1
 
Yankee Memphis
 
 
I have always counselled [the freed people] that liberty meant the right to work for themselves, to get their own living, and live honestly as white people do;… I have told them … that they must be obedient to their employers, and peaceable.
—Testimony of Benjamin P. Runkle, superintendent of Memphis Freedmen’s Bureau office
[The Rebels] call me a pimp. I have served the United States government in the army five years, and I am called a pimp in the public press.… I came here ready to take these people by the hand, but they have met me with insults, because I wear the uniform of the government.
—Testimony of Benjamin P. Runkle1
One day in the latter part of April a Northern-born man in Memphis named William Wilder sat down and wrote a short, bitter letter to Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a leader of the Republican Party’s Radical wing. Wilder was a Union army veteran whose regiment, the 6th Illinois Cavalry, had endured much hard campaigning in Tennessee, Mississippi, and other parts of the South. He had left the service in 1864, settled in Memphis, and started a business. His political sentiments were Radical. Now he had decided he must leave the city, and he thought Stevens might be interested in knowing why. “Enclosed please find an editorial clipped from the Avalanch[e] of this City,” Wilder wrote. “This article shows the state of feeling now existing in this city against all northern men. I came here to engage in business about two years since, but from the fact that I have served two years [in] the Federal Army … I shall be obliged to seek another home.”2
Congressman Stevens saved the letter in his files, but not the clipping. The editorial that so troubled Wilder probably appeared in the Avalanche’s April 3 issue. In it, the editor took note of the Yankee businessmen in Memphis who espoused Radicalism, men “who are, with [Massachusetts senator Charles] SUMNER and STEVENS, for confiscation, disenfranchisement, and everything calculated to degrade, ruin and embarrass the people to whom they propose to sell their wares.” The editor then suggested a way to deal with these miscreants: if his readers would identify them he would publish their names, so “that the Southern people may shun them as they would a leprosy [sic]. The Radicals are for war—let them have it. We have enlisted as a volunteer.”3
How many Yankees were living in Memphis in the spring of 1866 was uncertain. (The term applied to Northerners who had recently moved to the city, not to those who had lived in the city or elsewhere in the South for many years and regarded themselves as Southerners.) Certainly there were many hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand or more. Some had been called to Memphis by duty, some by conscience, some by ambition; some were the wives or children of those called. Most were middle-class and educated. Many intended to make Memphis their permanent home, while others were anxious to leave. All had come to the city after its capture by federal forces on June 6, 1862; the Yankees living there when the war began had abandoned the city and fled north.4
The U.S. Army had maintained a presence in Memphis ever since that day in 1862—a substantial one during the war that dwindled thereafter. And when the 3rd Colored Heavy Artillery mustered out at the end of April 1866, there remained only the headquarters of the Department of the Tennessee, a detachment of the 16th U.S. Infantry Regiment (a white unit), and a few quartermaster troops and other support personnel. Most of the officers and men of the 3rd remained in the city and in uniform, waiting for their back pay, but they were no longer members of the military.5
From June 1862 to June 1865, Memphis was under military rule, although for the first two years the municipal government was allowed to operate. In June 1865, with the war over and a Unionist-controlled state government in place in Tennessee, the army ended military rule in Memphis and returned power to the city government. But because politicians in Washington had...