On May 1, 1866, the city of Memphis exploded in racial violence that resulted in the death of 46 African Americans and three whites. Like many so-called race riots to follow, it was more of a massacre than a riot. The 1866 Memphis riot was the first incident of large-scale racial mob violence following emancipation, with later massacres in Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere to follow. As the first of its kind, however, the 1866 Memphis riot bore enormous consequences for President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policy. Along with the New Orleans riot in July of that year, the violence highlighted for Northerners the refusal of Southern whites to provide basic justice to freedpeople, as well as Johnson's inadequate response.

The Memphis riot was unique, however, in that it did not actually pit ex-Confederates against the city's black population. Instead, the perpetrators were all Irishmen, most of whom had not fought in the Confederate army and so were not disfranchised by Tennessee's postwar Radical reforms removing ex-rebels from the electorate. With blacks not yet enfranchised, and white rebels disenfranchised, the Irish were the only major group left to vote in and dominate Memphis city politics, including the police department that played such an important role in the riot. As a result, the 1866 Memphis riot resembled Northern ethnic and racial riots as much as it did Southern Reconstruction acts of mass violence.

Remarkably, the Memphis race riot has yet to receive the kind of sustained scholarly attention from historians that it deserves. Some scholars have used the riot to discuss larger postwar themes; for example, Hannah Rosen's excellent Terror in the Heart of Freedom devotes two chapters to the Memphis riot in a larger study of sexual violence.Footnote ¹ But nobody, up to now, has offered a narrative of the riot itself or a deep analysis of the actors involved. Thankfully, Stephen Ash, the premier historian of Civil War-era Tennessee, has come forward with just the sort of full-scale study of the 1866 Memphis riot that the event deserves.

A Massacre in Memphis is basically two books, written very differently but covering the same ground. The first section is divided neatly into quarters, with Ash's keen eye for the different constituencies involved in the riot: Yankee Memphis, Rebel Memphis, Irish Memphis, and Black Memphis. In each case he identifies the contingent factors that give shape to post-Civil War Memphis life. For Yankee Memphis, it was the combination of Freedmen's Bureau officers, army officers, and longtime river merchants, each with competing lines of authority that rendered even the most benevolent among them impotent in the face of the crisis. Rebel Memphis had been under occupation since June 1862, oscillating back and forth between defiance, accommodation, and frustrated blame for others for Memphis's ailments. Black Memphis was the fastest-growing segment, with nearly all of the residents having moved to the city during the war itself, and with black soldiers at Fort Pickering serving as guardians of the community.

The section on the Irish is most intriguing as there have been few accounts of Irish immigrant life in the mid-nineteenth-century South outside New Orleans. The riot mostly pitted Irish immigrants against freed slaves, and the reasons were broader than working class rivalries across the color line. Ash offers mini-biographic sketches of key players in the Irish community, including Mayor John Park, Fire Chief Edward O'Neill, grocer John Pendergrast, and Sheriff Patrick Winters, each of whom played a key role in the violence. Concentrated in the Pinch district on the North Side, the Irish identified strongly with the Fenian movement, but in the eyes of the rest of Memphis, seemed not really “Memphian” at all. Ash's portrait of Irish settlement in the river city, mistreatment by the native white population, and competition with the black population arriving in the city during the war, is one of the better explanations of urban wartime change in the historiography of the entire war.

The second section abruptly changes style to the present tense and describes the riot in narrative form, with the help of previously ignored congressional testimony. The book's impeccable research provides lurid details of the shootings, burnings, and sexual violence that engulfed the city for three long days in early May. The pro-Confederate press, including especially the Memphis Avalanche, cheered on the rioters, while other rebel leaders remained largely aloof. Federal troops had hoped the city's government could stop the violence itself, and intervened only after the riot had largely run its course. The black community learned that the only resources it could depend on for its own protection was its own leadership. Two concluding chapters reflecting on the investigation of the riot and the memory of it over time underscore this story of mutual dysfunction and treachery.

If there is anything to quibble with, it is the rather curious decision to employ the present tense for just one section of the book. The stylistic advantage of the present tense becomes quickly apparent under Ash's pen, but the shift in tense hits the reader with little warning. Also, the chapter on the post-riot investigation masterfully outlines the competing narratives of blame, and the immediate responses within Memphis itself. A bit more discussion of how the riot figured in the national Reconstruction debate may have enhanced this section, especially as the event was deployed so heavily in the 1866 congressional elections (along with the riot in New Orleans).

These minor points aside, Ash's Massacre in Memphis is a spectacular and sobering account of one of the most important events in Reconstruction America. It is a thoroughly compelling read, not only for scholars of the Reconstruction era, but for anybody interested in post-Civil War America.