as bastions for white Americans. However, their control was largely limited to the western part of the state, within counties where there were few blacks. As the Democrats chipped away at Republican rule, things came to a head with the 1876 gubernatorial campaign of Zebulon B. Vance, a former Confederate soldier and governor. Vance called the Republican party "begotten by a scalawag out of a mulatto and born in an outhouse." Through Vance, the Democrats saw their biggest opening to begin implementing their agenda in the eastern part of the state. However, in that region, poor white cotton farmers, fed up with the capitalism of big banks and railroad companies, had aligned themselves with the labor movement. They had turned on the Democratic Party, founding The People's Party (also known as The Populists). As the US plunged into an economic depression, the Populists banded with black Republicans who shared their hardships, forming an interracial coalition with a platform of self-governance, free public education and equal voting rights for black men, called the Fusion Coalition. In the 1894 and 1896, the Fusion party won every statewide office, including the governorship. This shift of power horrified white Democrats, who sought to capitalize on some cracks between the Fusion alliance, of black Republicans and white Populists, that began to show in 1898. Rise to leadership Democratic Party Chairman, Furnifold Simmons, was tasked with developing a strategy for the Democrats 1898 campaign. He decided to build a campaign around the issue of white supremacy. Simmons created a speakers bureau, stacking it with talented orators who he could deploy to deliver the message across the state. One of those orators was Waddell, a skilled speaker, who had developed a reputation as "the silver tongued orator of the east" and as an "American Robespierre." Waddell aligned with the Democrats and their campaign to "redeem North Carolina from Negro domination." With the aid of Josephus Daniels, the editor of the influential Raleigh newspaper, News & Observer, Waddell, and the other orators, began inciting white citizens with sexualized images of black men, insinuating their uncontrollable lust for white women, running newspaper stories and delivering speeches of "black beasts" who threatened to deflower white women. Leading up to the November election, in August 1898, white men began to abandon the Fusion coalition when Alexander Manly, the owner of Wilmington's sole black newspaper, "The Daily Record," wrote an editorial responding