Confederate Memphis

   Memphis was both an old city and a new city when the war began. Native Americans, like the Chickasaw and their ancestors, had inhabited the area for centuries. Settlers had built some homes on Fourth Bluff prior to October 1818, when the Chickasaw elders sold more than six million acres of land to the United States. Shelby County, named for Revolutionary War hero and Kentucky governor Col. Isaac Shelby, was established by the Tennessee General Assembly in November 1819. By the time Tennessee left the Union in 1861, Memphis was major port on the Mississippi River. Shelby County had a population of 48,092 people, which included 276 free people of color and 16,953 slaves. This included “bankers and manufacturers, cotton buyers and factors, wholesale grocers and slave traders, doctors and lawyers, editors and railroad presidents.” 22,623 people lived in Memphis alone, making it the thirty-eighth largest city in the United States. Memphis had a fire department, hospital, and city streets paved with cobblestones.[1] 

Memphis, ca.1862, LOC

   When the vote for United States president came in 1860, the men of Memphis cast 2,319 votes for Stephen Douglas, 2,250 votes for John Bell, and a mere 572 ballots for Vice President John C. Breckinridge. The men of Memphis were more inclined at this stage to conditionally support the Union. With the secession of South Carolina in December 1860, the tone of the people in Memphis slowly began to change. Both pro-Union and Secession meetings were held across the city. With the Federal resupply and subsequent Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, followed by Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, more and more Memphis citizens supported secession. Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris called for a meeting of the legislature in Nashville. On May 6, the General Assembly passed a Declaration of Independence. The following day, Harris agreed to a military allegiance between Tennessee and the Confederate government. These actions were ratified by a public vote on June 8.

   Memphis, its port, the most important port in Tennessee, and even more importantly, the railroads, quickly entered the discussion. In August 1861, Confederate Rep. David M. Currin requested $160,000 “for the construction, equipment, and armament of two ironclad gunboats for the defense of the Mississippi River and the city of Memphis.” The bill was signed into law the next day.[2] Prior to the war, from 1844 to 1854, Memphis had a US Naval dock. Several private shipyards still existed along the Mississippi River. Two twin-screw vessels, the Arkansas and the Tennessee, were contracted to John T. Shirley, a local Memphis businessman. He was to deliver the two vessels by December 1861, at a cost of $76,920 each. The ships were to be 165 feet in length, and a draft of no more than 8 feet when loaded. Shirley struggled to find skilled carpenters and shipwrights, and both he and Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory implored district commander Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk for details of men to help with building the ships. Not having enough experienced hands, Shirley concentrated on building the Arkansas. Lieutenant Henry Kennedy Stevens arrived from Charleston, assigned as the executive officer of the Arkansas, and took charge of the operations.[3]

   Memphis appeared in the campaign plans of several Federal commanders, including George B. McClellan, David G. Farragut, and Abraham Lincoln. McClellan’s tenure as general-in-chief was short lived, although he did approve of a plan of taking New Orleans first, followed by Baton Rouge, the railroad hub at Jackson, Mississippi, and then Mobile, before setting his sights on Memphis. Farragut, a  “firm advocate of combined operations,” submitted a plan to force the Confederates out of their defenses around New Orleans, then proceed up the Mississippi River, taking Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and then Memphis. After firing McClellan, Lincoln’s strategy was “a joint movement from Cairo to Memphis; and from Cincinnati to East Tennessee.”[4]

   Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Nashville fell in February. Governor Harris ordered the General Assembly to convene in Memphis on February 20. Island No. 10 fell in April 1862. Only Fort Pillow remained to protect Memphis. Mallory ordered the Arkansas to New Orleans if she was in danger of capture. To the west, the Confederates lost the battle of Shiloh on April 7, and to the south, the bombardment of New Orleans began on April 18. Four of the Southern flotilla from Fort Pillow made their way to Memphis after the fort was abandoned on May 10, 1862. The Federals knew of the construction of the ironclads at Memphis, and Farragut worried that just one of them could destroy most of his ships and maybe even retake New Orleans. Farragut would not get a crack at Memphis.[5]

