The Coup on Cape Fear - Part Two: Red Shirt Riot

January 31, 2022 by Nathaniel Lloyd

It is no secret that prominent conspiracy theorist and erstwhile U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, proven to be without merit in court case after court case, were the main impetus propelling the Capitol Rioters in their attempted coup on January 6th, 2020. And such claims were nothing new from Trump. He was telegraphing his intentions to make these claims throughout the 2020 campaign, using this lie as a means of suppressing votes by casting suspicion on the perfectly legal and secure mail-in voting protocols that many states relied on during the first year of the pandemic. Indeed, Trump had told this lie many times before. He blamed Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012 on voter fraud, he blamed his own defeat by Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus on cheating, and when he was projected to lose the presidential election that year, he suggested he could only lose if the election were stolen. Even after winning, he doubled down on his voter fraud claims, seemingly in a desperate effort to save face over having lost the popular vote, and he organized the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, appointing to it people like J. Christian Adams, who had been making false claims about voter fraud for years through his conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF. The voter fraud commission was not long lived, but PILF has continued to make claims about non-citizens voting and dead people voting, all of which have been investigated by journalists and election supervisors and disproven, but conservative media amplifies these claims and not their eventual disproof or PILF’s quiet retractions of claims. It is propaganda, pure and simple. Certainly, voter fraud exists, but it is not the epidemic they claim. In fact, it is frequently conservatives themselves who are guilty of committing it in the occasional genuine cases that are proven. Take for example, some of the only real cases of voter fraud to have been turned up after all the scrutiny over the 2020 election, a cluster of incidents all in the same Florida retirement community, The Villages, where four different residents have been arrested for voting more than once for Trump. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise; after all, in his rhetoric before election day, Donald Trump had said that, in order to counteract the cheating he said would be happening, his supporters should vote more than once. Essentially, he said there’s voter fraud, so the solution is more voter fraud! Absurd as it may seem, this is actually more common than you might think. Let us return to North Carolina, the scene of our story, for a further example. 120 years after the post-election insurrection in Wilmington, a definite case of voter fraud occurred. Conservative proponents of the widespread voter fraud conspiracy theory like to point to this case because it involved absentee ballots, but it was the Republican candidate for congress, Mark Harris, or more specifically, his political operative McCrae Dowless, who was guilty of the fraud. In Bladen County, northwest of Wilmington, a Black get-out-the-vote group had previously seen great success with an absentee ballot initiative. Many conservatives suspected that group, The Bladen Improvement Association, of voter fraud, but they never produced any evidence of wrongdoing because the Improvement Association’s use of absentee ballots appears to have been completely above board. Unable to confirm their conspiracy theories about voter fraud favoring the Left, the Right just went ahead and committed voter fraud themselves, with McCrae Dowless found guilty of organizing an elaborate ballot fraud operation, in which they would collect blank ballots, fill them out in support of Republicans, forge witness signatures using different colored pens and different names to prevent detection, and deliver them in small batches to avoid suspicion. NPR’s Serial Productions made a fantastic podcast about the whole affair, called The Improvement Association, which I encourage everyone to check out. The takeaway here is that we see a pattern among reactionaries: point your finger in voter fraud accusation with one hand while the other is stuffing fraudulent ballots into the box. We can see the pattern all the way back in the 19th century, when the progressive and reactionary parties had opposite names. On Cape Fear in 1868, after Abraham Galloway mustered newly freed Black residents and stood up to the voter intimidation of the KKK, their subsequent legitimate victory at the polls, making universal male suffrage a reality in North Carolina, was blamed on voter fraud by white supremacists. Yet thirty years later, white supremacists would gleefully resort to voter intimidation and fraud and even armed insurrection to achieve their own political ends.

Numerous times on this podcast, I have spoken about the supposed and the real influence of secret societies on changes in government. When it is the claim of a vast conspiracy, such as the idea that the Illuminati was behind the French Revolution, or that the Jesuits intrigued to assassinate kings and reverse the Reformation or the Revolution, it is a disprovable and untenable fallacy. However, there have been clear instances of secret societies influencing political change through electioneering. In Bourbon Restoration France, the secret society of the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, were instrumental in achieving Ultramontane Catholic domination of the government. I spoke about this in part two of my series on the Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus. And in the mid-nineteenth century, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in America, about whom I have released a Patreon exclusive podcast episode, swore their members to secrecy as they worked to stir resentment of Catholic immigrants and eventually launch the nativist Know-Nothing Party into political power, their party’s name a direct reference to the secrecy of the society that started their movement. After the Civil War, Southern Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan, another effort to influence the social and political order through secret combination, and more specifically through violence. Thus it should come as no surprise that, as the newspaper editor Josephus Daniels and the Democratic chairman Furnifold Simmons developed their White Supremacy campaign in 1898, it relied on the clandestine scheming of more than one secret society in Cape Fear country. Some of these secret societies, operating as compartmentalized cells of the White Supremacy campaign in Wilmington, were called Group Six and the Secret Nine. They did much of the on-the-ground planning for the coup to take place after the election, establishing safehouses and organizing the “citizen patrols” and “vigilance committees” that would act as death squads when the violence erupted. Some among them may have truly believed the false news about an impending Black uprising that Josephus Daniels was purposely spreading, but many of them were in it for the sake of hate and just out for blood, as evidenced by the fact that the men commanded by these secret societies, most already sporting the red shirts symbolic of white supremacist anti-Reconstruction violence in the South, had to be held back and talked down from commencing with their planned reign of terror before election day. They were champing at the bit to strike at Alexander Manly, the offending Black newspaperman who had dared to suggest that whites raped Black women just as much or more than Black men raped white women and, even more offensive to their sensibilities, that it was possible for white women to welcome the amorous advances of Black men and even made such advances themselves. The Red Shirts wanted to lynch Manly, as they had wanted to do since the day his controversial editorial was printed, and they wanted to burn his newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground. The leaders of the White Supremacy campaign had to reassure their Red Shirts that they would be set loose on Manly and the Record after the election, and that it benefitted them and their cause to keep the peace for the time being.

Alexander Manly. Photo Courtesy of the J.Y. Joyner Library, Special Collections, East Carolina University

With their newspapers creating the false impression that the Black citizens of Wilmington were planning some kind of uprising, they justified their mustering of a standing army of Red Shirt white supremacists who were ready at any moment to strike first and thereby create the race riot they said they feared. Indeed, Red Shirts were already assaulting Black residents in the streets with impunity. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the White Supremacists had full control of the situation, which they made clear to the Fusionist Governor of North Carolina, Daniel Russell. In their first bid to undermine the forthcoming election and seize power, the White Supremacists threatened Russell. First, they said that he couldn’t make a campaign stop in Wilmington because a speech from him would set off a race war. When Governor Russell canceled his visit, they pressed further, knowing that Russell feared being blamed for the outbreak of a race war. So they strong-armed Governor Russell into removing all the Fusionist and Republican candidates for county offices. Election Day was still weeks away, and already White Supremacists in Wilmington had threatened and bullied their way to victory in all county offices up for election. Then Election Day came, and lo and behold, there was no uprising of Black residents. Instead, Black and white men alike went to the polls early, hoping to cast their votes and avoid trouble. Red Shirt “vigilance committees” stopped and searched black men wherever they saw them, certain they would find them armed or carrying kerosene intent on setting the city ablaze, but of course they found nothing of the sort. Their harassment certainly dissuaded many Black citizens from even attempting to vote though, and in some precincts, Red Shirts actually turned Black voters away in flagrant acts of voter intimidation. Many Red Shirts wanted to attempt far more on Election Day, pushing to move in force on the Daily Record offices and Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly, but they were again kept in check by their leaders, who assured them that they would be set loose like attack dogs in the aftermath of the election. Governor Russell was obliged to travel to Wilmington, his hometown, to cast his vote, but he was on alert that Red Shirts might attack him. In fact, as he was escorted to the polls by White Supremacists who wanted to avoid such a scandal, he suffered nothing worse than some insults about his corpulence. Afterward, the governor suffered the indignity of having to switch trains and finally having to hide away in the baggage car to avoid Red Shirts who were hunting him throughout his return journey. Finally, that evening, as votes were being tallied, the White Supremacists carried out the most brazen part of their plan to steal the election. They surrounded polling stations in predominately Black and Fusionist precincts, turned off the streetlights outside, stormed inside shoving people over and upending tables, knocking lamps aside. In the ensuing confusion, as poll workers scrambled and fled in darkness or stamped out fires spreading from the overturned lanterns, the White Supremacists stuffed the ballot boxes before escaping. Some of their opponent candidates had already stepped down at the governor’s request due to the corrupt bargain they’d made, and now their voter intimidation and fraud resulted in White Supremacist Democrats illegitimately winning the rest of the races. By the time all the ballots were counted, the so-called “White Man’s ticket” had swept the election of 1898 in Wilmington.

