The Fourth Chickasaw Bluff, which rises high above the Mississippi
River even at flood stage, has long presented a logical place for
settlement. Though they had departed prior to Hernando de Soto's
expedition through the area in the 1540's, Native Americans dwelt there,
and ongoing settlement began again in 1795 when Spain built Fort San
Fernando on the bluffs. Soldiers, traders, and squatters occupied the
area until the formal founding of Memphis.
Prior to Spanish
occupation, John Rice and John Ramsey claimed five-thousand-acre tracts
based on North Carolina's British-based titles. John Overton purchased
Rice's tract from his heirs, and Andrew Jackson and James Winchester
bought into the venture. In 1819 they founded Memphis, named for ancient
Egypt's capital.
For a variety of reasons, Memphis grew slowly. A
national economic depression, a river sandbar, loss of the county seat
designation to neighboring Raleigh, yellow fever, a severely restricted
hinterland, depredations by raucous flatboatmen, and competition from
other ports all retarded growth. By the early 1840's, however, the city's
fortunes improved. Northern Mississippi opened to settlement, doubling
the settled hinterland. The city became a post and stagecoach terminus,
and by 1842 six miles of railroad had been laid eastward. Upstream,
Randolph lost its river access with the development of a mile-wide
sandbar, and Memphis quelled its flatboatmen's antics. Citizens
organized a fire department, built a wharf, established a board of
health, and undertook many other reforms. Moreover, they initiated such
amenities as a bank, a thespian society, newspapers, and a truly grand
hotel, the Gayoso House.
The 1850's brought even more explosive
growth and considerable ethnic diversity to the "Bluff City." Three
western rail routes converged on Memphis as the result of military
planning. By 1861 the Memphis and Charleston and the Memphis and Ohio
Railroads connected the city to the Southeast and Midwest. Slower
development of a line to Little Rock may have cost the town its chance
to become the first eastern terminus of a transcontinental railroad, but
the city did serve as an eastern terminus of the Butterfield overland
mail coaches.
Despite its uneven record, Memphis grew at a faster
rate than any other American city in the mid-1850s. From a population of
fewer than 1,800 in 1840, the city swelled to 22,000 inhabitants in
1858. In addition to Anglo-American migrants, Irish and German
immigrants contributed to the population rise.
The Irish arrived
first, refugees from English oppression and successive famines following
the potato blight. Displaced and largely illiterate farmers with few
marketable skills, the Irish provided the labor for cutting roads,
erecting buildings, and constructing railroads, levees, and canals.
Irish crews also manned the area's trains and boats, and handled their
cargoes. They entered politics enthusiastically and filled municipal
jobs, especially fire and police ranks.
Germans came for reasons
similar to those of the Irish, though after the revolutions of 1848,
political motives dominated. Generally more urban and propertied than
the Irish, Germans found a niche in the city's retail, commercial, and
small industries sectors. They guarded their ethnic traditions more
closely than the Irish and furnished many of the city's artists,
musicians, and teachers.
African Americans, both slave and free,
also contributed to the boom decades. Unlike European immigrants,
African Americans received few rewards for their work, and racial
prejudice intensified as their scope of opportunities shrank. An 1840s
repeal of Tennessee's ban on the domestic slave trade made Memphis a
slave trading center during the 1850's.
Most urban blacks were
domestic servants, but many others worked as draymen, roustabouts, and
barbers, as well as in the mechanical trades and crafts. The mobility
demanded in these jobs threatened whites, and the city imposed a curfew
and pass system with harsh penalties for violators.
In the
generation following the boom era, Memphis suffered a succession of
disasters. Prior to the election of 1860, Memphians remained loyal to
the Union. Once Lincoln called for volunteers to subdue the rebellion,
however, they abruptly and wholeheartedly switched to secession and the
Confederacy. Styling their city the "Charleston of the West," Memphis
leaders squelched all dissent and prepared for war. Men volunteered for
military service and converted local facilities and services to meet
wartime needs.
Initial confidence in a quick victory soon gave way
to a more sobering evaluation as Tennessee's defenses fell early in
1862. The Confederate retreat at Shiloh left Memphis vulnerable to
attack from the north and east. Confederate troops in Memphis destroyed
local stores and abandoned the unfortified city. Many civilians followed
the army south. With only a makeshift naval fleet left to protect the
city, Memphis fell quickly on June 6, 1862. Eight converted steamboats
faced twenty-four new Union warships, as 10,000 citizens watched the
ninety-minute battle from the bluff. Upon sinking or disabling seven
Confederate vessels, Union forces demanded surrender and occupied the
city.
