THE 1898 WILMINGTON MASSACRE IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE: AN ESSAY ON THE DISCOURSE OF POWER Walter Hölbling, Karl-Franzens-University, Graz Justine Tally, University of La Laguna, Tenerife BUT THERE IS A LIMIT TO EVEN THE MOST VICIOUS TENDENCIES OF MAN, AND THAT LIMIT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN REACHED IN NORTH CAROLINA. It has become necessary, after twenty years of uninterrupted peace and Christian Civilization, to teach the Southern Negroes that they cannot rule over the property and the destinies of the superior race, and that lesson will be taught on Tuesday next, we solemly [sic!] believe. IT IS OUR CONVICTION, MOREOVER, THAT THE TEACHERS WILL HAVE THE SYMPATHY AND APPROVAL - WHETHER AVOWED OR UNAVOWED - OF THE WHITES THROUGHOUT THE LAND. (The News and Observer. Vol. XLV, no. 54. Morning edition, Nov. 8, 1898, p. 1) Black women in Wilmington, as elsewhere in the state, played leading roles in education and community development. While most black men and women worked in menial, low-wage employment, North Carolina also had a successful - too successful from the point of view of whites - class of educated, professional African Americans strongly engaged in politics. With 8,000 whites and 17,000 blacks, Wilmington represented the heart of black political power in the state. Breaking that power, and defeating the upward aspirations of black working- and middle class people, could not be more logical or necessary from the perspective of the Democratic Party. But it would take considerable doing, since African Americans in North Carolina had a grassroots movement for personal, political and group advancement as vigorous as any in the South. (Michael Honey, in Cecelski/Tyson, Democracy Betrayed. 1998, p. 170f) These two rather diverging assessments of a Southern society on its way towards implementing available opportunities after the end of slavery not only illustrate a change of opinion that comes with the passing of time. They also serve as very pertinent examples that the historical subject does not exist as an objective given but is generated by narrative description, and that the resulting retrospective construction depends on the processes of selection and combination of data on which it is based. It took more than three generations for the dominant public and historical discourse about what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the wake of the November 8, 1898, elections to gradually move beyond the position expressed in the first quotation and begin to acknowledge that of the second one. A little over a hundred years after these events, three novels and a children’s book as well as a growing number of historical articles and monographs indicate a newly awakened interest in what has variously been labeled “revolution,” “coup d’etat,” “riot,” “uprising,” “racial massacre,” “tragedy,” depending on the political, ethnic, or sociological preferences and affiliations of authors. In the light of available information today, “coup” appears to be the most suitable description (cf. Prather, City, p. 9 ff.) Before discussing the novels that have been inspired by what happened in Wilmington, it might be useful to sketch out the historical facts, if only to demonstrate that history in Wilmington, as in many other places, has become a hotly contested terrain over the past few decades. The historical context of the 1890s in North Carolina was characterized by two major developments (cf. Edmonds, “Introduction”): 1) The “New South,” led by entrepreneurs in the textile, tobacco, railroad and banking industry, made for rising profits but also for accelerated labor exploitation. (White) Landowners, especially in the eastern part of the state, used racial segregation as a means of forcing unfair labor contracts and indebtedness on black agricultural workers who suffered under conditions little better than slavery. White small farmers also faced increasing impoverishment: the market price of their crops continually declined while their costs rose and (Democratic) state government gave the entrepreneurial classes tax breaks and other advantages not available to small farmers. 2) At the same time, the economic depression of the 1890s led more and more North Carolinians to contest Democratic rule. Through a series of state and local elections, an organized Populist Party (mostly white) and a newly resurgent Republican Party (mostly black) mobilized small farmers, mountaineers, workers, and virtually the entire African American voting population against the vested interests of wealthy Democrats who controlled the state. In 1894, these two parties “fused,” and in 1894 and 1896 elections the interracial “Fusionist” candidates carried the votes statewide and put Daniel L. Russell, a native Wilmingtonian, into the governor’s seat. The new legislature immediately started dismantling the old Democratic appointive system on regional and local levels and restored popular election procedures. In communities like Wilmington where, with a total population of 20,055 in the 1890 census, blacks outnumbered whites by 11,324 to 8,731, the Fusionist victory constituted a serious threat to established power structures. At that time, Wilmington was the largest and most important city in a predominantly rural North Carolina scattered with farm towns and a rapidly growing number of small textile mill villages, lumber camps, and tobacco markets. Any drastic changes in this commercial capital cast a long shadow over the state’s political and business life. According to Leon Prather’s most recent in-depth study of the events, Wilmington was one of the best cities for blacks in the American South in the years before 1898: Compared to other communities in the South, blacks and whites more commonly walked the same streets, lived in the same neighborhoods, and patronized the same shops. Blacks also held considerable political power. In 1897, for example, there were three blacks on the ten-member board of aldermen, the city’s most important elected body. Another black was a member of the powerful five-constituent board of audit and finance. Other public offices held by blacks included justice of the peace, deputy clerk of court, superintendent of streets, and even coroner. The city had two black fire departments and an all-black health board. To this list can be added a significant number of black policemen and, in federal patronage, the mail clerks and mail carriers. The most conspicuous of President William McKinley’s black appointees was John Campbell Dancy, named collector of customs at the Port of Wilmington in 1897. In addition to being black, and a non-native of Wilmington, he replaced a prominent white Democrat. (Prather, in Cecelski/Tyson, p. 16 f.) There was also the Wilmington Daily Record, a newspaper edited by Alexander Manly, which is often mentioned as the only black daily in the U. S. at the time. It was an open secret that the fairly white-skinned Manly was the acknowledged son of a former North Carolina governor. According to historians, there were three groups in Wilmington who were not at all happy with these conditions: 1) Influential white businessmen - “the secret nine” - who, motivated by a sense of boosterism as well as by what Dorothy Hayden calls “sense of place,” thought that a less visible and “insolent” black population would attract more Northern investors. 