– 26 September 2019 –

Janus:

About ten o’clock in the morning, pale and haggard from a sleepless night of prayer and thought, the Preacher arose to address the people. The hush of death fell as he gazed silently over the audience for a moment. How pale his face! They had never seen him so moved with passions that stirred his inmost soul. His first words were addressed to God. He did not seem to see the people before him.

“Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

“Before the mountains were brought forth or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God!”

The people instinctively bowed their heads, fired by the subtle quality of intense emotion the tones of his voice communicated, and many of the people were already in tears.

“Thou turnest man to destruction: and sayest, return, ye children of men.”

“Who knowest the power of thine anger?”

“Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent Thee concerning Thy servants.”

“Beloved,” he continued, “it was permitted unto your fathers and brothers and children to die for their country. You must live for her in the black hour of despair. There will be no roar of guns, no long lines of gleaming bayonets, no flash of pageantry or martial music to stir your souls.

“You are called to go down, man by man, alone, naked and unarmed in the blackness of night and fight with the powers of hell for your civilisation.

“You must look this question squarely in the face. You are to be put to the supreme test. You are to stand at the judgment bar of the ages and make good your right to life. The attempt is to be deliberately made to blot out Anglo-Saxon society and substitute African barbarism.”

– Excerpt from The Leopard’s Spots by Thomas Dixon, published in 1902

Thomas Dixon

Thomas Dixon in 1902

Rev. Thomas Dixon was a renowned Baptist minister who defended Southern racial policies to sympathetic northern audiences throughout the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and the first decades of the Twentieth. Disgusted with the ignorant bias he saw in a theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dixon responded with The Leopard’s Spots as a follow-up to that novel.

Though Dixon supported the Solid South strategies of the Democratic Party that restored white rule in the South after Reconstruction, by the turn of the Twentieth Century, at the national level Dixon favored the Progressive policies of Theodore Roosevelt, and later Dixon supported his long-time friend Woodrow Wilson. Dixon believed that the destiny of the South lay within a larger cooperation with the dominant, newly white supremacist Northern establishment.

Dixon is most famous for his book The Clansman, which inspired the ground-breaking silent film The Birth of a Nation. That film, of course, inspired the resurgent KKK movement that, at its peak in the 1920’s, claimed the membership of roughly five to ten percent of America’s eligible whites. Oddly, Dixon disapproved of the new Klan, opposed as it was to Catholics and Jews.

Brief Overview of The Leopard’s Spots

The first quarter of The Leopard’s Spots provides a background on the lives of the main characters during the Reconstruction period in North Carolina after the U.S. Civil War. Dixon offers a touching description of the poverty-stricken times, showing the hardships and struggles of the people under the rule of vengeful and capricious carpetbaggers and free blacks.

The remainder of the book presents a satisfying plot of wholesome romance between a young politician and an heiress whose father forbids her to marry him, of a preacher (based on Dixon himself) who rallies his people (white Southerners) against the combined dangers of scalawags and out-of-control blacks, and of a scalawag villain who drives much of the story. Taken by itself, the story is entertaining though not very remarkable.

The Wilmington Coup of 1898

Vigilantes pose in front of the smoldering ruins of the taunting Daily Record

The main value of The Leopard’s Spots comes from its depiction of the resurgence of the Republican Party to power in North Carolina in 1894 and 1896, the Wilmington Coup of 1898 that forced the resignation of the Republican government in Wilmington, and the subsequent gubernatorial election of 1900 that defeated this last gasp of Reconstruction and established explicit white rule in the state.

Today these events are not well known, and to the extent that anyone talks about them, they are universally condemned. But they are fascinating from the vantage of today’s decrepit state of affairs. They show an early clash between proto-racial-egalitarians and a remarkably vibrant, morally decent, racially self-aware people who unapologetically stood up for their rights to preserve their society, both for themselves and their posterity. Contrast such commonplace attitudes only a century past with those of our own self-absorbed, shallow, and apathetic white consumers!

For the elections of 1894, North Carolina’s mostly black Republican Party formed an alliance with the relatively large People’s (or Populist) Party. This Fusionist ticket won total control of the state congress from the Democrats who had reigned in the state for a generation. In 1896, these Fusionists took the governorship. To cement their power, the new Fusionist government lifted restrictions on black voting, encouraged black candidates, and formed cabals such as “The Ring” in Wilmington, all to the great alarm of the Democrats who remembered the horrors of Reconstruction thirty years before. It wasn’t long before emboldened blacks, many of them returning home from the Spanish-American War, began committing acts of insolence and crime against whites.

Racial tensions grew in the lead-up to the election of 1898, and blood ran high in a hotly contested campaign that became almost entirely about race, with outbursts of violence on both sides. Democrats in Wilmington―North Carolina’s largest city at the time―hoped to defeat the Fusionist bi-racial city government. Fanning the flames, in August, the Wilmington Daily Record, a black newspaper, taunted whites and their hysteria over black-on-white rape, saying:

We suggest that the whites guard their women more closely, as Mrs. Felton says, thus giving no opportunity for the human fiend, be he white or black. You leave your goods out of doors and then complain because they are taken away. Poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women, especially on farms. They are careless of their conduct toward them and our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness bring attention to them and the man is lynched for rape. Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is well known to all.

