we allow the Negroes to control this state as they do now, we will kill enough of them that there will not be enough left to bury them." Governor Russell, who by this point had withdrawn his name from the ballot in the county, decided to come to Wilmington, as it was his hometown, and he thought he might be able to calm the situation. However, when his train arrived, Red Shirts swarmed his train car and tried to lynch him. When the day was over, Democrats won 6,000 votes, overall, which was sizable given that the Fusion Party won 5,000 votes just two years prior. However, years later, it was determined that the 11,000-vote net increase also strongly suggested a high degree of election fraud. Mike Dowling would support this suggestion when he testified that Democrat party officials worked with the Red Shirts, instructing them where to deposit Republican ballots so they could be replaced by votes for Democrats. The political director of the Washington Post, who was in Wilmington for the election, recounted, "No one for a moment supposes that this was the result of a free and untrammelled ballot; and a Democratic victory here, as in other parts of the State, was largely the result of the suppression of the Negro vote." However, the biracial Fusionist government still remained in power in Wilmington, because the mayor and board of aldermen had not been up for reelection in 1898. The night following the election, Democrats ordered white men to patrol the streets, expecting blacks to retaliate. However, no retaliation occurred: The White Declaration of Independence The "Secret Nine" had charged Alfred Waddell's "Committee of Twenty-Five" with "directing the execution of the provisions of the resolutions" within a document that they authored, that called for the removal of voting rights for blacks and for the overthrow of the newly elected interracial government. The document was called "The White Declaration of Independence". According to the Wilmington Messenger, the Committee of Twenty-Five included Hugh MacRae, James Ellis, Reverend J.W. Kramer, Frank Maunder, F.P. Skinner, C.L. Spencer, J. Allen Taylor, E.S. Lathrop, F. H. Fechtig, W.H. Northon Sr., A.B. Skelding, F.A. Montgomery, B.F. King, Reverend J.W.S. Harvey, Joseph R. Davis, Dr. W.C. Galloway, Joseph D. Smith, John E. Crow, F.H. Stedman, Gabe Holmes, Junius Davis, Iredell Meares, P.L. Bridgers, W.F. Robertson, and C.W. Worth. On election day, Hugh MacRae (of the Secret