"ONE OF THE BLOODIEST OUTBREAKS IN THIS VIOLENT ERA": SCARCE AND IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION OF MEMPHIS RIOTS AND MASSACRES, 1866

(BLACK HISTORY) WASHBURNE, E[lihu]. B. Memphis Riots and Massacres. 30th Congress, 1st Session. House of Representatives. Report No. 101. (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1866). Octavo, contemporary pebbled brown cloth rebacked with original spine laid down; pp. (1), 2-394. $1600.

First edition of the July 1866 congressional Report of the House Select Committee containing hundreds of pages of official testimony and eyewitness accounts of the brutal May 1866 Memphis Massacre that killed over 45 Black men, women and children, and destroyed hundreds of Black homes and churches, sending "the unmistakable message that the North may have won the war, but it did not win the hearts and minds of the white ruling class that clung to white supremacy."

The 1866 Memphis massacre was ignited by a quarrel between a white man and a Black man. "A group of recently discharged Black veterans intervened, and a white crowd began to gather" (Foner, Black Reconstruction, 262). Eyewitnesses reported that as the dispute escalated, a white Memphis policeman told some of the Black men, "'Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned.' This phrase, reported more than once by those who later testified to the House Select Committee, sums up the attitude of many of those who perpetrated the Massacre." One man, who was shot but survived, testified that he saw white men drag a Black man out of a house and shoot him "'right in his mouth.' Another man then 'kicked him over, and shot him again.' Said he, 'God damn you, you will never be free again.' The violence of the first three days of May 1866… sent the unmistakable message that the North may have won the war, but it did not win the hearts and minds of the white ruling class that clung to white supremacy and Black inferiority. White southerners refused to abandon their 'property interest' in Black lives… If 'war is politics continued by other means,'" then the violence in Memphis "could be understood as the Civil War continued by other means" (Donald, When the Rule of Law Breaks Down, 1631-39). Before the violence subsided in Memphis, "one of the bloodiest outbreaks in this violent era,… at least 48 persons (all but two of them Black) lay dead, five Black women had been raped, and hundreds of Black dwellings, churches and schools were pillaged or destroyed" (Foner, 262).

An investigator reported: "'women and children were shot in bed.' An African American woman… 'was shot and then thrown into the flames of a burning house and consumed'… in some instances houses were [set ablaze] and armed men guarded them to prevent the escape of those inside… In the aftermath, no arrests or attempts at prosecution were made. Federal civil-rights enforcement was lacking and… Memphis Mayor Park washed his hands of the matter" (Schermerhorn, "Civil-Rights Laws," Atlantic). That July the House of Representatives Select Committee issued this Report. Herein, refusing to call the three days in Memphis a "riot," it declares the violence a "massacre… the mob, finding itself under the protection and guidance of official authority… [was] actuated by feelings of the most deadly hatred to the colored race." Nevertheless, there were still "no arrests, no trials and no convictions." To historian Calvin Schermerhorn, the violence of those days in 1866 continues to have "a powerful legacy… the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, sits only a few blocks from the site of the Memphis Massacre of 1866" (Atlantic). First edition: House of Representatives Report No. 101: "July 25, 1866—Ordered to be printed." First text leaf with small marginal notation, "x 16521." 1874 library bookplate.

Interior very fresh with minor expert repairs to rear blanks, both pastedowns and front inner hinge. An excellent copy of a very scarce book.