November 10 in U.S. History: A White Mob Forced Wilmington’s Elected Officials From Office in 1898

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Wilmington coup leads an edition that also covers the 1775 resolution raising the Marines, the hanging of Henry Wirz, 41 suffrage pickets, the Marine Corps War Memorial and the Edmund Fitzgerald.

An election settles who governs only as long as nobody takes the offices by force. On November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob did. The other entries for this date run from a resolution in Philadelphia to a federal accident report on Lake Superior, and most of them turn on the same subject: what government did, and what the record says about it.

November 10, 1898

A mob removed a city government two days after the election

The election of 1898 passed quietly in Wilmington, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources records. Two days later, on November 10, Alfred Moore Waddell led about 2,000 white men in an attack on the newspaper’s offices, Britannica reports. The paper, the Daily Record in the state’s account, was a Black-owned newspaper edited by Alex Manly, whose August editorial had enraged Waddell and others. Manly had already left the city. The mob invaded the building, a fire broke out and the top floor was destroyed.

The attack on the paper was followed by an attack on the government. Republicans and Populists then held power in Wilmington. Mayor Silas P. Wright, a white Republican, “resigned under pressure,” the state history says, as did city council members and other officers, Black and white. Waddell then took office as mayor. A manifesto Britannica calls the White Declaration of Independence had demanded the resignations of the mayor and the chief of police.

Nobody has a firm death count. The state’s account runs from the coroner’s 14 to unconfirmed reports of scores or hundreds, and says North Carolina’s 2006 report settled on as many as 60. All the reported victims were Black. Britannica gives the same upper figure and says the exact number is unknown.

Restrictions on Black voting came soon after. George Rountree chaired the 1899 committee that drafted the grandfather clause, which denied most Black voters the franchise.

North Carolina took more than a century to examine it officially. The General Assembly created the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission in 2000 under Senate Bill 787, sponsored by Sen. Luther H. Jordan and Rep. Thomas E. Wright. A draft came out in December 2005 and the final report in May 2006. It recommended efforts to “repair the moral, economic, civic and political damage,” in the words Britannica quotes. The state notes that the event has been called a massacre, a rebellion, a revolt, a race war and a coup d’état. The commission’s own title used the word riot.

November 10, 1775

Congress resolved to raise two battalions of Marines

Meeting in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress resolved that “two Battalions of marines be raised,” according to the journal entry preserved by the Marine Corps History Division. The officers and men were to be good seamen or familiar with maritime affairs, and they were enlisted for the duration of the war with Great Britain unless Congress dismissed them sooner. The resolution called them the first and second battalions of American Marines and counted them toward the Continental Army before Boston.

November 10, 1865

Henry Wirz was hanged after a military commission found him guilty

Capt. Henry Wirz commanded the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. Arrested in May 1865, he went before a military commission that sat from August 23 to October 18, with Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace among its members and Col. N.P. Chipman as chief prosecutor. It found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to death. He was hanged at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington on November 10, 1865. A Library of Congress research guide says he was the only Confederate soldier charged with war crimes during the Civil War. The full trial record was printed as House Executive Document No. 23 of the 40th Congress, 2nd Session, and the National Archives holds an illustration of the execution from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

November 10, 1917

Forty-one suffrage pickets were arrested at the White House

The Turning Point Suffragist Memorial gives the most detailed account of the day: 41 women left National Woman’s Party headquarters in five groups for the White House gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, each carrying a five-foot banner. Police arrested them and booked them for blocking traffic on the sidewalk. Mary Nolan, 73, was the oldest. Lucy Burns, just released from a 60-day sentence, walked in the final group. Each was released on $25 bail and ordered to Police Court two days later.

The National Park Service confirms 41 arrests that month, including Burns and Nolan, on charges of obstructing traffic, with sentences from six days to six months at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. On November 14, 1917, guards there beat and abused prisoners in what the suffragists called the Night of Terror, the National Women’s History Museum recounts. President Wilson endorsed the amendment on January 9, 1918. The House passed it the next day. The Senate waited until June 1919.

November 10, 1954

Eisenhower dedicated a memorial built without public money, and a New Hampshire Marine stood by

President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated the Marine Corps War Memorial on the 179th anniversary of the Corps. Felix W. de Weldon sculpted it, and “no public funds were used,” the National Park Service says: the $850,000 came from Marines, friends of the Corps and members of the Naval Service. The figures stand 32 feet high.

Rene Gagnon, whom the Navy’s All Hands magazine describes as a New Hampshire Marine, attended with John Bradley and Ira Hayes. Those three posed for de Weldon as survivors of the flag raising on Iwo Jima, and All Hands says it was the last time the three were photographed together. The record later changed. In October 2019 the Marine Corps concluded that Harold Keller, not Gagnon, was in the famous photograph, The Associated Press reported, while still crediting Gagnon with carrying the larger flag to the summit. The Park Service says the Corps also concluded that Bradley was not in the picture and that Harold Schultz was.

November 10, 1975

The Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all 29 aboard, and the safety board looked at federal rules

The ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald went down about 7:15 p.m. Eastern time in eastern Lake Superior, about 17 miles from the entrance to Whitefish Bay, Michigan, carrying about 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets. All 29 officers and crew were lost, and no bodies were found.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s report, dated May 4, 1978, put the probable cause at “the sudden massive flooding of the cargo hold” after one or more hatch covers collapsed. It also pointed at regulation: the freeboard reductions allowed by the 1969, 1971 and 1973 Great Lakes Load Line amendments contributed, along with the lack of watertight bulkheads in the hold. The board told the Coast Guard to make sure hatch covers could be made weathertight and to stop ships lacking weathertight integrity from sailing.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Sources for this edition are the Marine Corps History Division, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the National Park Service, All Hands, the National Transportation Safety Board, Britannica, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial, the National Women’s History Museum and The Associated Press. The Nov. 10, 1917, detail rests on the Turning Point account, which the Park Service corroborates for the month and the count of 41; it is the weaker source on the exact day. The 1775 journal entry records a resolution and gives no vote count, so this edition does not report one.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.