198
the advancement of federal troops into the
state would be an insult similar to that of
Reconstruction and would drive another
divide between northern and southern
interests. 14
Legal Strategies to Address Violence
In response to the troubles in the two
Carolinas, U. S. Attorney General John
Griggs and other Washington officials
determined that an investigation was
necessary. Wilmington papers reported that
U. S. senator Jeter Prichard planned to
propose a congressional investigation of the
violence when the session reconvened in
January 1899. North Carolina’s Democratic
press asserted that investigation by Congress
would threaten a newly discovered North—
South unity extolled by President McKinley
and “ intensify race feelings in the south
and… make the negro problem still more
difficult.” 15 At the same time, Oliver
African American reaction to McKinley’s speech was
reprinted in the Wilmington Star after the meeting of
the Afro- American Council in Washington, DC. The
Council cautioned blacks that “ the time has come for
the colored men to act; to act with firmness, calmness
and after due deliberation.” News and Observer
( Raleigh), December 15, 1898; Timothy Thomas
Fortune to Booker T. Washington, December 17,
1898 as quoted in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker
T. Washington Papers, 13 vols. ( Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1972- 1989), 4: 535; Morning Star
( Wilmington), December 30, 1898; “ Open letter to
President McKinley by the colored people of
Massachusetts,” October 3, 1898, Library of
Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections
Division, African American Pamphlet Collection;
McDuffie, “ Politics in Wilmington,” 750.
14 Hayden recounted that a “ hotheaded
Wilmingtonian” had telegraphed federal officials that
if troops were sent into the city, “ caskets should be
included in their equipment” because fellow citizens
“ would not brook any outside interference.” Hayden,
WLI, 98.
15 The “ Negro Problem” had multiple facets. As W.
E. B. DuBois observed in 1897, that although he and
other contemporaries “ ordinarily speak of the Negro
problem as though it were one unchanged question . .
Dockery contested the election of John D.
Bellamy to Congress as a representative
from North Carolina’s Sixth District which
included Wilmington.
As a result of increased
correspondence and a call to action by
. it is not one problem, but rather a plexus of social
problems, some new, some old, some simple, some
complex.” DuBois attributed most of the problems
faced by blacks in economics, politics and education
to their collective history as slaves and second class
citizens after emancipation. He later claimed that the
country had experienced a re- birth of the caste
system for blacks similar to that which existed under
slavery. DuBois summarized three arguments by
which whites justified the new caste system in which
blacks were second class citizens without equal
rights: enfranchisement of blacks was a mistake,
African Americans are inherently inferior to whites,
and a final resolution to the race problem will be
“ open and legal recognition” of black inferiority.
Intellectuals on both sides of the color line began to
use the phrase – “ negro problem” or “ negro question”
– as a catch- all for topics ranging from education and
disfranchisement to strains on north- south relations.
Governor Daniel Russell biographer Jeffrey Crow
defined the “ negro question” as a “ shibboleth for
disfranchisement” by whites. Owen Aldis of Chicago
wrote Thomas Nelson Page that “ this North Carolina
affair shows that neither this generation nor the next
will ever be through with the dangers arising from the
negro.” He also observed that he did not believe
“ that the education of the intellect of the negro will
alone solve the problem.” Another writer, Thomas
H. Carter of Charlottesville, concluded that “ the idea
of the north that the [ Civil] war solved the negro
problem” was wrong and that the “ problem” still
persisted with no answer. Discussions of the “ negro
problem” persisted long after the Carolina riots faded
from the papers. Wilmington Messenger, December
6, 1898; Morning Star ( Wilmington), December 9,
1898; W. E. B. DuBois in Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 1898
reprinted in W. E. B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and
Addresses, 1890- 1919, 2 vols., ed., Philip S. Foner
( New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 1: 104- 108;
W. E. B. Dubois in the Proceedings of the National
Negro Conference in New York, 1909 as re- printed
in Foner, W. E. B. DuBois Speaks, 196- 199; Owen
Aldis to Thomas Nelson Page, November 10, 1898,
Thomas H. Carter to Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas
Nelson Page Papers, Duke University Library,
Durham; Crow, Maverick Republican, 138.
State Publications Collection
