January 6 looked like a coup: a violent assault on a government, an attempt to seize power by force. Coups take many forms, born of grievances real and imagined, executed by insurgents homegrown or hired, and they can fail or succeed. Amid the endless accounting of January 6, one precedent has gone strangely missing — the only coup d’état in American history that actually succeeded.

On November 10, 1898, more than five hundred armed white men seized Wilmington, North Carolina — a city run by a biracial government born of Reconstruction and sustained by a coalition of white populists and black Republicans. This was no mob; it was an army with commanders, units, even a machine gun mounted on a carriage. The insurgents targeted a black newspaper editor first, torching his office, then turned on the wider black community and its most successful figures.

They didn’t just storm city hall — they stayed. After evicting the elected government at gunpoint, they issued a Declaration of White Independence and installed themselves as the city’s new rulers, liberated, as they saw it, from black rule. One local pastor summed up the mood without shame: “We have taken a city.”