A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War - Hardcover

Ash, Stephen V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809067978 ISBN 13: 9780809067978

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2013

Synopsis

An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history

In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed people had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks―and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history.
Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism.
Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War–era history like no other.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen V. Ash is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Firebrand of Liberty, A Year in the South, and other books on the Civil War era. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
 
Yankee Memphis
 
 
I have always counselled [the freed people] that liberty meant the right to work for themselves, to get their own living, and live honestly as white people do;… I have told them … that they must be obedient to their employers, and peaceable.
—Testimony of Benjamin P. Runkle, superintendent of Memphis Freedmen’s Bureau office
[The Rebels] call me a pimp. I have served the United States government in the army five years, and I am called a pimp in the public press.… I came here ready to take these people by the hand, but they have met me with insults, because I wear the uniform of the government.
—Testimony of Benjamin P. Runkle1
One day in the latter part of April a Northern-born man in Memphis named William Wilder sat down and wrote a short, bitter letter to Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a leader of the Republican Party’s Radical wing. Wilder was a Union army veteran whose regiment, the 6th Illinois Cavalry, had endured much hard campaigning in Tennessee, Mississippi, and other parts of the South. He had left the service in 1864, settled in Memphis, and started a business. His political sentiments were Radical. Now he had decided he must leave the city, and he thought Stevens might be interested in knowing why. “Enclosed please find an editorial clipped from the Avalanch[e] of this City,” Wilder wrote. “This article shows the state of feeling now existing in this city against all northern men. I came here to engage in business about two years since, but from the fact that I have served two years [in] the Federal Army … I shall be obliged to seek another home.”2
Congressman Stevens saved the letter in his files, but not the clipping. The editorial that so troubled Wilder probably appeared in the Avalanche’s April 3 issue. In it, the editor took note of the Yankee businessmen in Memphis who espoused Radicalism, men “who are, with [Massachusetts senator Charles] SUMNER and STEVENS, for confiscation, disenfranchisement, and everything calculated to degrade, ruin and embarrass the people to whom they propose to sell their wares.” The editor then suggested a way to deal with these miscreants: if his readers would identify them he would publish their names, so “that the Southern people may shun them as they would a leprosy [ sic]. The Radicals are for war—let them have it. We have enlisted as a volunteer.”3
How many Yankees were living in Memphis in the spring of 1866 was uncertain. (The term applied to Northerners who had recently moved to the city, not to those who had lived in the city or elsewhere in the South for many years and regarded themselves as Southerners.) Certainly there were many hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand or more. Some had been called to Memphis by duty, some by conscience, some by ambition; some were the wives or children of those called. Most were middle-class and educated. Many intended to make Memphis their permanent home, while others were anxious to leave. All had come to the city after its capture by federal forces on June 6, 1862; the Yankees living there when the war began had abandoned the city and fled north.4
The U.S. Army had maintained a presence in Memphis ever since that day in 1862—a substantial one during the war that dwindled thereafter. And when the 3rd Colored Heavy Artillery mustered out at the end of April 1866, there remained only the headquarters of the Department of the Tennessee, a detachment of the 16th U.S. Infantry Regiment (a white unit), and a few quartermaster troops and other support personnel. Most of the officers and men of the 3rd remained in the city and in uniform, waiting for their back pay, but they were no longer members of the military.5
From June 1862 to June 1865, Memphis was under military rule, although for the first two years the municipal government was allowed to operate. In June 1865, with the war over and a Unionist-controlled state government in place in Tennessee, the army ended military rule in Memphis and returned power to the city government. But because politicians in Washington had not yet settled the pressing questions of how the former Confederate states would be restored to the Union, how the defeated Rebels would be dealt with, and what the status of the freed slaves would be, the army forces posted in Memphis and other Southern cities continued to wield considerable influence in local affairs.6
