The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
Even in-universe (and IRL) democracy is integral to socialism actually working, otherwise it'll degenerate into a party bureaucracy.
Well, you can have intra-Party democracy, with a moderately strong leadership that ensures candidates remain true to the principles of the revolution while the general populace -presumably Party members- still holds the rights to assembly, organize and vote in favor of their preferred vision for the future of the Party, and thus, the Country
Socialists in the South
Excerpt from Black and Red: Socialists and the Race Question In the Late United States (Imperial University Publishing. Brisbane, 1963)
Daniel DeLeon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party, was a difficult individual. He was often blasted by ostensible allies for his inflexibility and the bullheaded dogmatism that drove many away from the SLP.
He was consistently scornful of electoral politics, insistent that the ballot box held nothing at all for the worker, and that reforms were hardly worth fighting for, even so long as the revolution failed to come. DeLeon essentially had to be wrangled into running for the congressional seat he eventually won. Once he did so, he found he actually enjoyed the opportunity to hurl Marxist invective at flabbergasted Republicans and Democrats. But on most other issues he remained as unmoved as ever.
Race, in particular, held little interest for DeLeon and he refused to discover any interest in it. For him, class was class, and all else was nothing. Besides his stubborn nature, his foreign birth and upbringing made it difficult for him to understand the extreme salience of race in American daily life.
He frequently claimed that the friction between whites and blacks was “in no way attributable to their color” and was instead purely a function of class. He failed to see the unique status of American blacks in the life of the nation.
This being the case, it surprised many that the SLP received an unusually high share of the vote from a number of southern cities during the ’94 midterms. New Orleans was still under martial law and thus barred from voting. But in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Wilmington, the Socialist ticket won a surprising 15%+ of the electorate. Considering the demographics of these cities, this would have been impossible without the black vote.
All three cities had seen sympathetic strikes that summer, and there had been some violence in Atlanta especially. So, the blacks who voted SLP probably did do so as a function of class rather than race. Nevertheless, the result was an alarm for the Socialists, who until now had focused almost entirely on organization in the industrial belt and to a lesser extent the mining west. Many were not even aware their party had been on the ballot in any southern states.
Now it was clear a potential constituency existed in the south, and that constituency consisted at least in part of black Americans.
DeLeon was all for organizing in the south but was opposed to any organization ‘on the basis of race’.
Many of the SLP organizers who took their first tentative steps over the Potomac were inclined to agree. In late 1895, a branch of the party was opened in New Orleans. Its headquarters were shortly targeted by arsonists. City firemen took their time in fighting the blaze, and by the time they even bothered to direct their hoses in the proper direction, it had been reduced to ash. A young Pennsylvania Socialist who’d traveled to Mississippi in the hopes of organizing sharecroppers, white and black, was dragged from his bed in the night by masked men, stripped naked, beaten, and ordered to leave town by morning or die. The newly established SLP offices in Montgomery began receiving letters in their first week of operation threatening physical harm and death should they not ‘make themselves scarce’ immediately.
All this was without loudly advocating racial egalitarianism. Many Socialists perhaps understandably believed DeLeon right, and that pushing for any policies along racial lines was a surefire way to bring down even worse wrath upon their heads.
This began to change with the arrival, or rather, the return, of Peter H. Clark.
In 1896, Clark was already sixty-seven, a lifelong abolitionist and later labor activist. In the 1870s, he had joined the SLP (then called the Workingmen’s Party) but left within a few years after he was convinced the party had little concern for the welfare of blacks.
Now, in the wake of the Red Summer, with the specter of disenfranchisement looming over the south (Mississippi had recently implemented a new constitution effectively stripping blacks and many poor whites of the vote), and the reality that the SLP was making efforts, if halting and tentative ones, to reach out to black voters, he returned.
Clark insisted that “if the negro can be convinced that socialism is his best, and indeed his only, hope for emancipation, he will be the best and most loyal socialist on the face of the earth.”
DeLeon was skeptical, but many in the party, especially its newer and younger members, were less so. This faction, led by Emil Seidel, finally prevailed upon DeLeon to at least allow Clark a permanent column in People, the SLP mouthpiece, devoted to ‘colored issues’. DeLeon stormily agreed. As the party’s ranks swelled, his personal idiosyncrasies counted for less and less.
One of his very first editorials was simply titled ‘the Negro and Socialism’. Roughly paraphrasing Sieyés, Clark asked, rhetorically; ‘What is the negro? Nothing. What does the negro wish to be? Something. What will socialism give him? Everything’.
It was a great promise, but the SLP’s prospects in the south did not look much improved. Despite the respectable vote share they had received in some quarters, it seemed few native southerners, white or black, were clamoring to join up, whether out of apathy, antipathy, or fear. Organizers were still being harassed, run out of town, and in a few particularly grim examples, lynched.
By the close of 1896, the executive committee was considering cutting its losses in the old Confederacy.
It was the Populists that came to the rescue. In the wake of ’94, the Populists were in a powerful position through the south. In some states, particularly Georgia and North Carolina, they had all but completely swept the vote of the poor farmers and workers from the Democrats. In others, such as Mississippi and Florida, they were making serious inroads.
Initially, the Populists had been indifferent and even hostile to the SLP. Bryan, by now the party’s undisputed leader, distrusted DeLeon and his bunch, foreign and ‘godless’ as they were (though the American socialists were rarely as anti-religious as their European counterparts). But the Populist Party was having a hard fight in the south. The Democrats might be fading, but they were not fading gently. They clawed and fought for every voter. Populist offices were ransacked same as SLP offices. Known Populist voters and organizers were harassed and on occasion killed. Bryan decided they needed all the allies they could get.
The coalition began at the local level. Only a month before the elections of 1896, the respective leaderships of the SLP and Populist Party in Athens, Georgia, concluded an agreement by which they would run a joint ticket. It was more a hollow display of strength than anything—when one saw two parties joined together, hopefully they would not notice one of those two parties had next to zero members.
