| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Jackson succeeded, through battles and bribes, in acquiring twenty million acres of land from the Chickasaws and, as president of the United States from 1829 to 1837, persuaded Congress to pass the 1830 Indian Removal Bill and, in 1837, negotiated a forced exodus—known as the Trail of Tears—of Natives from the Mid-South. Earlier, Jackson, Overton, and Winchester divided a part of their ill-gotten land into the 362 lots that comprised the town of Memphis. Characterized by one historian as a “primitive and pestilential little mudhole” when it was founded in 1819, the settlement consisted of several cabins, a store, a tavern, and other frame buildings, as well as fifty inhabitants, including, more than likely, a few slaves and one or two free persons of color.
Although the history of Memphis’s founders has been well preserved, very little is known about the townsfolk—the anonymous Natives, working-class Whites, and African-descended people who lived in and around the settlement on the Lower Chickasaw Bluff. Most of what is known about early Blacks was passed down through oral history or was obtained from official documents such as wills, church records, property deeds, census reports, and baptism records, as well as birth, marriage, and death certificates, but these documents are sketchy at best. Among the early inhabitants of Memphis and Shelby County are four notable African Americans—Joseph Harris, Marie Loiselle Winchester, Morris Henderson, and Joseph Clouston—whose life stories reveal some of the rigors of the Black experience in Memphis in the early nineteenth century. Many African Americans were born in other states and came to Memphis with the White settlers who moved from Virginia and the Carolinas after North Carolina’s western territory became the state of Tennessee. Harris and Henderson, for example, were born in Virginia, while Loiselle was probably born in Louisiana. These early Memphians included free men and women such as Marie Loiselle Winchester; slaves such as Limus, a ferryboat operator who belonged to Marcus Winchester; and freedmen such as Harris, Clouston, and Henderson, who had worked as builders, barbers, and carriage drivers to purchase their freedom. Their lives reveal that, before 1830, Black Memphians had some rights and privileges: they could purchase their freedom and that of other Blacks; free men could vote, buy property, obtain mortgages, worship freely, found churches, migrate to the state, legally marry, and maintain interracial marriages in spite of Tennessee’s antimiscegenation laws.