By Saturday, it was becoming clear that the city could not function without Negro labor. Sprunts’ Champion Compress, largely because of James Sprunt’s reputation for fairness, had retained most of its men, but MacRae’s Wilmington Cotton Mills and other large concerns were nearly deserted. It was impossible to train ordinary laborers to be skilled machinists overnight. Construction sites were abandoned, waiting for brick masons, carpenters, and glaziers.

Most of the forty-four restaurants in town had been owned and run by Negroes. Now, all but a handful were closed. On the waterfront, nothing was moving. Steamships and coastal packets lay idle at the wharf, accumulating wharfage fees, with no stevedores to unload their cargoes and no teamsters to haul them away if they did.

Blacks were no longer allowed to leave the city but were directed back to their homes. They left anyway: in boxcars, on trails through the swamp, along unguarded lanes, in small boats across the Cape Fear River.

Colonel Waddell sent delegation after delegation into the swamps to persuade the Negroes to come back into town and return to their jobs, but none met with much success. He even wrote an appeal for the Messenger, explaining away the violence as isolated, spontaneous acts: “Self-appointed vigilantes are responsible for much of this misery, because of the indiscriminate way they have gone about banishing objectionable persons; and, in some instances, unscrupulous whites have gratified their personal spite in dealing with the Negroes.”

But nobody was reading the newspaper out in the swamps, along the lanes of Oakdale Cemetery, or under makeshift cover in the great railroad culvert that was the boundary between Brooklyn and white Wilmington.

As a last resort, Waddell sent black search parties into the swamps—men borrowed from Sprunts’ Champion Compress. These brought back a few dozen workers, but not enough. Brooklyn was a ghost town.

The city was still technically under martial law. At the suggestion of George Rountree, Waddell’s board took advantage of the situation and approved Rountree’s draft of two temporary ordinances designed to consolidate power and ease the labor shortage: first, any person arrested within the city limits could be tried only before the mayor, not a magistrate, since there were still a handful of Republican magistrates legally in office; second, any vagrant was ordered to find employment within twenty-four hours or leave the city. If he refused, he could be summarily sentenced to work without wages on city property for up to thirty days.

Rountree planned to include these ordinances in the new city charter he would champion in Raleigh when he took his seat in the legislature in January.