More important to the Socialists than electoral gains were the physical protections afforded by the alliance.
Only a few weeks later, an armed band organized by the Athens Democrats made for the SLP headquarters, with the intention of burning it down or stampeding its occupants out, with the justification that the Socialists were pushing ‘nigger rule’. When they arrived, they found the building guarded by a hastily formed but heavily armed militia courtesy of the Populists, who commanded strong support from farmers in the region. Not having anticipated resistance, the vigilantes retreated.
Similar stories came out of dozens of towns and cities through the south.
Finally, the SLP had some leeway, though not much, to organize.
The party attempted to strike a fragile balance between appeal to black workers and farmers, and appeal to their white counterparts. No socialist editor or speaker south of Washington would dream of calling for social equality, or, God forbid, integration. Rather, in the southern editions of Daily People, and on election posters, there were promises to ‘give the Negro a fair deal’, or ‘right the wrongs done to the colored race’. One could read into the slogans promises as modest or lofty as he liked. And those whites that would be scared off by such meek proposals would never have voted Socialist to begin with.
The SLP thus went on to score some appreciable victories in Dixie. In 1896, they managed to elect two legislators to the Louisiana state congress. That same year, they elected three representatives from Georgia on a Populist-Socialist ticket. In 1897, the Socialists managed to hold a rally in New Orleans attended by more than 2,000. Naturally, it devolved into a brawl, but no one was killed, so it was counted as a triumph.
The great turning point did not come until Wilmington.
In 1896, North Carolina had brought to a power a ‘Fusionist’ coalition of Republican and Populist candidates, including Republican Daniel J. Russell as governor. The Fusionists also held an overwhelming majority in the state legislature in the wake of the elections. The victory was powered both by the support of the state’s large black minority, and also an increasing number of poor and laboring whites defecting from a Democratic Party they saw as ever more the tool of the moneyed ‘Bourbon’ elites.
One of the Republican governor’s first acts in office was to sign an act reducing property qualifications for suffrage, endearing him and the Fusionists to the poor, black and white.
The outcome was horrifying for North Carolina’s white supremacists. The terrible days of Reconstruction seemed at hand again. Anarchy, race war, and worst of all, race amalgamation loomed.
As 1898 approached, the Democrats were convinced they had to turn out the Fusionists as soon as possible or risk tumbling into dreaded ‘negro rule’. This impulse was especially powerful in the black majority Wilmington. Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina, a bustling port city surrounded by the pine flats whose sap and timber fed the state’s economic life.
The Fusionist mayor Silas Wright had staffed the civil services with other Fusionists, including a number of blacks. The sight of African postmen and, aldermen, and worse of all, policemen, was too much for many of the local whites.
The Democrats launched a statewide campaign against Russell and the ‘vicious negroes’, that he was foisting onto the good people of North Carolina. The rabid Ben ‘Pitchfork’ Tillman of South Carolina—who had openly bragged of overturning electoral results by way of fraud and slaying negro voters in the days of Reconstruction—upbraided his neighbors to the north for their temerity in allowing themselves to be ‘ruled by niggers’.
But Wilmington, with its large and relatively organized community of blacks, was especially important. Early in 1898, editor of the Raleigh News and Observor Josephus Daniels met with state Democratic Party chairman Furnifold Simmons in New Bern to discuss the upcoming election. They agreed that, besides the vigorous press campaign Daniels and his allies would wage on behalf of the Democrats, force might very well be necessary to prevent the black vote from deciding in favor of the fusionists yet again.
In Wilmington, the core of any paramilitary units assembled to terrorize blacks would undoubtedly be drawn from the largely Irish white working-class districts of the city, historically a loyal Democratic constituency.
But history was marching on.
In 1894, Wilmington’s workers had joined in the nation-wide general strike that had ended in such sorrow. This included the Irish brakemen, bricklayers, and stevedores. A clash had ensued with state militia, leaving twenty dead. It was no New Orleans or Chicago, but it was bloody. And it was not forgotten.
A significant number of North Carolina’s whites had voted for the fusionists, including those in Wilmington. This certainly did not mean they had suddenly become proponents of racial equality, by any means. But this change of allegiances worried leading Democrats nonetheless—it was a foreboding crack in the hitherto rock-solid popular foundation of Democratic-white supremacist dominance.
A chapter of the SLP had existed in Wilmington since ‘95, and it had made some inroads with the working-class whites and blacks alike through their appeals to the spirit of ’94 and denunciations of Democrat ‘treason’ against the working class. Not to the extent of the Populists, but they had a firm, if quite small constituency.
Across the state, Fusionists were well aware the coming election would not be a fair and free one if the Democrats could help it. Already, men like Daniels and Simmons, not to mention the old white supremacist stalwart and ex-Confederate officer Alfred Waddell, were raising paramilitary units of ‘red shirts’, which would patrol on election day and keep blacks from the ballot boxes by any means necessary.
In Wilmington the redshirts were especially prominent. Many were not even North Carolinians—they had come from South Carolina or even further south to prevent negro rule in a southern sister state. A few weeks ahead of the election, they paraded 1,000 strong through the city, intentionally planning their route to include predominantly black neighborhoods in a show of intimidation. They passed, singing and shouting, pistols rattling at their hips, with a very clear message for any black man who might entertain the idea of voting.
But something had changed. When they moved on, and marched through white districts, their reception was not quite what they had expected. There were certainly cheers, probably more cheers than hisses—but there were hisses.
It is quite important to emphasize that this implies no developing racial concord in Wilmington or North Carolina. When the redshirts were catcalled by whites, it was not because they were white supremacists, but because they were Democrats, and there was a developing contempt towards the Democratic party among many southern whites.
The Fusionists hardly cared about motivations. They would need all the support they could get.
In late October, the chair of the SLP in Wilmington, in fact a female New Yorker named Ella Bloo, came to Republican Mayor Wright and offered the party’s meager resources in the coming campaign. A bit befuddled but in no position to turn her down, he agreed.
