page_title: Memphis, Tennessee
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Memphis, Tennessee / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Memphis, Tennessee in mid 1850s. Steamboat Hiram Powers
context_page_description: Memphis is a city along the Mississippi River in southwestern Shelby County, Tennessee, United States. The 2019 population was 651,073, and the second-most populous city in Tennessee, as well as the 26th-largest city in the United States. Greater Memphis is the 42nd-largest metropolitan area in the United States, with a population of 1,348,260 in 2017. The city is the anchor of West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi, and the Missouri Bootheel. Memphis is the seat of Shelby County, Tennessee's most populous county. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the southern United States, Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods.
  The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541 with his expedition into the New World. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississippi was then contested by the Spanish, French, and the English as Memphis took shape.
context_section_description: The city of Memphis was founded on May 22, 1819 (incorporated December 19, 1826), by John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson. They named it after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River. Memphis developed as a trade and transportation center in the 19th century because of its flood-free location high above the Mississippi River. Located in the low-lying delta region along the river, its outlying areas were developed as cotton plantations, and the city became a major cotton market and brokerage center.
  The cotton economy of the antebellum South depended on the forced labor of large numbers of African-American slaves, and Memphis also developed as a major slave market for the domestic slave trade. Through the early 19th century, one million slaves were transported from the Upper South, in a huge forced migration to newly developed plantation areas in the Deep South. Many were transported by steamboats along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In 1857, the Memphis and Charleston Railroad was completed, connecting Memphis to the Atlantic coast of South Carolina; it was the only east-west railroad constructed across the southern states before the Civil War. This gave planters and cotton brokers access to the coast for shipping cotton to England, a major market.
  The city's demographics changed dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s under waves of immigration and domestic migration. Due to increased immigration since the 1840s and the Great Famine, ethnic Irish made up 9.9% of the population in 1850, but 23.2% in 1860, when the total population was 22,623. They encountered considerable discrimination in the city but by 1860, the Irish constituted most of the police force. They also gained many elected and patronage positions in the Democratic Party city government, and an Irishman was elected mayor before the Civil War. At that time, representatives were elected to the city council from 30 wards. The elite were worried about corruption in this system and that so many saloonkeepers were active in the wards. German immigrants also made this city a destination after the 1848 revolutions; both the Irish and German immigrants were mostly Catholic, adding another element to demographic change in this formerly Protestant city.
  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 Army commanders allowed the city to maintain its civil government during most of this period but excluded Confederate veterans from office, which shifted political dynamics in the city as the war went on. As Memphis was used as a Union supply base, associated with nearby Fort Pickering, it continued to prosper economically throughout the war. Meanwhile, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest harassed Union forces in the area.
  The war years contributed to additional dramatic changes in 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. The white population was also increasing, but not to the same degree. After race riots against the blacks in 1866, thousands left the city. The total population in 1870 was 40,220; the number of blacks declined to 15,000 that year, 37.4% of the total.
caption: Memphis in the mid-1850s
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