Alfred Moore Waddell (16 September 1834-17 March 1912) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-NC 3) from 4 March 1871 to 3 March 1879, succeeding Oliver H. Dockery and preceding Daniel Lindsay Russell. He led the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 - the only successful coup on American soil as of the 21st century - and overthrew the biracial Republican administration and seized power as the city's white supremacist mayor from 1898 to 1906. He popularized the term "race riot" to absolve his insurgents of their responsibility for the atrocities committed during the coup.
Biography[]
Alfred Moore Waddell was born in Hillsboro, North Carolina in 1834, a descendant of American Revolutionary War generals Hugh Waddell and Francis Nash and US Supreme Court justice Alfred Moore. He became a lawyer and active Know Nothing in Wilmington in 1855, served as a Constitutional Union Party National Convention delegate in 1860, and published the Whig and anti-secessionist Wilmington Daily Herald from 1860 to 1861, when the American Civil War broke out. He served as a Confederate States Army cavalry colonel during the war, and, after the war, he returned to politics as a conservative Democrat. He served on the Ku Klux Klan committee and in the US House of Representatives from 1871 to 1879, and he served as a delegate to the 1880 and 1896 Democratic National Conventions and as an elector-at-large in 1888. Waddell became known as a silver-tongued orator and a fierce supporter of white supremacism, and, on 10 November 1898, he personally led 2,000 insurgents to seize the Wilmington armory, destroy The Daily Record (the sole African-American newspaper in the state), destroy the black areas of the city, and kill up to 300 blacks and banish 2,100 from Wilmington. Waddell carried out his vow to "choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses" in the first successful coup d'etat on American soil, but he instead popularized the term "race riot" to blame the insurrection on the black community. He served as Mayor of Wilmington from 1898 to 1906, and he died in 1912.