threat, 120; recounting experience of,
Tories, 43 240; as response of masters, 47; from ROWP,
Tourism, 4, 179, 187, 205–6, 218–19, 270, 307n57. 233–34; rules of, 286n49; by slave patrols, 50;
See also Heritage tourism towards slave runaways, 26; as unstoppable,
Trade, 38, 77, 81–82, 94 250; Waddell, A., validating, 140; as white
Traditions, 61–70, 125, 158, 174, 182, 230 directed, 12; willingness towards, 174. See also
Trauma: in Cape Fear, 42; collective memory Racial violence
and, 189; depiction of, 277; memorializing of, Virgo, David Clarke, 166
12; reactions to, 214; soothing of, 101; from Voice of the Cape Fear (Bissette), 256
Wilmington Revolution of 1898, 162 Voter intimidation, 99, 138, 147
Tryon, William, 33–35 Voting rights, 96, 103, 150
Turner, Henry McNeal, 151
Turner, Nat, 49–50, 248 Waddell, Alfred Moore, 76–77, 88, 91, 136–37,
Twardy, Chuck, 250–51 144, 300n52; fund raising speech by, 122; ver-
Tyson, Timothy, 200 bal assurances from, 147; violence validated
by, 140
UCC-CRJ. See United Church of Christ, Com- Waddell, Hugh, 35, 137
mission for Racial Justice Wages of whiteness, 63, 233
Umfleet, LeRae, 128, 273, 275 Wagner, Bryan, 126
Underground railroad, 72 Wagner Act, 200
Union, the, 85–89, 110 Walker, David, 8, 47–48, 49, 54
Unionist sentiment, 76–77 Walker-Howe, Anthony, 44, 64
Union League, 95, 97, 100, 295n84 Walker-Howe, Tenah, 44, 64
United Boys Brigade of America, 123, 124 Washington, Booker T., 120, 151, 211, 212, 241
United Charities, 186 Watson, John, 16
United Church of Christ, Commission for Racial We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial
Justice (UCC-CRJ), 231–32 Massacre and Coup (Prather), 242, 261
United Daughters of the Confederacy, 123 Welfare, 186, 225
Upbuilding, 113–22, 175 Wells, John, 60
Upperman, Leroy W., 222 WGUs. See White Government Unions
Uprising. See Insurrection Wheeler, John, 36–37
Urban slavery, 9, 46–47 White elites, 7, 99; authority of, 37; black resis-
USCT. See Thirty-seventh U.S. Colored Troops tance crushed by, 172; conspiracy of, 143; as
conspirators, 135, 274; consternation of, 242;
Van Amringe, Stacey, 100 existential dilemma of, 126; laws devised by,
Vigilance committee, 50, 132, 138, 142, 299n42 22; legislature influenced by, 45; past reinter-
Vigilantism, 19, 148, 232 preted by, 124–25; persuasions by, 43; power
Violence, 8, 199, 201, 275–76; avoiding of, 137; struggle of, 16–17; praise given to, 93; progress
in Birmingham, Alabama, 222; of black embraced by, 57; racial status quo maintained
youth, 227–28; commerce and, 15, 136, 176; as by, 8; slave runaways challenging, 42–43; as
controlled, 141; cultural schema of, 241; as de- symbol, 207; as threatened, 32; threats from,
fense, 232; extreme level of, 235; from fear, 26; 104; understanding privilege of, 166; universal
fear of retributive, 134; frequency of, 85; glee experience of, 257, 280; Wilmington Revolu-
from, 154; as illegitimate, 43; justification for, tion of 1898 orchestrated by, 127–28; Wilming-
146, 148; Kuners projecting, 31; legitimizing ton traditional, 217
of white, 263; nonviolent protesters disbursed White Government Unions (WGUs), 132
Index 355
White Man’s Declaration of Independence, The, in, 215; as slave center, 20; traditional elite
139–40, 160–61, 272, 300n58 of, 217; transformation of economy in, 170;
White supremacy, 9, 174; as challenged, 45; com- Union campaign in, 85–86; the Union enter-
mitment to, 51; Democratic Party campaign ing, 87–88; as unwelcoming, 198; upbuilding
for, 128; demonstrations of, 116; fostering of black, 113–22; ward boundaries in, 97, 119,
of, 151; hypocrisy of, 119; increase in, 54–55; 150; war narratives of, 81; zoning ordinances
intimidation campaign to support, 236; as key for, 219–20
to prosperity, 160; memories of, 168; premise Wilmington Alliance for Community Transfor-
of, demolished, 109; resistance to, 134, 173; mation (ACT). See Centennial Foundation
sanctity of, 107–8; schools combating, 211; as (1898)
shared goal, 250; Union League fighting, 100; Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, 56, 57, 78,
vicious campaign for, 112; weakness demon- 86–87, 106
strated in, 154 Wilmington Light Infantry (WLI), 73, 80, 123,
Whiting, W. H. C., 71, 85 131, 142, 172
Wilkerson, William, 42 Wilmington on Fire, 280
Wilkings, William C., 73–74 Wilmington Rebellion (1765), 34–37, 76
Williams, Belle, 100 Wilmington Revolution and Massacre of 1898,
Williams, Cornelia, 84 9–10, 112, 127–28, 253; allegations investigated
Williamson, H. E., 227, 234, 237 after, 147; black murders during, 143–44;
Williamson, Mamie, 202–3 collective memory of, 161; economic damage
Williston: alumni association, 257; controversial from, 258; exhibit exploring, 266; heroism
closing of, 228–29; establishment as grammar of blacks in, 154; as inevitable, 140; media
school, 102, 109; as industrial school, 166–67; response to, 145–46; memorial erected honor-
1968 protests at, 226; as segregated high ing, 276–77, 278; military companies involved
school, 211, 214 in, 144; as planned racial violence, 142; publi-
Wilmington, 1, 82; arson in, 45–46; authentic cized facts about, 155; trauma from, 162
heritage of, 219; blacks abandoning, 147; Wilmington Rifle Guards, 80
Board of Aldermen formation for, 127; busi- Wilmington Stamp Act (1765), 8, 33, 36, 65, 163
nesses in, 94–95; change in, 62; climate of, Wilmington Ten, 10, 237–39, 263
137; collective memory efforts of white, 123; Wilmington Ten, The (Janken), 238
commemorative rituals of, 121; confederate WLI. See Wilmington Light Infantry
soldiers stationed in, 85; defining characteris- Wonce, Benjamin, 233
tics of, 12; defining culture themes of, 206–7; Wood, John Coffin, 62, 71
domestic relations shift in, 203; economic Wood, Robert, 62
future of, 130; escaping from, 153; evacuation Wood, Thomas Fanning, 74, 77
of, 86–87; fire of 1840, 62; fire of 1886, 115; Woodward, C. Vann, 60
hierarchies in, 19; historic district of, 60, 220; World War I, 9, 112, 176
as historic tourist destination, 181–82; hostility World War II, 10, 177–78, 203
in, 90; identity of, 56, 125; Ku Klux Klan ter- Worth, Jonathan, 103
rorizing, 100; last duel in, 73; leadership loss Wright, Daniel, 143
in, 105; literacy of black population in, 120; Wright, Silas P., Dr., 135, 143
loss weakening, 83; map of, 20, 21; pamphlet Wright, Thomas, 276
promoting, 160; past of, marketed for pros- Wright, William Augustus, 98
perity, 190–97; place-based heritage of, 112; Wycoff, Samuel, 92
port closure in, 34; power structure in, 221;
progress and pleasure in, 217; racial hierarchy Yeamans, John, Sir, 13
in, 108; racial violence as heritage of, 213; real Yellow fever, epidemic of, 83–84
estate developments in, 239–40; reputation of,
37, 72; residents according to race, 109; sit-ins Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, 271
Margaret M. Mulrooney is professor of history and associate vice-provost
of university programs at James Madison University. She is the author of sev-
eral books, including Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural
Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.
Cultural Heritage Studies
Edited by Paul A. Shackel, University of Maryland
The University Press of Florida is proud to support this series devoted to the study of
cultural heritage. This enterprise brings together research devoted to understanding
the material and behavioral characteristics of heritage. The series explores the uses of
heritage and the meaning of its cultural forms as a way to interpret the present and
the past.
Books include important theoretical contributions and descriptions of significant
cultural resources. Scholarship addresses questions related to culture and describes
how local and national communities develop and value the past. The series includes
works in public archaeology, heritage tourism, museum studies, vernacular architec-
ture, history, American studies, and material cultural studies.
Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: Reshaping Archaeological Assessment and

