![]() Insurgent veterans joined the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which orchestrated violence and intimidation to deter blacks from organizing and voting.ĭemocrats regained control of the state legislature in 1870. ![]() Many white Democrats were already embittered by the Confederacy's defeat. Resentment also developed over Confederate veterans being barred from voting and holding public office in the state for a period after the war. However, conservative white Democrats, who had previously dominated politics in the state, greatly resented this "radical" change, which they deemed as being brought about by black residents, Unionist " carpetbaggers", and race traitors referred to as " scalawags". Freedmen were eager to vote and overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party that had emancipated them and given them citizenship and suffrage. The state legislature and governorship were dominated by Republican officials, with the governor a white man and the legislature made up of both white and black people. In 1868, North Carolina ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, resulting in the recognition of Reconstruction policies. Tensions grew in Wilmington and other areas because of a shortage of supplies- Confederate currency suddenly had no value and the South was impoverished following the end of the long war. With the end of the war, freedmen who lived in many states left plantations and rural areas and moved to towns and cities, not only to seek work, but also to gain safety by creating black communities without white supervision. Numerous enslaved laborers and free people of color worked at the city's port, in households as domestic servants, and in a variety of jobs as artisans and skilled workers. In 1860, just prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, the majority of Wilmington's population was black, and it was also the largest city in the state of North Carolina, with a population of nearly 10,000. Background A group of "Red Shirts" at Old Hundred, North Carolina, on Election Day 1898 Historian Laura Edwards writes, "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole", as it affirmed that invoking "whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law that black Americans were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was part of an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, which had been underway since the passage of a new constitution in Mississippi in 1890 which raised barriers to the registration of black voters. The Wilmington coup is considered a turning point in post- Reconstruction North Carolina politics. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the American Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people. The coup was the result of a group of the state's white Southern Democrats conspiring and leading a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected local Fusionist biracial government in Wilmington. Since the late 20th century and further study, the event has been characterized as a violent overthrow of a duly elected government by a group of white supremacists. The white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race riot caused by black people. The Wilmington insurrection of 1898, also known as the Wilmington massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington coup of 1898, was a coup d'état and a massacre which was carried out by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, on Thursday, November 10, 1898.
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