“The outbreak of the disturbance resulting from collision between some policemen and

discharged colored soldiers was seized upon as a pretext for an organized and bloody massacre

of the colored people in Memphis, regardless of age, sex, or condition, inspired by the teachings

of the press, and led by sworn officers of the law comprising the city government, and others.”

-Report of the Select Committee on the Memphis Riots and Massacres, 39th Congress of the United States, 1866

 

 

The above quote is a description by Congressional investigators of a massacre that took place in Memphis, Tennessee, May 1-3, 1866.  It paints a picture of vigilante violence that grew out of disruptions to race and class hierarchies during and after the Civil War. The Memphis Massacre is one of the most well documented episodes of nineteenth-century American history due to three separate investigations undertaken right after the massacre, the records of which survive today.  Yet the Massacre remains a largely forgotten and unknown event. It is a complicated story of post-Civil War power struggles over race that not only changed Memphis, but also the direction that Reconstruction would take in the post-Civil War United States.

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In the spring of 1866 the South was profoundly unsettled by the end of the Civil War. Not only had the war destroyed land and infrastructure, but with the Union victory and the emancipation of all slaves, Southern society was turned on its head. White slaveholders no longer held dominion over black labor, or controlled black families. Formerly enslaved African Americans now lived in freedom. But this freedom was not defined and questions about the nature and scope of black freedom hung in the balance. Diverse urban populations in Memphis held dissimilar and competing visions for the future. Everyone had been aware of disruptions in class, gender, and race hierarchies during the war; now Memphians saw the emergence of black identities and cultures in traditionally white spaces.  No one was certain how social, economic, and political order would be redefined. 

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 After the war, cities like Memphis hosted Union Army forts, Freedmen’s Bureau offices, and the protective presence of federal officials. In 1866, Memphis was still under military occupation, and most white Southerners resented the presence of a federal army protecting officials whom they felt did not represent them. While President Johnson battled Congress over the future of Reconstruction, Southern cities became magnets for freed people who left plantations in search of new ways of life. Memphis had been a site for “contraband camps” during the war, gatherings of escaped slaves who eked out a living in makeshift shanties and cabins. Both the Union and Confederate armies had referred to escaped slaves as ‘contraband,’ emphasizing their status as property confiscated by the enemy; hence the term ‘contraband camps.’ These hastily built urban shanty towns evolved to become more established African American settlements in cities across the postwar South.[1] In Memphis, freedpeople sought opportunities and built communities that gave shape and meaning to their dreams of economic and social freedom.

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Though a beacon of hope to African-Americans leaving plantations, Memphis was also a poorly run, over-crowded city in which competition for jobs became intense. The influx of freedpeople to Memphis created anxiety among working-class whites who now faced competition on the docks and wharves, barges, sawmills, timber camps, and stables. Irish men were especially bitter about freedmen cutting into their business as ‘draymen,’ those who drove small wagons as taxis about the city, or worked as teamsters hauling goods. Working-class Irish immigrants harbored animosity toward this new group of people who had been their subordinates while enslaved, but now had the freedom to surpass them in education, wealth, and social status. As immigrants, the Irish already were marginalized by white Southerners, especially by Memphis elites, the ‘old-money’ folk who looked down on the Irish as drunk, rowdy, and disruptive. Despite facing class and ethnic prejudice, Irish immigrants in Memphis had carved a niche for themselves working as police and firemen, and becoming active in the city government. And so the Memphis Irish, though not necessarily ex-Confederates, nonetheless felt provoked by  the concept of African American freedom. Freedpeople found assistance from Northern officials and federal institutions, while Irish immigrants had found little support when they landed on the shores of the Mississippi River at the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff. In 1866 Memphis, the Irish still led hardscrabble lives.  

