Massacre In Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War - Softcover

Ash, Stephen V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809068303 ISBN 13: 9780809068302

Verlag: Hill & Wang, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

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 into 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 shows us newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen V. Ash

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Massacre in Memphis

The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War

By Stephen V. Ash

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2014 Stephen V. Ash
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8090-6830-2

Contents

Maps of 1866 Memphis.........................................................................................................................
Author's Note................................................................................................................................
Prologue: Memphis, Tennessee, May 22-24, 1866................................................................................................
Part I: A City Divided.......................................................................................................................
1. Yankee Memphis............................................................................................................................
2. Rebel Memphis.............................................................................................................................
3. Irish Memphis.............................................................................................................................
4. Black Memphis.............................................................................................................................
Part II: The Riot............................................................................................................................
5. An Incident on the Bayou Bridge: Monday, April 30, Midafternoon to Tuesday, May 1, Late Afternoon.........................................
6. "You Have Killed Him Once, What Do You Want to Kill Him Again For?": Tuesday, May 1, Late Afternoon to Wednesday, May 2, First Light......
7. Fire: Wednesday, May 2, Early Morning to Thursday, May 3, Dawn............................................................................
Part III: The Aftermath......................................................................................................................
8. Recriminations and Investigations.........................................................................................................
9. The Riot in History and Memory............................................................................................................
Notes........................................................................................................................................
Bibliography.................................................................................................................................
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................
Index........................................................................................................................................

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill & Wang
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809068303
• ISBN 13: 9780809068302
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland