Democratic manager of another precinct.  The Negroes came to Tolbert’s defense, and in the fight that followed Etheridge was killed and Tolbert wounded.  John Tolbert, coming up, was filled with buckshot, and a younger member of the family was also hurt.  The Negroes were at length overpowered and the Tolberts forced to flee.  All told it appears that two white men and about twelve Negroes lost their lives in connection with the trouble, six of the latter being lynched on account of the death of Etheridge.

In North Carolina in 1894 the Republicans by combining with the Populists had secured control of the state legislature.  In 1896 the Democrats were again outvoted, Governor Russell being elected by a plurality of 9000.  A considerable number of local offices was in the hands of Negroes, who had the backing of the Governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court as well.  Before the November elections in 1898 the Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes from holding office in the city.  Especially had they been made angry by an editorial in a local Negro paper, the Record, in which, under date August 18, the editor, Alex.  L. Manly, starting with a reference to a speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she “lost sight of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one class of people as against another,” and continued:  “The papers are filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching of the alleged rapists.  The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty.  If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would root the evil out of both races....  Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.  Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness brings attention to them and the man is lynched for rape.”  In reply to this the speaker quoted in a signed statement said:  “When the Negro Manly attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher’s rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers”—­a method of argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South.  As election day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes, the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts.  Election day, however, passed without any disturbance; but on the next day there was a mass