According to Daniels in his autobiography, "The "News and Observer" was relied upon to carry the Democratic message and to be the militant voice of White Supremacy, and it did not fail in what was expected." In the Findings of the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, Daniels is the only name mentioned as a cause of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, Daniels printed numerous articles intended to stoke fears of black men as rapists of white women. A lone white woman noticing a black man in her vicinity would be written up in the paper as a narrowly avoided rape. Daniels also argued that achieving political office emboldened black men to commit more outrages against white women. He hired Norman E. Jennett to spread his message among the 25% of white voters who were illiterate. Daniels admitted later that actual assaults committed by black men on white women were very few in number. However his newspaper coverage had the desired effect of winning Populists over to the Democratic Party. Newspapers were sold at cost to the Democratic Party, which distributed them to white voters. According to historian Helen Edmonds, the paper "led in a campaign of prejudice, bitterness, vilification, misrepresentation, and exaggeration to influence the emotions of the whites against the Negro." The result was the only successful "coup d'état" in American history, the overthrow of an elected government by force in the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.