How did the architects of Wilmington’s coup moved seamlessly from physical to structural violence? Their use of hidden power exposes how modern institutional frameworks like Project 2025 echo historical legal blueprints to hoard power for a privileged elite.
Physical violence is destructive, expensive, and inevitably invites a backlash. The smoke over the Daily Record’s torched offices, the guns pressed into the backs of Wilmington’s Fusionist officials, and forced exile of African American leaders in November 1898 signaled an immediate victory for the White Supremacist insurrection. Yet the coup’s architects knew violence alone would not subvert a multiracial majority forever. To ensure the coup’s impact spanned generations, they packed away the rifles and walked into the halls of bureaucracy.
The men who engineered the Wilmington insurrection did not hide in the shadows. Instead, they used the chaos as a springboard into state offices, quickly pivoting to use hidden power to enact their long-term agenda. Hidden power manipulates institutional rules, backroom alliances, and procedural technicalities by deciding whose voices matter and whose are systemically excluded before a single vote is ever cast.
When hidden power is successfully appropriated, it creates structural violence: a system where laws, ordinances, and economic policies do the damage that bullets used to do. It stifles opportunity, economic mobility, and political agency of targeted identity groups. In 2026, as we observe 250 years of the “American experiment,” we must confront how the rules of democracy were intentionally rewritten by powerful elites who understand that the easiest way to control a populace is through its machinery.
The Legalization of a Coup
Former Confederate officer Alfred Moore Waddell, who led the armed mob to City Hall, took office as Wilmington’s mayor. The Secret Nine leveraged their financial networks to control state politics. Charles Aycock, who orchestrated the intimidation of Black leaders, used the momentum to win the North Carolina governorship in 1900. For the next decade, virtually every civic leader in Wilmington was a signatory to The White Declaration of Independence.
North Carolina’s displaced Congressmen and exiled Republican leaders desperately appealed to the federal government for help. The coup d’état was blatantly illegal; the manufactured portrayal of a “Black riot” did not erase the fact that elected officials were forced to resign at gunpoint, and Black citizens were murdered or exiled. Yet, President William McKinley, a Republican president whose party base was overthrown, chose silence. He refused to use his executive authority to intervene militarily, restore law and order, or depose the insurgent government. His implicit acceptance established a political precedent that greenlit the destruction of Black civil and political rights throughout the American South. Radical racists saw the lesson clearly: they were free to use any means they thought necessary to re-subdue African Americans without fear of federal intervention.
Legislative Laundering and Workarounds
Once ensconced in state offices, the ruling class moved to ensure they would never have to fight an election against a multiracial coalition again. They bypassed national civil rights protections not by breaking federal law, but by circumventing it.
In 1900, under Governor Aycock’s leadership, the state legislature adopted a mandatory literacy test and a poll tax as the “Grandfather Clause” amendment to North Carolina’s constitution. This acted as a bureaucratic workaround to the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying the right to vote based on race. To protect poor, illiterate White voters, they added an exemption for anyone whose ancestors were eligible to vote before 1867. On paper, the law was race-neutral. In practice, it systematically wiped out the Black electorate. Within a few years, Black voter registration in North Carolina plummeted to near zero. The Red Shirts no longer needed to guard the ballot boxes; the constitutional amendment hampered Black voters until the 1950s.
Economic Sabotage and Institutional Gerrymandering
With the ballot box secured, the post-coup regime dismantled the independent economic power Black Americans had built since the Civil War. Prior to 1898, Black entrepreneurs owned 90% of downtown eating establishments and 80% of the barbershops.
The White Declaration of Independence explicitly declared its intention to strip employment opportunities from African Americans and hand them to White men in private and public sectors. The new administration used local ordinances, licensing boards, and zoning laws to shutter Black-owned enterprises. They seized or sold property owned by banished Black leaders for pennies on the dollar. By destroying Black economic self-sufficiency, they ensured any future fight for political freedom would be logistically unsustainable.
