The Memphis massacre of 1866 was a rebellion with a series of violent events that occurred from May 1 to 3, 1866, in Memphis, Tennessee. The racial violence was ignited by political and social racism following the American Civil War, in the early stages of Reconstruction.Zuczek, Richard (ed.). 2006. Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era: Memphis Riot (1866). After a shooting altercation between white policemen and black veterans recently mustered out of the Union Army, mobs of white residents and policemen rampaged through black neighborhoods and the houses of freedmen, attacking and killing black soldiers and civilians and committing many acts of robbery and arson.
Federal troops were sent to quell the violence, and peace was restored on the third day. A subsequent report by a joint Congressional Committee detailed the carnage, with blacks suffering most of the injuries and deaths by far: 46 black and 2 white people were killed, 75 black people injured, over 100 black persons robbed, 5 black women raped, and 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools (every black church and school) burned in the black community.United States Congress, House Select Committee on the Memphis Riots, Memphis Riots and Massacres, 25 July 1866, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office (reprinted by Arno Press, Inc., 1969) Modern estimates place property losses at over $100,000, suffered mostly by black people. Many black people fled the city permanently; by 1870, their population had fallen by one quarter compared to 1865.
Public attention following the riots and reports of the atrocities, together with the New Orleans massacre of 1866 in July, strengthened the case made by Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress that more had to be done to protect freedmen in the Southern United States and grant them full rights as citizens.Ryan, "The Memphis Riots of 1866" (1977), p. 243. The events influenced the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted full citizenship to African Americans, as well as the Reconstruction Act, which established military districts and oversight in certain states.Waller, "Community, Class, and Race" (1984), p. 233.
Investigation of the riot suggested specific causes related to competition in the working class for housing, work, and social space: Irish immigrants and their descendants competed with freedmen in all these categories. The white planters wanted to drive freedmen out of Memphis and back to plantations, to support cotton cultivation with their labor. The violence was a way to enforce social order after the end of slavery.Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), p. 123. Quote: "The Memphis riot was a brutal episode in the ongoing struggle that continued well past the actual moment of emancipation to establish the boundaries around and possibilities for action by black people. The rioters asserted dominance over black people and attempted to establish limitations on black behavior. Where one cultural code had governed racial interaction under slavery, another, more appropriate to the new black status, had to be established after black people claimed their freedom."
Background
The cotton trade collapsed in the first year of the war, precipitating economic problems in West Tennessee. After the capture of Memphis by Union forces in 1862 and occupation of the state, the city became a center for "contraband" camps and a haven for refugee slaves seeking protection from former masters.
In Shelby County and the four adjacent counties around Memphis, the total slave population in 1860 was 45,000. As escaped and freed slaves migrated to the city, the black population of Memphis increased from 3,000 in 1860 to nearly 20,000 in 1865.Ryan, "The Memphis Riots of 1866" (1977), p. 244. The total population of Memphis in 1860 was 22,623 and, while it was growing rapidly, the thousands of black people had a major effect. By 1870 the city totaled 40,226.
While some black people lived in the camps, families of the 3rd Artillery—a black unit that had been stationed there—built cabins and shacks. They settled beyond the city limits near Fort Pickering, near what was called South Memphis.Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), p. 112. Quote: "Once large numbers of black soldiers came to be stationed at Memphis, members of their families began to settle there as well." Other blacks moved there in hopes of military protection and federal assistance.
Unique among the states because of the long-term military occupation, during the war Tennessee created a kind of de facto Black Code, which depended on the complicity of police, lawyers, judges, jailers, etc.Forehand, "Striking Resemblance" (1996), pp. 12–13. Slaveholders of Tennessee and the Memphis area struggled with a labor shortage due to slaves escaping to freedom behind Union lines, and they could no longer rely on profits from forced labor. White people resented and were alarmed at the many freedmen at large in Memphis and urged the military to force black people to work. The military took into custody black people classified as vagrants and forced them to accept labor contracts on plantations.Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), pp. 113–115. Quote: "Major William Gray, one of Dudley's officers, remarked in September, that 'I am daily urged by influential persons in the city' to compel freedmen and women to accept plantation jobs.' Dudley's attitude regarding the status of freedmen is apparent in a letter that same month, in which he wrote 'worthless, idle, persons have no rights to claim the same benefits arising from their freedom that the industrious and honest are entitled to.' In October he ordered that the streets be patrolled by soldiers from Fort Pickering to pick up "vagrants" and force them to accept labor contracts with rural planters. To some, and especially to black people, this policy seemed akin to the reimposition of slavery."