2) The city’s Democrats, mostly but not completely identical with the white business community, whose public voice was the daily Wilmington Messenger, editor Thomas W. Clawson. 3) Segments from the poor white unskilled labor force who suffered from unemployment and had to compete with blacks on the unskilled labor market, led by Mike Dowling, an Irishman, who had lost his job as chief of one of the city’s fire departments because of his love of the bottle. Dowling and his men were also supported by some of the “secret nine” businessmen. Faced with the prospect of even more major losses in the upcoming 1898 elections, the Democrats’ only defense against too much democracy at the election booths was an unprecedented state-wide campaign built around the key words “Negro rule” and “white supremacy.” For months, charges of corruption, scandals, and inefficiency were leveled against the Republican-Populist coalition, though increasingly the topics focused on “insolent” and malicious blacks, especially the most sensitive issue in Southern race relations, the supposed interest of black men in white women. Practically every 1898 issue of the Raleigh News and Observer contained a racist and/or anti-Republican/Fusionist diatribe evoking vague yet primal fears among members of the white and therefore superior race. There was no mincing of words, as a brief selection of titles makes clear: The News & Observer, Jan. 21, 1898, morning, p. 1: “POLITICAL MIXING WITH NEGROES MEANS MISCEGENATION.” Page 2: “TIRED OF NEGRO RULE. Commercial Stagnation Logical Outcome of Corrupt Government.” The News & Observer, July 16, 1898, p. 5: “NEGROES IN CONTROL. The Raleigh Coon is Asserting His Rights. WHITE MEN NOT IN IT Except Where the Negro Cares to Tolerate Him.” The News & Observer, July 21, 1898, p. 1: “NEGROISM EXALTED. The Republican Convention Heartily Endorses Every Old Thing in Sight.” [The News and Observer. October 12, 1989, morning edition, p. 1] As of the end of September 1898, during the last two months of the election campaign, the number of items per issue increased noticeably; they were also supported by cartoons from the hand of Norman Ethre Jennett (see illustrations). Democrats throughout the state were clearly digging their trenches at the color line, trying to counteract the interracial Fusionist appeal with a monoracial and persuasively non-classist rallying cry of “white unity” that relied heavily on stereotypes of “white manhood.” In Wilmington, Clawson’s Messenger did its best to keep step with Josephus Daniels’ The News and Observer in spreading rumors and carrying aggressive cartoons that nourished fears of “negro domination:” For example, The News & Observer, September 30, 1898, p.1: “THERE IS NEGRO DOMINATION. Negro Rule Keeps Capital Out of Eastern North Carolina;” p. 2: “NOT ONE TWENTIETH Of the Horrors of Negro Domination Has Been Printed in the Paeprs [sic!].” The News & Observer, October 1, 1898, p. 1: “The Wilmington Negroes Are Trying to Buy Guns” [reproducing the facsimile of a letter to a Greensboro hardware store]; p. 2: “WHERE ARE THE TROOPS? O. H. Dockery, Sr., Advises Negroes to Go Armed.” The News & Observer, October 12, 1898, p. 2: “HERE’S THE RESULT OF RUSSELLISM. The Negro Congressman Demands to Sit With White People at the Circus;” p. 4: “The Impudence of the Negro Congressman.” The News & Observer, October 18, 1898, featured a Jennett cartoon of an allegorical white female figure in a praying posture (representing Eastern North Carolina) behind bars made from the words “NEGRO RULE” on the front page, followed up by two boxed notices at the bottom of the page, one with the caption “NO BETTER THAN NEGROES. That is What a Republican Leader Says of Eastern White Men,” the other one with “A NAMELESS CRIME Attempted Against a Highly Respectable White Girl in Broad Daylight in a Densely Settled Section of the Country.” At the same time, White Supremacy was openly advertised, like in the Sunday issue of The News & Observer of October 23, 1898, that featured a cover article titled “White Supremacy. It is Our Heritage and Not a Dogma - Must We Lose Our Birthright?,” followed on October 28 by another front page story about “THE GATHERING AT GOLDSBORO. The White Man’s Great Rally There Yesterday,” and by the complete printing of the white supremacy resolutions adopted there. It did not calm the waters that Alexander Manly’s Daily Record on August 18, 1898, chose to run an editorial reply to a public address given almost a year before by white supremacist Rebecca Latimer Felton, Georgia, in which she had encouraged lynching as an appropriate means of defending white Southern womanhood. Manly’s editorial refuted Felton’s insinuations in detail, suggested that most cases of miscegenation between white women and black men were based on mutual attraction and consent rather than on black force, and advised white men to take better care of their women. The editorial exploded like a bombshell and was quickly denounced by all the white press, as well as by several local black groups who thought it was unwisely radical. Democratic newspapers started reprinting transmogrified versions of Manly’s editorial as of October 1898 to add fuel to the white supremacist election campaign. (Prather, City, p. 70ff; Nash, p.159) The News & Observer also provided matching additional captions like “I AM YOUR FELLOW. What an Impudent Negro Said to a White Lady. It Frightened Her and She Ran to Her Sister and Related the Occurrence. Public Road Unsafe for Women” (Nov. 2, 1898, p. 2), followed on p. 4 by the caption “NEWBERN NEGROIZED - WHO DID IT?,” and the like. [The News and Observer, October 28, 1898, morning edition, p. 1] _______________________________________ On November 6, 1898, two days before the elections, The News & Observer featured the following hymn as specially boxed text on p. 6: THE WHITES SHALL RULE The whites shall rule the land or die! The purpose grows in hearts of steel; With burning cheek and flashing eye We wait what waiting may reveal. But, come what may the whites must hold What white men’s patriot valor bought; Our grandsire’s ashes not yet cold, Hallow the soil for which they fought. Shall low-born scum and quondam slaves Give laws to those who own the soil? No! By