So it was that a triple alliance of Socialists-Republicans-Populists emerged in North Carolina. It was certainly a strange marriage, not one that would last, and not one that could have ever come into being outside of such a specific time and place. But it did exist, and it would contest the elections of 1898.
The fusionists (which in North Carolina now included the SLP) launched a propaganda campaign to counter that of the democrats.
The theme was not, of course, the defense of colored suffrage. That would have been a non-starter. Rather, they drew as much attention as possible to the fact that the Bourbon Democrats would just as soon disenfranchise working whites as negroes, and that in fact such provisions would be included in the state constitution many prominent Democrats proposed to implement should they win the elections. The Democrats were accused of using the bogey of ‘negro rule’ as a treacherous mask for their true intentions of taking the vote from honest, working white men.
“We couldn’t say to white men, you must get out and defend the nigger vote,” A black socialist who worked on the campaign in Wilmington at the time would later recall. “We would not have got a single man out of his house with that. We had to say—and it was true—you have to defend your right to vote, and if the black man’s right to vote is defended as a consequence, well, so be it.”
Regardless, the message was an effective one in Wilmington, with its working class still smarting from the suppression of ’94. The Fusionists, with the support of Mayor Wright and Chief of Police John Melton, organized their own militias to counter the redshirts. Needing a symbol of their own, the armed supporters of the Fusionists were soon parading through Wilmington wearing green armbands, the color of the Populists.
In a strange twist of fate, the militants of the Democrats and of the fusionists were both largely drawn from ethnic Irish workers. Sometimes even from the same family.
“I saw two Irishmen,” Chief Melton would later recall. “A redshirt and a Fusionist, both carrying pistols, confront each other on a street corner. The red shirt asked his fellow ‘how can you carry arms so that the nigger can rule over you?’ To which the fellow replied, ‘you are the one who wants to be nothing but a nigger for the rich man’. Amazingly, neither shot the other down where he stood, nor did they even come to blows. But they turned and walked away.”
An Irish railway worker, in an appeal to his fellows, said that “the Democrat like Mr. Waddell or Mr. Daniels is not your friend. He will call you a white man and a brother so that you will cast your vote for him, and then when your back is turned, he will laugh that he got one over on that filthy Hibernian ape.”
The Socialists, though small (they had registered less than 250 votes out of Wilmington’s 5,000 or so eligible in the ’96 elections, and the party rolls included only three dozen people) were second to none in organization. It was them that produced the famous cartoon depicting a white worker running himself through with a saber to get at the black man behind him, while a portly Democrat in suit and top hat watches from afar, rubbing his hands with glee. The sword reads ‘Democratic government’, and the caption reads ‘the white man’s ticket, or the rich man’s ticket?’. Another cartoon depicts a similarly caricatured capitalist standing upon the corpse of a slain laborer (identified as ‘the workers of ’94’) and extending a blood-drenched hand of friendship towards a living worker, who he calls ‘my Anglo-Saxon brother!’.
But tensions did not explode until election day themselves.
When the day did come, violence erupted almost immediately, as a young white socialist bricklayer named Michael Cronly went to cast his vote. The trio of redshirts stationed at the ballot box, in fact working comrades of Cronly’s who knew his sympathies, threatened, ‘boy, you had best be voting the white man’s party’. Cronly responded, ‘I am going to vote Fusionist and by God if any of you try to stop me, I will shoot you dead’. He attempted to force his way past them but was thrown back. Cronly did not draw the revolver he had tucked into his belt. Instead, he returned with six other armed fusionist militants, who compelled the three redshirts at gunpoint to surrender their own arms, then beat them bloody and stuffed the ballot box full of Fusionist votes. They remained on guard the rest of the day, allowing blacks and Populists or Republicans in but turning away all men they knew or suspected would vote Democrat.
In the town of Maxton, redshirts smashed ballot boxes, stuffed others, and ran off blacks with rifles. In Hamlet, a clash between redshirts and fusionists resulted in five dead men and a burnt polling station.
The entire state of North Carolina, but especially Wilmington, seemed a war zone. Men kept their ears open for gunfire as they filled out ballots. They stood guard at their doors with rifles, waiting for either redshirt terror or a phantom black uprising that Daniels had threatened in his papers.
The Fusionist militias in Wilmington and the outlying areas were largely the product of socialist organization. Bloor herself worked out their division into ‘companies’ of twenty men, each led by captains, an organization Chief Melton simply signed off on. Most of the men in these forces were not themselves Socialists (though some were), but simply Republicans, or, more likely, Populists.
The classic 1958 film, the Battle of Wilmington famously portrays a mixed-race militia defending a ballot box from redshirts in the employ of the story’s villain, a wealthy planter. It is stirring fiction, but it is indeed fiction. While both black and white men served in Fusionist militias, almost without exception the individual units were monoracial. Blacks and whites might be willing to acknowledge, grudgingly, that they shared an interest, but that did not mean they wanted to carry arms beside one another.
Nevertheless, the sight of Irish stevedores or rough-faced white farmers escorting blacks to vote struck many as surreal. The Wilmington Messenger denounced them as ‘race traitors’, but they certainly did not see themselves as such. As far as they were concerned, they were white men, working in the interests of white men, and if blacks had to vote to advance that interest, then so be it.
One young black voter recalled being guarded at the polls by a crew of “cruel-looking white timbermen with pistols.” He went on; “as we approached, one of them waved his Colt revolver before my face and said, ‘we are taking you to vote, and you will vote the fusionist ticket’. It was a silly threat. No black man from Galveston to Richmond would vote Democrat. I suppose he just wanted me to know that even if we were for the moment in league, he was still a white man and I was still a black man.”
Daniels’ News and Observer crowed that the Democrats would ‘sweep the states’ as North Carolinians had ‘grown tired of negroism’.
Fusionist papers seemed equally confident of victory.
The true vote totals will likely never be known. The widespread voter intimidation, violence, and outright fraud perpetrated on both sides that 8 November makes it impossible.
