# White Declaration of Independence A white supremacist manifesto read aloud by former Confederate officer [[Alfred Moore Waddell]] at the New Hanover County courthouse in Wilmington, North Carolina on **November 9, 1898** — the day after the [[1898 Midterm Elections]] and the day before the [[Wilmington Coup of 1898]], the only successful coup d'état in American history. It is one of the most consequential primary-source documents of the post-Reconstruction era: a public, signed, premeditated announcement that white elites intended to nullify a multiracial democratic government by force. ## What it said The document deliberately appropriated the structure and cadence of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, inverting its universalism into an explicitly racial compact. Its core declarations: - That the framers of the U.S. Constitution "did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin," and that Wilmington's whites would "no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin" - That the city's prosperity required white men to occupy the jobs and offices then held by Black citizens - An ultimatum that [[Alexander Manly]] — the Black editor of the *Daily Record*, who had published an editorial rebutting the rape-panic justification for lynching — cease publication and leave the city within 24 hours It was drafted under the direction of the "Secret Nine," a cabal of Wilmington businessmen who had spent months planning the takeover, and was endorsed by roughly 450 white signatories. A "Committee of Colored Citizens" was summoned and given until the next morning to respond; their conciliatory reply was deliberately never received. ## What followed On November 10, 1898, a mob of as many as 2,000 armed white men burned the *Daily Record* offices, killed an estimated 60–300 Black residents, and forced the elected Fusionist (Republican–Populist) municipal government to resign at gunpoint. Waddell — the man who had read the Declaration — was installed as mayor by day's end. Thousands of Black residents fled permanently, transforming a Black-majority city with a thriving Black middle class into a white-majority one within two years. ## Why it matters for the KB The Declaration is the connective tissue between the [[White Supremacy]] campaigns of the 1890s [[Democratic Party]] and the legal architecture of the [[Jim Crow Era]]: the coup it announced directly enabled North Carolina's 1899–1900 disenfranchisement amendment (literacy tests plus grandfather clause), a model of [[Voter Suppression]] that spread across the South in the shadow of [[Plessy v. Ferguson]]. As a genre, it is the prototype of the modern political manifesto-as-permission-structure — a public document that converts conspiratorial planning into communal sanction for violence, a pattern that recurs from the [[Tulsa Race Massacre]] to contemporary stochastic-violence dynamics. Its 1776 pastiche also makes it a key artifact for [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] and [[The Lost Cause]]: the rhetorical capture of founding-era language for counter-democratic ends. ## Key passages > "We, the undersigned citizens of the City of Wilmington and County of New Hanover, do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin." > "...the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people... its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin." [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]