“Well, at last—the press!” Colonel Waddell joked when Sam walked up.

“Big turnout,” Sam said.

Over the music of the band and the clamor of shouted conversations, Rountree was talking seriously. He had been to see Governor Russell two weeks ago, along with Hoge.

Sam knew that, after a lot of leaning, Governor Russell had backed down, canceling last week’s scheduled speech in Wilmington and promising to keep the Republicans from fielding a slate of candidates. He hedged, same as when he had let the Democrats take a majority on the Board of Audit and Finance. He was running scared. In 1870, when the Democrats swept the state ballot, they had impeached the Republican governor. Russell was too cagey to expose himself like that.

He laid down a condition: the two Democratic candidates most likely to impeach him must be taken off the ballot in favor of more moderate candidates. The delegation had agreed.

One of the new “moderate” nominees was George Rountree.

Meantime, the Republican slate had collapsed. Ben Keith, drafted to run for the state senate, had announced in a letter to the Messenger and other newspapers in town, “I cannot afford to sacrifice my business interests for political considerations.” Twice, he’d been ambushed by thugs from the White Government Union, and the Red Shirts had enforced a boycott of his store. He was going broke and feared for his life. The daily mail brought anonymous threats to his family. Rountree visited him late one night and wrote the letter for him.

Dan Gore, candidate for the state house of representatives, and like Keith an alderman, had also gotten scared off. He was easier than Keith—a single brick through his front window, wrapped in a sheet of paper on which was scrawled a crude skull and crossbones. He vowed publicly to vote the white supremacy ticket. He gave Rountree fifty dollars for the campaign war chest.

Other champions of Fusionism and Negro suffrage—acting Sheriff George Z. French and Flavell Foster prominent among them—had quit the fight. Foster had been the Yankee commissar during the occupation of Wilmington at the end of the Civil War. Despite the fact that he’d doled out food and blankets generously to paroled Confederate prisoners, they’d never forgotten he was a Yankee.

The field was open. The ballot would include no Republican candidates for county commissioner, sheriff, coroner, clerk of superior court, or state house of representatives. The only black man slated to run in the first place, for register of deeds, had quietly withdrawn.

Oliver Dockery would still stand for the United States Congress against John D. Bellamy, and everybody already knew how that would turn out.

“Congratulations, George,” Colonel Waddell said. “You’re going to come out of this a state representative.”

“We haven’t won anything yet,” Rountree said, put off by Waddell’s tone. “Nobody votes till Tuesday.”

“Still,” Clawson, the editor, said, “it’s all in place. We’re ready to move anytime.”