Significance, edited by Clay Mathers, Timothy Darvill, and Barbara J. Little (2005)
Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade, edited by Neil Brodie, Morag M.
Kersel, Christina Luke, and Kathryn Walker Tubb (2006)
Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America, edited by Helaine Silverman (2006)
Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World, by Christopher
C. Fennell (2007)
Ethnographies and Archaeologies: Iterations of the Past, by Lena Mortensen and Julie
Hollowell (2009)
Cultural Heritage Management: A Global Perspective, by Phyllis Mauch Messenger and
George S. Smith (2010; first paperback edition, 2014)
God’s Fields: An Archaeology of Religion and Race in Moravian Wachovia, by Leland
Ferguson (2011; first paperback edition, 2013)
Ancestors of Worthy Life: Plantation Slavery and Black Heritage at Mount Clare, by Teresa
S. Moyer (2015)
Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation, by Theresa A.
Singleton (2015; first paperback edition, 2016)
Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, edited by Maria Theresia
Starzmann and John R. Roby (2016)
Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism,
by Daniel R. Maher (2016)
Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage, by Melissa F. Baird (2018)
Heritage at the Interface: Interpretation and Identity, edited by Glenn Hooper (2018)
Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation, by Pablo Alonso
González (2018)
The Rosewood Massacre: An Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence, by Edward
González-Tennant (2018)
Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina, by Margaret M.
Mulrooney (2018)

