of the campaign's orators) used what happened at Wilmington as a warning to those who dared to challenge the Democrats. He stated that disenfranchisement would keep the peace. When the votes in Wilmington were counted, only twenty-six people voted against black disenfranchisement, demonstrating the political effect of the coup. Historical recounting "Race riot" On November 26, 1898, Collier's Weekly published an article in which Waddell wrote about the government overthrow. The article, "The Story of The Wilmington, North Carolina, Race Riots" included an early use of the term "race riot". Despite vowing to "choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses", and the fact that some members of the white mob posed for a photograph in front of the charred remnants of The Daily Record, in the article Waddell painted himself as a reluctant, non-violent leader – or accidental hero – "called upon" to lead under "intolerable conditions". He painted the white mob not as murderous lawbreakers, but as peaceful, law-abiding citizens who simply wanted to restore law and order. He also portrayed any violence committed by whites as either being accidental or executed in self-defense, effectively laying blame on both sides: Although individuals of both races pointed to Democrat-backed violence as the driver behind the incident, the national narrative largely cast black men as aggressors, legitimizing the coup as a direct result of black aggression. For example, The Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper in Atlanta, Georgia, justified the violence as a rational defense of white honor, and a necessary response against the "criminal element of the blacks", furthering stereotypes of black violence. The complex reasons for the coup were overlooked in Waddell's account, which disregarded the overthrow as a carefully planned conspiracy, established the historical narrative as the coup being an event that "spontaneously happened", and helped usher in the Solid South. Complemented by Hugh Ditzler's illustration depicting blacks as gun-welding aggressors, Waddell and Ditzler effectively defined and illustrated the term "race riot", and set the precedent for its application which is still used today. It was referred to that way by the North Carolina Legislature in 2000 when it set up the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, and is the term used to this day (2018) by the State Archives of North Carolina, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, and the State Library of North Carolina, in its online NCPedia. "Massacre" vs. "Insurrection" Waddell's Harper's Weekly account framed