Nevertheless, as it was reported in North Carolina’s papers the following day, the Fusionists had not only maintained their two-thirds majority in the state legislature, they had expanded it, compressing the Democrats to less than a fourth of total representatives.
The Democrats, of course, were horrified. The News and Observer lamented that ‘negroism, communism, and anarchy have won the day’, rather overstating the presence of the Socialists among the ranks of the Fusionists. But in most of the state, the results of the election were accepted with a quiet, simmering resignation.
Not so in Wilmington.
10 November 1898, two days after the election and a day after the outcome had become clear, Colonel Waddell, prominent attorney and organizer of white supremacist paramilitaries George Rountree, and the former Democratic mayor Silas Fishblate called a meeting of Wilmington’s ‘white men’ in the county courthouse, to ‘discuss the furtherance of white supremacy’.
It was clear to all who saw the appeal printed in the Wilmington Messenger that the ‘discussion’ would consist of organization for the overthrow of the city government.
Panicked, Chief Melton issued orders for the Fusionist divisions remaining from election day not to disband, and for those that had already disbanded to reconstitute. Mayor Wright barricaded himself at Thalian Hall (which served as theater and city hall), and Fusionist militiamen shortly arrived to provide security. They sealed up the entrances and established a perimeter around the building, and finally a number of the men sporting green armbands took up positions on the rooftop or in top floor windows, so that they could sweep the streets with rifles.
Meanwhile, Democrats and redshirts flooded into the courthouse in answer to Waddell’s summons. Sure enough, Waddell and Rountree harangued the crowd, announcing that the election was ‘illegitimate’ and represented the triumph of ‘black and red anarchy’ over ‘good government’. As such, Waddell insisted the white men of Wilmington had no choice but to take up arms. Of course, many of the redshirts in his audience were already carrying arms and raised their Winchesters and revolvers into the air in assent to the colonel’s plea.
By noon, an army of nearly 2,000 redshirts and other armed Democratic whites were marching on city hall, with the intent of forcing the resignation of Wright, Melton, and the rest of the Fusionist officials. And if they would not go peacefully—well, that was why the men carried rifles.
The mob paraded through Wilmington’s streets, shouting ‘out with the niggers!’ and ‘this is a white man’s government!’
Melton had consciously divided his Fusionist militants by race. He placed white militiamen in city hall and the immediately adjacent streets and spread black units further along the approaches to city hall, so that they would be the first to meet the approaching redshirts.
All of Wilmington not already out and armed on one side or another huddled down behind locked doors and prayed for the best.
Two blocks from Thalian Hall, the redshirt column encountered its first resistance. It was a thin line of black fusionist militiamen, spread across the road, rifles on their shoulders. A redshirt captain called Dowling ordered them to step aside. They did not.
In the weeks leading up to the election, both Democrats and Fusionists had purchased hundreds of Winchesters, Colts, and other weapons for use by their respective partisans. Wilmington was perhaps the best-armed town in the country. And now they would be put to use.
The redshirts raised rifles, and again demanded that the blacks make way. They refused and insisted “we are defending the true government”.
Someone opened fire. Bullets whirred along the old streets and sparked off brick and mortar. Men fell, shot through the throats or guts. Blood slicked the cobblestones. Acrid smoke hung in the air.
By the time the first bout of shooting was through, the redshirts had killed or scattered all of their opponents and continued their march on to Thalian Hall.
They defiladed before the building. In the windows and on the building’s classical Greek porticos, they could see their similarly equipped counterparts glowering down at them. Many of the men on opposite sides of the lines knew each other. They worked together or were even family.
But it had come down to one question—as the Fusionists saw it, did they care more for the suppression of the negro vote, or the protection of their own?
Waddell told his redshirts not to “squeeze your trigger unless you must—there ought to be no more blood, excepting that these scoundrels will not come out peacefully.”
The redshirts called out to the Fusionist officials and militiamen barricaded inside, “come out, come out, or by God we’ll turn you out!”
The redshirts, who had already slain some half a dozen black militiamen on the approach, were ready for further action. The blood of the Fusionists was likewise up.
The Battle of Wilmington was about to commence.
Last edited:
The Battle of Wilmington
Wilmington, North Carolina
November 1898
Truth was, he did not especially want to be here. He looked up at Thalian Hall, the neat Greco-Roman construction, sparkling white in the evening light. God willing this would be over before it got dark.
He had not liked seeing those negroes fall, but if they would not put aside all of this nonsense there was nothing else to be done. Robbins was not a nigger-hater. But the black man had his place. Everything had its place in the world. Robbins was a workingman, and that was all he was. Regardless of what the red strangers said, he did not want to grasp for anything more. He was content. Why could not the negroes be likewise?
Robbins scanned the roof of the hall. He counted six men there, though there were probably more he could not see. Six men. White men. From down here on the street, he could make out the green armbands and in the Winchesters in their own hands. He could even call one of them by name—Bobby Tanner, who labored alongside him at the wharf, and who was now aiming a rifle at him from the roof of city hall.
He simply could not understand them. This red Fusionist madness was just that—madness. There was nothing worth negro rule. Not the vote, not free silver, nothing. Why could they not see this?
Robbins shouldered his rifle and sighed. The redshirts all along the line began knocking the stocks of their weapons against the ground, producing a chilling cacophony.
Colonel Waddell, in characteristic fit of self-importance, had brought along a tanned thoroughbred, on which eh now sat. He clopped up to the head of the redshirts, reined his mount in, and shouted up at the hall. “Come on out! Silas Wright! John Melton! John Dancy! Come out, and we will guarantee your lives so long as you are gone from Wilmington by morning!”
The red-orange rays of the sun blasted out in a sizzling halo behind Thalian Hall. Robbins shielded his eyes again.
There was a brief moment of silence. Then one of the Fusionists up on the roof shouted down, “goddamn you Bourbons, and goddamn the Democratic Party!” He shouldered his rifle, drew a bead, and fired. The skull of a redshirt five down from Robbins exploded. The man sagged to the flagstones, blood and brain matter leaking from the ragged cavity just above his left eyebrow. He stared blindly ahead, mouth slack.
