America’s Only Successful Coup Served the Ruling Class

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…