our grandsires’ bloody graves, No! By our homesteads bought with toil. Our rights are rooted in the land, Our law is written in the sky; Fate flings the fiat from her hand: The whites shall rule the land or die! On the level of practical violence, members of the Klan and their poor white counterparts, the armed Red Shirts and the Rough Riders, were spreading terror throughout the countryside. The key speakers among the Wilmington Democrats were Alfred M. Waddell, a former Colonel, and Charley B. Aycock; both roused the masses at white supremacist meetings and uttered public threats to black and white fusionist should they dare exercise their voting rights on election day. The strong and systematic display of verbal and physical force was successful: the Democrats won a landslide victory at the elections of November 8,1898. Nobody seriously questioned the validity of the Wilmington vote count that showed about 6,000 votes for the Democrats where the previous elections had brought 5,000 votes for the Fusionists. Waddell and the “secret nine” then decided not to wait out the time until the legal change of the city government; on November 10, two days after the election, by declaration and aided by the support of about 2,000 white supremacist followers, they removed the elected city government from office and nominated themselves in their place. Waddell then marched the mob to the building of Manly’s Daily Record, which was destroyed and set on fire. During the following two days, armed white supremacists roamed the streets and the countryside; prominent Fusionists were put on the train North and advised never to come back again; according to different sources, between nine and twenty blacks were killed, about 1,500 fled from the city. The “revolutionaries,” as they saw themselves, established supremacist rule unchallenged by either the state or the federal government, despite numerous letters by afflicted black and white persons to the Northern newspapers, Republican Senators and Members of Congress, and to President McKinley himself, and in spite of official reports by commissioners and district attorneys to Attorney General John W. Griggs (cf. Prather, City, pp. 152 ff.). The Democratic Party press set the tone for the future discourse about the event early on. On the front page of the November 12,1898 issue of The News & Observer it said: “DEMOCRATIC REGIME STRANGLING ANARCHY. Wilmington’s New Government Bringing Law and Order out of the Chaotic Conditions Brought About by Negro Domination. Leaders of Turbulent Negroes Banished.” No mention is made that only the whites in Wilmington were heavily armed. The state of North Carolina did not seek federal assistance; in fact, Governor Russell declined to even comment on the troubles in Wilmington. This obvious reluctance on the state level to investigate the matter led President McKinley to decide against federal intervention unless violence was resumed (cf. Prather, City, pp. 151 f.). Given the importance of Wilmington in the region, the coup there was understood as a signal throughout the South and, in fact, established the definite rule of Jim Crow laws there for almost sixty years to come, until President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock in 1957. White Supremacy had become part of the constitutional order of the Old North State. Accordingly, the victors wrote their own history in which they were remembered as heroes who had saved Wilmington from “black dominance.” Especially influential was J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton’s History of North Carolina (1919), which informed the contents of school textbooks for generations to come. Hamilton interpreted the Democratic Party’s takeover of Wilmington as the dramatic conclusion of a historical conflict between the forces of good and evil and thus set a pattern of discourse not even some of the most recent studies completely avoid (cf. Edwards, in Cecelski/Tyson, p. 114 f.). Today’s visitors find places and streets named after the Democratic Party leaders of the coup and monuments erected in their honor, but not a single plaque commemorating the victims of these events. Not until the 1950s did new research present a different view; the `70s and `80s saw more extensive research that also revealed in detail how city records, school books and public memory had been manipulated. The Wilmington Centennial Committee preparing the 1998 commemorative events discovered that under Wilmington’s surface of friendly civility tensions between race and class were still running strong. Yet they managed to find a representative number of Wilmingtonians to sign a Declaration of Racial Interdependence which counter-balances that of White Supremacy a hundred years before. This suggests that today there may be a statistically significant portion of citizens who believe in Charles Chesnutt’s closing sentence in The Marrow of Tradition (1901): “There’s time enough, but none to spare.” The altogether four literary responses to the Wilmington coup differ from the historical discourse in two major respects: two of them were written by African American authors within three years after the event (David B. Bryant, Hanover; or The Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre, 1900; Charles Chesnutt. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901). One a clear novelistic manipulation in order to explore larger meanings, the other a factional account of the historical events. Two other novels appeared almost simultaneously 100 years later (1994 and 1995): a historical novel by a white author (Philip Gerard, Cape Fear Rising,1994) and a ‘children’s book’ (Celia Bland, The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine, 1995). The two later novels rely heavily on the reconstruction of events as documented by the black historian Leon Prather, Jr. All four texts, however, place the press at the center of their stories, specifically in its role of firing up the Southern white imagination over such sensitive issues as miscegenation and illegitimacy (legal, political, hereditary), and all rely on the potent connotation called up by the image of the train, which in Chesnutt’s and Gerard’s work frames the narration and that closes the stories in Fulton and Bland. Bland's book is written from 11-year old Troy Worth’s point of view in a first-person narrative. The message of this “children’s book” is disconcerting. Major characters are given fictional names (e. g., Alexander Manly is Mr. Strong), thereby discrediting the story as a historical account; yet the ending of the book seems to belie the usual objective of children’s books as educational and uplifting. What are we to make of a children’s book published in 1995 that so devastatingly negates the possibility of friendship (or even of recognition!) between black and white children?  [The New and Observer, October 5, 1898, morning edition, p. 1] _______________________________________ That Southern race relations still turned to a large degree upon the fear of miscegenation (the “contamination” of the “white” race) is clearly manifest in the facility with which Manly’s editorial could be manipulated to inflame the white population. As Eric Sundquist points out, “fusion” was a popular euphemism at the time for miscegenation (p. 409), and it could not have been lost upon the Democrats that the cry against “Fusionist politics” could be easily transformed into a defense of Southern white womanhood, the control of whom was absolutely necessary in order to keep the race “pure” (since the offspring of mesalliances between white men and black women were relegated to the “black” race by virtue of the Supreme Court sanctioning of the “one-drop theory”). Much has been written with respect to Charles Chesnutt’s concern for the improvement of race relations and his preoccupation with the “color-line,” a position he well understood as a light-enough-to-pass mulatto. But while critics Sally Ann Ferguson and Trudier Harris attack Chesnutt for abandoning the blacker African Americans in favor of a campaign for the admission of a mulatto class into full equality with whites, based on a comparison of his essays (principally “The Future American”) with his novelistic work, new analysis by Stephen P. Knadler springing from recent interest in the construction of “whiteness” offers a different view. Although most critics before this had centered their evaluation of Chesnutt’s ideological position in The Marrow of Tradition on the contrast between Josh Green and Dr. Miller, and almost unanimously coincided in signaling that the author’s sympathies lie with the accommodationist stance of Miller over the militancy of Green, Knadler points out correctly that the hero of the book is not Miller at all, but his wife Janet, unacknowledged half-sister to Carteret’s wife Olivia, whose final magnanimous gesture allows her husband to hurry to the Carteret’s child for an emergency tracheotomy in an attempt to save his life. The irony of this situation could not have escaped Chesnutt, however. Clearly the militancy of Josh Green is no way to solve the race problem, as it ends not only in his own death but in the death of the Millers’ son as well; but if Miller is successful in his operation (the final scene of the book leaves the question unresolved as Miller arrives at the Carteret home and asks if the child is still alive, prompting the final remark cited above), his own apologist/accommodationist position will have had the effect of prolonging the family “reign” of precisely the people who helped bring on the massacre of his people. There is no happy ending here, and the lack of clear resolution certainly points to Chesnutt’s own despair at such a devastating reversal of his people’s fortune precisely in Wilmington (Wellington in the novel), a city in which blacks had made such apparent strides. Rebecca Felton’s article, which had prompted Manly’s acerbic reply, fed on the myth of the ideal (white) women, but white women in Chesnutt’s novel are less than the perfect image: Polly Ochiltree is conniving, manipulative and vindictive, and Olivia Carteret, whose hysteria echoes other famous heroines at the end of the nineteenth century (see Showalter, especially Chapter 6), is so concerned with her family’s not being “tainted” by the recognition of colored kinship through her father’s second marriage to Julia that she destroys the documents that would have proved Janet’s rightful place as her sister and co-heir to Merkel’s fortune. Instead, it is Janet, though long hurt by the repudiation of her next of kin and reared in poverty by her mother who was dispossessed by Polly Ochiltree, who rises to the position of highest moral authority (even in the midst of her despair over losing her only son) to refuse her legal birthright - now desperately tendered by Olivia in what might be true remorse but is probably desperation over her own endangered child - and bid her husband to do what he can for her half-sister’s child. Embedded in this climactic scene, of course, is the direct rebuttal of Felton’s obsession with the protection of white women from “black savages.” Gunning astutely points out that the description of Olivia as she runs to Miller to plead for her son’s life is presented in clearly sensuous terms, startling at first to Miller also because she so closely resembles his wife Janet (p. 73). There is no brute here springing to take advantage of a damsel in distress. Miller’s “restraint” inverts the myth, while at the same time producing the enormous satisfaction of having the offender begging for mercy from the offended, a normal human desire for revenge which the author does not dwell upon. This uselessness of “whiteness” as a determinant for high ideals and noblesse oblige is reinforced by the contrast of the degenerate Tom Delamere, heir to the Southern aristocracy, the obvious negation of the ideal white gentleman and the direct opposite of William Miller, whose father had been born a slave and whose “gentility,” intelligence, hard work, community service and dedication belie his humble origins. Even though many critics have stated that Chesnutt, through Miller, advocates an affinity based on class rather than on race (Miller finds himself relegated to the Negro car on the train filled with working class blacks whose rowdiness and smell he finds unpleasant), the figure of Tom Delamere certainly gives weight to the idea of a meritocracy independent of both race and class: just because you are born there does not mean that you belong there. Moreover, the groveling Jerry Neither is the excessive subservience to whites illustrated in the character Jerry any insurance of protection by the dominant group: Jerry is also killed in the massacre. Though Ferguson and Harris see Jerry’s and Mammy Jane’s deaths as indicative of Chesnutt’s inability to envision a place for darker-skinned blacks, we are rather inclined to believe they had more to do with the fact that for this author their sense of devotion to whites whom they look upon as superiors is no solution to the race problem. Wallinger even argues that “[B]y turning the uneducated and very dark Josh Green into a heroic figure, Chesnutt may be read as criticizing the common stereotype that grants heroic status to light-colored mulattoes only.” (Wallinger, p. 65) serves to critique the offensive McBane; in Chesnutt’s eyes, money new or old is still no guarantee of the “innate” characteristics reputed to the aristocracy. Both the deconstruction of ideal womanhood and the biting analysis of male privilege based on whiteness lend credence to Knadler’s hypothesis that the author was subtly