Another moment of inaction passed.
Then an eruption of fire burst forth from the redshirts on Thalian Hall. Bullets tore away chunks of marble. Shattered glass. Winchesters flashed in the windows as the Fusionists returned fire.
As he dove behind the cover of a donkey cart, Robbins heard one of his comrades shout; “Damned niggers!”. But he himself was quite sure all of their opponents were, at least those he could see, white men.
He poked his head out over the edge of the cart, only to pull it back down as a round snapped past his ear. He crawled around the side, got down on his belly, and balanced the rifle over one of the cart’s sagging axles. There was a Fusionist hiding behind one of the faux-Greek pillars. Occasionally he would stick his head out to fire into the mob of redshirts with what looked like an old wartime revolver. Robbins took careful aim. He stilled his breath. The next time the man emerged, he blew a hole in his chest. The Fusionist fell back dead. Thank God.
The redshirts were strung out along the square before Thalian Hall, trapped behind carts or benches or bushes. The withering fire from up on the rooftops kept their heads down. But they had formed a loose cordon of men around the building. Robbins realized they had only to let the defenders exhaust their ammunition. Then they could storm the place at their leisure. And the enemy had squandered his last chance for mercy.
Robbins heard the clattering of hooves on stone. He turned his head to see Colonel Waddell careering wildly behind the lines, waving his hand, shouting, ‘charge ‘em boys, charge ‘em!’
Evidently, he seemed to believe it was ’63, and he was back on the field. But his words had an effect. Redshirts stood from behind their meager cover, readying for a frontal assault on the hall.
Why not wait for them to run out of bullets? But Robbins did not have the gall to counter the mood, or his commander.
“Charge e—” halfway through his well-worn cry, a rifle sparked in an upstairs window, and a bullet slammed into the colonel’s shoulder. He tumbled from his saddle with a howl. The shattered limb spurted blood.
The sight galvanized the redshirts. With a cry they rose from concealment, shouldered their rifles, and advanced. Robbins stood, took a deep breath, and charged out over the blood-flecked square once more.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The battle at Thalian Hall had been raging for nearly an hour when Colonel Taylor of the Wilmington Light Infantry finally decided to involve himself and his men.
The Light Infantry was a company of militia stationed in Wilmington’s armory on market street. They had just returned from the war against Spain and were still technically in federal service. Thus, though the Infantry was firmly allied to the Democratic Party establishment and often served as its paramilitary wing, Taylor was reluctant to commit his boys the insurrection. He feared it would invite federal intervention.
But now, after more than thirty minutes listening helplessly to the snapping of rifles and shouts of rageful, wounded men from only a mile away, he decided he could tarry no more. He marshalled his men and announced they were going to ‘put down this damned negro rebellion’, to cheers and hoots.
The Light Infantry had an ace in the hole that would turn the tide of the battle in the favor of the redshirts. They had recently acquired a Colt rapid fire machine gun, purchased with the private donations of Wilmington’s wealthier citizens. The weapon was a killer, capable of firing up to 400 rounds per minute. Turned on the Fusionists, it would make the Winchesters and revolvers now in play look like children’s pop guns.
Taylor ordered the Colt loaded up onto its cart, and they were off to Thalian Hall and the rescue of the embattled redshirts.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Daniel Wright fingered the action on his old 1858 Navy Remington. He tried to take heart in the numbers—he was not alone. But there were only twenty-three men in his division. Hardly fit to take on soldiers. They crouched in the shadows of a dark alleyway, listening to the rifles crack in the distance.
Wright didn’t mind that Chief Melton had assigned white Fusionists to guard Thalian Hall and sent him and the other black militiamen to guard the roads on the route to the hall. If the whites wanted to take the brunt of the redshirts’ fire, that was alright with him.
His division had been ordered to garrison the corner of 4th Street should the redshirts attack from the south. Most of the Democrats had ended up marching down from the north, and Wright and his fellows had not yet been forced to discharge their weapons. That, again, was alright with him.
He did not want to be here. It was nearly dark now. He would very much like to be in bed. He poked his head around the corner. The streets were empty. All life in Wilmington was either struggling for Thalian Hall or locked away behind shuttered doors and windows.
“You see something, Dan?” asked Walter Bruce.
“See nothing yet,” Wright replied.
No, he did not want to be here. But he had to be here. The green armband was tied tightly enough around his right arm it almost hurt. But it meant something. He was a man, for God’s sake. He ought to be free to cast his ballot and live in liberty just like any other man. And if he—or some redshirt son of a bitch—had to die to prove it, then just as well.
Not twenty minutes before, a messenger had come from Chief Melton, who was still holed up in the hall with the mayor and the rest of the aldermen. The courier had slipped through the redshirt lines and bore an urgent order. Word was the Light Infantry was coming out of the armory and bringing the Colt.
Everyone in Wilmington knew of ‘the Colt’. Mightier than fifty rifles, they said. And if the Colt was put to use, that would be the end for the Fusionists.
So, Wright’s division had one task—when the soldiers marched by, seize the Colt.
It hardly seemed possible. There were a hundred men in the Infantry, and while they would not send all one hundred up 4th street, they would send enough. Wright had only his thirty odd-boys with their rusty rifles and single-actions.
But at the very least, they held the element of surprise. And that might count for everything.
Wright heard a whistle. He looked up. It was Jim Bowman, the spindly timberman they’d placed up on the nearest roof to watch around the corner. The whistle meant the Infantry was on its way.
Wright turned to the mass of dark shapes crouched behind him in the thickening shadows. Occasionally, their black faces were illuminated in the flash of rifle barrels or pistol cylinders. “Quiet,” Wright hissed. “Quiet, now! They’re comin’!”
Soon enough, they heard the unmistakable cadence of horse’s hooves and polished boots against brick.