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Following the Civil War, Memphis politics saw a scramble for power, as the wealthier ex-Confederates were prohibited from voting or holding office. People who were of like mind formed citizen organizations, newspapers, and political parties to try and consolidate their influence. While the white, Democrat, ‘old citizens’ felt entitled to power, they now found Irish immigrants, Northern officials, and freedmen opposing their traditional authority. These white elites, Memphis’ traditional leadership class, were dismayed and angered by the competition for power. It radicalized them as counter-revolutionaries; they wanted to return to the old ways.  In their discourse, Memphis white elites painted the enemy federals, blacks, and Irish in broad strokes, as crude stereotypes--  the greedy carpetbagger, the rapacious freedman, the coarse, drunken Irishman. On the national stage, Johnson’s presidency empowered these Southern white conservatives, leading them to believe they could perpetuate white upper-class supremacy.

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In Memphis, these trends were worsened by the local, conservative newspapers edited and published by white elites. Papers like the Avalanche and the Argus portrayed freed blacks as dangerous and a menace to the city; warning white residents about alleged “Negro uprisings.” However, the antagonism was not only directed toward African Americans.  The newspapers captained by white elites also depicted federal officials as unwanted intruders, and encouraged disrespect for their authority. White northerners who had come to aid in the Emancipation process and to teach in black schools were especially abhorred by white Southerners, drawing further vitriol from these newspapers. The ‘better sort,’ like the Irish whom they snubbed, felt threatened by federal programs aimed at developing African American social and political agency. African American soldiers in the Union Army represented the pinnacle of black agency; they had been fighting men, armed against their oppressors during the Civil War. After the war, black soldiers remained a proud and visible presence in the city, strolling in uniform, carrying arms, and commanding respect. Thus black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering also became targets for white animus, slander, and vitriol in Memphis newspapers. In this way, the ‘old citizens’ still wielded considerable power, fueling Irish fear and hatred toward black soldiers, freedpeople, and federal officials. Memphis’ Irish police directed hostility and aggression toward black Union soldiers, insulting, bullying, shoving, or striking them without provocation. As one witness later described it, “I think these Irish have been used as cat’s paws by the better sort.”  

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The incident which acted as a catalyst to the massacre occurred on May 1st, 1866, when four Irish policemen confronted a group of raucous, uniformed, black soldiers in south Memphis near Fort Pickering[2]. These Union soldiers had been mustered out the day before, their term of service having ended in good standing. They no longer carried military issue rifles, though a handful carried pistols of their own. They had gathered in the street to drink, joke, carouse, and visit. The police ordered the soldiers to disperse but their orders were ignored. The police tried to assert their power and the soldiers refused to kowtow. Instead, the soldiers traded insult for insult, and returned their taunts, shoving, and challenges. Finally, the police, outnumbered, began to walk away, and a handful of soldiers followed, catcalling. One of the former soldiers fired his pistol into the air – the police, thinking they had been shot at, fired back into the group of black men. One of the four policemen accidently shot himself in the thigh, a wound that would prove mortal. News of his injury spread quickly, but everyone assumed the bullet that killed him had come from a black soldier. As news of the encounter spread, the story became even more distorted until rumor held that black citizens of Memphis were in full scale revolt. White Memphians began congregating in mobs, urged on or led by Irish police, firemen, and aldermen.  

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The idea of a black uprising had been a long-standing anxiety of white Southerners, and as rumors of a “Negro riot” spread through Memphis, their worst fears appeared to be true.  These fears harked back to the days of slavery when plantation owners constantly worried about slave revolt. Because enslaved people had no protection under the law, any slave uprising could be stopped by the arbitrary use of violence. Now that African Americans were free citizens with the rights to carry weapons and defend themselves, and now that freed people had become visible in public spaces, white anxieties about “Negro revolt” intensified. When white Memphians heard rumors of a black uprising, their fears about the overturning of white supremacy erupted in violence. As they had in the past, white Southerners asserted their assumed superiority over African Americans by assaulting them.  

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Most telling, Irish police and officials had waited until the day after African American troops had been released from military service, to pick a fight with black soldiers on the street. Now white Memphians could publicly use violence and intimidation without fear of intervention by black Union troops. In fact, when news of the mobs reached Major General Stoneman of the U.S. Army at Fort Pickering, he offered no help in quelling the riot. Many of his troops had been transferred out of Memphis immediately following the war and those who remained had to guard the fort and its properties. Stoneman’s reluctance to send troops from Fort Pickering into south Memphis to restore order also reflected four years of hostility from white Memphians toward the federal army in their midst[3]. White citizens had long insisted that the Memphis police could deal with anything that might happen, so Stoneman left it to Memphis police to stop the mob. This was like asking the fox to protect the henhouse.   