On November 9th, the day after the election, the absolute domination of the White Supremacists was trumpeted in newspapers that did not give any hint that their victory was illegitimate. The day was quiet, and many believed the White Supremacists might cease their reign of terror, having gotten what they wanted, but their secret societies and other orchestrators of the campaign knew that more was to come. They had pent up the hatred and violence of their Red Shirt army as long as they could and could postpone its full expression no longer. One white supremacist newspaper printed a notice inviting the white men of Wilmington to a meeting at the courthouse, at which White Supremacists approved a statement they called the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence.” Their declaration resolved that they would no longer be “ruled by Negroes,” nor by whites “affiliating with negroes.” They denounced the right of Black men to vote, suggesting that they used the franchise only to antagonize the interests of whites, who “paid 95 percent of taxes.” They claimed that employing Black workers had somehow harmed Wilmington’s economy and resolved that those jobs must be “handed over to white men,” and that the Daily Record was to be shut down, its editor, Alexander Manly, banished from the city. But more than this, these seditionists resolved that the rest of the city’s Fusionist government was to be overthrown. The Mayor and the Chief of Police were to be forced to resign, and the entire board of aldermen likewise would be unceremoniously ejected from office. One man emerged from this meeting, rather against the preferences of the White Supremacy campaign orchestrators and the members of its secret society leadership, as the de facto leader of the mob. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate veteran, skilled orator, and former congressman, had become something of a drunk with gambling debts. Over the last year, he had seen in the White Supremacy campaign an opportunity to restore his political career, and had wormed his way in by volunteering to give speeches, one speech in particular, declaring that they would “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses” in order to overturn the current social and political order, having stuck in the minds of many Red Shirts. Waddell had only heard about the meeting at the courthouse on November 9th last minute, but once he rushed over, he was called on to speak, much to the chagrin of the campaign’s leaders. After that, he was selected to lead a committee of 25 men to plan their overthrow of the government and to further ensure that no Black man would ever again hold a position of authority in Wilmington. Waddell’s Committee of Twenty-Five started by summoning the men they thought of as the leaders of the Black community. With little time to prepare, these Black leaders, all of them lawyers and business owners, answered the summons and came to the committee, hats in hand, terrified.

Alfred Moore Waddell. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04294

Alfred Waddell gave these Black leaders an ultimatum, reading the white men’s “Declaration of Independence” aloud and insisting that the Back leadership reply in writing, agreeing to use their influence to meet the demands or face consequences. These summoned Black community leaders left the meeting and immediately wrote their letter of response, capitulating entirely and agreeing to do everything in their power to help ensure white supremacy in the city. But their capitulation would mean nothing. The young man tasked with delivering the letter to Waddell’s house became afraid of the Red Shirts who filled the streets, firing their rifles into the air, and instead chose to drop the letter off at the Post Office. After all, word had already been sent to Waddell that the Black leaders had acquiesced in writing. Waddell, however, was hoping for any reason to escalate the situation and in the process further elevate himself. The next day, November 10th, he emerged from his home after the deadline he had given to the Black leaders to respond, and despite knowing that their response was in the mail, he declared that they had failed to respond to the Committee’s demands. Taking command of some five hundred white gunmen who had gathered in Wilmington, spoiling for a riot, he marched them to the Daily Record office and politely knocked before breaking down the door and destroying the place. Broken piece of the printing press as well as fixtures and pieces of furniture flew out of the office’s windows, and then came smoke as the Red Shirts set the place on fire. A Black fire crew quickly responded as the fire spread to adjacent buildings, but the white rioters kept them at bay until the newspaper offices were entirely burned down. Many were disappointed that the office was empty and that Alexander Manly, the truth-telling Black newspaper editor, was not there for them to lynch. Apparently he had read the writing on the wall and had already fled the city for his life. According to one story passed down in his family, Manly, who often passed for white, was stopped by White Supremacist gunmen outside of Wilmington, who believing him white, confided that they were planning “a necktie party” for the Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly. Supposedly they even gave Manly a rifle and told him to keep an eye out for himself. For the rest of his life, Alexander Manly, who had shown great courage and principle in publishing his inflammatory editorials, would blame himself for what happened next in Wilmington.

At a cotton compress that employed many Black laborers, the workers’ wives showed up, telling them that the White Supremacists were attacking, and the workers left their tasks, begging their employer to let them off work in order to protect their families and homes. Waddell’s Red Shirts, hearing the rumor that a Black mob was forming at the compress, hurried there and begged Waddell to issue an order to shoot all the black workers present. Before that situation got out of hand, though, rumor of an armed Black mob drew the Red Shirts away. A small crowd of Black men had gathered in front of a saloon, dismayed at the burning of the Record and the threats of the Red Shirts. A few of them were armed with what few old weapons they could find, and the Red Shirt mob, believing the long foretold Black uprising had begun, converged on them, amassing across the street and cursing them. Finally, the white rioters unleashed a barrage of gunfire, and some of the Blacks fired back, though they were hopelessly outgunned. White Supremacists would afterward claim that the Blacks fired first, but this seems very unlikely. Twelve Blacks and only two whites were afterward delivered to the hospital with gunshot wounds following this first skirmish, and it is very telling that all of the Black patients had been shot in the back, whereas none of the white patients had been, which certainly would seem to indicate the whites were the aggressors. Regardless, though, the Red Shirts would go on to raise absolute hell that day, marching from place to place around the city, chasing after the ghosts of rumored Black mobs that didn’t exist and shooting down Black men in the streets along the way. Telegraphs were sent to Governor Russell claiming that the Black residents of Wilmington had started the race war they had long warned about, prompting Russell to declare martial law, activate the Wilmington Light Infantry, and send in the state militia. The problem was, many of the Red Shirt rioters were part of the Light Infantry and were commanded by White Supremacy campaign leaders, and the militia detachments sent in were full of white supremacists as well. They now had a mandate from the state to put down an uprising that didn’t exist. In other words, they had the go-ahead to freely massacre the Black people of Wilmington. They hitched the rapid-fire guns that they had obtained in anticipation of this day, and they rode through the streets in machine gun death squads, mowing down any Black citizens who were not already in hiding, and afterward they went to their churches and then to their homes, shooting up the walls of their refuges and demanding they surrender, whereupon they were more likely to be summarily executed than taken prisoner. Before the massacre was over, at least 60 Black residents had been murdered, but many think the number of dead is likely much higher, counting in the several hundreds. A multitude of the Black residents of Wilmington disappeared after the White Supremacist riot, and it is unclear whether they simply fled the city or were buried in the ditches that reports say Red Shirts filled with Black corpses.

White Supremacists posing in front of Alexander Manly’s *Daily Record* newspaper office after burning it down. Public domain.

That evening, as the Black families of Wilmington left their homes and hid in cemeteries and swamps to avoid the death squads, Alfred Waddell, now the undisputed leader of the White Supremacist campaign of terror, convened his Committee of Twenty-Five and plotted the completion of their coup. They sent letters to the Fusionist Police Chief, the Mayor, and the Board of Aldermen, demanding that they gather at City Hall for an emergency session. Then they simply drew up a list of names for who would replace the current officeholders. Unsurprisingly, Waddell was selected as the new Mayor of Wilmington, and the rest of the offices would likewise be filled by staunch White Supremacists. When the time came, Waddell and his Committee, as well as a huge mob of Red Shirts, stormed City Hall, shouting taunts and curses as they entered the seat of local government and made their way through its corridors to the main chamber in a scene that should seem exceedingly familiar to us in the 2020s. The purpose of the emergency session was made very clear to all the remaining Fusionist government. They were being asked to resign, and the aldermen had no illusions about whether there was any real choice in the matter. Red Shirt gunmen leaned from the rails in the gallery, scowling and scorning them. Each duly elected board member resigned in turn, and their replacement was “nominated and elected,” though election had nothing to do with it. They were being installed by insurrectionists in a blatant coup. Afterward, Waddell would claim the whole process had been perfectly legal, and astoundingly, even Northern magazines and newspapers, like Collier’s and the New York Times, would report it as such. Northern journalists had been present in town both before and during the riot because of all the anticipation of a race war, but they invariably interviewed whites rather than Blacks about the troubles and took their word for what was going on. After the overthrow of Wilmington’s government, the Times shamefully reported that the city’s Board of Aldermen had simply “resigned in response to public sentiment.” Thus the lies of seditionists and insurrectionists were recorded as truth and became the accepted historical narrative for what happened on November 10th, 1898. The lies proliferated through the years in pamphlets and even textbooks. It was not until 1951 that a historian rejected the White Supremacist version of events. Now, for the most faithful accounting of what really happened, you can read my principal source for this episode, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

In the days after the coup, while the working class Black residents of Wilmington stayed hidden in the forests and swamps outside of town, the Black business owners and white Fusionist leaders remained, confident that the White Supremacists would relent after getting what they wanted. The White Supremacist insurrectionaries, though, were not satisfied. They rounded up Black and Fusionist pillars of the community and directed them to depart from the city and never return. The choice was banishment or certain death, and they were not even given enough time to put their affairs in order. Even among those who complied, some still did not make it out alive, like a Black barber, Carter Peamon, who got onto a train that also carried a group of Red Shirts and was later found dead in the woods with numerous gunshot wounds. Even one white Fusionist, a deputy sheriff the White Supremacists had forced to resign, would likely have been murdered by a gang of Red Shirts during his attempt to leave town if it weren’t for the fact that he gave the Masonic distress call and some whites among his attackers were oathbound to protect him. Eventually, Mayor Alfred Waddell was obliged to get his Red Shirts under control, as it reflected poorly on him when they swarmed the city jail and attempted to lynch the Black men being held there. Waddell slowly but surely leashed his war dogs, and he even made attempts to reassure the Black families hiding in the forests and swamps that it would be safe for them to return, since the city relied on their labor despite their intentions to give as many jobs as they could over to whites. Meanwhile, the white newspaper propaganda continued to churn out falsehoods, pretending everything that had happened was perfectly lawful, and minimizing the violence that had occurred. And among the Northern newspapers that did criticize the methods of Southern Democrats, many nevertheless praised the outcome, tacitly accepting that the city was in better hands than it had been under the Fusionists. It was clear enough that even in the North, most white supporters of emancipation and universal male suffrage still did not feel that Black men were competent to hold public office and wield authority.

Top: a group of Black residents in the Wilmington community. Bottom: a group of the White Supremacist Red Shirts who massacred and banished people like those in the above photo.

Republican President William McKinley was a son of abolitionists who had campaigned against Democrat intimidation of black voters, and yet, he did little to address the insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina, despite the Afro-American Council beseeching him to present the matter to Congress. Instead, his Attorney General directed a U.S. attorney in North Carolina to investigate the matter with a view to indict. The attorney dutifully undertook the investigation, but in the end, he found no political will in Washington to organize a grand jury. So much as I fear will the orchestrators of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th, 2020, the North Carolinian organizers and perpetrators of the White Supremacist campaign to steal the 1898 election, commit wholesale massacre, and overthrow the government ended up getting away with it scot-free. And if there is one further lesson to drive home why we cannot let the orchestrators of even a failed coup attempt get off without penalty again, it’s the terrible harm that these White Supremacists went on to do while in power. The following year, White Supremacist Democrats took control of North Carolina’s legislature, and they immediately set about enacting policies that would suppress the Black vote. The coup de grace came when they established a poll tax and required a literacy test to vote, but with the caveat that men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867—which of course was the year just before Black men received the right to vote—would be exempt from the requirement. So essentially poor, illiterate whites could still vote without taking the literacy test and paying the poll tax, but most poor, illiterate Blacks could not. This Grandfather Clause was one of the early examples of Jim Crow laws, a law designed to privilege whites and ensure that Blacks remained forever an underclass. Anyone who suggests that there never has been systemic racism can hardly respond to this, and those who claim there no longer remains such systemic racism simply don’t understand how these actions reverberate even today through class divisions, geographic segregation, educational disparity, and enduring racial inequality. These policies and structures spread across the U.S. North Carolina took the idea of the Grandfather Clause from Louisiana, where a similar constitutional amendment had been passed, and in the same way, other Southern states after 1898 used the North Carolina playbook to intimidate and suppress black votes. In the end, this is why we must hold the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection to account. This is why not only civilians must be prosecuted, but elected representatives who were directly involved, including and especially the former President. They must at the very least be barred from ever again holding office under the 14th Amendment. If they are not held responsible, then their failed coup will only invite further attempts, and when the enemies of democracy seize power, who knows what authoritarian systems and structures they may attempt to establish.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part One: The Dark Scheme

January 11, 2022 by Nathaniel Lloyd

They marched in a raucous throng, shouting and chanting, making their way inexorably toward the building that housed the seat of their government. Their intentions were clear. Manipulated and roused to action by an inundation of fake news during the recent election year, they were set on overthrowing officials who had been lawfully elected to represent them. They meant to drive them out, by coercion or by violence, if necessary, for they had not shrunk from violence that day. This was a message to the whole of the country, that men such as they, white men who felt keenly that political change had taken from them the power they felt they deserved, the supremacy to which they felt entitled, that they would not be governed by those they despised, even if they had to defy the laws they claimed to love in order to make sure of it. So with the recent election still fresh in their minds, they stormed the hall of government, kicking up a riot as they made their way through its corridors, shouting out insults as they flooded into the main chamber, pouring into the room and heaping abuse on the duly elected representatives for whom they had come searching. Innocent lives were lost in their historic insurrection, yet afterward, when the dust settled, they and the journalists who had helped to incite them would present these insurrectionists as victims, and as patriots. In the end, there would be no real accountability for the orchestrators of this coup, but the date would be long remembered and live in infamy . . . November 10th 1898.

What’s that? Oh you thought I was talking about January 6th, 2020? I suppose they do have some striking similarities, now that you mention it, but I’m referring to a different insurrection, which occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, 123 years ago. They’re quite different, I assure you. The Wilmington coup was deadly… well, yes, so was January 6th, but I mean deadlier, taking far more lives. And it was perpetrated by white supremacists… well, I mean explicitly, like ALL the insurrectionists were white supremacists, as in self-professed and proud, rather than on January 6th when it was just a good portion of the insurrectionists. Well, if nothing else, the insurrectionists of 1898 North Carolina were at least different in that they were staging a coup following an election they actually won, or rather, stole, and perhaps the biggest difference is that, they actually succeeded in their coup that day, and got away with it afterward, too. Surely those who incited the attempted coup of 2020 won’t also get away with such brazen sedition. OK, you’ve convinced me. Maybe the story of the Wilmington insurrection is indeed the perfect historical lesson we need to better understand how we must respond to the insurrection that took place in Washington, D.C., a year ago.