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Race, Place, and Memory

Cultural Heritage Studies

University Press of Florida

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

University Press of Florida

HENRY AND MARY

1.1. C. J. Sauthier’s map of Wilmington, 1769 21

Heritage, Social Justice, and Peace Building

hands or feet, castration, or burning to death, depending on the crime. Mul-

In July 1996, I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, to fill a visiting profes-

opposite. This interpretation will undoubtedly displease some of my former

includes feelings of attachment to (or alienation from) a place, town, state, or

curred in 1898, when nine prominent, white businessmen, led by descendants

began to disavow publicly their heritage of violence and revolution; however,

Rising Tide, 1739–1840

landscape, too, in place names, physical monuments, representational archi-

Establishing “a Province within a Province”

“A Very Considerable Town”

nically and socioeconomically stratified. In the 1730s and 1740s, hundreds of

More than a “Frolic”: Black Remembrance and Resistance

With capture and transplantation to the colonies came a profound sense of

The Wilmington “Rebellion”

By about 1760, black Wilmingtonians had a particular reputation in North

he opined, “King Charles thought proper to grant that an assembly should be

Because Tryon moved regularly between his home plantation in Brunswick

Wars for Independence

popular histories, this point is evident in period sources. Sometime in early

“This Bloody Land”

constant humiliation and brutal mistreatment from white Wilmingtonians.

Friends had begun by 1810 to transfer ownership of their human property to

“To Be Truly Free”

ibn Said. An enslaved Muslim marabout from Senegambia, he escaped from

Port in a Storm, 1840–1880

water-based modes of transportation, and manufacturing enterprises altered

“Wilmington . . . Has the Most Go-a-headity of the Yankees”

Figure 2.1. Reproduction of a portrait of Alexander MacRae in his Masonic regalia.

as “President of Wilmington Commercial Bank,” even though he owned a large

become merchants; calling them “genteel vagabonds,” the author unfavorably

cieties, lyceums, schools, and other reform-minded organizations designed to

Transformations and Traditions

Newcomers rarely questioned the chattel principle that undergirded south-

hierarchy. Although we cannot be certain, this interpretation is consistent

“Foam and Fury”: The Secession Crisis

In 1858, Wilmingtonians celebrated the opening of an elegant new opera house,

“The Argument of the Sword”

In their political disagreement, whites in and around Wilmington reflected

Wilmingtonians took up arms as soon as word of Lincoln’s call for troops

vedores loaded onto railroad cars for reshipment to southern battlefronts. As

skewed sharply to men. Wartime brought hundreds of foreign and American

“Blow, Gabriel, Blow”

On paper, the Union objective was to capture Wilmington and use it as a

“They Will Soon Be Practically Enslaved Again”

In late April, well after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and

procession in honor of the assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln. Price, a

the Wilmington Dispatch complained that Ruger’s actions demonstrated his

“To Something Nobler We Attain”

Carolina Freedmen’s Convention, noted a wide range of abilities and motives

Under Moore’s leadership, Wilmington’s Klansmen launched a nighttime

elections, they launched a coordinated propaganda campaign, using the state’s

Senator Abraham Galloway, running for reelection, remained a local favorite.

builder Alfred Howe, granddaughter of Anthony and Tenah Walker-Howe, she