From the war’s end through early 1866, the ranking army officer in Memphis was Major General John E. Smith, commander of the District of West Tennessee. Although he embraced Republican Party principles, Smith dutifully followed President Johnson’s policy of magnanimity and reconciliation with regard to the defeated Confederates. He was skeptical, however, about the Rebels’ willingness to reconcile and especially about their acceptance of black freedom. “The white people of the South,” he wrote in June 1865, were still influenced by “the wicked leaven of slavery” and were “blind to the lessons of this war.… The former master would still induce the black to think that he is as much a slave as ever.” At the same time, he doubted the freed people’s capacity to exercise freedom wisely. While sympathetic to their plight, he believed that the degradations of slavery had rendered them incapable of meaningful citizenship, at least for the time being. On their own they were “an incubus upon society, a helpless, useless, unproductive class,” desiring nothing more than “a life of idleness” and potentially “vicious and unsafe to communities.” From these facts, as he saw them, he drew a firm conclusion: “Both races yet need to be controlled by the strong arm of Federal authority.”7
Smith thus insisted on the need for federal troops in Memphis, but not black ones. While those in the city were generally well behaved in his opinion, he recognized that their mere presence infuriated whites. “The prejudices of the southern people against the negro troops,” he told his friend Elihu Washburne in a private letter in December, “seem to be insurmountable.” Public peace was in danger as long as they were posted in the city, Smith thought, and he had no doubt that a lot of white Memphians would welcome a racial clash. The best insurance against that, he told Washburne—and, repeatedly, his own superior officer—would be to replace the black troops with white ones. That recommendation was not acted on during his tenure in Memphis.8
Although military rule in the city had formally ended, Smith unhesitatingly asserted his power whenever he thought it necessary to do so. The most notable instance occurred in December 1865, when a freedman named Billy Clarke was shot to death by Mike Maloney, a policeman. An investigation revealed that, in the act of arresting Clarke with no substantial cause, Maloney had fired a fatal pistol bullet into him and then, as he lay in the street dead or dying, had shot him twice more. Smith, well aware of the bad reputation of the police and certain that no white who murdered a black would ever be found guilty in the district criminal court, had Maloney arrested by the provost marshal, confined in the military jail in irons, and tried by a military commission. The civil authorities howled in protest and the criminal court judge issued a writ of habeas corpus, which Maloney’s attorneys presented to Smith—who dismissed it out of hand, telling the lawyers that “any act of encroachment upon the rights of the negro … is in violation of military law” and that, given “the notoriously loose administration of criminal law in this city,” justice demanded that the case remain under army jurisdiction. The military commission sentenced Maloney to five years in prison, and he was dispatched to the state penitentiary in Nashville.9
Not long before Maloney’s sentencing in late January, Smith was succeeded as ranking army officer in Memphis by Major General George Stoneman. Born in upstate New York in 1822, Stoneman was a West Pointer and a veteran of service in the Mexican War and on the frontier. During the Civil War he had been a prominent cavalry commander in both the eastern and western theaters. Given command of the Department of the Tennessee (embracing all U.S. Army forces in Tennessee) following the war, he was Smith’s immediate superior. He maintained his headquarters in Nashville until January 1866, when he relocated to Memphis and moved into the combined office and residence that Smith had occupied, a building on Promenade Street opposite the old federal navy yard in the First Ward—comfortable accommodations, but a long way from Fort Pickering, where the troops were quartered. Smith moved to another building, but not long afterward his command was abolished and he left the city. From that point on, the garrison force in Memphis reported directly to Stoneman.10
In contrast to Smith’s, Stoneman’s political sentiments were Democratic. Although he was determined to protect the freedmen from gross abuse, he was at least as skeptical as Smith about their capacity for productive citizenship and far more critical of the black troops. He had not been long in Memphis before he started cracking down on the misconduct of the men of the 3rd Colored Heavy Artillery. He was, furthermore, less hostile to the Rebels than Smith and more willing to accede to their political demands. Their anger and agitation would subside, Stoneman believed, if they were reenfranchised, and he did not worry that, once restored to power, they would persecute their political enemies or reenslave the freed people. The Rebel newspapers in Memphis were rabid and vituperative, he admitted, but no more so than some Northern Radical papers he was familiar with. And, too, he was more inclined than Smith to trust the city’s civil authorities and leave law enforcement wholly in their hands. He was, in fact, somewhat disengaged from this assignment in Memphis; compared to his wartime adventures at the head of cavalry brigades, it seemed petty and dull.11
Even had he been as ready as Smith to intervene in municipal affairs, Stoneman did not have the same manpower at his disposal. With the mustering out of the 3rd Heavy Artillery, the military force remaining in Memphis was quite small. It consisted of four understrength companies of the 16th U.S. Infantry—180 men and five officers, all told, a contingent barely larger than the Memphis police force.12
