"Your Old Father Abe Lincoln is Dead and Damned": Black Soldiers and the Memphis Race Riot of 1866

Abstract

Between May 1 and May 3, 1866, racial conflict erupted violently in Memphis, Tennessee. Irish policemen and firemen, together with white laborers and small businessmen, rioted in southern part of city. For three days they attacked black residents living in shanty settlement surrounding Fort Pickering, a Union military installation on outskirts of city. The rioters initially focused their attacks on former soldiers of Third United-States Colored Heavy Artillery regiment, which had disbanded April 30-the last of three black regiments to be mustered out of United States service at Memphis. On May 2 and 3, however, rioters increasingly targeted civic institutions and property of black community of south Memphis, including schools, churches, and black-owned houses. By May 4, when federal military authorities declared martial law and detachments of white troops enforced order in city, two whites and at-least forty-six blacks had been killed, between seventy and eighty others had been wounded, at least five black women raped, more than one hundred people (mostly black) robbed, and four churches, twelve schools and ninety-one houses burned.2 Contemporary observers attributed violence to unruly conduct of black soldiers in Memphis and to longstanding animosity between blacks and Irish, who competed for work as manual laborers. The Memphis Daily Avalarlche, for example, argued, is only with negro soldiers that trouble has ever existed.... With their departure, will come order, confidence, and good will of old days. Had we had [white troops] instead of negro troops, neither this riot, nor many lawless acts preceding it during past six months, would have occurred. The superintendent of Memphis Freedmen's Bureau, Major General Benjamin P. Runkle, stressed that was also a conflict of labor between Irish hackSdrivers, dray-drivers, porters, laborers, c there was a good deal of bitterness felt upon part of Irish, from fact that these southern gentlemen preferred to hire negro servants. Another observer, Ewing O. Tade, a representative of American Missionary Association, stated succinctly that the late Memphis Riot was beyond a reasonable doubt instigated by Irish Police of this city.3 The rioters, however, were a diverse lot, and their ethnic and occupational background does not support such a narrow, socio-economic interpretation of