The Capitol Siege Has Deep Roots in American History — Part III
This is Part III of a series on the more than 40 micro-rebellions that have occurred in America since the Revolutionary War. The causes of these uprisings have been sparked by political grievances, economic injustices, racial bigotry and paranoia. The Capitol Insurrection of January 6th is not without precedent and understanding what sparked these earlier revolts makes it easier to understand what caused the January 6th uprising. Part III covers Racist, White Supremacist Uprisings.
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 — Enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863 capped two years of increasing support for emancipation in New York City. But to New York’s German and Irish immigrants, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears.
In March of 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government $300 would avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not citizens, were exempt from the draft.
Anti-war newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern Blacks in the wake of the Proclamation’s publication. Echoing what, 160 years later, would be a rallying cry of Trump supporters, in the midst of war-time economic distress, these immigrants believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as Blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery under the conscription law was held. Two days later, five days of mayhem and bloodshed broke out. The New York City Draft Riots began.
The rioters’ targets initially included only military and government buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters began to attack Black people and symbols of Black political, economic and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving on to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. The crowd took bedding, clothing and food and used them as tinder to set the building on fire. Firefighters were unable to save the structure. Miraculously, the mob did not assault any children.
Throughout the week of riots, mobs harassed and killed Blacks and their supporters, destroying their property as well. As recently as March of 1863, white employers had hired Blacks as longshoremen. Now the Irish refused to work with them. An Irish mob attacked two hundred Blacks who were working on the docks. White dockworkers also destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses and tenements that catered to Blacks.
Rioters subjected Black men to the most brutal violence: torture, hanging, and burning. They also made sport of mutilating Black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A mob gathered and hanged a Black coachman named Abraham Franklin from a lamppost after dragging him from his apartment. After the mob pulled Franklin’s body down, it dragged his corpse through the streets by the genitals.
With this violence, white workers gave vent to their desire to eradicate the Black working-class in New York City. The Longshoreman’s Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that “the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry.”
Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the riots were “equivalent to a Confederate victory”. Fifty buildings, including two Protestant churches and the Colored Orphan Asylum, were burned to the ground. Four thousand federal troops had to be pulled out of the Gettysburg campaign to quell the riots. Landlords, fearing the mobs would destroy their buildings, drove Black residents from their homes. As a result of the violence, hundreds of Black people left New York. It is estimated that 119 Blacks were killed.
The white elite in the city organized to provide relief to riot victims, helping them find new work and homes. But by 1865, the Black population in New York City dropped to under 10,000, the lowest since 1820. On August 19th, the government resumed the draft in New York.
The Election Riot of 1874 took place on election day, November 3, 1874, near Eufaula, Alabama. Freedmen comprised a majority of the town’s population and elected Republican candidates to office. Members of an Alabama chapter of the White League attacked Black Republicans at the polls.
The White League was a paramilitary terrorist group made up primarily of Confederate veterans. League members killed at least seven Black voters and wounded 70 while driving away more than 1,000 unarmed Black people from the polls. As a result of the attack, the League influenced the outcome of elections, turning out all the Republican officeholders.
The White League formed in 1874 in parishes on the Red River in Louisiana as an insurgent, white Democratic paramilitary group. Chapters soon spread throughout Alabama and other states in the Deep South. In Spring Hill, they stormed a polling place, destroyed the ballot box and killed the 16-year-old son of a white Republican judge. The League refused to count any Republican votes cast. Republican voters included the Black majority in the county, as well as white supporters. They outnumbered Democratic voters by a margin greater than two to one. Nevertheless, the League declared the Democratic candidates victorious and forced Republican politicians out of office. Due to the actual and threatened violence by the White League, Black voters began to stay away from the polls in Barbour County. They no longer voted in sufficient numbers to maintain a majority.
White Democrats continued to intimidate Black voters throughout the late 19th century, especially after a Populist-Republican alliance elected some Fusion candidates in the Deep South. Violence against Blacks and their white supporters — against the Republican ticket — was widespread. Democrats regained control of Alabama, a hold the party did not relinquish for a hundred years.
The Battle of Liberty Place — Again echoing the Capitol seige that would take place more than 140 years hence, The Battle of Liberty Place was an attempted insurrection by the Crescent City White League against the Louisiana Republican government in New Orleans in 1874 during Reconstruction. Five thousand members of the League fought the badly outnumbered New Orleans police force and state militia for three days. Insurgents took over the statehouse, armory and downtown, only retreating with the arrival of federal troops. None of the insurgents were charged or arrested.
The conflict had its roots in the election of 1872, when John McEnery, a Democrat, was supported by a coalition of Democrats and anti-Grant Republicans, including Republican Gov. Henry Warmoth. Warmoth’s opponents in the Republican Party remained loyal to President Grant and supported the Republican nominee, William Kellogg. Warmoth had appointed the State Returning Board, which administered elections . The Board declared McEnery the winner. A rival board endorsed Kellogg. The legislature impeached Warmoth and removed him for “stealing” the election. Both McEnery and Kellogg had inaugural parties and both men certified lists of appointed local officeholders. The federal government eventually certified Kellogg as governor.
McEnery and his allies proceeded to form a rump legislature in New Orleans, The paramilitary White League entered the city with a force of 5,000 to seat McEnery, going up against 3,500 police and state militia. The League defeated the state militia, inflicting about 100 casualties. Insurgents occupied the state house and armory for three days and turned out Governor Kellogg. When former Confederate general James Longstreet tried to stop the fighting, he was pulled from his horse and taken prisoner. It took three days for President Ulysses S. Grant to send federal troops to restore peace. White League insurgents retreated from New Orleans before federal troops arrived. In the aftermath, no one was prosecuted. City governance remained split until 1877 when federal troops were withdrawn as a result of the Compromise of 1877, which threw the presidential election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
In 1891, the city erected the Battle of Liberty Place Monument to commemorate and praise the insurrection. This was a prime example of the South’s effort to undo Reconstruction, glorify the “Lost Cause”, and as much as possible, resurrect its antebellum past. In 1932, the city added an inscription that reinforced that racist, white supremacist viewpoint.