In another moment, the head of the infantry column rounded the corner. Peeking just out of the alley, Wright watched the first rank of soldiers emerge into his line of sight, blue coats dark and almost black in the nearly vanished sunlight. They came up the road, about five abreast, and ten deep. So, there were about fifty. Half the Infantry, right here. Behind them came the Colt, drawn by a powerful grey workhorse, straining its muscles, the heavy gun bouncing along in its wake.
The soldiers approached, faces grim, rifles primed.
Wright signaled up to Bowman. Then he signaled to the men behind him. Thirty seconds. Then the column would pass their alley. That was their window.
Twenty seconds. The soldiers neared, advancing inexorably towards the cacophony of the battle in the distance.
Ten seconds.
“Go on, boys!” Wright shouted. He and his division exploded from the alley, and burst upon the Light Infantry, shouting and shooting. Wright’s revolver flashed, and he blew the kepi from a sergeant’s head with a burst of brain and scalp. The man riding in the cart alongside the Colt toppled over, slain by a shot from up on the rooftops.
The soldiers reeled, taken utterly on the back foot. They staggered backwards, fighting to shoulder their rifles and take aim.
“Fuck! Fuck!”
Wright saw through the corner of his eye one of his militiamen go down with a bullet in the gut. But he pushed on towards the soldiers, who increasingly bunched up against the far side of the road. The Fusionists worked their rifles and pistols with practiced ease, while the infantrymen sputtered and stumbled and fired wild, aimless shots into the dark sky.
Wright slid a new round of bullets into his revolver. He crouched low, took aim again, and shot another soldier through the eye. The man crashed backwards through an apothecary’s window in a flurry of glass.
Another Fusionist fell, taken in the chest. But the soldiers’ numbers quickly thinned. Well-drilled as they were, they simply had not been prepared. Three boys in blue threw down their rifles, turned, and sprinted off down an adjacent backstreet, to the raucous laughter of the Fusionists.
When the number of the infantrymen had fallen to near twenty, a blue coated captain finally raised his arms in surrender and cried. “Halt! Halt, boys, halt!”
His men quickly followed suit, throwing down rifles or pistols and instead throwing their hands into the air.
The black militiamen rapidly surrounded them. A few swept forwards to collect the weapons.
“Now,” said one of Wright’s lieutenants, as he plucked a Springfield from the arms of a red-faced Army corporal. “We’ll be takin’ the Colt.”
Wright detailed ten men to guard the prisoners. Then he jogged towards the stilled cart where the rapid-fire gun sat. Amazingly, the horse had not bolted in the commotion. He rubbed the beast’s nose to calm it, and then mounted the cart.
The machine gun was a fearsome looking weapon. He’d never seen anything like it. It was long, sleek, balanced like a camera on three stout legs. Wright ran a hand over its barrel.
“Goddammit you let that thing be, boy!” cried one of the soldiers, who by now had been forced to his knees, with his hands behind his head. Wright smiled and slid a finger into the trigger guard.
“It’s ours now!” he called back.
A cheer went up. Wright hopped into the driver’s seat and took up the horse’s reins. The nearest ten or so of his men crowded into the cart alongside the machine gun.
Those who remained to watch the prisoners marched the disarmed soldiers into the ruined apothecary at gunpoint. Wright snapped the reins, and the cart careened forward, racing towards the sound of gunfire. Racing for Thalian Hall.
The redshirts would be expecting the Colt any minute now. And they would get it, alright.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Bill Robbins was tired. He was again on his belly behind meager cover that would not stop a handgun bullet—only this time the cover was not an abandoned horse cart, but the heaped corpses of two fellow redshirts.
The square before Thalian Hall was only some thirty meters wide, but it might as well have been a mile across, for all the effort it was taking them to cross it. The Fusionists hadn’t let up yet and picked off their besiegers with frustrating accuracy. As they should. Robbins knew many of the boys in the building and knew how they could shoot.
Three sallies the redshirts had made towards the broad front doors of the hall, and three times they had been repulsed, leaving the stones of the square littered with the bodies of their comrades.
Waddell, who had bandaged his wounded shoulder, had returned to the fray, and was again extorting his boys ‘forward, forward!’ This time, from foot rather than horseback.
Another redshirt he did not know by name crawled up next to Robbins. “Listen,” the man said. “Them boys from the armory are bringin’ it in. Jes’ gotta hold on another minute.”
Robbins took heart. The Colt. Thank God. That would decide the day.
A bullet flashed on the stones just a few feet ahead of them. Both men flinched and pressed themselves tighter to the ground. The piled bodies serving as their scanty concealment had begun to turn white as the blood drained from their faces and hands. The blood leaking from their fatal wounds had turned a dark brown on their red coats.
“Who were those boys?” Robbins’ companion asked.
“Don’t hardly know. Not by name.”
“Well, God rest ‘em.”
“Right.”
It was dark now, and the stars were blinking into being overhead.
“Come on, boys! Charge ‘em! Charge ‘em!” Waddell, this time peeking out from over the top of a barrel, had taken up his cry again. The last three charges had not gone so well, but that was no reason not to try again, Robbins supposed.
As if to hearten the attackers, at that moment some lucky redshirt scored a direct hit on a Fusionist crouching in a second-floor window. The man’s head snapped back with a splash of blood, and then he tumbled down over the ledge, striking the square with a hard crack of bone.
The redshirts gathered their wits for another assault. God willing, this one would at last break the will of the defenders, and the hall—and the city—would be theirs.
Then, they heard the clicking of horse’s hooves on stone.
“The Colt! The army boys!” someone called.
Robbins audibly breathed a sigh of relief. He turned, rolling onto his back, still not eager to stand and expose himself to the sharpshooters on the roof. Behind them, coming up from the south, moving as a dark shadow through puffs of gunsmoke, was the Colt mounted on its horse cart. The cart trundled closer. Robbins saw the wheels shudder on their axes beneath the weight of the heavy gun.
The cart entered the square.
And then the redshirts noticed something horrifying. The men in the cart were negroes.
There was hardly a moment to process that, because then the Colt opened up. On them.
Robbins heard the chatter of the gun like God’s hammer. He saw flames spark from the barrel. He watched six redshirts scythed down in quick succession by the monstrous weapon. One man’s stomach was torn open. His guts spilled forth and he toppled over them. The mound of intestines steamed in the chill evening air.
The man beside Robbins leapt up. He charged the Colt. The next round ripped his chest open and burst out through his back.
All discipline dissolved. Robbins saw Colonel Waddell sprinting for cover. He decided to do as much himself.
The hell with it.
He tossed away his rifle. He jumped up. He ran, amidst the screaming, panicked throngs of his comrades and the victorious hoots of the Fusionists.
Robbins leapt over downed corpses. He skidded through pools of blood and gore. He only just saw the Cold tracking him out of the corner of his eye. A lance of pain shot into his side. He stumbled, rose, and kept running. Something warm and wet pooled at his hip. The pain exploded through his chest.
The next bullet caught him just above the right ear and took off the top half of his skull.
But he didn’t feel that one.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Excerpt from Black and Red: Socialists and the Race Question In the Late United States (Imperial University Publishing. Brisbane, 1963)
By the time the bloodletting was through, the only redshirts left in the square before Thalian Hall were corpses or prisoners.
The Battle of Wilmington had ended in a resounding victory for the Fusionists. In a grand twist of irony, this was thanks in no small part to the Colt machine gun meant to safeguard white-Democratic power.
When it became clear the redshirts’ organization had been broken and their men scattered, the Fusionist divisions quickly devolved into death squads. Gangs of men sporting green armbands, black and white, roamed the streets of Wilmington, firing Winchesters into the air, calling “come on out, you damned Bourbons! Come on out!”
Colonel Waddell attempted to take refuge in the armory with what remained of the Light Infantry, but a gang of Fusionists easily overpowered his protectors, dragged the colonel out, and hanged him from the nearest lamppost.
The other Colonel, Taylor of the Light Infantry, was seized attempting to flee Wilmington in disguise, beaten, and then hanged himself.
The captured redshirts were herded into the town jail, which was soon overcrowded by a factor of nearly ten. With passions as inflamed as they were, this problem was quickly solved by the summary murders of about three dozen.
By now, news of the chaos in Wilmington had spread beyond the borders of North Carolina. Reports were confused. Many papers relayed it as a ‘negro riot’. Others as an ‘anarchic rebellion’.
By the time Governor Russell sent in the state militia, most of the fighting was over. But redshirts and Democrats were still being murdered through the city. The militia arrived—and promptly failed to restore order, massively outnumbered as they were by the Fusionists, which were now also pouring in from outlying counties to vent their hatreds against the hated ‘Bourbons’ (a term quickly coming to refer to all Democrats, rather than simply those in the tradition of Cleveland). Soon, Russell was begging President McKinley for federal troops.
McKinley could hardly have been faced with a worse decision. Most believed—including the president himself—that his victory in 1896 had owed at least in part to the staggering unpopularity of Cleveland following his actions in the summer of ’94. Now McKinley was confronted with the same terrible choice. He could refrain from sending in soldiers and be called a coward and an impotent. Or he could send in soldiers and become just another Cleveland.
What’s more, if he did call in the army, there flowered a new dilemma. Should the troops tend to act in favor of the Fusionists, he would be tarred for abetting radicalism and rebellion. Should they tend to act in favor of the Democrats, he would be called a traitor to his own party, which was after all a major component of the bizarre Fusionist alliance.
The president was distraught.
In the end, he took a leap of faith and ordered in the army on 12 November, four days after the elections and two days after the worst of the killing had subsided.
Luckily, neither the Fusionists nor the Democrats greeted the bluecoats with gunfire. The soldiers marched into Wilmington and took up posts in the armory and Naval Reserves billet, and the aging General Shafter declared martial law.
The summary executions were stopped, and the dangling bodies removed (no one had found the courage, in particular, to cut down Colonel Waddell’s corpse until the soldiers arrived).
The federal forces arrested some of the more egregious offenders on both sides, such as the Fusionists who had led the lynch mobs that killed Waddell and Daniels, and a redshirt who openly bragged about murdering unarmed blacks. But very few people were punished in the end.
The army’s conduct was, amazingly, quite impartial.
But by this point, it was clear to the nation that, with nearly 400 dead, Wilmington had become McKinley’s Chicago.
But the latest carnage meant a great many things to a great many people.
For the dying Democratic Party, the chattering of the guns at Wilmington was a death rattle.
The party had been slipping into oblivion since 1894, but this was its final curtain. The returns in the ’98 midterms had left them with only 21 seats in the House and in the Senate, they’d been left with only 11.
Wilmington proved the worst was true of the Democrats, both to their friends and foes.
To enemies, the massacre proved the Democrats were the same traitors that had tried to destroy the republic not forty years before. They had lost an election, and so they had again risen in bloody rebellion to overturn its results by force. As a party, they had no place in any civilized system of government.
To supporters, Wilmington demonstrated that the Democrats were weaklings, unable to conquer either at the ballot box or in the streets. The electoral and martial victory of the Fusionists in North Carolina disgusted many white supremacists in the deep south, including Pitchfork Ben of South Carolina, who declared that the denizens of the Tar Heel State no longer deserved to be called white men.
By the winter of 1898, Democratic constituencies in the west and north were rapidly falling to the Populists and Socialists. By 1900, the Party of Jackson would be forced into its deep south strongholds, losing even the old border states, along with Georgia. There it would cling to life even until the last day of the Republic itself, but its time as a force to be reckoned with on the national stage was through.
Wilmington was of course, also a watershed moment for the Populists. Bryan was greatly saddened by the carnage, and sharply rebuked an aide who suggested it was ‘an opportunity’.
He was not sure how to respond. He knew the racial animus of many Populist voters—at the same time, he could hardly come out on the side of the redshirts and Democrats who had tried to throw out representatives of his own party.