This article sent the white population into fits of rage as it impugned the character of Southern women in an explicit sexual manner that was shocking for its time, and observers from both political sides subsequently blamed this editorial for the events following the November election.

The 1898 election saw the defeat of the Fusionists all over the state, including Wilmington. (Wikipedia incorrectly reports that Fusionists had won in Wilmington, but newspapers from the time report otherwise.) The day after the election, the leading men of the city, organized as the Committee of Twenty-Five, met at the courthouse where they adopted seven resolutions. The first six amounted to political statements to uphold white rule while the last resolution ordered the closure of The Daily Record and the exile of the black paper’s editor from the city, to be enforced by the Committee of Twenty-Five. Strikingly, the committee rejected a proposed resolution to order the resignations of the mayor, the chief of police, and the city aldermen (whose terms would expire the following year.)

The following day, the Committee marched to the Daily Record where they destroyed the press and set fire to the building. To keep order, a crowd of upstanding white men, including doctors, preachers, merchants, etc., guarded these men with rifles. In the subsequent chaos, patrolling whites clashed with crowds of angry blacks around the city, particularly in the black neighborhood of Brooklyn, with some unknown number of Wilmington’s blacks (at least six) killed and roughly 2,000 of them fleeing Wilmington entirely, turning a majority-black city into majority-white.

The following day, at the behest of Wilmington’s leading businessmen, the Fusionist mayor called an emergency meeting in which he and his government resigned, with new aldermen and a new mayor elected in their places. State militia marched Fusionist leaders, many of them New Englanders, to the train station and warned them never to return to North Carolina. And this was the great coup d’etat that modern historians so hysterically condemn.

For more detailed information, the 1898 Wilmington Institute For Education & Research runs an excellent website where they describe this history in detail with numerous citations from primary sources.

Two years after the riot and coup in Wilmington, Democratic power was totally restored in North Carolina with the election of Charles Aycock to the governor’s office.

Governor Charles Aycock, renowned as a promoter of education in North Carolina, now being erased for his support of white rule. Thomas Dixon based his main character on a fictionalized Aycock.

The Leopard’s Spots gives a fictionalized account of all these events. Dixon loosely based his main protagonist, Charles Gaston, on Governor Aycock, while the other main character, Rev. John Durham, is based on Dixon himself.

Themes of the Book

Apart from merely depicting history, Dixon used the backdrop of the Wilmington Coup to make a case for white rule in the South and to warn the rest of the country against establishing legal equality of the races.

Throughout The Leopard’s Spots, Dixon explicitly repeated the main idea of his book, that the future Southerner in particular, and the future American in general, must either be ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (used synonymously in those days with ‘white’) or mulatto, that the attempt to retain two distinct but equal races could only fail, as the blacks would demand equal access to whites. If white supremacy was not upheld, and if blacks were given social equality with the whites, then society would inevitably decline into dysfunction as it becomes essentially negrified, that is, dumbed down and carnally obsessed. On the other hand, so long as whites remained supreme in this land, peace and order and progress could continue to advance civilization. In particular Dixon seemed to advocate the total expulsion of blacks to Africa as the best method to achieve peace and prosperity for both races.

Another theme of the book encouraged the South of that time to embrace the North in forging a unified front, if not an outright amalgamation, to create a dominant United States across the world. The Spanish-American War took place during the events of The Leopard’s Spots, a war that Dixon saw as bringing together the North and South to face the world, both sides united in white supremacy. With the North seemingly content to uphold white hegemony in the South, many other Southerners at the beginning of the Twentieth century embraced the United States in this way, seeing the Spanish American War as the pinnacle of this new era.

Dixon wrote his book during the pinnacle of white ascendancy in the world. Yet he could see even then that well-meaning Northeastern liberals would threaten that order if they adopted the system of racial equality that they espoused. These well-meaning Northern fools believed they could raise the black man to the level of whites; Dixon observed that the black man can never be anything but black, just as the leopard can’t change its spots.

Conclusion

Clearly America has made zer choice.

More than a century later, it is clear that white Americans, and white Southerners, have chosen to become mulatto, although only a few have ever consciously made that choice. It took years of subtle programming through a complicated system of deception and social engineering, with the willing and cynical cooperation of white elites from both North and South, to ferment the social intoxication in which we revel today. Dixon would be appalled, though not surprised, at the results.

Used References:

_{The Weekly Star, XXX (Nov. 1898)}

_{Tyson, Timothy B., “The Ghosts of 1898“, The News & Observer (17 Nov. 2006)}

_{Melton, Henry L., “1898 Wilmington Race Riot Home Page” (2005)}

_{Wikipedia, “Wilmington insurrection of 1898“}