Symposium Spotlight: Memphis: The City in the Middle

Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2025 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Dwight Hughes’s topic.

Memphis: The City in the Middle

Memphis, Tennessee, was in the middle: The middle of the continent; the middle of mass migration; the middle of a gigantic market, and the middle of an unprecedented river war. In early 1861, this pivotal Mississippi River port saw hundreds of steamboats monthly ferrying masses of produce, products, and people up and down river supplemented by railroads running north, south, and east. Memphis hosted Tennessee’s largest slave and cotton markets; twenty thousand bales shipped across its wharfs every week in the single month of March. The city also was a vital industrial and boat-building center. In the early light of June 6, 1862, citizens thronged the bluffs to witness a battle as extraordinary warcraft commanded by inexperienced civilians and blue-water seamen employed the most modern technology alongside the most ancient weapons. This was a purely maritime affair, the only fleet engagement in the heartland and the first to employ steam-driven rams on both sides. Steam propulsion, innovations in iron armor, powerful naval artillery, shot and shell, were introduced to river combat. The hitherto unknown art of joint riverine warfare was invented amidst strategic and tactical ambiguity, technological uncertainty, interservice misunderstanding, and command confusion. In the fiery clash, Confederate naval presence was virtually eliminated from heartland rivers. Afterwards, Memphis became a huge armed camp funneling hordes of troops and megatons of material downriver for the Vicksburg campaign. This is the story of a river city in the middle.