Memphis stands on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. It is the emporium of West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, and Northern Mississippi, and is the most important town between New Orleans and St. Louis. Its growth has been rapid. Laid out in 1820, its population in 1840 was 8,839; in 1850, 16,000; in 1860, 50,000. Its present population is not known; but it has immensely increased since the last census, and is still increasing. I was told that, at the time of my visit, the building of nineteen hundred new houses had been contracted for, and that only labor was wanted to complete them.
In the year ending September 1st, 1860, 400,000 bales of cotton were shipped from this port. During seven months of the year 1864,—May to November inclusive,—the shipments amounted to only 34,316 bales. In 1865, from May, the month when the cotton released by the fall of the Confederacy began to pour in, to December 22d, the date of my visit, the shipments were 138,615 bales. These last figures, furnished me by the government assessors, do not include the government cotton, which passed untaxed, and a considerable quantity which came to Memphis after being taxed in interior districts.[[14]]
The view of the commerce of Memphis from the esplanade overlooking the landing is one of the most animated imaginable. You stand on the brow of the bluff, with the city behind you, and the river below,—its broad, sweeping current severing the States. From the foot of the bluff projects an extensive shelving bank, with an understratum of sandstone; forming a natural landing, commonly called a “levee,” although no levee is here,—the celebrated levee at New Orleans having impressed its name upon all landings of any importance up the river. You look down upon a superb array of steamers, lying along the shore; their elegantly ornamented pilot-houses and lofty tiers of decks supported by slender pillars fully entitling them to be named floating palaces. From the tower-like pipes issue black clouds of smoke, with here and there rising white puffs of steam. The levee is crowded with casks and cotton bales, covering acres of ground. Up and down the steep way cut through the brow of the bluff, affording access to the landing from the town, a stream of drays is passing and repassing. Freights are going aboard, or coming ashore. Drays are loading and unloading. Bales of cotton and hay, casks, boxes, sacks of grain, lumber, household furniture, supplies for plantations, mules, ploughs, wagons, are tumbled, rolled, carried, tossed, driven, pushed, and dragged, by an army of laborers, from the levee along the broad wooden stages to the steamers’ decks. The movement, the seeming confusion, the rattling of drays, the ringing of boats’ bells, the horrible snort of the steam-whistle, the singing calls of the deck hands heaving at a rope or lifting some heavy weight, the multitudinous shouts, and wild, fantastic gesticulations of gangs of negroes driving on board a drove of frightened mules, the voices of the teamsters, the arriving and departing packets, drift-wood going down stream, and skiffs paddling up,—the whole forms an astonishing and amusing scene. Then over the immense brown sand-bar of the Arkansas shore, and behind its interminable line of dark forest boundaries, the sun goes down in a tranquil sea of fire, reflected in the river,—a wonderfully contrasting picture. Here all is life and animation; there all is softness and peace.
Evening comes, and adds picturesque effect to the scene. The levee is lighted by great smoking and flaring flambeaux. A grate swinging in a socket on the end of a pole is filled with bituminous coal and wood, the blaze of which is enlivened by flakes of oil-soaked cotton, resembling fat, laid on from a bucket. The far-illuminating flame shoots up in the night, while the ignited oil from the grate falls in little streams of dripping blue fire into the river. Until late at night, and often all night, amid darkness and fog and rain, the loading of freight goes on by this lurid illumination. The laborers are chiefly negroes whose ebon, dusky, sallow and tawny faces, lithe attitudes, and sublime carelessness of attire, heighten the pictorial effect of the scene. Bale after bale is tumbled from the drays, and rolled down the levee,—a negro at each end of it holding and guiding it with cotton-hooks. At the foot of the landing it is seized by two other negroes, who roll it along the plank to its place on the deck of the upward-bound boat. Here are fifty men rolling barrels aboard, each at the other’s heels; and yonder is a long straggling file of blacks crossing the stage from the levee to the steamer, each carrying a box on his shoulder.
[14]. Since March 15th, 1864, the government tax on cotton had been two cents a pound. The average weight of a bale, which was latterly 460 or 465 pounds, is now 500 pounds. The tax on a bale was accordingly about ten dollars. There were in Memphis at that time 30,000 bales.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS AND THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU.
By a census taken in June, 1865, there were shown to be 16,509 freedmen in Memphis. Of this number 220 were indigent persons, maintained, not by the city or the Bureau, but by the freed people themselves. During the past three years, colored benevolent societies in Memphis had contributed five thousand dollars towards the support of their own poor.
There were three thousand pupils in the freedmen’s schools. The teachers for these were furnished, here as elsewhere, chiefly by benevolent societies in the North. Such of the citizens as did not oppose the education of the blacks, were generally silent about it. Nobody said of it, “That is freedom! That is what the Yankees are doing for them!”
Visiting these schools in nearly all the Southern States, I did not hear of the white people taking any interest in them. With the exception of here and there a man or woman inspired by Northern principles, I never saw or heard of a Southern citizen, male or female, entering one of those humble school-rooms. How often, thinking of this indifference, and watching the earnest, Christian labors of that little band of refined and sensitive men and women and girls, who had left cheerful homes in the North and voluntarily exposed themselves to privation and opprobrium, devoting their noblest energies to the work of educating and elevating the despised race,—how often the stereotyped phrase occurred to me, “The Southern people were always their best friends!”