The Wilmington Coup of 1898 and an Elected Government Driven Out by Force

On the morning of November 10, 1898, a crowd of armed white men gathered at the armory in Wilmington, North Carolina, then the largest city in the state. They had rifles, and before the day was out a rapid-fire gun bought by local white businessmen would be hauled through the streets. The men marched to the building that housed The Daily Record, a newspaper owned and edited by a Black man named Alexander Manly, and set it on fire. Manly was gone; friends had warned him to leave town. By afternoon, gunfire had spread into Black neighbourhoods across the city, and men were dead in the streets. And by that evening, the city's elected mayor and board of aldermen had been forced to resign one by one, replaced by men chosen by the leaders of the mob. The man sworn in as the new mayor was Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and congressman who, a few weeks earlier, had told a crowd that white men would retake the city even if they had to choke the Cape Fear River with bodies. Nobody was ever prosecuted for any of it.

In short: In November 1898, white supremacist leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina used a campaign of fear and an armed mob to overthrow a lawfully elected biracial city government, kill an unknown number of Black residents, and drive Black and white Republican leaders from town. State and federal authorities did nothing, and the coup helped launch the disfranchisement laws that shut most Black North Carolinians out of voting for more than half a century.

A city that worked

To understand why Wilmington's elite felt it had to use force, start with what the city looked like before November 1898.

Wilmington was a busy port on the Cape Fear River, and Black residents made up a majority of its population. It had a substantial Black middle class: business owners, skilled craftsmen, ministers, teachers, lawyers, a doctor or two, and federal officeholders appointed under Republican presidents. Black residents served as aldermen, police officers, magistrates and postal workers. The Daily Record was a daily paper published by Black owners, a rarity anywhere in the South.

Politically, North Carolina in the 1890s had something unusual: a working alliance across race and party. The Populists, mostly white farmers angry at railroads, banks and the Democratic establishment, joined forces with Republicans, many of them Black, in what was called Fusion. Fusion candidates won control of the state legislature in 1894 and the governorship in 1896, when Daniel Russell, a white Republican, was elected. The Fusion legislature restored local self-government, which Democrats had curtailed, and made voting rules fairer. As a result, Wilmington's city government included Black and white Republicans, elected by its voters.

Fusion was messy, as coalitions are. Populists and Republicans disagreed about a great deal. But it was working, and that was exactly the problem for the Democratic Party leaders who had controlled the state before 1894.

The white supremacy campaign

In 1898, North Carolina Democrats organized what their own leaders openly called a white supremacy campaign to win back the legislature. The party's state chairman, Furnifold Simmons, ran it like a military operation. The strategy was to break the Fusion coalition by persuading white Populists that their alliance with Black voters threatened white women and white rule.

Newspapers were central. The Raleigh News and Observer, edited by Josephus Daniels, ran a steady stream of stories and cartoons depicting Black officeholders as corrupt and dangerous. Speakers toured the state. Armed groups of white men on horseback, known as Red Shirts, rode through Black neighbourhoods and broke up Republican meetings, especially in the southeastern counties.

Then the campaign found its spark. In August 1898, Alexander Manly published an editorial responding to a speech by Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia white woman who had urged lynching to protect white women from Black men. Manly's editorial pointed out that not every relationship between a white woman and a Black man was rape, and that white men had been forcing themselves on Black women for generations without punishment. It was a measured argument about a double standard. Democratic newspapers reprinted it across the state for months as proof of Black insolence.

By the fall, white business leaders in Wilmington had formed secret committees, bought weapons, and drawn up lists of Black and white Republicans to be driven out. Waddell gave his speech about the river in late October. The governor, Russell, was threatened and largely sidelined.

The election, then the coup

The general election on November 8, 1898 was marked by intimidation, fraud and Red Shirt patrols that kept many Black men from voting. Democrats won control of the state legislature. In Wilmington, they did not yet control the city government, because the mayor and aldermen were not up for election that year.

On November 9, a mass meeting of white men at the county courthouse adopted a document they called the White Declaration of Independence. It stated, among other things, that the Constitution never contemplated rule by people of African origin, and demanded that Manly leave town and his press be removed. A committee delivered an ultimatum to a group of Black leaders. Their response, a conciliatory letter, was sent by mail rather than delivered in person because the messenger was afraid to walk through town; the mob leaders later said it never arrived in time.

The next morning, the mob moved. After burning the Record office, armed white men spread through the city. Fighting broke out in the Brooklyn neighbourhood, a largely Black area north of downtown. Witnesses described Black men being shot in the streets and in their homes. Many Black families fled into the swamps and woods outside the city and stayed there through a cold November night, including women and children.

While the shooting was going on, the coup leaders went to city hall. The mayor and aldermen were forced to resign one after another, and as each one left, a member of the white supremacists' slate was appointed to replace him. By late afternoon, the new board elected Waddell mayor. Every step was dressed up as legal procedure.

Counting the dead, and the banished

How many people were killed is unknown. Official counts at the time were small. A commission created by the North Carolina General Assembly, which released its report in 2006 after years of research, concluded that the true number was very likely much higher than the contemporary counts, possibly sixty or more, and that the records needed to know for certain had never been kept.

