Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in Shelby County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. Situated along the Mississippi River, it had a population of 633,104 at the 2020 census, making it the second-most populous city in Tennessee, the fifth-most populous in the Southeast, and the 28th-most populous in the US. Memphis is the largest city proper on the Mississippi River and anchors the Memphis area that includes parts of Arkansas and Mississippi, the 45th-most populous metropolitan area in the U.S. with 1.34 million residents.
European exploration of the area began with Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. Located on the high Chickasaw Bluffs, the site offered natural protection from Mississippi River flooding and became a contested location in the colonial era. Modern Memphis was founded in 1819 by John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson. The city thrived due to its river traffic and cotton-based economy, becoming one of the largest cities in the Antebellum South. After the American Civil War, it remained a key hub for the cotton and hardwood industries. Memphis is also notable for its role in the American Civil Rights Movement; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated there in 1968, and the city is now home to the National Civil Rights Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate.
Memphis is one of the nation's leading commercial centers in transportation and logistics. The largest employer is FedEx, which maintains its global air hub at Memphis International Airport, one of the world's busiest cargo airports. The Port of Memphis also hosts the fifth-busiest inland water port in the U.S. Memphis is also known for its music scene, with Beale Street central to the development of Memphis blues and a broader legacy that includes soul, rock and roll, and hip-hop. Cultural landmarks include Graceland, Sun Studio, the Memphis Pyramid, and Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The city is also famed for its Memphis-style barbecue and hosts the annual World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. It is home to the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA and several colleges and universities, including the University of Memphis, LeMoyne–Owen College, and Rhodes College.
History
Early history
Occupying a substantial bluff rising from the Mississippi River, the site of Memphis has been a natural location for human settlement by varying indigenous cultures over thousands of years. In the first millennium A.D. people of the Mississippian culture were prominent; the culture influenced a network of communities throughout the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries. The hierarchical societies built complexes with large earthwork ceremonial and burial mounds as expressions of their sophisticated culture. The Chickasaw people, believed to be their descendants, later inhabited this site and a large territory in the Southeast.Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered the historic Chickasaw in this area in the 16th century, followed in the 17th century by French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle,.
J. D. L. Holmes, writing in Hudson's Four Centuries of Southern Indians, notes that this site was a third strategic point in the late 18th century through which European powers could control United States encroachment beyond the Appalachians and their interference with Indian matters—after Fort Nogales and Fort Confederación : "Chickasaw Bluffs, located on the Mississippi River at the present-day location of Memphis. Spain and the United States vied for control of this site, which was a favorite of the Chickasaws."
In 1795 the Spanish Governor-General of Louisiana, Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet, sent his lieutenant governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, to negotiate and secure consent from the local Chickasaw so that a Spanish fort could be erected on the bluff; Fort San Fernando De Las Barrancas was the result. Holmes notes that consent was reached despite opposition from "disappointed Americans and a pro-American faction of the Chickasaws" when the "pro-Spanish faction signed the Chickasaw Bluffs Cession and Spain provided the Chickasaws with a trading post".
Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas remained a focal point of Spanish activity until, as Holmes summarizes:
he Treaty of San Lorenzo or Pinckney's Treaty of 1795 , all of the careful, diplomatic work by Spanish officials in Louisiana and West Florida, which has succeeded for a decade in controlling the Indians , was undone. The United States gained the right to navigate the Mississippi River and won control over the Yazoo Strip north of the thirty-first parallel.
The Spanish dismantled the fort, shipping its lumber and iron to their locations in Arkansas.
In 1796, the site became the westernmost point of the newly admitted state of Tennessee, in what was then called the Southwest United States. The area was still largely occupied and controlled by the Chickasaw nation. Captain Isaac Guion led an American force down the Ohio River to claim the land, arriving on July 20, 1797. By this time, the Spanish had departed. The fort's ruins went unnoticed 20 years later when Memphis was laid out as a city after the United States government paid the Chickasaw for land.