Military occupation lasted more than three years and
affected local attitudes more than the war itself. Memphians chafed
against occupation rule and operated the city as a center of smuggling
and profiteering. Approximately 15,000 African American refugees poured
into the city, and many aided the Union war effort as auxiliaries or
soldiers. In August 1864 Nathan Bedford Forrest's dramatic raid on
Memphis raised Confederate morale but had no effect on the war's
outcome.
As war gave way to Reconstruction, a white backlash to
radical rule often made bad situations worse. In 1866 the city
experienced three days of racial rioting set off by tensions between
Irish immigrants and African American soldiers. Forty-four blacks died
in the violence, and twelve schools and four churches burned.
Approximately three-quarters of the city's African Americans departed in
the riot's aftermath. In the late 1860s former Confederate President
Jefferson Davis made his home in Memphis. His daughter Margaret married
Addison Hayes at St. Lazarus Episcopal Church in 1876; his son Jefferson
Davis Jr. died in Memphis during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878.
Yellow
fever, indeed, posed a worse problem than Reconstruction for many
Memphis families. The city suffered through epidemics in 1867, 1873,
1878, and 1879. Thousands of people died despite the heroic efforts of
physicians, clergy, volunteers, and black militia units. To escape the
repeated epidemics, many Memphians abandoned the city, some permanently.
Declining property values and a generation of poor fiscal management
ended in bankruptcy and the loss of the city's charter in 1879.
Under
the rule of the "Taxing District of Shelby County," the bluff community
revived and became a modern city. Frugal government repaid municipal
debts; the state restored home rule in 1893; and economic growth
returned. Railroading (Memphis had eleven trunk lines and a bridge
across the Mississippi by the early 1900's), hardwood lumber, cotton, and
hardwood and cotton byproducts contributed to the city's economic
well-being. Technology revolutionized urban life: electricity, trolleys,
skyscrapers, artesian wells, sewerage and sanitation facilities, and
the automobile restructured Memphis lifestyles. Rural in-migration and
extensive annexation sent the city's population past 100,000 by 1900.
As
Memphis rose from disease and debt, the city undertook progressive
reforms. Edward Hull Crump, a rural transplant and Horatio Alger success
story, gained control over local politics. In 1915 his failure to
comply with state prohibition laws led to his removal from office by the
courts, but he continued to exercise strong influence over municipal
politics. After 1927, and for the next twenty-one years, his rule was
unchallengeable in Shelby County and across much of Tennessee.
Memphis
acquired a mixed reputation in the early decades of the century. On the
one hand, it became recognized as the nation's murder capital. On a
more positive note, the city lobbied for the Tennessee ratification of
woman suffrage, promoted blues music, and initiated the self-service
supermarket, the Piggly-Wiggly stores of Clarence Saunders. When the
boom times of the 1920's gave way to the Great Depression, Memphis
promoted its economic future through the organization of the Cotton
Carnival. During the 1930's, Crump's political power brought many New
Deal dollars for public buildings, public housing, and improvements in
urban structure. World War II brought enormous military and industrial
expansion, including the Memphis Defense Depot and even a German POW
camp.
After the death of E. H. Crump in 1954, Memphians entered a
new political era as African American demands for full political
participation emerged. Memphis promoted a policy of gradual interracial
cooperation until the mid-1960s, when racial integration intensified
emotions and polarization replaced accommodation.
In 1967-68
Memphis replaced its city charter and instituted a mayor-city council
form of government. Almost immediately the city faced the challenge of a
"budget busting" sanitation workers strike. When Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. arrived to support the strike, an assassin's bullet struck him
down, and the city erupted in riot. Television provided the nation with
a much-needed lesson on racial oppression, but it polarized Memphis.
Race baiters, both black and white, used divisiveness to personal
advantage. The election of a black mayor, William Herenton, in 1991 and a
black majority in the city council in 1995 restored a measure of
restraint.
Post-World War II Memphis gave the world important
innovations in lodging and shipping as the birthplace of Holiday Inn and
Federal Express. Elvis Presley put Memphis on the map in rock music,
and St. Jude Hospital made important strides in the battle against
catastrophic childhood diseases. The city has lost several large
corporations in recent decades but has strengthened the local economy
and maintained a high employment rate by encouraging the growth of
numerous small businesses. Moreover, the corporate headquarters for
FedEx and AutoZone, two internationally recognized corporations, have
located in Memphis. Both corporations were instrumental in bringing the
National Basketball Association Memphis Grizzles to the city to begin
play at the Memphis Pyramid for the 2001-2002 season.
Such symbols
give the city hope in an atmosphere of racial mistrust, declining
population, and political cynicism. As Memphis rejects race-baiting
opportunists and embraces equality for all, it anticipates a reversal of
its postwar decline and a return to its reputation as a "city of good
abode."
Source: tennesseeencyclopedia.net
Source: mamarocks.com
