| Chapter : | Introduction |
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For example, Harris, a former slave who had learned to read and write, purchased his wife’s freedom, obtained a marriage license, founded a church, and bought and mortgaged property. The highly educated Marie Loiselle married Marcus Winchester, Memphis’s first mayor and son of a founder, and she bought property in downtown Memphis, where she lived with her husband and their eight biracial children.
Free and freed Blacks had more rights in the 1820s because (1) Memphis was still a small town, with a population that increased from 50 in 1820 to only 663 by 1830; (2) most Memphians—laborers, traders, and small farmers—were not slaveholders; and (3) antislavery sentiment was evident in 1826, when Frances Wright established Nashoba, a utopian community near Memphis that promoted emancipation and interracial communal living. Those rights were taken away, however, in the 1830s, when a racial backlash ushered in a period of Negrophobia and oppression of Blacks, a reaction, in part, to Nathaniel Turner’s 1831 rebellion, David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, and the fear of slave revolts in the South. Consequently, the city and state took measures to curtail the civil rights of African Americans: in 1831, the state legislature barred the migration of free Blacks into the state; in 1834, the state constitution took away Blacks’ voting rights and made manumission almost impossible; and, in 1837, the Memphis City Council passed an ordinance against “citizens keeping colored wives.” Such repression forced the Winchesters to move outside of Memphis, and, after Marie’s death in 1839, her children crossed the color line to become “White” in the 1840 census.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Memphis had become a major urban center. Located on the Mississippi River, at the hub of a tri-state region that includes Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, it had the resources—a railroad, steamboat landing, businesses, and retail establishments—to make it one of the Mid-South’s most important trade centers. The city became famous for cotton trading and infamous for slave trading, mainly because of the efforts of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who operated one of the largest slave markets in the South. Indeed, the labor of Blacks, most of whom were enslaved, contributed substantially to the economic growth of the city. It is estimated that by 1850, there were 2,362 slaves and only 109 free Blacks in Memphis, at a ratio of 24 to 1.