19th century
At the beginning of the century, as recognized by the United States in 1786 Treaty of Hopewell, the land still belonged to the Chickasaw Nation. In the Treaty of Tuscaloosa, signed in October 1818 and ratified by Congress on January 7, 1819, the Chickasaw ceded their territory in Western Tennessee to the United States. The city of Memphis was founded less than five months after the U.S. takeover of the territory, on May 22, 1819, by John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson. They named it after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River.From the city's foundation onwards, African Americans formed large proportion of Memphis' population. Prior to the abolition of slavery in the United States, most Black people in Memphis were enslaved, being used as forced labor by white enslavers along the river or on outlying cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. The city's demographics changed dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s, due to waves of immigration and domestic migration. Due to increased immigration since the 1840s and the Great Famine, Irish Americans made up 9.9% of the population in 1850, but 23.2% by 1860, when the total population was 22,623.
Tennessee seceded from the Union in June 1861, and Memphis briefly became a Confederate stronghold. Union ironclad gunboats captured it in the naval Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862, and the city and state were occupied by the Union Army for the duration of the war. Union commanders allowed the city to maintain its civil government during most of this period but excluded Confederate States Army veterans from office. This shifted political dynamics in the city as the war went on.
The war years contributed to additional dramatic changes in the city population. The Union Army's presence attracted many fugitive slaves who had escaped from surrounding rural plantations. So many sought protection behind Union lines that the Army set up contraband camps to accommodate them. Memphis's black population increased from 3,000 in 1860, when the total population was 22,623, to nearly 20,000 in 1865, with most settling south of the city limits.
Postwar years, Reconstruction and Democratic control
The rapid demographic changes added to the stress of war and occupation and uncertainty about who was in charge, increasing tensions between the city's ethnic Irish policemen and black Union soldiers after the war. In three days of rioting in early May 1866, the Memphis Riots erupted, in which white mobs made up of policemen, firemen, and other mostly ethnic Irish Americans attacked and killed 46 blacks, wounding 75 and injuring 100; raped several women; and destroyed nearly 100 houses while severely damaging churches and schools in South Memphis. Much of the black settlement was left in ruins. Two whites were killed in the riot. Many blacks permanently fled Memphis afterward, especially as the Freedmen's Bureau continued to have difficulty in protecting them. Their population fell to about 15,000 by 1870, 37.4% of the total population of 40,226.Historian Barrington Walker suggests that the Irish rioted against blacks because of their relatively recent arrival as immigrants and the uncertain nature of their own claim to "whiteness"; they were trying to distinguish themselves from blacks in the underclass. The main fighting participants were ethnic Irish, decommissioned black Union soldiers, and newly emancipated African-American freedmen. Walker suggests that most of the mob was not in direct economic conflict with the blacks, as by then the Irish had attained better jobs, but were establishing social and political dominance over the freedmen.
Unlike the disturbances in some other cities, ex-Confederate veterans were generally not part of the attacks against blacks in Memphis. As a result of the riots in Memphis, and a similar one in New Orleans, Louisiana in September, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Yellow fever epidemics
In the 1870s, a series of yellow fever epidemics devastated Memphis, with the disease carried by river passengers traveling by ships along the waterways. During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878, more than 5,000 people were listed in the official register of deaths between July 26 and November 27. The vast majority of these deaths were from yellow fever, making the epidemic in the city of 40,000 one of the most traumatic and severe in urban U.S. history. Within four days of the Memphis Board of Health's declaration of a yellow fever outbreak, 20,000 residents fled the city. The ensuing panic left the poverty-stricken, the working classes, and the African-American community at the most risk from the epidemic. Those who remained relied on volunteers from religious and physician organizations to tend to the sick. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 were confirmed dead in Memphis. The New Orleans health board listed "not less than 4,600" dead. The Mississippi Valley recorded 120,000 cases of yellow fever, with 20,000 deaths. The $15 million in losses caused by the epidemic bankrupted Memphis, and as a result, its charter was revoked by the state legislature.By 1870, Memphis's population of 40,000 was almost double that of Nashville and Atlanta, and it was the second-largest city in the South after New Orleans. Its population continued to grow after 1870, even when the Panic of 1873 hit the US hard, particularly in the South. The Panic of 1873 resulted in expanding Memphis's underclasses amid the poverty and hardship it wrought, giving further credence to Memphis as a rough, shiftless city. Leading up to the outbreak in 1878, it had suffered two yellow fever epidemics, cholera, and malaria, giving it a reputation as sickly and filthy. It was unheard of for a city with a population as large as Memphis's not to have any waterworks; the city still relied for supplies entirely on collecting water from the river and rain cisterns, and had no way to remove sewage. The combination of a swelling population, especially of lower and working classes, and abysmal health and sanitary conditions made Memphis ripe for a serious epidemic.
