The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [7]
And so began Carnival.
Memphis had been chosen as a bluff city, literally poised on the precipice of the American South and an immense, new frontier. The only thing separating the two was the treacherous Mississippi River, a huge gash in the American landscape. Murky, ochre-colored and unpredictable, the river pushed against levees, dividing the river town from the dense forests and willow thickets of Arkansas. It was the last stop for the likes of David Crockett and Sam Houston making their way to Texas, a place for flatboats to purchase firearms before heading west, and it was the point of entry back into the civilized world of the Old South. But it wasn’t just the topography that gave Memphis a startling sense of contrast; it was the people. All classes of society, all colors of skin, all manner of accents migrated to a fault line carved between the past and the future, the Old South and the new frontier.
As the latticework of American transportation and expansion spread westward in the 1850s, Memphis remained at the cross-roads; steamboats joined the city to a massive trade line between the Gulf of Mexico through the Ohio Valley, and railroads connected it to the burgeoning ports of Charleston and New Orleans. Surrounded by rural states and plantations, Memphis became a hub: the largest inland cotton market, at its peak, handling 360,000 bales of cotton per year. As the bluff city sloped toward the Mississippi River, levees and thoroughfares piled high with crates of tufted white, Memphis looked like a town literally built upon cotton. But cotton was not the only business booming. At the center of a vast web of plantations, railroad lines and port towns, Memphis profited from the slave market as well. The Bolton, Dickens & Co. held what could only be called “yard sales” for slaves, while Hill, Byrd & Sons and Nathan Bedford Forrest opened slave showrooms on Adams Street. Said to have kept his business fair and his slave pens clean, Forrest prospered as one of the South’s largest slave traders, selling up to 1,000 slaves per year. Forrest, a vehement Confederate, took up arms during the Civil War and, in spite of near illiteracy, rose in rank to become one of the greatest military tacticians in American history. His surprise attacks on northern troops in Memphis would later inspire the German blitzkrieg. Long after the Civil War, Forrest’s name would live in infamy for founding the Ku Klux Klan.
Even as northern troops marched through Memphis in the 1860s, they recognized it as a center for trade and transportation, contraband or otherwise. It was spared Sherman’s flames, and a strange coexistence emerged between the occupying army and its Confederate residents. The North looked the other way as illegal southern shipments slipped through northern quarantine. As a result, despite four years of Civil War, Memphis business and shipping never ceased, and a number of those northern troops never left. The Civil War put an end to slavery once and for all, but the slave trade would have a lasting legacy not yet realized.
By 1870, Memphis’s population of 40,000 was almost double that of Nashville and Atlanta, ranking it second only to New Orleans as the largest city in the South. As its population grew, so did its diversity. It was a city built upon clashes, of river against land and people against people.
Despite the relative good fortune in Memphis, the country lagged under national debt in the 1870s. The Panic of 1873 ushered in an economic depression the likes of which had never been seen before, and the South suffered most of all. The war had destroyed the vast farmlands and plantations that carried the financial success of the entire region. Even if Memphis was equipped and ready to ship cotton north, none was arriving from the south. As jobs grew scarce on farms and in small towns, poor families flocked to nearby cities, and the newly termed tramps moved freely along the railroads.
Soon, Memphis swelled with the underclasses. A freedman’s camp established during northern occupation propelled the black