It has now been a full year since Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election encouraged Qanon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and true believer Trumpers to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the election results by coercing then Vice President Mike Pence not to accept the electoral vote tally. In marking a year since the Capitol attack, I want to shed some light on the event by looking to the past. The Capital attack of 2020 was hardly the first insurrection or attempt to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not counting numerous slave rebellions, the most famous of which I will have more to say about later, there remains a laundry list of failed insurrections like the one that occurred a year ago. There is Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and the Dorr Rebellion. There was the State of Muskogee in Florida, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and the Anti-Rent War in Upstate New York. Of course, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would count as one, though that too was a slave revolt, and the secession of the Confederate States can be counted as the most significant. Several insurrections occurred following the end of the Civil War as a response to Reconstruction, and these typically involved white supremacists, like the White League in Louisiana, which tried to rise up against their state government in 1874. The Wilmington Coup that I will be discussing has been called the only successful insurrection or coup in American history, but that’s not quite accurate. One white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction insurrection, the Election Massacre of 1874 in Alabama, was quite successful in driving out the Reconstruction government and suppressing Black voters, and was also, as its name indicates, very deadly. Indeed, it might even have been viewed as an example to follow by the orchestrators of Wilmington’s insurrection decades later. The reason I will focus on the Wilmington insurrection as a precedent and a lesson warning us against letting the leaders of such an insurrection go unpunished is because of some striking similarities. Like the previous insurrection in Alabama and like the Capitol attack of 2020, the Wilmington coup involved a reactionary minority, outnumbered at the polls, who sought to take back power illegitimately. As with every major insurrection in the 21st century, both the Alabama insurrection of 1874 and the one we’ll focus on in 1898 North Carolina were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and much like the Capitol attack, which has seen hundreds of participants prosecuted but none of its orchestraters, including media figures, congressional representatives, and the former president, held accountable, the leaders of these anti-Reconstruction coups were never prosecuted. However, unlike on January 6th, these insurrections succeeded, creating illegitimate, unelected governments, and encouraging similar violence in other Southern states to intimidate and disenfranchise Black voters. In fact, it can be argued that it was in this time, as white supremacists sought to illegally fortify their control of civil government and limit the political influence and economic opportunities of free Blacks that the kind of structural, systemic racism we see today first began to take shape. But what makes the Wilmington insurrection especially relevant today is the way that it was propelled by fake news propaganda, and the way its orchestrators afterward projected guilt onto their opponents. Just as apologists on the Right have claimed a false equivalence between Capitol insurrectionists and racial justice protestors, or attempted to gaslight the country by saying it was actually far-left provocateurs in disguise who stormed the Capitol, after the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, its leaders assured the rest of the nation that their seizure of power was all perfectly lawful and that their violence was actually warranted to quell a race riot initiated by Black residents of the city. The scary part is that most seem to have believed them, and this false narrative of their massacre was accepted as accurate history for more than fifty years.

This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts anti-Reconstructionist white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League combining forces to restore a “white man’s government” and redeem the “lost cause” by brutally oppressing free Citizens.

In order to grasp the motivations of the insurrectionists in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, we must look further back, at the struggle for political power in this important coastal city beginning during the Civil War. Wilmington, as with all of North Carolina, had always been a contested state, split between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party. The state was among the very last to secede and join the Confederacy, and after the Confederacy’s collapse and the end of the Civil War, Wilmington was something of a Mecca for free Blacks. There had always been a relatively large population of free Black people living in North Carolina even before the war between the states, and from the nation’s independence until 1835, the state actually permitted free Black men to vote. And at Wilmington, a bustling trade hub on Cape Fear, there were many port jobs available to Black workers, loading and hauling shipments of fruits and vegetables, rice and corn, peanuts and cotton, tar and guano. Out in the forests, they worked in the timber industry, or harvesting sap to process into turpentine. In 1868, after more than 30 years denied the vote, free Black men who lived and worked around Wilmington were again given the opportunity to exercise the franchise, and even to campaign as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. With the state under the control of Union forces following the end of the war, and Confederates who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union being denied the right to hold office or vote, it was no surprise that Republicans took the majority of delegate positions in the convention. More surprising and galling to the unreconstructed rebels, though, was that 13 Black men won their races and became delegates. The new state constitution being voted on might guarantee universal male suffrage, which, with the growing population of eligible Black voters around Cape Fear, meant that the party of slavery might never hold power again in cities like Wilmington. This was unacceptable to white supremacists, so unsurprisingly, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, only recently formed in Tennessee, increased in that area and commenced a voter intimidation campaign. A month before the election, the KKK placed placards around the city, warning that “When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike,” and publishing notices in newspapers stating that “THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT.” They even went so far as to parade ominously through the streets in their hoods, hauling a cart full of dry bones behind them. What the KKK did not count on, however, was the leadership of one delegate, a relentless campaigner for Black suffrage named Abraham Galloway, who roused his fellow Black men to patrol the streets with pistols and fence posts in hand, ready to combat any white-clad terrorist attempting to intimidate Black voters. Galloway’s resistance campaign was successful, the Black vote was not suppressed, Black men in North Carolina regained the right to vote under its new constitution, and the Ku Klux Klan, as such, did not come back to Wilmington again for several decades.

After the passage of the new constitution, the anti-slavery Republican Party, bolstered by the Black vote and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, kept control of the state for only a couple years. In 1870, former Whigs and white supremacists formed the Conservative Party and took back the legislature. Eventually the Conservative Party merged with the dominant Democrats, who by fearmongering and race-baiting were able to muster their white base enough to retake power in North Carolina through the 1870s and 1880s, during which time they rigged the game, making it so that certain county official positions that had been going to Black candidates were appointed by them instead of elected, and finding procedural excuses to suppress the Black vote. However, following a recession, many white farmers left the Democratic Party and joined the Populist Party in the early 1890s. A new alliance between the Republicans and the Populists, called Fusionism, would eventually retake the legislature and restore the election of county officials. By this time, sixteen counties in eastern North Carolina boasted Black majorities, and starting back in 1880, Wilmington had had the highest percentage of Black citizens of any city in the South, with a staggering 60 percent of the city’s population. The result was Fusionist domination in local politics, and Black residents winning election to office and earning appointment to positions typically reserved for white men. Wilmington, North Carolina, between 1894 and 1898, was ahead of its time as a truly racially diverse community. In addition to the majority white Republican and Populist officials, like the mayor, the police chief, and the deputy sheriff, there were several Black officials, including magistrates, aldermen, and police officers. In the end, this is what chafed Wilmington’s white supremacists the most. It wasn’t the loss of their party’s political influence, or even being outnumbered by free Blacks, who mostly kept to their own neighborhoods or to the poor, wooded areas outside town. Certainly the poor, jobless whites resented when employers hired a Black laborer instead of them, but the real impetus for the white supremacy campaign mounted in 1898 was the fact that some Black men had been elevated to positions of authority over white men. The mere thought that a white man might be arrested by a Black police officer and convicted by a Black magistrate led white supremacists to bemoan so-called “negro domination.” Of course, this was classic race-baiting. Black officials were still in the minority among the Republican leaders in Wilmington and across the state, and white Republicans were sensitive to the racial resentments of Democrats, and maintained an informal segregation, such that Black magistrates decided cases for Black residents, and Black police arrested only Black offenders. After all, despite many liberal and even radical Republicans in favor of racial equality before the law, many white Republicans still shared the same notions that Black and white should not be social equals. But these first gestures toward Jim Crow segregation were not enough for white supremacist Democrats, who would not be happy unless the Black residents of the Cape Fear area were stripped of any power and made as subservient and afraid as they once had been under the lashes of harsh overseers and cruel slave patrols.

A North Carolina newspaper cartoon spreading propaganda about “negro domination.”