Kate Bionda, an owner of an Italian "snack house", died of a fever on August 13, 1878. Hers was officially reported by the Board of Health, on August 14, as the first case of yellow fever in the city. A massive panic ensued. The same trains and steamboats that had brought thousands into Memphis, in five days carried away more than 25,000 refugees, more than half of the city's population. On August 23, the Board of Health finally declared a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, and the city collapsed, hemorrhaging its population. In July of that year, the city had a population of 47,000; by September, 19,000 remained, and 17,000 of them had yellow fever. The only people left in the city were the lower classes, such as German and Irish immigrant workers and African Americans. None had the means to flee the city, as did the middle and upper-class whites of Memphis, and thus they were subjected to a city of death.
Immediately following the Board of Health's declaration, a Citizen's Relief Committee was formed by Charles G. Fisher. It organized the city into refugee camps. The committee's main priority was to separate the poor from the city and isolate them in refugee camps. The Howard Association, formed specifically for yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans and Memphis, organized nurses and doctors in Memphis and throughout the country. They stayed at the Peabody Hotel, the only hotel to keep its doors open during the epidemic. From there they were assigned to their respective districts. Physicians of the epidemic reported seeing as many as 100 to 150 patients daily.
The Episcopal Community of St. Mary at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral played an important role during the epidemic in caring for the lower classes. Already supporting a girls' school and church orphanage, the Sisters of St. Mary also sought to provide care for the Canfield Asylum, a home for black children. Each day, they alternated caring for the orphans at St. Mary's, delivering children to the Canfield Asylum, and taking soup and medicine on house calls to patients. Between September 9 and October 4, Sister Constance and three other nuns fell victim to the epidemic and died. They later became known as the Martyrs of Memphis.
At long last, on October 28, a killing frost struck. The city sent out word to Memphians scattered all over the country to come home. Though yellow fever cases were recorded in the pages of Elmwood Cemetery's burial record as late as February 29, 1874, the epidemic seemed quieted. The Board of Health declared the epidemic at an end after it had caused over 20,000 deaths and financial losses of nearly $200 million. On November 27, a general citizen's meeting was called at the Greenlaw Opera House to offer thanks to those who had stayed behind to serve, of whom many had died. Over the next year property tax revenues collapsed, and the city could not make payments on its municipal debts. As a result, Memphis temporarily lost its city charter and was reclassified by the state legislature as a Taxing District from 1879 to 1893. But a new era of sanitation was developed in the city, a new municipal government in 1879 helped form the first regional health organization, and during the 1880s Memphis led the nation in sanitary reform and improvements.
Perhaps the most significant effect of yellow fever on Memphis was in demographic changes. Nearly all of Memphis's upper and middle classes vanished, depriving the city of its general leadership and class structure that dictated everyday life, similar to that in other large Southern cities, such as New Orleans, Charleston, and Atlanta. In Memphis, the poorer whites and blacks fundamentally made up the city and played the greatest role in rebuilding it. The epidemic had resulted in Memphis being a less cosmopolitan place, with an economy that served the cotton trade and a population drawn increasingly from poor white and black Southerners.