The coup leaders also carried out what they called banishment. Prominent Black residents and white Republicans who had supported Fusion were marched to the train station under armed guard and put on trains out of town, told never to return. Some were businessmen whose success was itself considered a provocation.

Over the following months and years, many Black residents left Wilmington. A city that had been majority Black became majority white. Black-owned businesses closed or were taken over. The federal patronage jobs that had sustained part of the Black middle class were gradually lost.

The federal government looked away

Black citizens of Wilmington and their allies appealed to President William McKinley for help. He did not send federal troops or open a prosecution. The Justice Department investigated in a limited way and took no action.

Why? Part of the answer is political. The federal government in 1898 had largely given up on enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South after the end of Reconstruction two decades earlier. Northern Republicans were less interested in protecting Black voters than in national reconciliation and business. McKinley had just fought a war with Spain that many saw as uniting North and South. Intervening in a Southern city on behalf of Black residents was not a priority.

The state government did not act either. The new Democratic legislature had no interest in prosecuting its allies, and Governor Russell, though nominally in charge, had no practical power to do so.

That is the hard lesson of Wilmington. A government was overthrown in daylight, in front of thousands of witnesses, by men who signed their names to a public declaration. It was not a secret conspiracy. And still nothing happened, because the people with the authority to enforce the law decided not to.

What came after: the law caught up to the mob

Wilmington was not an isolated explosion. It was part of a strategy, and the strategy continued.

In 1900, North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring a literacy test and poll tax for voting, along with a so-called grandfather clause that exempted men whose ancestors could vote before 1867, effectively exempting most white men. Charles Aycock, a leader of the 1898 campaign, was elected governor the same year. Black voter registration in the state collapsed.

George Henry White, a Black Republican from North Carolina, was serving in Congress during all of this. When his term ended in 1901, he was the last Black member of Congress for nearly three decades, and North Carolina did not send another Black representative to Washington until 1993. In his final speech in the House, White predicted that Black Americans would one day return to Congress. He was right, but it took most of a century.

The Wilmington story was then covered over. For decades, it was taught in North Carolina, if at all, as a "race riot" started by Black residents. The men who led it went on to prominent careers. Josephus Daniels later served as secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. The real history was recovered slowly by historians, journalists and descendants; the state commission report in 2006 and a widely read history by the journalist David Zucchino, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, brought it to a broad audience.

Recovery has come from unexpected directions. Descendants of families who were banished or fled have traced their lines back to the port city and told those stories publicly, sometimes alongside descendants of the men who led the coup. Wilmington now has a public memorial to the events of 1898, and historical markers stand where markers once said nothing. The state commission recommended that the newspapers that had fanned the campaign acknowledge their role, and at least one major paper published a public reckoning with its own coverage. None of this restores what was taken. It does mean that the official story is no longer the one the coup's leaders wrote.

Why this belongs in a conversation about democracy now

It is easy to treat Wilmington as ancient history. It deserves to be read instead as a case study in how democratic governments are lost.

The coup did not start with violence. It started with a political strategy that defined a group of fellow citizens as a threat, a press campaign that spread that message, and armed groups that made voting dangerous. The violence came after the election, when the people who had organized it decided that results they did not control were illegitimate. And it succeeded because the institutions that were supposed to stop it, the state government, the federal government, the courts, declined to act.

The lesson is not that any particular modern event is the same as Wilmington. Making those comparisons loosely cheapens both the history and the present. The lesson is about what protects elections: officials who certify results they dislike, courts that enforce voting rights, law enforcement that protects voters and officeholders from intimidation, and a public that treats the peaceful transfer of power as nonnegotiable. Those protections were absent in 1898. The record of the twentieth century's voting rights struggle is a record of rebuilding them, and arguments over the rule of law today are arguments over whether they hold.

There is also something here about coalitions. Fusion brought together poor white farmers and Black voters around shared economic grievances, and it was destroyed by a campaign that told the white farmers their real enemy was their Black neighbours. That pattern recurs. Progressives who want durable majorities have to build them across lines that opponents will try to cut, and make the economic case in a way that holds when the fear campaign starts.

What you can do

The people of Wilmington lost their government when the institutions meant to protect it stood aside. Keeping those institutions strong is ordinary civic work.

1. Protect your own vote and help others protect theirs. The voting guide has registration deadlines, voter ID rules, and mail and early voting options for every state, with links to each state's election office.
2. Support election protection and civil rights groups. Voter protection hotlines, poll monitors and legal aid groups are listed by state in the organizations directory. Many need volunteers trained before each election.
3. Know who certifies your elections. State legislators write election law, and county and state officials certify results. Find your representatives by address to get your state legislators' and members of Congress's phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and ask them how they will protect election officials from threats.
4. Follow the voting rights cases. The Supreme Court's 2026 decisions on redistricting and mail ballots are summarized on Court Watch, along with the emergency docket where many election disputes now land.
5. Learn the history where you live. Many communities have their own buried stories of elections overturned or voters driven away. Local historical societies and libraries are often where the record survives. Our racial justice page gathers current reporting on how places are reckoning with that past.