Here, before I go further and discuss the inception of Wilmington’s White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, I feel I must digress to clarify something about the Civil War–era and postbellum Democratic and Republican parties. You’ll sometimes hear conservative commentators today criticize the modern-day Democratic Party as being the party of slavery and the KKK. Usually, it’s in defense of the modern-day Republican Party, which has become the favored party of white supremacists—a kind of whataboutism or tu quoque fallacy, a hurling of the same charge back at the accuser… y’know: classic “no puppet, you’re the puppet” rhetoric. But those who try to use the history of the Democratic Party against them like this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. First of all, it’s a conspiracy theory at heart, arguing that Democrats have somehow made the world forget that they used to be pro-slavery white supremacists and that they probably still secretly are. And if you accepted this, then you would have to accept that Republicans also must have taken on a kind of secret façade, one that actively promotes voter suppression, denies the existence of systemic racial injustice, rejects the grievances of racial justice protesters, and appears to actively be courting the support of white supremacists. So if Democrats today are secretly the party of racism, this must mean that the GOP secretly supports universal suffrage, stands behind BLM, actually wants schools to teach the history of racism despite all their protests, and only draws the support of white supremacists because those stupid racists have failed to see through the mutual ruse of both parties. It’s absurd, and such gaslighting relies on historical blindness; it only works on someone who doesn’t understand how our dominant political parties changed over the course of the 20th century. Some will try to simplify this change by saying that the two parties are just different parties with the same names, which is inaccurate, or that they merely “switched” or just swapped platforms, but that is not strictly true either. The change was gradual, called a realignment. At the same time as the Populists in North Carolina were giving Republicans the majority they needed, elsewhere, they were allying with Democrats and beginning to change the party. While previously, Republicans had been the party of a strong central government and Democrats campaigned against it, the populist William Jennings Bryan, who would eventually come to control the Democratic Party, argued instead that the federal government should have different priorities, focusing more on social justice. Bryan put Democrats on the path toward Progressivism, and after the Great Depression, the party was nearly unrecognizable. Meanwhile, Republicans were, at the same time, gradually losing Black voter support, and eventually moved away from arguing for a stronger federal government. Surely this was partly rhetorical, to move in opposition to their political rivals, who now advocated for federal programs, but it was also practical. As historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, the Republican Party has always been the party of big business interests. Early on, those business interests profited from the federal programs the Republicans pushed for, like the creation of a national currency and the institution of protective tariffs, but later, their big business supporters favored a less intrusive federal government, and the Republicans adjusted their principles accordingly. The realignment according to racial justice issues can be most clearly observed in the politics of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was Democrats who finally delivered significant civil rights legislation, and when Republicans achieved increased political influence in the South through their Southern Strategy, effectively becoming the new party of Southern white supremacy. So to sum up in a simplistic way, Republicans used to be socially progressive, but now Democrats are, and Democrats used to be the party of racism, but now Republicans are. Through it all, however, Republicans have remained the party of the rich. So when someone suggests that you should decide which party’s candidates to support based on what their parties used to represent, remember that it makes a lot more sense to support a party because of what it stands for now, or better yet, to support candidates based on their personal convictions.

Back to Wilmington in 1898, we have Democrats looking for a path to reclaim power from the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans, and we have white residents resenting the social and political equality awarded to the city’s Black majority. Having learned from the actions of anti-Reconstructionists elsewhere in recent decades, some Democrats planned out a White Supremacy Campaign ahead of the election that would deliver them everything they had lately lost to the Fusionists. And I’m not just calling it a “white supremacy campaign” because it was white men wanting to take free Blacks and their allies down a few pegs. No, that’s what its orchestrators called it, proudly, in capital letters. Devised by North Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, and Raleigh newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels, the plan was first and foremost to inflame resentment among white residents throughout what they called the “Negroized East” of North Carolina, with especial focus on the Black Belt counties, including Wilmington. This meant a focused propaganda campaign in his and other white supremacist newspapers, lamenting the suffering of poor Southern whites under so-called “Negro domination,” and arranging for public speakers to whip up the white populace to a fever pitch. If their propaganda campaign was successful, they correctly surmised that they would be able to command their own private army of enraged white supremacists come election day and would be able not only to carry the day through intimidation and fraud, but could even go further than that in the days after the election. As they commenced with their plan, using the printed word as well as political cartoons, what Simmons and Daniels found was that they needed to stir up more than just resentment over Black residents voting and holding positions of authority. They needed to spread fear throughout Cape Fear country, make it live up to its name. Following Daniels’s lead, white supremacist newspapers fell back on the age-old specter of the Black man as a beastly rapist. They printed story after lurid story about affairs between Black men and white women, which they presented as rapes, for the prevailing sentiment was that intercourse between the races cannot possibly be consensual. It got so ridiculous that he would report on complete non-events, like a white woman noticing a Black man cross her yard or a teen girl who felt uncomfortable in passing two Black teen boys in the street, and he would report them as narrow escapes from rape with headlines like “No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro.” He focused his reporting on Wilmington in order to demonstrate what he called “the result of Negro control in the city.” And make no mistake: he was not in earnest. Josephus Daniels knew what he was doing. In a later memoir, he admitted “that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” remarking that, “The propaganda was having good effect.” It succeeded in winning white Populists and even some Republicans to their cause because of deeply ingrained racial tensions, but also because the manipulative and false reporting was not robustly challenged. In one case, a Black newspaper editor did have the courage to challenge the propaganda, and it cost him everything.

White supremacist newspaper propagandist and orchestrator of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898, Josephus Daniels.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly was the publisher of a respected weekly Black newspaper in Wilmington, the Record, and he had long tried to follow in the tradition of Abraham Galloway before him, advocating for equality and justice for the Black citizens around Cape Fear. When he stirred the pot, he even made some enemies with certain ministers and upstanding figures in the Black community who preached accommodation, urging the Black residents of Wilmington to keep their heads down and avoid confrontation with whites at all costs. And none of Manly’s editorials upset them and enraged white supremacists as much as his challenges to the notion of Black men as insatiable, beastly rapists. Manly had the courage and honesty to point out the double standard, remarking on how frequently white men raped Black women without consequence. He suggested that if they were to condemn all rape, and seek to prosecute rapists whether they were Black or white, they would find the Black residents of Wilmington their greatest allies in such a crusade against this heinous crime. And he further challenged claims about the frequency with which Black men raped white women, rejecting the doctrine that white women could not possibly be consensual paramours of the Black men who may be caught with them. While Manly may have believed his editorials could do some good, speaking truth to power as good journalists should, in the hands of Josephus Daniels’s and Furnifold Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign, it became little more than fuel for the white hot fire they were stoking. They reprinted his most damning editorial over and over, suggesting that it was a provocation and an admission that Black men openly intended to ravage their white women. White supremacists threatened to haul Manly out of his newspaper office and lynch him, but Josephus Daniels discouraged such mob action. After all, it was only August. He much preferred to keep stoking resentments until Election Day, so he pressured the Republican Governor, Daniel Russell, to condemn Manly’s editorial. With white advertisers ceasing to do business with him, this was the beginning of the end for Alexander Manly in Wilmington.

During the next leg of his White Supremacist Campaign, Josephus Daniels kicked his fake news propaganda machine into high gear. He began to report on supposed rumors that the Black residents of Wilmington were planning an uprising. Never mind the fact that he and Furnifold Simmons and certain secret societies in Wilmington were planning their own uprising, which of course he did not report on. No, he reported unconfirmed rumors about Black women intending to burn down the white homes in which they were servants, of the entire Black populace intending to embark on a murder campaign house to house if the Democrats won the day. It was all part of the white supremacists’ plan to gaslight, to obfuscate, to project. Such that, when they finally chose their moment to enact violence, they could say they were defending themselves. And it worked. The white citizens of Wilmington began to stockpile an arsenal of revolvers and Winchester rifles. They even acquired a rapid-fire gun that they placed on a tugboat just off shore, and they invited certain Black leaders to a demonstration of their artillery piece just to intimidate them. Unsurprisingly, some Black citizens, fearing for their safety, also attempted to acquire guns, and the white gun sellers refused to fulfill their orders and informed Josephus Daniels, who reported on it as proof of the Black conspiracy to rise up in armed revolt, writing, “The Dark Scheme Has Been Detected.” In October, at a white supremacist rally called the Great White Man’s Basket Picnic, Red Shirt brigades from other regions travelled to put on a show. These mounted terrorists in red shirts showed how a terrifying brigade of armed white supremacists could intimidate Black and Republican voters. And the keynote speaker, Pitchfork Tillman, former governor of South Carolina and rabid white supremacist, spoke of his successful campaign to intimidate Black residents in his home state. He wore a scowl and an eyepatch as he recounted his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, in which he and his Red Shirts oversaw the murder of six Black men, an event that set off a series of similar attacks and an estimated 100 further murders leading up to the election of 1876, in which the Democrats took power, or “redeemed” the state. Following the Great White Man’s Rally and Picnic, the white supremacists of Cape Fear began wearing red and forming brigades of their own, and the lynchings of Black men steadily increased.

Amexander Manly, editor of the Black newspaper the *Daily Record*, and a courageous voice against white supremacist propaganda in late 19th-century North Carolina.

