Race riots of 1866

Significance: Economic and social disparities between the races, along with a continuing military presence, led to violence during Reconstruction.

Racial disturbances in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 were the result of economic, social, and political issues that troubled the nation during Reconstruction. Given the upheaval in the lives of Southerners after the Civil War, the racial disturbances are hardly surprising. In the simplest terms, one of the major tasks of Reconstruction was to assimilate the more than four million former slaves into US society. A more complex view must consider the problems faced by the newly freed African Americans who had to achieve a new identity in a society that had allowed them no control over their own lives. White Southerners had to live with the economic, social, and political consequences of defeat. The military occupation of the South by federal troops after the Civil War angered Southern whites, who believed in their right to rebuild and rule their own society without interference from the North. The presence of federal troops (many of them African Americans), an armed citizenry, and the psychological difficulty of accepting the end of the world they had known created explosive conditions that erupted into violence.

The Black Codes

The Memphis and New Orleans riots were one result of this upheaval. Soon after the surrender of the Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, legislatures in the South acted to pass a series of black codes. These laws were intended to maintain control over the lives of the newly freed African Americans and, in effect, keep them enslaved. For example, harsh vagrancy laws allowed police to arrest black people without cause and force them to work for white employers. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, had freed the slaves in the Confederate states. The United States Congress, having abolished slavery throughout the nation with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, founded the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist the former slaves and was in the process of enacting, over the strong opposition of President Andrew Johnson, a series of Reconstruction Acts intended to repeal the South’s black codes. President Johnson resisted congressional attempts to admit African Americans to full citizenship, but Congress ultimately overrode his veto and took control of the Reconstruction program in the South.

Many former slaves, rejecting the life they had known on the plantation, moved to the cities of the South. Most African Americans were refugees without any economic resources, competing with Irish and German immigrants for scarce jobs in the war-torn South. Southern white Protestants feared both the immigrants and the African Americans as threats to the social order.

Conditions in Memphis were especially volatile in May 1866. The city was a rowdy river town known for heavy drinking, gambling, prostitution, and fighting. In 1865, the black population of Memphis had increased to between twenty and twenty-five thousand, many of them living in a run-down district near Fort Pickering. The white citizens were alarmed by incendiary newspaper accounts of crime and disorder.

The Memphis police, mostly Irish immigrants, were corrupt and ill-trained and had a record of brutality toward black people. Added to this already explosive mixture was a body of federal troops, four thousand of whom were black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering waiting to be mustered out of the army. The violence began on April 29, with a street confrontation between black soldiers and white policemen. On May 1, the violence escalated, with fights breaking out between groups of black soldiers and the city police. By May 2, the mob included a number of people from the surrounding countryside as well as white citizens of Memphis. The mob rampaged through the black district, attacking families, raping women, and burning homes. Civil authorities took no steps to curb the disturbance.

After considerable delay, Major General George Stoneman, commanding the federal troops, brought the city under control. The three days of mob violence resulted in the deaths of forty-six African Americans and two white people. An estimated seventy to eighty other people were injured, and some ninety homes of black people, along with several African American churches and schools, were destroyed. Southern newspapers and civic officials blamed the black soldiers for the outbreak. A committee appointed by Congress, however, attributed the disturbances to the hatred of white people for the “colored race.”

The New Orleans Riots

Although the Memphis riots were the result of local conditions, the New Orleans disturbance of July 30 was caused by state politics and had national significance. Louisiana governor James Madison Wells, a Union sympathizer who needed to consolidate his power over the Confederates in New Orleans and the state, supported a plan to reassemble the state constitutional convention that had been disbanded in 1864. This convention, supported by Unionists, planned to gain votes by enfranchising African Americans. The city, sympathetic to Confederate politics, was armed, and the corrupt police force had a record of false arrests and mistreatment of free African Americans. The local newspapers, using highly emotional language, incited the fear of white citizens that African Americans would gain political control.

The commander of the federal troops, General Absalom Baird, should have foreseen the impending violence but apparently ignored the problem. When the delegates to the state convention began to assemble on July 30, fighting broke out between the city police and African American marchers supporting the right to vote. Delegates were dragged from the convention hall and assaulted by people in the street and by the police, who joined in the mob violence. The attacks on African Americans were savage; the wounded were dragged to the city jail and beaten, and the bodies of the dead were mistreated. As the violence escalated, fueled by the drunkenness of the mob, African Americans were dragged from their homes and beaten.

The death toll in the one-day riot included thirty-four African Americans and three white people; approximately 136 people were injured. Although General Baird declared martial law, his action was too late. Several observers, including General Philip H. Sheridan, who was called in to restore order, described the mob violence as a “slaughter.” As in the case of the Memphis riots, nearly all the dead and injured were African Americans.

Although the Memphis riots were caused by local conditions, the disturbances in New Orleans had state and national political consequences. The Republican Party lost power, paving the way for Democratic control of the state. Precedents for the racial violence that would mark the years of Reconstruction and beyond had been established.

Bibliography

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper, 1988. Print.

Franklin, John Hope. Reconstruction: After the Civil War. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Print.

Franklin, John Hope, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 9th ed. New York: McGraw, 2011. Print.

Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Vintage, 1980. Print.

Rable, George C. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984. Print.

Stampp, Kenneth R. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York: Knopf, 1969. Print.