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Led by city officials, mobs of white men formed and walked toward south Memphis ostensibly to quash a “Negro riot,” though in reality freedmen and women were not rioting. They were returning home from work, running errands, visiting neighbors, cooking supper, napping or tending the sick when hastily formed squads of white men attacked. White mobs knocked on doors and confiscated weapons and property, threatened and beat black householders, and randomly attacked black pedestrians. These attacks went unchecked for three straight days, and as the violence continued, it escalated.

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As noted in the testimony of survivors, nearly all the rioters were working class Irish. Ironically, the Irish and African Americans had lived side by side in Memphis’ working-class neighborhoods, and many had done routine business with each other. In daily life, some recognized each other and called each other by name. Both black and white witnesses identified Irish neighbors, workers, merchants, or officials by name. Another striking fact gleaned from the testimony is that the roving squads of white rioters were often lead by members of the Memphis police department, recognizable to observers by stars on their jackets or by their uniforms[4]. As leaders among the mob, the police not only violated their sworn duty to protect all citizens of Memphis, they also sanctioned the violence. City officials took no action against the mobs and instead, let the mobs attack the African American population of Memphis. The Congressional committee that investigated the massacre wrote,

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“The fact that the chosen guardians of the public peace, the sworn executors of the law for the protection of the lives and liberty, and property of the people, and the reliance of the weak and defenseless in the time of danger, were found the foremost in the work of murder and pillage, gives a character of infamy to the whole proceeding which is almost without a parallel in all the annals of history”[5]

 

The police would enter the houses of freed people under the pretense of searching for weapons, and having gained access, would then threaten, beat, and murder black householders.   

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The massacre lasted for 36 hours and left 46 African Americans dead and over 70 wounded. Not only was the loss of life tragic, but the Massacre was carried out in such a way as to destroy the promising new beginnings of African American life in Memphis. Every black church and black school in Memphis was burned. These were foundational institutions built by freed blacks that embodied their hopes for building a peaceful and prosperous future. The destruction of homes and businesses also cost the community an enormous amount of money from damaged property and stolen personal belongings, for which they were never compensated.  

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            Not only did the mobs ransack and torch property, inflict beatings, and murder black civilians, they also targeted African American women for acts of sexual violence.  Five black women were raped during the Memphis Massacre and two children were molested. Acts of rape signified another way for white men to show dominance over freed people. Sexual assaults on enslaved women had been a common practice and a way to subordinate slave populations before Emancipation. One historian found that during the Memphis Massacre, mob leaders targeted the female relatives of black soldiers, to strike a blow against black agency. In addition, white Southerners felt threatened by freed women’s roles organizing and empowering their communities through schools and churches. Sexual violence against black women further offended black men by showing them they could not protect their own families. The Memphis Massacre presaged a continued reign of sexual terror against black women in the post-Emancipation South. 

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The reaction of black Memphians to this violence also comes through in the testimony taken by Congressional investigators. Families were traumatized, seeing and hearing their loved ones beaten, raped, or killed. Many fled the city during or immediately after the Massacre; Memphis lost nearly 50% of its African American population. Some stayed to rebuild, yet faced continued fear and renewed poverty. However, others fought back, by speaking their truths to the Congressional investigators, who arrived approximately two weeks after the Massacre. Most striking were the African American women who spoke up about being raped. Despite using the Victorian parlance of the mid-nineteenth century, with phrases like, “he threatened to violate me, and did;” or “he said he would kill me, if I did not let him have his way with me;” their statements were clear and direct.  Given the legacy of white terror under slavery, it took great courage for a freed woman to tell public officials that a white man had raped her.