In the end, he announced that “I deplore bloodshed and terror—but the guilt cannot be charged to the men who sought no more and no less than the maintenance of their rights as free citizens of our republic.”
He was immediately denounced as ‘nigger-lover Bryan’ by many Southern whites. Throughout the south and west, the Populists stressed to their white voters that it was not a ‘negro revolt’ that had come off in Wilmington. It was men—white men—defending their right to the ballot, and the participation of black men was purely incidental. This message garnered a mixed reception, but probably did to an extent help balance out the departure of whatever whites felt especially strongly about white supremacy.
It is difficult to say whether Wilmington was a net gain or a net loss for Bryan’s party. It showed that they had successfully supplanted the Democrats in North Carolina among the poorer strata of whites. It had also endeared them to black voters. They were also well on their way to doing the same in Georgia.
But at the same time, it allowed them to be tied to radicalism and violence, which Bryan had always tried his hardest to avoid. The presence of the Socialists in the Wilmington debacle also put into the heads of many the idea of a much closer association between the Populists and the SLP than really existed.
Whether it was a help or a hindrance, it can be said with some certainty that it did not have the effect it did on the Democrats, one way or another.
The Republicans were shaken by Wilmington. As soon as federal troops had secured the city, McKinley was deluged with letters and the pleas of congressmen urging him to either ‘harshly punish negro insurrectionists’ or ‘firmly defend the duly elected governments of Wilmington in particular and North Carolina in general.’
McKinley was in a bind.
He ordered federal marshals into North Carolina to examine the particulars of the vote as best he could. Some feared he would overturn the election as a sop to the Democrats, and to avoid being seen as friendly to the Populists (or worse yet, the SLP), but it was a baseless fear. The report returned to Washington, finished by the second week of December, stated that ‘the Fusionist coalition…fairly won its seats.’ And that the discrepancies that existed ‘would not have reversed the general result of the election.’ A new wave of despair overwhelmed North Carolinian Democrats.
The troops remained to make sure the elected representatives were seated without fuss. These included two Socialists now in North Carolina’s legislature.
This probably hurt McKinley in the end. Though the Populists and Socialists rejoiced, they would never have supported him anyhow, and McKinley alienated many conservative Republicans who would have been glad to sacrifice their fellows in North Carolina for the sake of retarding the Populist-Socialist advance.
Wilmington also discredited the president in many quarters for the same reason that Chicago had Cleveland. Hundreds of people were dead. An American city had become a warzone. The national army had been deployed against fellow citizens.
Undoubtedly the greatest gains from the whole debacle went to the SLP. Ironically, it had been by far the smallest part of the Fusionist coalition in Wilmington. But it loomed so large in the national consciousness by this point that the battle very soon came to be seen as a ‘red uprising’ by certain frightened Americans.
The Voice naturally proclaimed, RED CARNAGE IN WILMINGTON.
Even the New York Times noted the ‘numerous Socialists’ involved in the violence, which was a great exaggeration.
But with at least one major voting bloc, the association with Wilmington helped, not hurt the SLP. That bloc was, of course, black southerners.
Despite the strenuous efforts of the Populists to deny that Wilmington had anything to do with ‘negro suffrage’ except incidentally, and the occasional efforts of the SLP to do the same for the benefit of southern whites, it soon became an article of faith among blacks that ‘the reds came out for the negro in Wilmington’. Their prestige was boosted immensely across the old Confederacy.
A black church in Mobile even flew a red flag for some time in early 1899, until the mayor personally ordered it removed.
Peter Clark’s editorial in the Daily People (which DeLeon still occasionally grumbled about) belabored this point. “What force, what party, what band, since the great days of Lincoln,” it asked, “has taken up arms in defense of the black man and his rights? Only the Socialists.”
In time, Wilmington came to be recalled by many as a Socialist affair, for better or for worse.
Despite this, white support for the Socialists in the south was not significantly harmed, mostly because it was already so miniscule. Socialists became very good at talking out of both sides of their mouths, eager to encourage the perception that the SLP was the champion of the black man when talking to blacks, and just as eager to deny it was any such thing when talking to whites.
Some progress was made among white sharecroppers and urban laborers in the south in the aftermath of Wilmington, though it was not until 1903 that support truly exploded.
But it was black voters that Wilmington won over. In the presidential election of 1900, it is estimated more than 30% of southern blacks eligible to vote voted SLP, more than any other demographic besides industrial workers in certain regions. In 1904, the number climbed over 50%.
Last edited:
The Socialists are gaining ground across the country, but it doesn't seem like they have any particular purchase in the military. That seems like something that will be key to the Revolution. Got lucky in Wilmington when they captured that machine gun, but they can't count on that every time. Somehow the socialists need to start getting at least a little popular with the average soldier.
That might change if this TL goes like Reds with a much earlier US involvement in WWI. Enact conscription, get thousands of American troops mutilated and scarred for life in the trenches of Europe, and eventually grow bitter at the establishment who sent them to die for no discernible reason.
Yeah conscription is the quickest way this could happen.
Bear in mind pre-WW1 American military was quite lackluster by other countries' standards and militias were everywhere. Expect a lot of red militias where the socialists are strong and that may be enough.
That was based more on luck than anything McKinley did. The author mentioned as much. Had he been unlucky, Wilmington could have been a LOT worse.
But why would the US go to war in Europe, when it's so much more chaotic in this timeline? It avoided going to war OTL for a long while, and in this timeline it's bound to be more unstable. Unless Frick becomes president, restores stability, goes to war to rally the country/vent pressure, and then the US gets it's teeth kicked in by the Prussian military and/or the British Navy.
My line of thinking is that IOTL, everyone thought WWI would be over by Christmas. Perhaps Frick, expecting a quick and easy war akin to the war against Spain, sends troops to Europe in order to get a rally around the flag effect and use the war as a cover for authoritarian acts such as suspending elections and otherwise consolidating power. Of course, WWI turns into the nightmare that OTL knows and it just snowballs from there as the first conscripts return scarred for life.