The New Yorkerhas a terrific piece by Lauren Collins on the delayed reckoning being brought for one of the more obscure acts of armed sedition in American history—the murderous overthrow of a multi-racial elected government in the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.

Everett turned onto Fourth Street, heading north toward Brooklyn. He passed by the county courthouse (the day before the coup, the conspirators convened there to sign "The White Man's Declaration of Independence"), Victorian houses, shotgun shacks, overgrown tracks, barbershops, churches, abandoned lots. He kept walking. "Fourth and Harnett, right here, is where they started shooting black folk," he said. "And then, if you go all the way down there, you get to the cemetery where they fled." There was hardly anyone around. Everett turned left, continuing until he reached a park, where six paddle-shaped bronze pillars were arranged in a semicircle. They were a monument, conceived of by a committee of local citizens, for the centennial of the coup. "At least ten blacks died, scores more, according to African-American oral tradition," a panel explained. "Wilmington's 1898 racial violence was not accidental. It began a successful statewide Democratic campaign to regain control of the state government, disenfranchise African-Americans, and create a legal system of segregation which persisted into the second half of the twentieth century."

The Wilmington coup was so bad that "race riot" is considered a euphemism for what went on. A year earlier, a woman from Georgia named Rebecca Felton had given a speech defending the practice of lynching by saying, "If it requires lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand negroes a week ... if it is necessary."

This speech so angered Alex Manly, the son of former slaves who ran a successful newspaper in Wilmington, that he wrote a scathing editorial in which he pointed out that Felton's argument was simply a cover for consensual sexual relationships between the races. When the coup broke out, Manly escaped, but the first thing the mob did was burn down his newspaper office. Then, it set about killing African-Americans, and we still don't know how many died. The local government was overthrown, setting white supremacy in place in Wilmington for nearly another century.

In 2006, a state commission looking into what happened in November in 1898 issued its report into the events. From that report:

Waddell and the men present at the press destruction then re-formed their lines and returned to the armory. There, Waddell counseled the men: "Now you have performed the duty you called on me to lead you to perform. Now let us go quietly to our homes and about our business and obey the law, unless we are forced in self-defense to do otherwise."35 But Waddell's cautions fell on deaf ears for there were already roving clusters of armed men in a state of recklessness throughout the city. The white supremacy monster that he and other members of the Democratic Party had spawned, and previously held in check, had exceeded their control.

Also included in the report are copies of letters sent to President William McKinley from African-American citizens in Wilmington, in the vain hope that he might intervene and stop the slaughter. Again, from the report:

On the 10th Thursday morning between eight and nine o clock, when our Negro men had gone to their places of work, the white men led by Col. A. M. Waddell, Jno. D. Bellamy, & S. H. Fishblate marched from the Light Infantry armory on Market st. to Seventh down seventh to Love & Charity Hall (which was owned by a society of Negroes and where the Negro daily press was.) and set it afire & burnt it up And firing Guns Winchesters. They also had a Hotchkiss gun & two Colt rapid fire guns. We the negro expected nothing of the kind as they (the whites) had frightened them from the polls by saying they would be there with their shot guns. So the few that did vote did so quietly. And we thought after giving up to them and they carried the state it was settled. But they or Jno. D. Bellamy told them — — [illegible words] in addition to the guns they already had they could keep back federal interference.

"Keep back federal interference." That's a phrase that echoes, isn't it? And, of course, the report also illuminates the reaction of the white power structure to the bloody overthrow of the civil government. A local banker, who brags about how much he pays in taxes, also wrote to McKinley:

I make no apologies for being a Southern Democrat. It is the lawless, vicious bad element on the negro race that is being suppressed…the property owners and the tax-payers will not submit to the domination of the vicious element of the black race.

McKinley, a hero of Antietam and veteran of nearly the entire eastern theater of the Civil War, said nothing and did nothing. Three years later, he was dead. Jim Crow long survived him, braced as it always was by the threat of extrajudicial violence aimed at African-American citizens. It was hardly the only example. Last year, when I was in New Orleans, the city council voted to remove a monument commemorating a similar white supremacist revolt in 1874. This spring, it should be noted, the removal process was canceled because the contractors who bid on the removal job got death threats.

That remains the dynamic of white supremacy to this day. It persisted from the Wilmington coup all the way through the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, from the Red Shirt rioters to the Citizens Councils of the 20th century South. The respectable people always depend on the work of thugs and murderers to maintain the social order. (For the best modern description of how this worked for white people, see Diane McWhorter's masterful Carry Me Home.) Today, you would call the former movement conservatives. You might call the latter "deplorables," but then Chuck Todd would accuse you of racing to the bottom, so beware.

I mention all of this because, over the weekend, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a jumped-up talk-show boob named Matt Bevin, in a speech to the Values Voter Summit, summoned the spirit of the Wilmington rioters.

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(The summit, it should be noted, is organized by the Family Research Council, which itself has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Bevin walked right into the powder magazine of history with a blowtorch in either hand. From that speech, via Ring of Fire radio.

Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview and they said, "Do you think it's possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it's possible that we'll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away."

Here's the roster of speakers at the VVS. You will see people who ran for president. You will see the chairman of the Republican National Committee. You will see some of your favorite star pundits, many of whom are welcome to appear on cable news programs for the purposes of "balance." You will see many of you favorite star nutballs. And you will see the Republican nominee for President of the United States, who went before this designated hate group and pretended he's read a Bible any time in his life.

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This is an event that one of its award-winners, a governor of an actual state, felt was his own safe space to talk about armed sedition. What do all the people who took speaking fees from these people think about that? Why is this such a comfortable audience for important constitutional conservatives, and why do so many ambitious conservatives feel compelled to appear before it?

By all means, though, let's forget about that, and about how it reaches back to the collapse of democratic government to mobs all over the South in the last half of the 19th century. Let's not make anyone nervous. Let's all pretend that the condition of Hillary Rodham Clinton's respiratory system is the same as the very real possibility that the country may elect an intellectually and morally vacant man to be its quasi-caudillo. Let's look at videotape from last week so we don't have to look back at the flames of the past, which are leaping ever closer again.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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