To General Nathan Dudley, who established this labor policy for the Memphis Freedmen's Bureau, local Reverend T. E. Bliss wrote:
How is it that the colored children in Memphis even with their spelling books in their hands are caught up by your order & taken to the same place & there insolently told that they 'had better be picking cotton.' Is it for the purpose of conciliating' their old rebel masters & assisting them to get help to secure their Cotton Crop? Has it come to this that the most Common rights of these poor people are thus to be trampled upon for the benefit of those who have wronged them all their days?Quoted in Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), p. 115.
Black soldiers counteracted efforts to force their people back to the plantations. General Davis Tilson was head of the Memphis Freedmen's Bureau prior to Dudley. Referring to activities of the soldiers dispatched to threaten idle people to return to work on the plantations, Tilson said "colored soldiers interfere with their labors and tell the freed people that the statements made to them ... are false, thereby embarrassing the operations of the Bureau."Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), p. 116. Note: Tilson is discussing "the soldiers employed to visit the Freed people in and about Memphis and inform them that none but those having sufficient means or so permanently employed as to be able to take care of themselves will be allowed to remain."
Irish residents
Prior to the war, Irish immigrants had constituted a major wave of newcomers to the city: ethnic Irish made up 10% of the population in 1850 when there were 8,841 people in the city. The population expanded at a rapid rate by 1860 to 22,623, and the Irish constituted 23%.Carriere, Marius. (2001), "An Irresponsible Press: Memphis Newspapers and the 1866 Riot," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 60(1):2Bordelon, John. (2006), "'Rebels to the Core:' Memphians under William T. Sherman," Rhodes Journal of Regional Studies 3:7Walker, Barrington. (1998), "'This is the White Man's Day:' The Irish, White Racial Identity, and the 1866 Memphis Riots," Left History, 5(2), p. 36 They encountered considerable discrimination, but by 1860 they occupied most positions in the police force and had gained many elected and patronage positions in city government, including the mayor's office.Congress (1866), Memphis Riots and Massacres, p. 6 But the Irish also competed with free black people for lower-class jobs rejected by white people, contributing to animosity between the two groups Municipal politics in Memphis was plagued by corruption. Mayor John Park often appeared in public drunk, and the police chief complained that he had little control over his officers.
Most of the Irish had arrived beginning mid-century, since the Great Famine of the 1840s. Many settled in South Memphis, a new and ethnically diverse neighborhood constructed on two bayous. South Memphis was home mostly to families of craftsmen and semi-skilled workers. When the Army occupied Memphis, they took over nearby Fort Pickering as a base of operations. The Freedmen's Bureau also set up an office in this area.Waller, "Community, Class, and Race" (1984), p. 235. "It was one of several neighborhoods in Memphis whose residents could have entertained reasonable hopes for social and economic mobility, but whose precarious position within the social structure made them most vulnerable to economic fluctuation. ... While the entire economy of Memphis suffered from the complete collapse of the cotton trade in the first year of the war, it was this new, economically precarious neighborhood which was most directly confronted in with the dramatic social and demographic changes which accompanied the capture of Memphis by Union forces on June 6, 1862." Black refugee settlement was concentrated further to the South and outside city limits.
In the early years of the occupation, the Union Army permitted civil government, while prohibiting known Confederate veterans from taking office. Because of this, many ethnic Irish gained office during this period. General Washburne dissolved the city government in July 1864, but it was restored after the end of military occupation in July 1865.Art Carden and Christopher J. Coyne, "An Unrighteous Piece of Business: A New Institutional Analysis of the Memphis Riot of 1866", Mercatus Center, George Mason University, July 2010, accessed 1 February 2014
Rising tensions
The Daily Avalanche was one of the local papers that exacerbated tensions toward black people, as well as against the federal Reconstruction efforts after the war.Ryan, "The Memphis Riots of 1866" (1977), p. 245. The report by the Freedmen's Bureau after the riot described the long "bitterness" between the black people and the "low whites," aggravated by some recent incidents between them. Having been told by the mayor and citizens of Memphis in 1866 that they could keep order, Major General George Stoneman had reduced his forces at Fort Pickering and had only about 150 men assigned there. They were used to protect the large amount of matériel at the fort.
Social tensions were heightened when the US Army used black Union Army soldiers to patrol Memphis. There was competition between the military and local government as to who was in charge; after the war, the developing role of the Freedmen's Bureau added to the ambiguity. Through early 1866, there were numerous instances of threats and fighting between black soldiers and white Memphis policemen, who were 90% Irish immigrants. Numerous witnesses testified to the tensions between the ethnic groups.