This was not the first time that false rumors of a forthcoming Black rebellion resulted in indiscriminate violence in North Carolina. Back in 1831, just north of North Carolina’s border with Virginia, Nat Turner initiated his bloody rebellion, killing more than fifty white residents of Southampton County, including women and children. While he and his followers remained at large, similar rumors began to spread south of the border, in North Carolina, that slaves were planning a large scale uprising. As in Wilmington more than 60 years later, the newspapers fanned the flames of this panic, falsely reporting that armies of fugitive slaves were marching into North Carolina, murdering white families and freeing their slaves to add to their numbers. It was the most horrific nightmare of slaveholders throughout the South, every Southern white man and woman’s secret terror, and whites in North Carolina, including Wilmington, reacted to their worst fear coming true without questioning its veracity. They rounded up Black people who had the misfortune of being out on the street or away from their plantations, many of whom had not even heard about Nat’s Fray, as it was called, and they whipped them, tortured them, burned them at the stake, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts as warnings to the other rebel slaves, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, there was not a single instance of a slave killing a white person in North Carolina at the time, or for some time afterward. The newspapers, in warning about a massacre of white residents, had incited the massacre of Black men and women instead. In 1898, when Josephus Daniels ratcheted up his White Supremacy Campaign to lie to the public about Black plans for an armed uprising, he was tapping into that same fear. And he certainly was knowingly misreporting, for accomplices in his campaign had hired Black detectives to infiltrate the community and report back on what the Black residents of Wilmington were up to, and these detectives had reported that the Black residents were not up to anything besides fearing for their lives. By this time, Daniels’s and Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign had determined to foment real violence after Election Day, so we can assume that when he began to spread rumors of this so-called Dark Scheme on Cape Fear, he was counting on his white readers having the very same reaction as they’d had in 1831. He would not be disappointed. Join me for Part Two to hear more about how this disinformation campaign led to voter intimidation, election fraud, armed insurrection, and massacre.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas Carol

January 05, 2022 by Nathaniel Lloyd

The year is 1888, and the city of London is gripped by terror because of the ripper murders. This serial killer mutilated at least five women at night around certain impoverished districts of the city, though other killings were also believed by many to have been committed by the same person. Newspaper coverage of the murders turned into one of the first true media frenzies, and the result has been a lasting legacy of myths and pseudohistory surrounding the murders. The story of Jack the Ripper is one I’d certainly like to tell one day on this podcast, but this Christmas season, I want to focus on another story that is said to have occurred in this time, while all of London was locking their doors, afraid of the bloody phantom killer stalking the streets. That year, during the week before Christmas a young girl named Carol Poles went missing. When the authorities failed to find young Carol, her family and others from her community banded together to find her, terrified that she might become the victim of the Ripper, if that wasn’t already her fate. However, as they went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking about their dear Carol, few would open their doors and talk to them, fearing that it was the Ripper lurking outside their door. Therefore, as a signal that they meant no harm to the occupants of each home they visited, they sang Christmas songs outside each door, and only when the residents opened up did they inquire whether little Carol Poles had been seen. Alas, they never found young Carol, but every year, they kept up the tradition in her memory, singing songs from door to door, and that is why we call Christmas songs sung from door to door Christmas Carols. Isn’t that a fascinating story. Too bad it’s utter nonsense. It’s unclear where this urban legend originated, but it’s very clear that it is hogwash. If they first called Christmas songs carols in 1888, it’s rather hard to explain why Charles Dickens called his novella A Christmas Carol in 1843. So where does the word “carol” come from? Some identify John Awdlay, a chaplain in Shropshire, as being the author of the earliest known English usage of this word when he compiled a list of 25 “caroles of Cristemas” in 1426. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it was well in use by the 1500s. As for its origin, some, like Andrew Gant, author of one of my principal sources for this episode, The Carols of Christmas, claim that its derivation is murky and that it is said to have been borrowed from many different languages. The Oxford English dictionary tells us the English word was in use as far back as the 1300s referring to songs or dances generally, and not necessarily those associated with Christmas, and it traces the word etymologically to Old French. However, from there the origins do indeed become obscure, and there is debate over whether it may be derived from the Greek-Latin chorus or some other ancient derivation, such as the Latin corolla, or little crown, referring to the ring-dances also called “carols.” So as we begin to look closely at these famous songs of Christmas, we already see a patchwork of myths, misinformation, and historical blind spots.

We cannot begin our study of the little known history and surprising facts behind certain well-known Christmas carols without first properly delving into the true history behind the tradition of caroling from door to door, as we hear in the classic carol “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” This tradition has its roots in the older forms of Christmas that I spoke about in my first Christmas special, when it was more of a midwinter bacchanal that saw the norms of society, from gender to class, upended topsy-turvy style, which of course I also spoke further about in my second Christmas special. If you haven’t listened to those, you’ve got plenty of fun seasonal listening in store this holiday. The word “wassail” can be traced to an Old Norse toast to one’s health. “Waes hael,” was toasted, essentially meaning “Be healthy,” and the response was “Drinc hael,” whereupon the toasters drank. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in the 12th century that it entered the English language when the Anglo-Saxon chieftain’s daughter Rowena taught it to Vortigern, King of the Britons, though this is pure mythologizing. How this toasting became specifically associated with Christmas is unclear. The toast was commonly shouted at coronations, some of which occurred in Christmas time during the 11th and 12th centuries, including those of William the Conqueror and Stephen of Blois. However, it may simply be because people did a lot of drinking during the wild old Christmas festivities. Since then, though, the toast has evolved in meaning. A wassail is a drink, typically some kind of spiced ale, commonly drunk in Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and the verb, wassailing, refers to the nocturnal visits of the poor to houses of the affluent. These house-to-house visits were not the mannered and lovely caroling of today, however, but rather a kind of drunken form of panhandling in which wassailers asked for money or food. Often the singing was more of a threat. If the occupants did not treat them generously, they would annoy them with their intoxicated caterwauling until they got what they wanted. This, the true nature of Christmas caroling, may surprise some of you listeners, but Christmas carols are full of surprises like this. When you look into them, you find that lovely songs may not be about what you think they’re about, may not even be about Christmas at all, and may have a surprising history behind them.

A Christmas Eve 1842 issue of the *Illustrated London News*, depicting Father Christmas in a wassail bowl.

Ever since the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, watching it has become something of a national tradition in the U.S. In 1992, the Peanuts gang returned with an all-new Christmas special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Just as the first special had encouraged a more traditional Christian view of the holiday, the new special once again had Linus turn to the Bible for some insight, this time seeking an understanding of the classic repetitive song The Twelve Days of Christmas. “That song drives me crazy,” says Sally. “What in the world is a calming bird?” In response, Linus cracks open a Bible and says, “A calling bird is a kind of partridge. In 1 Samuel 26:20, it says: ‘For the king of Israel has come out to seek my life...just as though he were hunting the calling bird.’ There's a play on words here, you see? David was standing on a mountain, calling. And he compared himself to a partridge being hunted.” In reality, “calling birds” are not “a kind of partridge.” In fact, the original English version of this song, first published in the 18th century as a children’s rhyme, actually describes the 4th day’s gift as “colly birds,” which referred to European blackbirds. Oddly, among the many translations of this verse in 1 Samuel, none matches what Linus reads, and most translate it as a partridge, not a “calling bird.” It’s very strange then that they didn’t just have Linus talking about the first day’s gift, the iconic partridge in a peartree. But this line too sparks debate among ornithologists, since a partridge is a ground bird that would not typically be found in a tree. Some have looked to an alternate version of the song which says that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gives “a part of a juniper tree,” suggesting some corruption has turned it into a partridge in a peartree. However, most of the gifts in the song are game birds, so it would stand to reason that it is a partridge. Another explanation lies in the fact that the original English version was a translation of an older French rhyme, Les Douze Mois, The Twelve Months, not a Christmas rhyme at all. It is pointed out that the Old French word for a partridge was un perdrix, which sounds very much like a peartree. However, if the line was originally bilingual, “A partridge and un perdrix,” that would make it a gift of two birds on day one, spoiling the whole structure of the song. Regardless of what the original line was and how it was corrupted, one thing is certain. The song is absolutely not derived from that verse in 1 Samuel that Linus implies it is from.
Charles Schulz would not be the last to suggest that this classic Christmas song, which had evolved like so many others from earlier versions that were not about Christmas at all, actually has some religious meaning that it doesn’t really have. Since the 1990s, a claim has been circulating the Internet that the Twelve Days of Christmas was actually a secret coded Catholic catechism dating to the English Reformation, when Catholics could not openly practice their faith. However, this claim, often credited to 20th century Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar, doesn’t make much sense on a number of levels. First, the code itself is asinine. It says the twelve drummers drumming represented the twelve points of the Apostles Creed; the eleven pipers piping were actually the eleven apostles (minus the Twelfth Apostle, Judas Iscariot); the lords a-leaping clearly must represent the 10 Commandments; the ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit; the maids a-milking stood for the eight beatitudes; the swans a-swimming represented the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the geese a-laying were the six days of creation, the five golden rings really the five Books of Moses or Pentateuch; the four calling birds could be the four gospels; three French hens were the three gifts of faith, hope, and love; two turtle doves stood for the Old and New Testaments; and the partridge in a pear tree symbolized Jesus Christ on the cross, with God himself as the “true love” that gives all these things. The clearest refutation of this claim was given by Snopes, which pointed out that there is simply no support for this claim beyond the simple repeating of the claim itself. If we look at all these supposed symbolic connections, there is no correlation beyond the numbers of the things. There is no clear reason to associate Christ with a partridge, or leaping lords with commandments, or milkmaids with beatitudes. Also, besides the fact that there were varying levels of toleration of Catholicism in the centuries between Henry VIII and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, most of these secretly coded symbols, with the exception of the 12 points of the Apostle’s Creed, are just Christian things, not explicitly Catholic things. It’s not as though the Reformation did away with all talk about Christ, his Apostles, the Holy Spirit, and the books of the Old Testament. In fact, the time when the contents of the song might have been forbidden would have been during the English Civil War, when Puritans briefly outlawed Christmas, but in that case, it would have been the carol itself that was banned, not the mere mention of certain Christian concepts. While this Christmas carol myth is altogether ridiculous, it is perfectly representative of the way people simply don’t understand the origins of their favorite seasonal songs and sometimes choose to completely invent a fictional origin that suits their worldviews.

Statue of Saint Wenceslaus in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

One classic Christmas song, with an earworm melody and an uplifting message of Christian charity in the face of a harsh winter, is Good King Wenceslaus, but the history behind this popular Christmas song reveals that it is not quite what it seems. First, there is the ancient history of King Wenceslaus himself, who was actually a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, named Václav. According to the legend that that would see him later venerated as a saint and remembered as a king by Czechs, he was an honorable and virtuous ruler, devoted to Catholicism despite the pagan beliefs of much of his family, and he was known for his great charity to the lowliest of his subjects. This is the legend that would inspire the songwriter who would further immortalize him, but the reality of his life was rather more violent than the song lets on. When his father died, his grandmother became regent, but his pagan mother resented her and had her murdered, strangled with her own veil, it is said. When his mother took control, she suppressed Christianity, leading to a rebellion and coup by Christian noblemen who ended up exiling her and installing a teenage Václav as duke. His duchy was beset on all sides by enemies, from Magyars to Saxons, as well as from within, by conspirators who had gathered around his pagan twin brother, the resentful Boleslav who wanted power for himself. Duke Václav was eventually killed by his brother’s supporters, and supposedly run through by his own brother with a lance while celebrating the birth of Boleslav’s son. This has been portrayed in the many biographies and hagiographies of Václav as a trap laid by his brother, who had invited the duke to celebrate his son’s birth all the while planning to assassinate him, but this may very well be an embellishment meant to further portray the Catholic duke as a martyr of his faith, killed by pagan usurpers. In truth, the invitation may have been a genuine peace offering that only turned violent when a drunken argument broke out. It’s impossible to tell because the history of Václav comes to us principally through the aforementioned hagiographies, the purpose of which are to encourage the elevation of their subjects to sainthood, and thus are inherently unreliable.

Thus the image of Good King Wenceslas as a barefoot penitent who gave everything to the poor, the so-called “father of all the wretched,” is unlikely to have much relationship to the true character of the man. But it was just such hagiography that inspired Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale to write the famous hymn about him. Of course, the story that Neale describes in the hymn, of Wenceslas and his page trudging through the snow and risking frostbite to carry food and firewood to a poor subject living up a mountain, is pure fiction, a bit of further hagiography. Neale wrote the lyrics to the tune of an old Latin hymn, “Tempus adest floridum,” which in translation means, “Spring has unwrapped her flowers.” And he wrote it not as a Christmas song, but as a hymn for St. Stephen’s Day, observed in the liturgical calendar on December 26th. This much is clear from the first lines of the song, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even…” So we have a hymn adapted from a song about spring to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day, all about a Bohemian duke whose pagan family made a habit of bloody coups. Where is Christmas here? Is it enough simply to talk of snow? Or is it the least mention of Christian charity? And what of the beliefs of the hymn writer, John Mason Neale? Does it spoil his song entirely that he chose as his subject a Catholic saint for song to be sung by choristers in the Church of England? Many of his contemporaries certainly thought so, accusing him of idolatry and crypto-Catholicism because of his high church sympathies, leading even to mobs threatening to stone him and burn his home to the ground. Once, at the funeral of a nun, he was physically assaulted for his encouragement of Anglo-Catholicism. So the question, very relevant to the history of other Christmas carols, becomes this: how much might the biography of a songwriter cast different light on a well-known Christmas song?

James Pierpont, the unsavory character who wrote “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” better known today as “Jingle Bells.”

The perfect example of a carol-writer’s life completely changing a Christmas carol can be found in one of the most upbeat, light-hearted, and seemingly innocent of all Christmas songs: Jingle Bells. Since learning more about its composer, I personally have not been able to listen to this previously lovely song without some distaste. There is actually some debate over where the song was written, with both Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, claiming to have been its birthplace. In truth, both have some rightful claim, since its composer, James Pierpont, was surely writing about his memories of snowy Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics, for the city in which he actually wrote it, Savannah, is not known for snow. James Pierpont came from a family of Unitarian preachers, but he wasn’t very pious himself. At fourteen, he ran away from boarding school and went to sea, where he seems to have picked up some poor character traits. Returning to his family’s hometown of Medford, Mass., seven years later, he took a wife and fathered three children, but he promptly abandoned them to seek his fortune Out West, in San Francisco. After losing everything to a fire and then losing his wife, who remained back east, to tuberculosis, he did not return home to raise his children. Instead, hearing that his brother John had started a church in Savannah, he left his children in his father’s care and went south to play the organ. There in Savannah, as his brother preached an increasingly unpopular anti-slavery doctrine to his Southern congregation, James seems to have fallen into scandal. He took a new bride, fathering a child with her years before their nuptials, according to one census, and thereafter begetting more, a second brood, seemingly without much thought for the three children he had left behind in Massachusetts. Looking at his most popular song, the Christmas song he titled “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” we can see that it’s not really about Christmas. Once again, it’s simply the presence of snow that has made it a Christmas standard. Rather, the song is about wooing ladies, and may illustrate James Pierpont’s reputation as something of a rake. Its full lyrics are about taking a young lady out for a sleigh ride, and then being shown up and humiliated by another “young gent.” The message of the song seems to be that you get more girls with a more impressive sleigh, as summed up in its final stanza, “Go it while you’re young. Take the girls tonight.” Think of it like a more modern song that might talk about impressing one’s conquests with a flashy car.

