Thomas Jordan Jarvis and the White Supremacy Campaign of 1898

The election of 1898 brought to the fore some of the ugliest displays of racial prejudice, discord, and hostility in North Carolina history. In an effort to seize political power the NC Democratic Party launched its “white supremacy” campaign calling on all white voters to rally behind its candidates and drive Republican-Populist-Fusionists – many of whom were African-Americans – from the halls of local, regional, and state power. The most violent expression of this campaign occurred in Wilmington, then the state’s most populous city, on November 10, as white supremacist vigilante forces overthrew, with murderous fury, a slate of local officials, mostly African-American, elected days earlier. While the mastermind of the Democratic Party’s platform was Furnifold M. Simmons (1854-1940), former governor Thomas J. Jarvis (1836-1915) played, just a decade before breaking ground for the construction of East Carolina Teachers Training School, an instrumental role in giving the vile rhetoric of white supremacy as much political respectability as his earlier political career and personal charisma could confer of it.

Jarvis’s main contribution to the 1898 campaign took the form of a widely read newspaper article, “Greenville Negroized,” describing in detail how continued Republican-Populist rule might threaten other municipalities with what had already occurred in Greenville: domination by an African-American town council. Jarvis, writing first for The Morning Star in Wilmington, recounted how the NC state legislature in 1895, had gerrymandered Greenville so as to ensure African-American control of the town council, the mayor (a white Republican, elsewhere identified as “a white Radical Mayor”), and virtually all town offices including the post office, the tax collector’s office, and the police force. At the town council level, the result was a council with four African-Americans and two whites, despite the slight majority held by whites in Greenville. Jarvis noted that the town’s taxable property amounted to approximately $750,000.00, virtually all of which – he claimed – was owned by whites. African-American office holders only paid $8.00 in taxes while drawing from the town treasury an alleged $2,800.00, over half of the town’s total revenue. In a supportive editorial accompanying Jarvis’ article, The Morning Star asked, “What security has a property owner in that town?” Following Jarvis’s words, the editorial added, “More than once the town [Greenville] has narrowly escaped mob outbreaks, and it was then by the forbearance of the white people, who bore the swaggering insolence and the threats of the lawless negroes patiently to avoid trouble that would have come if they had given rein to their indignation ….”

Jarvis’ “Greenville Negroized” was later republished in the News and Observer and the Goldsboro Daily Argus, giving it multiple broadcasts in the state press. Equally significant is that it reappeared, in expanded form, in The Democratic Handbook, published in August 1898, by the Democratic Executive Committee. Under Furnifold Simmons’ leadership as chair of the Executive Committee, the 1898 rallying cry was “doing battle for Good Government and White Supremacy.” In part, as acknowledged in The Democratic Handbook, Simmons “secured the services of Hon. T. J. Jarvis” in compiling the text. Jarvis’ role is most evident in the section, “The Eastern Towns Given up to Negroes,” the first subsection of which is “The Town of Greenville,” wherein many of the same “facts” cited in Jarvis’ “Greenville Negroized” are reiterated with only minor editing. Additional material is added, praising the white population of Greenville as “one of the very best in the State.” Jarvis added that under Populist-Republican-Fusion rule, “the condition of affairs has grown constantly worse, the laws not being properly administered, until now disorderly people being unrestrained, the liquor shops sell right along on Sundays and general lawlessness and disorder prevail.” Following the section on Greenville, The Democratic Handbook includes another section on “Wilmington and Newbern,” where charters had been changed to allow the governor of the state, then a Republican, Daniel L. Russell (1845-1908), power to appoint aldermen to ensure Republican rule of those cities. According to this section of The Democratic Handbook, other eastern towns including Goldsboro, Wilson, and Fayetteville “were threatened” with similar “domination of the negroes.”

Following the Democratic Party’s landslide victory in the 1898 election, D. J. Whichard, editor of Greenville’s The Eastern Reflector, noted how publication of “Gov. Jarvis’ letter telling of negro domination in Greenville” had impacted voters in western counties such as Catawba and Wilkes, thus contributing to statewide Democratic victory. The celebratory reporting soon took a somber turn after news arrived of the “Wilmington riots” and the racial violence that prompted African-American office holders to resign, and many, along with their Republican supporters, to leave the city, under threat of physical harm if not death, and never return. Today, the November 1898 events in Wilmington are more accurately described as a coup, or a violent overthrow of an existing, legitimate government. In the wake of the mass resignation of the Wilmington city leaders, a new government was formed, dominated by the Democratic Party, and led by Alfred M. Waddell (1834-1912), the new mayor.

While Jarvis’ article might have seemed threatening to many insofar as it depicted African-American municipal rule in the worst light, it did not advocate violent resistance as an option. Rather, it issued from a willingness to obey the law, and a determination to change, from within the system, those laws considered unacceptable. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to see in Jarvis’ writings themes that, in lesser minds prone to violence rather the rule of law, had an incendiary effect. Whatever the case, Jarvis’ contribution to political discourse in 1898 reflected the extent to which he, less than a decade before the legislative founding of ECTTS, lent his political prestige to the white supremacy campaign and perhaps contributed, indirectly and inadvertently, to the Wilmington race riots and the resulting coup.