With The Secret Nine’s support, Mike Dowling, a White labor leader and Red Shirt, formed the White Labor Union and subsequent White Labor Bureau. The Bureau ensured no Black man would ever hold authority over a White man by methodically securing exclusive municipal contracts and replacing Black workers in the lucrative riverfront businesses where they had thrived since the war.
This economic sabotage and electoral manipulation systematically gerrymandered municipal and state districts to dilute a minority community’s voting strength. They moved away from stuffing ballot boxes, preferring to redistrict so that even if a minoritized community voted in unison, the structure neutralized their impact. This was the dawn of Jim Crow law, an era achieved by laundering a violent insurrection through the machinery of legislation and bureaucracy.
From The White Declaration of Independence to Project 2025
The tactics pioneered by The Secret Nine and The Group of Six remain the definitive manual for elite power-hoarding when the democratic will of a diverse populace shifts. Today, we are watching the violent chaos of the January 6th insurrection coalesce into a coordinated deployment of hidden power in state houses and think tanks across the nation.
Modern structural violence speaks the language of law and order, efficiency, and administrative reform. Just as the 1890s campaign exploited legislative suppression to neutralize Fusionist votes, modern factions apply strict voter ID laws, close polling places in working-class neighborhoods, slash early voting windows, and execute highly aggressive partisan redistricting. Like the “Grandfather Clause,” gerrymandering silences minority voters through procedural technicalities.
On a federal level, this structural blueprint manifests in frameworks like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Backed by more than 400 organizations, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the administrative state asserting that the federal government operates as an illegitimate, unaccountable engine of progressive ideology. The plan reclassifies tens of thousands of civil service jobs into political appointments, purges independent experts, and dismantles agencies that protect minoritized communities. These actions consolidate unchecked power within the executive branch and bypass democratic checks and balances.
This strategy of structural capture relies heavily on stacking the federal judiciary with lifelong appointments to dismantle key protections. The climax of this long-term campaign occurred in April 2026, when the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. By upending decades of precedent, the Court effectively eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark guardrail that for 60 years guaranteed communities of color fair congressional districts and helped elect thousands of Black and Hispanic representatives at all levels of government.
The Court ruled mapmakers can functionally dilute minority voting power under the guise of pursuing partisan advantage. Mapmakers now possess a judicial green light to systematically undermine minority representation from local school districts and city councils to state legislature and Congress. Just as the architects of 1898 authored The White Declaration of Independence to establish permanent rule outside the bounds of traditional democracy, modern judicial frameworks seek to construct an arena where shifting electoral majorities no longer alter the direction of the state.
The Organizers Toolkit: Countering Hidden Power
We cannot build a sustainable future if we continue to operate in an arena whose dimensions were drawn by the powerful elite to ensure a permanent home-team advantage. While coalitions may celebrate minor legislative wins or temporary policy shifts, we will not succeed if we continue to treat bureaucracy as a neutral machine.
Left unaddressed, hidden power erases decades of grassroots progress with devastating speed. To sustain an equitable society, movements must match the long-term vision of our opposition and adopt offensive institutional tactics:
- Consolidate: Merge disparate single-issue policy objectives into a single, unified structural roadmap that speaks with one collective voice.
- Plan: Design ironclad administrative mandates for every participating agency before taking power, ensuring that entrenched bureaucratic friction cannot stall execution after a coalition victory.
- Mobilize: Cultivate political insiders to change policy from within the civil service, while simultaneously leveraging grassroots pressure from the outside to keep those insiders accountable.
Yet, institutional planning is only half the battle. Legislative manipulation and structural capture succeed because they are fueled by a deeper, more insidious force: the capture of the public mind. To fracture solidarity and democratic structures, the ruling class must engineer a cultural narrative that makes exclusion acceptable to the masses.
In Part 3: Invisible Power, Exploited Disinformation: The Architecture of Manufactured Consent, we explore this psychological terrain. We examine how the architects of the 1898 coup employed media syndicates, fabricated crises, and stereotypical tropes to manufacture the public panic required to justify a violent uprising, and how today’s digital disinformation ecosystems deploy those same methods to fracture modern solidarity.