Besides this song, Pierpont’s other lyrics further betray his low character. He wrote more than one song complaining about having to pay his debts. And his numerous minstrel songs betray his drifting away from his Unitarian roots toward a more Southern and racist mindset, especially one titled “The Colored Coquette.” Finally, when his abolitionist preacher brother returned home to Massachusetts at the outbreak of the Civil War, James showed his true colors. He remained in Savannah, and he joined the Confederate army, serving in a cavalry regiment for two years, and he wrote numerous Confederate war songs, including “Strike for the South,” the lyrics of which unironically argue that Confederates fought for liberty; “We Conquer or Die,” whose lyrics suggest that defeat (read: the end of slavery) was a fate like unto death; and “Our Battle Flag!” which told Confederate soldiers that if they died in battle, they went to a “hero’s grave.” So there you have it. Next time you hear Jingle Bells, you, like me, may have a hard time not thinking about the child-abandoning, debt-evading, womanizing, white supremacist secessionist who wrote it. And ironically, his nephew, John Pierpont Morgan, or J.P. Morgan, the famously ruthless banker of the Gilded Age, has been unfavorably compared to that iconic Christmas film villain, Henry Potter, of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, I’m not suggesting that the art cannot be separated from the artist, that this classic Christmas carol, so simple and popular among children, should be canceled. Rather, I’m saying that, if knowing this kind of spoils the song for you, as it does me, then maybe you delete it from your Spotify Christmas playlist. And there is a contemporary alternative with which you might replace it. “Up on the Housetop,” a jaunty and genuinely Christmas-y song about Santa Claus’s visit, was also written during the Civil War, but its composer, Benjamin Hanby, was an abolitionist through and through, whose family is said to have worked the Underground Railroad. Like Pierpont, he too wrote other songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray” and “Ole Shady,” which unlike other songs about slavery in that era actually highlighted the cruelty of the institution with a focus on its separation of families.

The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce.

Much as Jingle Bells was never really about Christmas, so too another iconic Christmas carol, Oh Christmas Tree, was never really about Christmas trees per se. Nevertheless, it plays a central role in one of the most cherished modern Christmas stories, which itself may be somewhat embellished. Many have heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front, German and British soldiers crossed the trenches, sang Christmas carols, and played football, or soccer as Americans like me would call it, all of it to the chagrin of their sternly disapproving generals. Like most stories in history, this one too has gathered a variety of myths and misconceptions on its way through the years. For example, it was not so general a truce as some might believe, with hostilities continuing in many places, and the military leadership was not so disapproving as the legend would have it. They did not angrily take action to halt the armistice or discipline those soldiers who had participated in it or censor news about it afterward, as would later be claimed. Even the soccer matches seem to have been greatly exaggerated, with most accounts of them originating from rumors or reports that games of football had been proposed but never actually played because the soldiers didn’t actually have a ball handy. The carol-singing does appear to have been accurate though, and the song they often as not sang together was one well known in both their languages: “O Christmas Tree” to the British, and “O Tannenbaum” to the Germans. But the two were not really singing about the same thing. Tannenbaum more accurately translates to fir tree; turning this song into an ode to Christmas trees was a bit of creative mistranslation.

The song and its melody both evolved from different folk traditions. When Bavarian composer Melchior Franck wrote the lyrics in the 17th century, praising the evergreen tree for its hardy survival through the harsh cold of winter—a lesson on perseverance and stoicism in the face of cruel hardship—he was taking part in a long folk tradition of poetry and song that used evergreens as metaphors. But the lyrics would not be set to its recognizable melody until arranged by another German composer, Ernst Anschütz, in 1824. The tune he used can also be traced back to an old Westphalian folk song, the lyrics of whose later iteration, popular as a drinking song among German students in the Middle Ages, spoke of Roman poet Horace, his romance of women, his drunken merrymaking, and his intention to live in the moment and enjoy life, or carpe diem, as Horace would have said. In some sense, the song’s association with Christmas seems natural: the imagery of greenery in the winter lends itself well to the seasonal festivities, which have always been about celebrating the persistence of life in the midst of the winter’s cold lifelessness, and even its melody’s now lost association with merrymaking connects perfectly with the true Saturnalian origins of the holiday. But it occurs to me that, during the Christmas Truce, while the British might have sung the song with visions of Christmas trees festooned with gaudy decorations in mind, the Germans may have been thinking more about the intended meaning of the song, about precious life surviving in a cruel world and the need to persevere like the evergreen through this ghastly, numbing time. And unknowingly, all of them were acting in accordance with the old theme associated with the song’s melody, seizing the day, plucking some few moments of joy for themselves before time marched them on, many of them to their deaths.

Publicity photo of American entertainers Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, who played her little sister in *Meet Me in St. Louis*

Even the meanings of more modern Christmas songs are not always what many think they are, or what they were at first meant to be. For example, my father’s favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because, according to him, it’s so hopeful and uplifting. Dad, I know you listen to the podcast occasionally, so first, Merry Christmas, and second, you know I’m going to explode your understanding of this song. I’ve talked to you before about how this classic Judy Garland showtune is not hopeful but bleak and not uplifting but rather devastating. Well, now let’s go even further into why this song only seems positive because it was more than once revised to alter its tone. The song was originally written for the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, a classic that I recommend everyone view this season. In the musical, a family’s patriarch has decided to move them all from St. Louis to New York, and none of his girls is happy about it. The song is sung by Garland’s character, Esther, to her little sister Tootie, who is afraid that Santa won’t be able to find her in New York. Esther is melancholy herself in the scene, looking pensively out a window at the snow and thinking about the young man she’ll have to leave behind because of their cross-country move. This is the context of the song, full of pain because of a major life change that seems to be the end of their lives in the city they love, and its lyrics’ talk of having a merry Christmas is ironic and even rueful. When the song was first written, the lyrics better reflected this tone. Esther was to sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.” We have Judy Garland to thank for the somewhat brighter tone of the song in the film. She had been performing USO tours and had seen firsthand how another sad and yearning song of hers, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had taken on greater meaning to troops who saw in it a song about their eventual return home from service. She felt that a revision of the lyrics to this song could make it similarly meaningful on more than one level. That and she thought her character came off a bit mean singing the harsh original version to an already tearful child. So the lyrics were changed from “No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” to the more familiar “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.” Yet still the song retained its melancholic heart, with a line at the end that “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song did not see its final, joyful sanitization until 14 years after it was written, when Frank Sinatra wanted to include it in his album and came to the original songwriter, complaining that the “muddle through somehow” line still made it too sad. “'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” he said “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” And thus was born the line “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” and the original tone of the song was finally lost to any who hear it divorced from its intended context. Only the pathos in Judy Garland’s original performance of the song hints at the utter despair that the sung was meant to evoke.

In my previous Christmas specials I have spoken at length about the problems with the biblical nativity story, as well as the numerous myths and mysteries that derive from it. These include the true date of Christ’s birth, the time of year when he was born and the likelihood of shepherds tending their flocks at night during that season, the legend of the Christmas star, and the mythos of the Three Magi. Many of these elements of Christmas mythology owe their immortality to their inclusion in more than one Christmas carol. One example of a carol portraying the nativity, whose depiction has caused some controversy and debate, is Away in a Manger. One line in this song mentions “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” and its critics have gone so far as to call the song heretical. This innocent line about a placid babe, they said, suggests that Christ did not display human qualities, like a full range of emotion, and as such the song took part in the notorious heresy called Docetism. But whatever one thinks of this terribly serious debate, the song “Away in a Manger,” formerly called “The Cradle Song,” serves as a final apt example of the mystery and misconception that surrounds so many Christmas carols. The song is popularly attributed to Martin Luther, the famed church reformer. It was said that he wrote the song as a lullaby for his children. It’s feasible enough. Luther is known to have written hymns. But in fact, it does not appear to be true at all, having only first been claimed in 1884 by a Universalist newspaper whose editors regarded Martin Luther very highly. The true author of the lyrics remains unknown, and even harder to pin down is the composer of its melody, for it has been sung to many different tunes through the years. In a 1951 article, music scholar Richard S. Hill identified no less than 41 distinct tunes that have been used for the song. As with “Away in a Manger,” it seems the history of most Christmas carols is confounded by blind spots and myths. In this way, it reflects well on the history of the holiday generally. Those who bloviate like Linus about the “true meaning” of Christmas, or demand some adherence to a perceived original tradition of the holiday, fail to understand that the original meaning is mislaid in a confusion of misconceptions and mysteries, and that today’s traditions are just a jumble of whatever stuck through the years, their original forms lost to time. Such is the case with all folk tradition.