   Braxton Bragg ordered the evacuation of Memphis, and by June 4, the earthworks constructed on the river were empty. Only the small naval flotilla remained. On June 6, Federal Commander Charles Davis, with five ironclads and four rams, headed toward Memphis. The Confederate fleet, eight vessels mounting twenty-eight guns, under Capt. Joseph E. Montgomery, was the only force between the Federals and city. In the two-hour-long fight, only one of the Confederate gunboats escaped: the General Van Dorn. Three Confederate vessels were destroyed, and four others fell into Union hands. The Arkansas had been towed up the Yazoo River a month before the battle of Memphis. Historian William N. Still, Jr., believes that had the Arkansas been left in Memphis, she might have been finished in time to take part in the battle. The Tennessee was destroyed the night before the battle of Memphis.[6]

   Mayor Parks surrendered Memphis, and the city was occupied by Col. G.N. Fitch and a brigade of Indiana Infantry. The civic leaders had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union, and martial law was declared on June 13. Maj. Gen. U.S. Grant was in Memphis by June 23, finding the city in “bad order” and “secessionists governing much in their own way.”  Elections were held, and voters were required to swear the Oath of Allegiance before they could vote; property of pro-Confederate sympathizers was seized to pay for acts of destruction caused by partisans; partisans were “not entitled to the treatment of prisoners of war when caught”; it became a crime to display Confederate symbols; and, men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five had to take the oath or leave the city. Because Memphis was firmly under Federal control, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the city.[7]

  With local businesses refusing to open, hundreds of merchants from Cincinnati and Louisville arrived with goods, opening new stores. With open roads, this allowed goods to flow into Confederate hands. One observer believed that more than $20 million worth of supplies left Memphis, bound for the Confederate army, during the war. Confederate forces skirmished with their Federal counterparts in Shelby County frequently.  Memphis became a major supply depot for the Federals operating in western Tennessee, northern Mississippi and Alabama. Numerous raids and large-scale operations, both on the Mississippi River and overland, set out from Memphis. The Federals often retreated to the defenses of the city after confrontations with Confederate commander Nathan Bedford Forrest.[8]

   There was some discussion by the Confederate high command of recapturing the city. In October 1862, Jefferson Davis wrote to Maj. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes with plans to unite Southern forces in the west and drive the Federals out of the area, recapturing Helena, Memphis, and then Nashville.[9] Nothing came of the idea, but on August 21, 1864, Nathan Bedford Forrest rode into Memphis with 1,500 men and two cannons. “I attacked Memphis at four o’clock this morning, driving the enemy to his fortifications,” Forrest wrote later that day. “We killed and captured four hundred, taking their entire camp, with about three hundred horses and mules. Washburn and staff escaped in the darkness of the early morning, Washburn leaving his clothes behind.”[10] “Memphis Captured by Forrest” ran several Northern newspaper headlines. While Forrest failed to capture the three Federal generals in the city and only held the city for a few hours, he did divert the attention and draw resources away from other theaters of the war.[11]

General Washburn leaving his clothes behind. 

   While Memphis was spared the fate of other Southern cities like Atlanta, Columbia, and Richmond, it had one final role to play for history. On April 27, 1865, the boilers on the S.S. Sultana, carrying over 2,200 former Federal prisoners from Andersonville and Cahaba, exploded in the Mississippi River just north of Memphis. It is believed that 1,195 of the 2,200 passengers and crew perished in the explosion and subsequent fire. The loss of the Sultana was the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history. Many of the victims are buried in the Memphis National Cemetery.

    While every other Southern city with a population of over 20,000 people has a history of its wartime years(and in some case, multiple published histories), Memphis apparently does not.

 

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[1] Dowdy, A Brief History of Memphis, 13-24.

[2] Still, Iron Afloat, 16.

[3] Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 107, 119, 129.

[4] Reed, Combined Operations in the Civil War, 61-62, 66.

[5] Reed, Combined Operations in the Civil War, 198.

[6] Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 169; Still, Iron Afloat, 62.

[7] Dowdy, A Brief History of Memphis, 13-24.

[8] Dowdy, A Brief History of Memphis, 13-24; Long, Civil War Day-by-Day.

[9] Papers of Jefferson Davis,  8:454-56.

[10] Wyeth, That Devil Forrest, 417.

[11] Daily Ohio Statesman, August 25, 1864; The Times-Democrat, August 28, 1864; New York Daily Herald, August 29, 1864.