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Not a single white person was killed by a black person during the entirety of the massacre. Major General Stoneman of the Union army testified that the African American community “assembled no bodies, and were engaged in no riotous proceedings”[6]. While three white people did die during the massacre, one died from his own misfire, one died when accidently shot by a white rioter, and the third died when a white man in a pub shot him for speaking politely to a black man. It was the one-sided nature of the rampage that makes this event a ‘massacre’ and not a ‘riot’. Congressional investigators summarized it as follows:

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“after the first troubles on the first evening, there was no pretense of any disturbance by the colored people, or any resistance to the mobs, calculated to excite their passions, and what subsequently took place was the result of a cool and mature deliberation to murder and destroy the colored people.” [7]

 

            On the third day of the Massacre, wary of continued destruction to property and tired of the lack of intervention by any responsible city official, prominent citizens of Memphis gathered and demanded that the mayor, the sheriff, and the Union commanders all work together to patrol the city and end the riot.  After this, General Stoneman did assign federal troops to restore order in south Memphis. The appearance of Union soldiers on active duty in the streets quelled any remaining rioters. The Union troops at Fort Pickering also provided transportation out of town for some of the Northern officials and black Memphians who fled.   

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The Memphis Massacre of 1866 held a great deal of symbolic and practical significance to Republican lawmakers in Washington who shaped the direction Reconstruction would take. The story of the Memphis Massacre was told in newspapers across the country, many of which saw it as “a major development in the increasingly rancorous debate over the future of the South, and indeed the whole nation”[8].  Discussions of the Massacre featured prominently in debates about Reconstruction and “made what was at stake in them [debates] unavoidably clear and, because so many policemen had not just condoned but had taken part in the massacre, called into question the very foundation on which every classically liberal government rests its legitimacy; its guarantee to protect its citizens from being murdered”[9]. Something different had to be done. Indeed, the Massacre can be seen as a turning point in Congress’ role in Reconstruction. The Congressional body sent to do an investigation and report on the Memphis Massacre reported back with the following recommendation:

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“Your committee says, deliberately, that, in their judgment, there will be no safety to loyal men, either white or black, should the troops be withdrawn and no military protection afforded. They believe that the riots and massacres of Memphis are only a specimen of what would take place throughout the entire south, should the government fail to afford adequate military protection”.[10]

 

After this event Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from the president, and in 1867, authorized continued military occupation of the remaining rebel states. In the wake of the Memphis Massacre it seemed that federal troops would be necessary to oversee elections, protect freed peoples’ rights, and maintain order, since Southern whites and local law enforcement had proven themselves irresponsible. In 1868, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed federal protection of Constitutional rights for all citizens, regardless of race or previous condition of servitude. To enforce these protections, the United States did not withdraw military troops from the South until 1877.

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Despite being one of the best documented episodes of nineteenth-century American history, with three investigations and hundreds of interviews with survivors and witnesses to the Massacre, this moment in Memphis history has been largely forgotten. In fact, there are such detailed accounts of the event that it is possible to reconstruct the events of the massacre hour by hour. This is what historian Steven V. Ash does in his recent study, A Massacre in Memphis, published in 2014.  Despite Ash’s groundbreaking work, the Memphis Massacre remains practically unknown outside of academia, and even then, the intense violence and its significance are rarely acknowledged. In the city of Memphis there exists only one plaque commemorating this event, placed in a small, dingy, neglected park off the paths of tourism. Ironically, this plaque is an improvement. Erected by the NAACP, this plaque correctly identifies the incident as a “massacre” led by white Memphians against African Americans. This plaque replaced an earlier one created by the Tennessee State Historical Commission that had termed the event a “race riot,” which implied that African Americans were rioting against whites or each other, when in fact this was not the case. The old plaque reflected decades of Southern refusal to publicly acknowledge white supremacist violence. The new plaque, erected by the NAACP, renames the event a ‘massacre,’ reflecting the evidence of white violence against black Memphians. Like the replacing of an inaccurate plaque, historians have been slow to expose the history of violence against people of color. Only since 2014 have the publication of Steven Ash’s book and his public lectures raised more awareness about this defining moment in Memphis history.

