Daniel Lindsay Russell

Daniel Lindsay Russell

Daniel Lindsay Russell, Jr. (August 7, 1845 – May 14, 1908) was the 49th Governor of North Carolina from 1897 to 1901, an attorney and judge, and a politician elected as state representative and to the United States Congress. Although he fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War, Rusell and his father were both Unionists. He was the first Republican elected as governor since the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the last until 1973.

After the war, Russell joined the Republican Party in North Carolina, which was an unusual affiliation for one of the planter class. He served as a state judge, as well as in the state and national legislatures. In 1896, he was elected governor on a Fusionist ticket, a collaboration between Republicans and Populists that was victorious over the Democrats. After serving one four-year term, he retired from politics.

He was governor during the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, which occurred two days after the election in which Republicans won most of the offices in the city: the mayor and two-thirds of the aldermen were white, but Democratic Party white supremacists had planned to overthrow the government if they lost. Led by Russell's former gubernatorial opponent, Alfred M. Waddell, a white mob attacked the black newspaper and neighborhoods; they ran political opponents out of town. Russell ordered the Wilmington Light Infantry (WLI) to quell the rioting, but they killed several black men as well. He did not intervene with Waddell's city government. At the end of his term, Russell retired from politics to return to his law practice and plantation.