Elizabeth “Bessie” King never left Wilmington. She continued her employment as a domestic servant to various leading families until forced to retire because of arthritis in 1926 at the age of sixty-six. She finished her days in a private retirement home, where she lived for forty more years, supported by an anonymous benefactor.

Saffron King James went to Baltimore in 1902. There, she attended the Baltimore College of Nursing and Medical Arts. After stints in various hospitals, she returned to Wilmington’s James Walker Hospital in 1917 and was cited for her service during the influenza epidemic the following year. She outlived three husbands, the last a minister, and was struck and killed by an automobile in 1966 while going to the bedside of her dying mother.

John G. Norwood left Wilmington briefly during the coup but returned six months later. He continued to work behind the political scenes to improve the treatment of Afro-Americans.

Harry Calabash continued to reside in Wilmington. He was found dead of a heart attack on the night that the armistice was signed ending the Great War. On the floor next to his chair was an empty fifth of bourbon.

Captain William Rand Kenan, in the peak of health and vigor, died suddenly of unexplained causes in 1903 on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell served three terms as mayor of Wilmington, becoming one of the city’s wealthiest and most distinguished citizens. He died in his bed at the age of seventy-six on St. Patrick’s Day 1911, after an eight-hour illness. His funeral at St. James Episcopal Church was attended by hundreds of mourners, including representatives of many of the best clubs in Wilmington. The Raleigh News & Observer eulogized him as a model for Southern manhood: “When Waddell died, the South lost one of the cleanest and purest types of the chivalrous gentleman.” He was interred at Oakdale Cemetery.

Gabrielle deRosset Waddell survived her husband by many years. She became conspicuous for her public and private philanthropy, and she traveled widely. She never remarried.

Ivanhoe Grant disappeared from history in 1898. But an elderly man rumored to be Grant appears in an Associated Press wire photo, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial behind the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oratory. Grant would have been a hundred years old. The man in the photograph has never been positively identified.

Alex Manly returned to Wilmington only once, in 1925, with his wife, Carrie. He visited the courthouse, where he attempted to regain title to his properties confiscated in 1898. But there was no record that he had ever owned any real estate or other assets in New Hanover County.

In the aftermath of the coup, reporters from numerous papers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia requested interviews, but he refused them all, claiming that he would someday write the definitive account of his experiences during the uprising. No such account was ever published.