The Causcasian, 1884-1913
Sara Thompson
The Caucasian was founded in Clinton, NC, in 1884, and was affiliated with the Democratic Party at its inception. At the time, Clinton was a small town of around six hundred people, nestled in the southeastern part of the state, on the flat and fertile coastal plain. As with most communities in the area, the main economic activity of Clinton was oriented around agriculture, with the town becoming a hub of agricultural marketing and commerce. The curious name of the newspaper is a reference to its initial political platform, which advocated “pure democracy and white supremacy.” This tagline fell into disuse within the first few years of the newspaper’s publication.
A four-page weekly, the newspaper came under the editorship of future senator Marion Butler in 1884, who transformed the newspaper into a populist publication supporting the North Carolina People’s Party. In 1893, Butler moved the newspaper to Goldsboro, a larger town, in order to expand his readership. At the newspaper’s peak in the 1890s, more than ten thousand people subscribed to The Caucasian, supporting the newspaper’s advocacy of income tax, government ownership of railroads, educational funding, and, perhaps ironically, a fairly liberal stance on racial issues.
In order to create my dataset, I collected accounts of “criminal assault,” as rape was called at the time, searching issues of The Caucasian published between the 1890s and the 1910s. I then collected all of the relevant results and created a spreadsheet containing relevant demographic and historical information to contextualize the crimes, as well as digitizing and preserving the content of the articles themselves.