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The disappearance of the Memphis Massacre from public memory over the past 150 years was no mistake. This episode of racial terror was doomed to be forgotten when not a single member of the white mob was arrested, charged, or prosecuted for their actions.  Local, state, and federal officials implicitly pardoned the perpetrators of the Massacre by failing to hold them accountable. The Massacre slipped further through the cracks of Memphis history because it did not fit the master narrative of post-Civil War Southern history.  If the violence had been  perpetrated only by white, ex-Confederates, and southern Democrats, the conventional villains of racial oppression during the Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South, perhaps it would have been mentioned. The history of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, has been well researched and written into our past. However, the KKK did not lead the Memphis Massacre.  Most of the rioting was done by Irish immigrants whose position in Memphis and whose animus toward freed people eluded ready categorization and thus a place in public memory. The spontaneity and somewhat disorganized nature of the Memphis Massacre contrasted with other acts of white supremacist violence after Emancipation. Groups like the KKK and other ex-Confederate, white supremacist groups were well organized and secretive, held ritualistic meetings, planned their violent acts, and wore disguises as they carried them out. While the Memphis Massacre of 1866 may have had some elements of planning and organization, much of it was spontaneous, haphazard, and gruesomely “of the moment.” The Memphis Massacre further differs from Klan activity in that the perpetrators of this violence were not “the better sort,” the ex-Confederate, “old-citizen” community leaders of the South; but rather, they were an immigrant group, themselves marginalized. Further, the horrors of the Massacre do not fit the conventional Memphis history narrative of a beneficial cotton trade and a vibrant shipping trade before and after the infamous yellow fever epidemics.  Nor does the Memphis Massacre fit the narrative marketed to tourists about the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement, it’s trials, and victories. Perhaps the violence of the Memphis Massacre is too visceral to contain in these conventional narratives of progress.

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Today, tourists can visit the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, learn about the cotton industry and trading on the Mississippi river, visit music sites like Sun Studios or the Rock and Soul Museum, or even visit an Underground Rail Road house. History and tourism fuel each other in this town; but there are limits to this relationship. Not only does the 1866 Massacre not fit into conventional narratives of Memphis history, it is also a very difficult story to tell. For decades after the fact it was referred to as a “race riot,” which implied black culpability and obscured white responsibility for the violence. This denial of racial terror against African Americans was part of a larger, sanitized version of Southern history called the “Lost Cause.” Lost Cause history celebrated Confederates as the gracious, principled defenders of “state’s rights,” while obscuring the brutalities and injustice of slavery and white supremacy.

 

What we choose to call this historic moment shapes how people see, interact with, and remember it. There remains lingering animosity between those who would write Memphis history in terms of a heroic rebel cause and Southern [read white] heritage; and those who would focus on all the human beings who built the South, including indigenous people, African Americans, and immigrants. This revisionist narrative allows room to explore the complex interactions between diverse cultures who traded, intermarried, warred, built community, protested, created, and competed for leadership.  For some of the Lost Cause afficiondos, Southern history is deeply personal, reaching back to their ancestors and forward to their identities. So too, for African Americans, this history is equally personal and significant. Shifting the lens from white supremacist assumptions to the actual diversity of who built America moves marginalized groups to the center of story, where they share a rich tapestry with other populations.  Violence is unfortunately part of this complex past, and it calls for deeper understanding.  In recent years, the city of Memphis has been attempting to correct the outdated narrative of heroic white supremacy by changing the names of parks and critiquing public monuments that glorify Confederate leaders who condoned racial injustice.

 

[1] Steven V. Ash, A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2013).

[2] Ash, A Massacre in Memphis.

[3] Ash, A Massacre in Memphis.

[4] Ash, A Massacre in Memphis.

[5] R. Fogelson and R. Rubenstein, ed., Memphis Riots and Massacres: U.S. Congress House Select Committee on the Memphis Riots (New York: The New York Times + Arno Press, 1969).

 

[6] Fogelson and Rubenstein, Memphis Riots and Massacres.

[7] Fogelson and Rubenstein, Memphis Riots and Massacres.

[8] Ash, A Massacre in Memphis.

[9] Ash, A Massacre in Memphis.

[10] Fogelson and Rubenstein, Memphis Riots and Massacres.