The history of Memphis, Tennessee and its area began many thousands of years ago with succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples. In the first millennium, it was settled by the Mississippian culture. The Chickasaw Indian tribe emerged about the 17th century, or migrated into the area. The earliest European exploration may have encountered remnants of the Mississippian culture by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Later French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle likely encountered the Chickasaw. The city of Memphis was not founded until 1819. The city was named after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River in North Africa.
It rapidly developed as a major trading center for cotton cultivated at the region's large plantations and dependent on the work of enslaved African Americans. In the 19th century, and especially 1878 and 1879, the city suffered severe yellow fever epidemics. In 1878 tens of thousands of residents fled and more than 5,000 died, with hundreds more dying in the next year's epidemic, causing the city to go bankrupt and give up its charter until 1893.
By the early 20th century, cotton was still a major commodity crop; Memphis grew into the world's largest spot cotton market and the world's largest hardwood lumber market. During the 1960s the city was at the center of civil rights actions, with a major strike by city sanitation workers in 1968. Having come to the city to support the workers, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a lone sniper on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel. Many notable blues musicians grew up in and around the Memphis and northern Mississippi area. These included musical artists such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Isaac Hayes, Young Dolph and Elvis Presley.
Early history
From about 10,000 BCE, Paleo-Indians and later Archaic-Indians lived as communities of hunter-gatherers in the area that covers the modern-day southern United States. Approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, the Mississippi River Delta was populated by tribes of the Mississippian culture, a mound-building Native American people who had developed in the late Woodland Indian period. The Tipton phase people were a local expression of the Mississippian culture. They inhabited the region of modern-day Tipton, Lauderdale and Shelby counties during the time of first contact with Europeans, at the arrival of the de Soto Expedition.
By the end of the Mississippian period, the land was claimed and populated by the Chickasaw tribe. The exact origins of the Chickasaw are uncertain. Noted historian Horatio Cushman indicates that the Chickasaw, along with the Choctaw, may have had origins in present-day Mexico and migrated north. When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now Mississippi, with a smaller number in the area of Savannah Town, South Carolina. Twentieth-century scholar Patricia Galloway says that the Chickasaw may have been migrants to the area from the west and may not have been descendants of the pre-historic Mississippian culture. Their oral history supports this, indicating they moved along with the Choctaw from west of the Mississippi in pre-history.
European explorers – 16th/17th centuries European exploration came years later, with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto believed to have visited what is now the Memphis area as early as the 1540s.
By the 1680s, French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built Fort Prudhomme in the vicinity, the first European settlement in what would become Memphis, predating Anglo-American settlement in East Tennessee by more than 70 years. Fort Assumption was a French fortification constructed in 1739 on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff on the Mississippi River by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville's French army. The fort was used as a base against the Chickasaw in the abortive Campaign of 1739.
Despite such early outposts, the land comprising present-day Memphis remained in a largely unorganized territory throughout most of the 18th century in terms of European settlement. The boundaries of what would become Tennessee continued to evolve from its parent — the Carolina Colony, later North Carolina and South Carolina. In 1796, the site became the westernmost point of the newly admitted "state" of Tennessee in the newly independent United States. However, West Tennessee was at that time occupied and historically controlled by the Chickasaw tribe, owned by possession and tribal rights.
On April 3, 1790, promotion of a town at Chickasaw Bluffs was undertaken with leases offered by John Rice, Esq. of Cumberland or purchases to families that arrived at the landing near the mouth of the Big Hatcha-river. Part 2.
19th century Foundation – 1819 The area of West Tennessee became available for white settlement after the Federal Government purchased it from the Chickasaw Nation in the 1818 Jackson Purchase. Memphis was founded on May 22, 1819, by a group of investors, John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson,. and was incorporated as a city in 1826. The city was named after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River, itself named Memphis in Greek after the Egyptian name Mennefer for the Pyramid complex of pharaoh Pepi I. The founders planned for a large city to be built on the site and laid out a plan featuring a regular grid of streets interrupted by four town squares, to be named Exchange, Market, Court, and Auction.City of Memphis History of Memphis Of these squares Market, Court, and Auction remain as public parks in downtown Memphis. The Exchange square site was developed in the 20th century as the Cook Convention Center.
Memphis was a departure point on the Mississippi River for Native Americans removed in the 1830s from their historic lands to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears. In 1831 French writer Alexis De Tocqueville witnessed "a numerous band of Choctaws" crossing the River at Memphis.De Tocqueville Alexis, Democracy In America, Henry Reeve, tr. Volume 1, Chapter XVIII. The State of Mississippi insisted the boundary with the State of Tennessee be resurveyed with the object of some advocates being the capture of the young city of Memphis, but the new boundary proved Memphis was well outside the bounds.Franklin L. Riley. (1905). School history of Mississippi for use in public and private schools. pp. 192f.