Commanding this detachment was a young captain named Arthur W. Allyn. He had five years of military service to his credit, having enlisted just days after the war began as a private in a volunteer regiment in his home state of Connecticut. A few months later he accepted a commission as first lieutenant in the 16th, a newly created regular-army regiment assigned to the western theater, and he went on to fight in many of the greatest campaigns and battles of the war: Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Atlanta. Well educated, well-read, and attentive to duty, he was breveted captain in late 1861, assumed company command, and in 1864 was granted that rank in full.13
Like the other young Yankees among that first wave of enlistees in the spring of 1861, Allyn was aglow with nationalistic ardor—in one of his frequent letters to his family he described himself as a “patriot defender of our country’s honor.” His fervor did not wane over the years of hard soldiering, and with the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army in April 1865 he exulted in “the very glorious successes of our arms” and the Confederacy’s imminent demise. But then came the shock of President Lincoln’s murder by a Rebel sympathizer, and with it not only grief but rage: “Vengeance upon the traitor hearts that conceived so cowardly a deed,” Allyn declared, and he prayed to “the great and wise God who rules the destinies of our race [to] preserve the nation now and guide Abraham Lincoln’s successor in a path that will give us a quick and lasting peace though it be purchased at the price of the blood of every traitor who has borne arms against our good country.”14
In August 1865, Allyn’s company and several others of the 16th were assigned to garrison duty in Nashville. When the order came down for the 3rd to muster out, he was instructed to take command of a detachment consisting of companies A, C, G, and H of the 16th and move it to Memphis. This force arrived by train on the evening of April 12 and moved into empty barracks in Fort Pickering, a large, fortified army camp that stretched along the Mississippi River and straddled the city’s southern boundary. Stoneman informed Allyn that his main task would be to guard the considerable stockpile of army stores and equipment in the city. At that point, Allyn was simply the commanding officer of his detachment, but when the colonel of the 3rd was mustered out with his regiment on April 30, Allyn formally assumed command of the Post of Memphis.15
Four days after arriving in the city, Allyn issued an order that set the daily routine for his troops: reveille at daybreak, followed by breakfast; sick call at six thirty; drill from seven to eight; dinner at noon; retreat and inspection at six, followed by supper; tattoo at eight; taps at eight thirty; fatigue and guard duty as required. No off-duty enlisted man would be permitted to leave Fort Pickering without permission from his first sergeant and a written pass from his company commander. “Men upon pass,” Allyn added, “are particularly reminded that they are in a peaceful city, and ordered to deport themselves … with the dignity of the uniform they wear[,] remembering they are the representatives of a greate [ sic] and dignified Republic.… [They] will refrain from intoxication and all disorders which inflict disgrace upon a soldier of the United States Army.” Because the land on which Fort Pickering stood would soon be returned to its owners (it had been appropriated by the army during the war), Allyn assigned a detail of men with carpentry experience to fix up some of the buildings in the navy yard to serve as barracks after the move. With these soldiers trooping off to the First Ward each morning and others dispatched to do guard duty or work in the post hospital as nurses or cooks, and still others sick or confined in the military jail for various infractions, there were times when Allyn had as few as fourteen men on duty in the fort.16
*   *   *
In the wake of the Union military force that captured Memphis in 1862 had come another band of Yankee invaders, a far gentler cohort with a very different mission, armed not with muskets and cannons but with schoolbooks and Bibles. These were civilian women and men dedicated to aiding the freed people, the women mostly teachers, the men mostly ministers. They were inspired by evangelical Protestantism and by the reform movements that had stirred much of the Northern middle class in the antebellum years, especially the abolitionist crusade. During the war, as Union armies conquered Rebel territory and slaves flocked to the occupied towns, Northern benevolent societies—the American Missionary Association, the United Presbyterian Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission, and others—sponsored representatives willing to go south and labor on behalf of the liberated blacks. In Memphis these agents founded schools, churches, and an orphanage. Their efforts were aided and coordinated by the army until the summer of 1865, when the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau office in the city took charge.17
In the early months of 1866 there were approximately thirty such men and women in Memphis, nineteen of them teachers (white men and women, that is; at least four Northern-born blacks also ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0809067978
• ISBN 13: 9780809067978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288