signifying to his (mostly white) audience as to the fallacies of the “discourse of whiteness.” These double concerns of womanhood and of class figure prominently in the less well-known novel of 1900 by David Bryant Fulton (alias Jack Thorne) entitled Hanover; or the Persecution of the Lowly. Though less ably constructed and more overtly antagonistic and militant, Fulton’s novel provides an interesting complement to Chesnutt’s in that it comes close to what we would today denominate “faction,” combining novelistic device with journalistic entry and a personal letter Fulton includes “Mrs. Adelaide Peterson’s Narrative” to verify his own version of events, although he himself was not present during the massacre. Pp. 92-96. and employing both real and fictional characters (and real characters with fictional names). Gleason even states that Prather “cites Hanover half a dozen times as an historical source.” In fact, Prather mentions Hanover on page ten of his book, cites from it on pages 68 and 70-71, and is careful to mention that it is a fictional account. It is true that Prather´s opening sentence is a direct lift from Fulton’s “Introductory Note” on page six, but Gleason offers no other specific examples to support his affirmation that “Prather appears to lift material from Hanover without explicit acknowledgment, noting no other source” (p. 26). Like Chesnutt, Fulton explicitly explores class issues with emphasis on the manipulation of the Red Shirts by white Democratic “aristocrats.” Teck Pervis (fictional representative of the actual Mike Dowling) is scolded by his wife Amanda for buying into the ploy for white solidarity propagated by politicians who promise good jobs and positions of responsibility once blacks have been divested of their rights: “Now look er here,” she continued. “What do them risticrats kere er about the likes er we? In slave times we war not as good as their Niggers and ef we didn’t get out ther way on the road, they’d ride their fine critters plum over us. They hed no use fer we uns unless hit was ter use us fur somethin. Whan ther war broke out, of course they wanted der po’uns ter do ther fightin, an they kill me ole daddy bekase he wouldn’n jine em. He didn’t think it right ter tak up an fight again the Union; an I can’t fergit thet you’ns who did go ter ther fight ware promis’d er Nigger an er mule. But did yer git em? Teck Pervis winced. [...] “Teck Pervis yo may mark my words, but jes es soon es them broken down ristocrats git er hol of ther gov’mint, jes es soon es yo po fools help them, then yer kin go.” (Hanover, p. 32) In the author’s narrative voice he explains that after the disenchantment over being tricked into a “foolhardy and disastrous struggle” the lower-class whites became “lukewarm” with respect to politics. With the enfranchisement of blacks, however, these men’s votes were once again necessary to achieve aristocratic designs, but cries of “Negro Domination” and “Social Equality” did not rally enough support. Political expediency required raising the specter of miscegenation in order to inspire these men to vote for a white supremacy ticket. Once again the poor whites become “the cat’s paw - the tool of the aristocrat, he stands ready always to do the dirty work of lynching, burning and intimidation” (Hanover, p. 26). Fulton openly acknowledges the inflammatory nature of Manly’s remarks, even as he defends his feistiness and his right to refute Felton’s arguments, but he is quick to point out that the editorial in question was used to inflame sensibilities and fan the flames of an already highly explosive issue: “Those who are inclined to blame the editor of The Wilmington Record for the massacre of 1898 must remember that the article was written in August, and the massacre occurred in November. [...] Editor Manley’s (sic!) reply to the Georgia Woman was not the cause of the upheaval, but it was an excellent pretext when the election came on” (Hanover, p. 14). Fulton openly denounces the expediency of whites in manipulating the lower classes to do their dirty work. Unlike Chesnutt, however, he makes no distinction among blacks, and he comes down solidly on the side of defiance in his celebration of Dan Wright (Chesnutt’s Josh Green): “Was it right for him to stand alone against such fearful odds? Yes, that the chronicler in recording this terrible one-sided fight might be able to mention one act of true bravery; that among so many cowards there was one man” (Hanover, p. 85). See Sundquist for a discussion on the importance of “manliness” to the New South and the inevitable pun on Manly’s name (pp. 425-429). But as in Chesnutt’s work, moral authority resides resoundingly in the figures of the black women, particularly Mrs. Wise, who is not only well-educated, well-informed and a “refined” middle-class woman, but who also possesses the generosity of spirit and nobleness of the “ideal woman.” Even the wayward mulatta Molly Pierpoint, adopted at the age of four and brought up to fine tastes by Mrs. Wise but who has succumbed to the seduction of white male attentions, is given a redeeming heroic role. She hurries to dispel the rumor of an attack on black neighborhoods so as to deter the men at the mill from leaving the protection of their factory to try to protect their families, thereby running into the malicious mob of whites. Fulton touches on the questions of miscegenation in the figure of Molly, whose mother had been raped by a much older white man when she was only fourteen years old, thereby giving credence to Manly’s arguments in his rebuttal of Felton’s article. Though Fulton does not play up the hysterical fear of “black contamination,” he does make clear that for whites the “one-drop theory” is psychologically as well as legally grounded. Through inadvertent comments of her lover Ben Hartright, member of one of the leading families of Hanover, Molly also comes to understand that neither her position as favored mistress of one of the white community leaders nor her light skin color will protect her from the ravages of the white mob once the coup is under way. Like Chesnutt, Fulton is adamant that no “blacks,” irrespective of their position or skin-tone, will be safe from whites intent on stripping them of their hard-won rights. Unlike the former, however, he celebrates defiance even in the face of overwhelming odds. By including Mrs. Adelaide Peterson’s narrative of the massacre, Fulton not only substantiates the story of Molly Pierpoint’s heroics, but also documents the bravery of Lizzie Smith who, challenged by a group of ruffians who wanted to search her for hidden arms, insists on stripping herself of every last garment until the men, shamed by the white women watching their scandalous behavior, desist. This celebration of black women and the denouncing of the shabby pretext of whites’ defending the “purity” of “their” women for ulterior motives is epitomized in Fulton’s dedication of his novel to Ida B. Wells. Fulton does bring in the question of the harm done to the legitimate wives of those whites who take black concubines; Hartright’s wife eventually leaves him. Over ninety years later, almost on the centennial of the massacre itself, another novel once again explores the compelling factors that led to the coup. Philip Gerard’s Cape Fear Rising (1994) is straightforward historical realism so steeped in the reality of late-nineteenth century Wilmington that it is difficult to keep all the characters straight. Though Gerard’s opening disclaimer ends with “But this is fiction - only a storyteller’s history,” the main events and historical characters closely follow Prather’s We Have Taken a City, and the epigraphs that head each chapter are historical quotations. Upon the advice of his publisher this author has not disguised the protagonists with fictional names, a fact that enraged the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he is (fortunately) tenured, a good many of whose surnames appear in the book. Private conversation with Philip Gerard, Wilmington, North Carolina, January 9th, 1998. The same themes which are central to Chesnutt’s and Fulton’s novels appear here in heightened intensity: the deteriorating circumstances of Southern aristocrats with a craving for power and position, the competing forces of economic growth, the disgruntled working class whites competing with blacks for menial labor, and, of course, the centrality of a press campaign which utilized the “purity” of white women and the “uppityness” of blacks as an excuse to wrest control of the city from the Fusionists. Gerard’s narrative becomes complicated by its very thoroughness: Chesnutt’s conspiracy of the Big Three becomes two simultaneous conspiracies of the “Secret Nine” and the “Group Six”. This is history with a punch. From a novelistic point of view, however, and in keeping with the themes discussed thus far, Gerard’s characterization of the militant Ivanhoe Grant, who uses his powerful rhetoric as a preacher to stir up the passions of blacks and plays an otherwise low-keyed yet crucial role in the development of the action, Principally in the fictional interpretation of why the letter written by black community leaders conceding to the demands of the white conspirators never reached its destination by the imposed deadline. is an interesting variation on the theme of black agency and resistence. As the grandson of one of the black migrant workers murdered in the incident described in the “Prologue 1831" that opens the novel, Grant’s hatred of whites is given both a personal and a political basis. After the horror of the massacre, however, even this hardened “trouble-maker” is sobered by the seemingly unlimited cruelty of whites, a cruelty is described in vivid detail through the eyes of the journalist Sam Jenks. It is Jenks’ wife Gray Ellen, a northerner of Irish descent and a teacher at the Wilmington school for black children, who incorporates a more modern version of the Manly attack on Felton’s affirmation that white women need to be protected from the ravages of black men. Gray Ellen, a sober woman who has stood by Sam through his drunken bouts and repeated changes in employment, is at once repulsed and fascinated by Ivanhoe Grant, who deigns to show her the real situation of the children she teaches at school, and tells her in the most ominous of tones, “I want to burn the sin out of this wicked city!”(p. 150). Though she has felt an undoubtedly sexual attraction toward this black man, his chilling cold-bloodedness horrifies her at this point and she refuses his advances and finds his comments insulting: “Teacher, don’t tell me your heart is pure. Don’t tell me you do not lust, as I do,” prompting her unthinking response: “How dare you! How dare you talk to me like this! How dare you touch a white woman” (p. 151). Grant never loses a beat, forcing her to acknowledge her own latent racism and her fear of black men. He quietly insists that she pronounce the word she is stifling, and when she does so, he simply remarks, “In the beginning was the Word, teacher.” Noticing other black men coming toward them across the street, she begins to fear being “damaged” by rape. Though these men are, in fact, quite polite to her and actually accompany her away from Grant to the streetcar, her near adventure leaves her drained. She can neither confess nor respond to the sexual needs of her husband on returning home. Ivanhoe Grant was still “a black shadow looming over her” (p. 150), or “the devil on your shoulder. I am whatever you make me” (p. 239). Gerard’s treatment of sexual mesalliance encompasses both positions at the same time: white women can be and are attracted to black men as both Manly and Wells affirmed in their editorials, and black men can be a threat - though these possibilities are personalized in individuals and not, as demonstrated by the other blacks who come to her rescue, a general characteristic. And Gray Ellen’s repugnance toward Grant is very much grounded in his willingness to incite a riot, not in his blackness with which she is initially clearly fascinated. That she would so easily fall back onto racial stereotype, however, is a more modern comment on the more “liberal” situation of the 1990s. “Nigger” is used to sum up her horror over his sexual and political aggression, but the epithet slurs the whole of his race and not the individual aggressor; when fear takes over, racial prejudice is only masked by a “liberal” attitude toward African Americans. While all three novels are unanimous in their treatment of the heartless white leaders of the coup and their cold manipulation of people and events to achieve their own personal ends, Even Sam, who becomes progressively more horrified at the violence incited by the conspiracies, is at first vacillating and finally ineffectual in preventing any of the cruelty he witnesses. the black “heroes” vary. Grant is discredited by his equally cold calculations and manipulation of his own people; and the moderate blacks who capitulate to white demands, including Norwood, principal of the black school and very much like Chesnutt’s Miller, provide no protection, much less a solution in their attitudes. For Gerard, as for many black people in contemporary Wilmington, the real hero of the massacre was a light-skinned black named Carter Peamon, who successfully negotiated the safe passage of black workers wanting to leave the mill and join their families, and who secured the release of a white man held hostage by a group of blacks. Reflecting images and the (con)fusion of physical identity play an important role in both The Marrow of Tradition and in Cape Fear Rising. In the former novel Olivia