Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

In 1898, the Democratic Party was a rightwing, white supremacist party in the South. This is very different from the modern Democratic Party in the United States, which has its base in the Northern United States and West Coast. The shift took place following the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Wilmington’s Lie focuses on the machinations of the 1898 Democratic Party to regain power in North Carolina through the white supremacist strategy following their defeat by the Fusionists.

The Fusionists were “an uneasy political and racial alliance” between the Republican Party and the white working-class Populists. Zucchino describes this alliance as “a grassroots rebellion against Democratic plutocrats” (67). Fusionists won control of North Carolina politics and the Wilmington city government in 1894 following an economic downturn. As recounted in Wilmington’s Lie, the Democratic Party organized to defeat the Fusionists at the state level. They enacted a coup to remove the Fusionist city government of Wilmington and install a Democratic government.

Reconstruction was an era following the Civil War, when a series of laws were passed to reunify the country and expand Black suffrage from 1865 to 1877. Zucchino generally implies that Reconstruction was incomplete, writing, “Any civil liberties envisioned by the Emancipation Proclamation had not materialized by the summer and fall of 1865” (5).

The Republican Party in North Carolina in 1898 was a somewhat racially integrated party. They appointed Black men to positions such as postal clerk and police officer. They were advocates for Black suffrage, as Black men overwhelmingly voted for the Republican party due to Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s role in the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. However, white Republican politicians were not steadfast allies of their Black voters. During the Democratic pressure campaign, some white Republicans, like Wilmington postmaster William H. Chadbourn, “conceded that there was, in fact, Negro domination in Wilmington” (118). These equivocating views contributed to their political collapse following 1898.