The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 may be the closest historical analogy to the U.S. Capitol Insurrection, with two key exceptions; far more people were killed and the Wilmington Insurrection was successful.
The Insurrection, also known as the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington Coup of 1898, was a mass riot carried out by white supremacists in Wilmington NC on November 10, 1898. Though the Wilmington white press described the event as a race riot caused by Blacks, as more facts came to light over time, it became clear that the insurrection was a coup d’etat, a violent overthrow of an elected government by white supremacists.
The riots began when the state’s Democrats led a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected fusion government. They expelled opposition Black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of Black citizens — including the only Black newspaper in the city — and killed an estimated 60 people. Modern day estimates place the number of fatalities as high as 300. The Wilmington Insurrection has been described as the only incident of its kind in American history because it involved the direct removal and replacement of elected officials by unelected individuals. The riots also ushered in an era of severe racial segregation and Black disenfranchisement throughout the South.
In 1860, immediately prior to the Civil War, Wilmington had a Black majority and was the largest city in North Carolina with a population of nearly 10,000. At the end of the war, Freedmen left plantations and rural areas for towns and cities to seek work. They sought safety in numbers by creating Black communities. In 1868, North Carolina ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Democrats greatly resented this “radical” change, which they blamed on Blacks, Union carpetbaggers and race traitors.
Democrats developed a plan to reverse home rule, meaning local officials would no longer be elected but rather appointed by the state. They began circumventing legislation by taking over the state’s judiciary and they adopted 30 constitutional amendments mandating segregated public schools, outlawing interracial relationships, and granting the General Assembly power to modify, nullify or replace any local government.
The Republican Party was biracial. Unlike many other jurisdictions, Black people in Wilmington were elected to local office and also gained prominent positions in the community. They found themselves with newfound social, political and economic status, but with this enhanced status, racial tensions grew. Affluent whites believed they paid disproportionate taxes compared to the city’s Blacks, who now held the political power to prevent affluent whites from changing the ratio. Additionally, there was conflict with poor, unskilled whites, who competed with Blacks for jobs.
These dynamics continued through the elections of 1894 and 1896 in which a fusion party won every statewide office, including the governorship, in the latter election. Fusionists began dismantling the Democrat’s political infrastructure.They also encouraged Blacks to vote. This shift and consolidation of power horrified white Democrats who contested the new laws.
In late 1897, nine prominent Wilmington men were unhappy with what they called “Negro Rule”. They were particularly aggrieved about fusion government reforms that affected their ability to manage and game the city’s affairs.
On October 28, 1898 special trains from Wilmington provided discounted train tickets to white men so that they could travel across the state to Goldsboro for a “White Supremacy Convention”. A crowd of 8,000 showed up. Speakers at the convention accused Blacks of “insolence”, “arrogance”, overshadowed only by the Black population’s “criminality”. Attendees were assured that white men would banish Blacks and their traitorous white allies even if, in the words of one of the convention leaders, they had to “fill a river with enough Black dead bodies to block passage to the sea”. The atmosphere in the city made Blacks tense, while white men became paranoid. Blacks tried to buy guns and powder, but white merchants refused to sell to them. Newspapers incited people to believe confrontation was inevitable.
Most Blacks and many Republicans did not vote in the November 8th election, hoping to avoid violence. The governor tried to reduce tensions but he was nearly lynched by a white paramilitary mob. White supremacists and fusion supporters each issued manifestos threatening the other side.
A group of approximately 500 white businessmen and veterans broke into the Wilmington armory, heavily arming themselves with rifles and a Gatling gun. They then torched the two-story office of The Daily Record, Wilmington’s only Black newspaper. At the same time, Black newspapers all over the state were also being destroyed. Following the fire at The Record, the mob of white vigilantes, which had now swelled to about 2,000 men, swarmed into Wilmington’s Black neighborhoods destroying businesses and property and assaulting inhabitants. The Charlotte Observer quoted a prominent lawyer who proclaimed the coup a “success” for the white business elite.
A Wilmington cleric described the scene:
“The shrieks and screams of children, of mothers, of wives were heard, such as caused the blood of the most inhuman person to creep. Thousands of women, children and men rushed to the swamps and there lay upon the earth in the cold to freeze and starve. The streets were dotted with their dead bodies. Some of their bodies were left lying in the streets up until the next day following the riot. Some were found by the stench and miasma that came forth from their decaying bodies. … (An) army of men marched through the streets, sword buckled to their sides, giving the command to fire. The city was under military rule; no Negro was allowed to come into the city without being examined or without passing through with his boss...Colored women were examined and their hats taken off and search was made even under their clothing. They went from house to house looking for Negroes that they considered offensive; took arms they had hidden and killed them for the least expression of manhood. They gathered around colored homes, firing like great sportsmen at rabbits in an open field and when one would jump his man, from sixty to one hundred shots would be turned loose upon him…Negro stores were closed and the owners thereof driven out of the city and even shipped away at the point of the gun.
More than 2,000 Blacks left Wilmington permanently, forced to abandon their businesses and properties. This greatly reduced the city’s professional and artisan class. Wilmington no longer had a Black majority. Although some whites were wounded, no whites were killed. City residents’ appealed to President William McKinley for recovery help, but the White House said it could not respond without a request from the governor and Gov. Russell ignored the request.
End of Part III