is the “mirror image” of her younger mulatta sister Janet, who proves to embody the true characteristics of the ideal woman sans the hysteria of the nineteenth century female so evident in her half-sister. Moreover, and as Sundquist points out, Olivia’s hysteria mirrors not only that of the aristocratic males of the Democratic party over the supposed loss of political and economic power to “Negro Domination,” but also that of the obsession of “pure white blood” threatened with “contamination” by mesalliance. Behind Olivia’s hysteria and her “mirroring” of Janet, then, lies the “text” of the “one-drop-theory” of Plessy vs. Ferguson, through which any relationship with blacks would throw doubt upon her own ancestry and taint the future of her only son, heir to the Carteret-Merkell fortune. Her laborious rationalization of how to deal with the secret of her father’s second marriage and the destruction of the will that would have allowed for Janet’s inheritance also mirrors the rationalization of whites for their coup of the elected government of Wellington (Wilmington) and the subsequent massacre of blacks on the day after the election. As Colonel Waddell muses in Cape Fear: “The law was a kind of story told over and over again. From time to time, one needed to revise it – as he was already revising the role of Negroes and the ballot...” (p. 318). This blatant disregard for legality, both in the coup d’etat and in the destruction of the marriage certificate and the will, is mirrored as well in the Tom Delamere/Sandy Campbell (con)fusion. As Sundquist notes (p. 432), their physical resemblance together with the affection of the elder Delamere is emphasized too often not to surmise their blood relationship, an understood though unacknowledged bond between white men and black women. Once Sandy has been arrested for the crime of robbing and murdering Polly Ochiltree, the rumors that automatically arise concerning the possible/probable rape (what Sundquist calls “a free-floating trope of attack that could be used with virtual impunity on any political occasion” [p. 410]), but that are squelched once the real criminal is revealed in the novel, again illustrate the hysteria over the purity of white womanhood assaulted by black males. But as in the case of the Janet/Olivia pairing, the characteristics of the ideal southern gentility lie with Sandy and not the legitimate heir Tom. The “text” of miscegenation again underlies the reading of this episode, together with the illegitimacy of Tom’s inheritance, once his grandfather’s will is ignored by General Belmont, his executor, effectuated by yet another rationalization. The role these “texts” (of legitimacy and illegitimacy) play in the affair is literally and figuratively symbolized in the use of two major tropes which appear in both Marrow and Cape Fear. The first concerns the incidents on the train heading South in which the main characters in both novels first appear. The allusion to the Ferguson vs. Plessy decision and the reinforcement of the infamous Jim Crow laws frame both interpretations of the Wilmington disaster. The “resolution” of the attack on blacks by whites is effectuated toward the end of all four novels by the retreat of those able to escape to the North once again on the train. The other principle symbol concerns the literal text of the published newspaper in general and in particular the printing press sold to Alex Manly by Thomas Clawson, editor of the Wilmington Messenger (the characters Barber and Carteret in Marrow). This is reinforced by the observations and commentary provided by the figure of the Northern journalist, Sam Jenks, in Cape Fear, or Ellis in Marrow who, though Southern, is the son of Quakers who believe in equal treatment for blacks. Because of the printing and then “timely” reproduction of Manly’s article criticizing Rebecca Felton’s harangue – originally published in the Georgia press – the Daily Record is ordered closed and Manly is singled out by vindictive whites for lynching. In Cape Fear Rising, the printing press is first moved to new quarters closer to the black church; during the massacre the mob sets fire to the building and the press falls with a crash from the second floor into the ruins. While the “text” of the fear of miscegenation, as espoused in the laws upheld by the Supreme Court and in the inflammatory articles published by the press, is both figuratively and explicitly present in Marrow, Chesnutt gives Barber (Manly) a secondary role in the affair, preferring to focus on the Miller, Carteret and Delamere families and the questions of (il)legitimacy (both of inheritance and of power). Indeed it is the burning of Miller’s hospital, not the newspaper office that sparks the suicidal run of Josh Green, and it is precisely the hospital which forms the crux of Olivia’s plans to “recompense” her illegally disinherited half-sister through the donation of a sum of money equal to that stipulated by their deceased father. In Cape Fear the destruction, focused on The Record Publishing Company, is equally meaningful. The night before the mob is scheduled to ransack the town, Clawson clandestinely goes to visit Manly to warn him and to offer to buy back the printing press, at a clear loss for the black editor: “Sam hopped out of the buggy and turned. `So which was it, Mr. Clawson? Were you saving his life, or just trying to cheat him?´ Clawson smiled and leaned toward him. `Sometimes in life, son, there transpires what is know as a coincidence of interests [...]´ (Cape Fear Rising, p. 252). The “coincidence of interests” – the hysteria over white womanhood, the return to power of the Democratic Party, and the economic advantages to be had by the disempowerment of blacks – are precisely what Knadler refers to in his discussion of Henry Grady’s series of speeches on the material progress of the New South, particularly in “The South and Her Problems,” delivered at the Texas State Fair 1887. Writes Knadler: “Economically progressive Southerners such as Grady recast this transcendental historical process [of American expansion and Anglo-Saxon liberty] as the natural selection of the races: the embodiment of whiteness as the “marrow of tradition” would not only keep African Americans separate and unequal in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson, it would also ratify the South’s market revolution” (p. 437). What Knadler calls the “discursive connection between whiteness and Southern commercialism” was most effectively played out in the North Carolina press during the election campaign as Democrats claimed “white supremacy” would ensure economic prosperity. [The News and Observer, October 19, 1898, morning edition, p. 1] _______________________________________ In Hanover, Fulton waxes eloquent - albeit sentimentally - on the uses of the press: Glowing headlines in the newspapers have kindled the flames of Anarchy, and started men upon the path of destruction like wolves stimulated and brutalized by the scent of blood, to pause only when irrepairable (sic!) evil hath been wrought. “When new widows howl and new orphans cry.” What a power for evil is the newspaper! The newspaper arrayed on the side of the right hurls its mighty battering-ram against gigantic walls of oppression until they fall; takes up the cause of the bondman, echoes his wails and the clanking of his chains until the nation is aroused, and men are marching shoulder to shoulder on to the conflict for the right. What a power for good is the newspaper! (Hanover, pp. 11-12) Certainly, the importance of the statewide newspaper campaign in firing up the sentiments of whites over the prospect of the “violation of white womanhood” and “Negro domination” as illustrated by Norman Jennett’s cartoon campaign cannot be overestimated. While the Daily Record lay in its miserable heap of ashes after the massacre, the Wilmington Messenger proclaimed the legitimacy of the new government and supported the exodus of middle-class professional blacks and countless working men and their families. The “revolution” is sanctioned and legitimized in print; the coup literally authorized in the press for many years thereafter. In Cape Fear Rising Waddell, newly installed as mayor, is shocked over how little control he has over the men he has incited even as he justfies its aims; yet in the epilogue to the book Gerard is careful to include the eulogy for him published by the Raleigh News and Observer upon his death: “When Waddell died, the South lost one of the cleanest and purest types of the chivalrous gentleman” (p.416). The fictional elder Delamere would turn over in his grave. The term “whitewashing” could never be applied more appropriately than to the erasure of this bloody coup. While the avenues for a solution to the “Negro problem” through militancy are disputed by the moderate Miller and in fact cut short in Marrow with the tragic sacrifice of Josh Green, resolution through accommodation with whites is left deliberately ambiguous at the end of this book. Though Sundquist interprets the ending as “an optimistic gloss on the future that was hardly justified by contemporary events” (p. 407), the ambiguity inherent in the ending smacks more of wishful thinking. Fulton, on the other hand, extols the bravery of Dan Wright in Hanover who confronted the mob and was shot down, effectively supporting militancy and resistance rather than accession. The murder of Dan Wright is also mentioned in Cape Fear Rising, but through the (con)fusion of identities of Grant, Manly and Peamon, Gerard sends an equivocal message. Alex Manly, who in this novel is not directly responsible for the offending editorial but just refuses to disallow it, Fulton has Manly take a militant stand and unequivocally claim responsibility for the article, but then must deal uncomfortably with the fact that the editor leaves town before the massacre. Bland solves this problem by having the young Troy argue with Mr. Strong, who wants to set the type for the next edition of the newspaper even as the mob closes in on his building, persuading the editor to flee with him at the very last minute. Sundquist states that Manly almost surely is the author of the editorial, and Chesnutt, without dwelling upon the problem of authorship, also indicates that he is. actually escapes before the mayhem. Ivanhoe Grant, a Manly look-alike, plays a crucial role in the massacre by inciting black men to fight and by encouraging Almond Scott to mail rather than deliver the conciliatory letter that (supposedly) would have averted the massacre. Waddell’s attitude in this novel, however, indicates that punctual arrival of the letter would have served no purpose. Like Waddell, Grant acknowledges his underestimation of the situation and muses over how poorly he has evaluated the cruelty of whites. Even so, Grant escapes with the help of Gray Ellen, whose husband Sam will lose his chance to be Waddell’s biographer (a move that would have ensured his future as a member of the ruling elite) precisely because he “cannot control” his wife - Waddell’s allusion to Gray Ellen’s supposed mesalliance with the black man. For all his skillful negotiation with whites in order to save both black and white lives, however, Carter Peamon is mistaken for Manly as he takes the train out of Wilmington and is shot by a vigilante who brags that he has killed the editor. History confirms his death; his reasonableness and invaluable mediation served for little in the wake of destruction wrought by a mob which rapidly grew out of control. Is it, then, an irony that the two men “responsible” for inciting whites (Manly) and blacks (Grant) to confrontation escape the fates of other blacks, while the ultimate mediator between the two “races” (Peamon) is murdered? Or do these three men, so similar in physical appearance, represent the conflicting fates and limited choices of blacks in the U.S., a triad that constitutes a no-win situation? Gerard’s attention to historical detail, while at times overwhelming, convincingly conveys the enormity of the disaster even as it dissects the personal and political motivation of the men who brought it about. Perhaps his most damning observations, however, come not within the context of the novel at all, but in the brief historical summary of many of the actual participants in the coup of 1898. The convenient “white-washing” of these bloody events allowed many of the white instigators to assume positions of leadership and respect both in Wilmington and in the state of North Carolina, while the black men went unsung and unnoticed. It is also perhaps a reflection on the current “fusion” of historical and literary studies that these three novels come closer to the truth than did the official history for almost ninety years after the fact. Perhaps the commemoration of the events held in November of 1998 and a special re-edition of Prather’s historical account, together with the edition of new essays on the magnitude and importance of its legacy, indicate that the inheritors of such racial antagonism are now willing to read their history more honestly, and Carter Peamon may finally claim his rightful place in the history of black agency in the United States. Acknowledgements: The original cartoons included in this article are by Norman Ethre Jennett (1877-1970) for The News and Observer and have been reproduced for publication by Jorge Zubiría Tolosa, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. Bibliography Bland, Celia. The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine. Illustr. D. L. Williams, Jr. London: Silver Moon Press, 1995. 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