The city grew in the 19th century as a center for transporting, grading and marketing the growing volumes of cotton produced in the nearby Mississippi Delta (for background, see "King Cotton"). The cotton economy of the antebellum South depended on the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves, and Memphis became a major slave market. Prior to the Civil War, one quarter of the city's population were slaves. Seeking their freedom, many slaves turned to the Underground Railroad to escape to the free states of the North, and the Memphis home of Jacob Burkle was a way-station on their route to freedom.
The Gayoso House Hotel was built overlooking the Mississippi River in 1842 and became a Memphis landmark; it stood until 1899, where it burned down. The original Gayoso House was a first-class hotel, designed by James H. Dakin, a well-known architect of that era, and was appointed with the latest conveniences, including indoor plumbing with marble tubs, silver faucets and flush toilets. In 1857 the Memphis & Charleston Railroad was completed, linking an Atlantic Ocean port and one on the Mississippi River. Memphis was one of the two eastern termini of the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach route to California from 1857 to 1861.Waterman L. Ormsby, Lyle H. Wright, Josephine M. Bynum, The Butterfield Overland Mail: Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2007. pp. viii, 167, 173. Through the railroad, Memphis traders could export cotton through Charleston, South Carolina, to London and the European continent.
Competing towns: Hopefield, AR and Randolph, TN Hopefield, Arkansas was founded by the Spanish Governor in 1795, across from Memphis near present-day West Memphis, Arkansas. Hopefield became the eastern terminal for the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad in 1857 and prospered until the Civil War. It was burned by Union forces in retaliation for Confederate Raids. Although Hopefield was rebuilt afterward, it was destroyed in a flood. The area of Crittenden County, Arkansas has been subject to some of the country's most disastrous floods, due to the Mississippi River backing into the St. Francis River. These frequent disasters have prevented much population growth on the Arkansas side. Because of its location on a bluff, Memphis was not subject to flooding.
Randolph, Tennessee was founded in the 1820s at the second Chickasaw Bluff upriver of Memphis; for a time it was a major competitor to Memphis for commerce along the Mississippi River. However, Randolph gradually lost commerce and influence to Memphis, particularly after it was bypassed by railroad construction.
Civil War
At the time of the American Civil War, Memphis was already an important regional city because of its river trade and railroad connections, particularly the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, the only east–west rail link across the South. Tennessee seceded from the Union in June 1861 and Memphis briefly became a Confederate stronghold.
Union forces moving down the Mississippi River captured Memphis from the Confederacy in the First Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862. The city remained under Union control for the duration of the war, except for a dramatic raid conducted by Nathan Bedford Forrest. During that time the Gayoso House Hotel was a Union headquarters. According to local legend, General Forrest's brother Captain William Forrest, an escort on the raid, rode his horse into the lobby seeking to capture a Union general.Harkins, John E. Metropolis of the American Nile: Memphis and Shelby County, second edition. Guild Bindery Press, Oxford, MS, 1991, p. 81.
Memphis became a Union supply base and continued to prosper throughout the war. The city became a focus for illicit trade in raw cotton, which was in great demand by northern cotton mills because of the Union blockade and the Confederate embargo. In January 1863 Charles Dana, a special investigator for the Federal War Department, reported from Memphis that a "mania" for illicit cotton had "corrupted and demoralized" Union Army officers.Leigh, Phil. "Trading With the Enemy", New York Times, October 28, 2012.
Thousands of slaves with families fled from rural plantations to Union lines, and the Army established a contraband camp south of the city lines. By 1865, there were 20,000 blacks in the city, a sevenfold increase from the 3,000 before the war.Ryan, James G. (1977). "The Memphis Riots of 1866: Terror in a black community during Reconstruction", The Journal of Negro History 62 (3): 243–257, at JSTOR. The presence of black Union soldiers was resented by ethnic whites in the city; thousands of Irish had immigrated since the mid-19th century. In 1866 there was a major massacre with whites attacking blacks. Forty-five blacks were reported killed, and nearly twice as many wounded; much of their makeshift housing was destroyed.Art Carden and Christopher J. Coyne, "An Unrighteous Piece of Business: A New Institutional Analysis of the Memphis Riot of 1866", Mercatus Center, George Mason University, July 2010, accessed 1 February 2014 By 1870, the black population was 15,000 in a city total of 40,226.
Post Civil War Memphis emerged from the Civil War undamaged from the fighting. On July 24, 1866, Tennessee was the first southern state to be re-admitted to the Union.