Loyalty in Federally Occupied Memphis, 1862–65

In her preface to Disloyalty in the Confederacy, Georgia Lee Tatum noted that the subject of dissent in the Civil War South was marked by “almost insoluble complexities.” Seventy-five years later, scholarship has certainly borne out this observation, at least as far as complexity is concerned. We are lucky to have a host of interesting and provocative studies about the problem of dissent in the Confederacy. Most of these scholars owe much to the ground work laid by Tatum, even as they have carved out essential new categories of analysis and asserted divergent arguments about the nature of and reasons behind “disloyalty.” What has emerged is a view of the Confederate home front that is multi-layered, contradictory, and highly dynamic—one that emphasizes the connections between the military and the civilian as essential to understanding not only the significance of loyalty, but the nature of the Civil War itself.  

This paper will explore the issues of dissent and disloyalty as they played out among soldiers and civilians in the federally-occupied city of Memphis, Tennessee (1862-1865). Transformed by the Civil War, the city embodied the “almost insoluble complexities” Tatum found central to the study of loyalty on the southern home front. In the words of one Union soldier, the city was “literally full of spies.” Flooded by northern army bureaucrats and soldiers, white unionists and partisan guerrillas, cotton black-marketers and female peddlers, resentful rebels and runaways slaves, Memphis was the site of a headlong collision between civilian loyalties and the exigencies of wartime life. The city thus offer historians an excellent opportunity to examine the many facets of southern loyalties during the war, as well as the role played by civilians in shaping the war and its progress in the West.