Tobin T. Buhk - Memphis Vice, 1863: Sex for Sale and the Scandal that Rocked a Civil War City

When it comes to the Memphis of 1863, there are two primary news sources: the Memphis Daily Appeal and the Memphis Daily Bulletin . Both present problems for the historian.

The arrival of Federal troops in June 1862 complicated things for the Memphis press.

The Memphis Daily Appeal s editors fled, but their presses continued to run as a newspaper in exile. Throughout the remainder of the war, the Appeal would continue to print, albeit from various spots throughout the Confederacy, daily coverage of affairs inside Memphis. This coverage is based on information leaking from the Union-occupied city to the Appeal s editors, who constantly had their ears to the ground listening for rumblings from the River City.

They also reprinted items from the Bulletin , which operated inside Union-occupied Memphis. For example, on April 9, the Appeal ran the same article about the Buttenburg-OBrien feud that appeared in the April 2, 1863, edition of their in-Memphis rival under the headline ASSAULT WITH INTENT TO KILL. (See chapter 4 for a discussion of this case).

Unfettered by restrictions placed on the press by Federal provost marshals, Appeal writers had the freedom to criticize Uncle Sams army. They also tended to seize on items about lawlessness in the Memphis streets as a way of exposing the inability of Union overseers to keep law and order.

Their colleagues in Memphis did not enjoy the luxury of criticism.

To ensure favorable coverage, Union army officials replaced the editors of the Argus with New York newspaper editors and suspended the Avalanche altogether. They also cut an order organizing a new paper, the Memphis Union Appeal , apparently an attempt to fill the vacuum left by the Appeal and to provide a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln voice.

By 1863, both publicationsthe Argus and the Union Appeal had ceased to exist, but the Avalanche had been bought by pro-Union editors, renamed the Bulletin , and returned to business (not to be confused with an antebellum paper by the same name that merged with the Avalanche in 1861). By 1863, the Argus also returned, but apparently few if any issues from the period covered in this book have survived.

The mostly pro-Union Memphis Daily Bulletin , therefore, is the only existing daily paper from 1863 to cover events in Memphis from inside Memphis. This is both a blessing and a curse to the twenty-first century researcher. The blessing comes on page three of each edition. Devoted to Local Matters, these items provide the only reliable glimpse at everyday life in 1863 Memphis.

These pages reveal, like a time capsule in microfilm, what life was like for people on the ground level in Memphis. Consider the coverage for late May, which reveals that Memphians suffered through an unseasonable cold snap; two boat loads of ice arrived in the Port of Memphis, one for the army encamped near Vicksburg, and another for private merchants in the city; and Doctor Peters, the infamous assassin of C.S.A. general Earl Van Dorn, was staying in town with the full blessing of the Union Army. (After supposedly catching Van Dorn with his wife Medora, Peters shot the general at his Spring Hill headquarters and fled. Some whispered that Peters agreed to assassinate the rebel horse soldier in exchange for the return of his land, which had been confiscated by the Federal army.)

Yet for all its value as a magical phone booth leading back in time, the Bulletin also comes with a caveat. In an era when one author went to prison for writing a glorified biography of slain Southern superhero Thomas A. Stonewall Jackson and a Maryland housewife earned a stint in prison for uttering the phrase that damned Lincoln, the editors of the Bulletin , while occasionally rankling the Union overlords, remained circumspect about criticizing the U.S. government.

In some cases, quite the opposite is true: perhaps realizing the power inherent in the Provost Marshal department, they tended to lionize Provost Marshals Melancthon Smith and Wager Swayne. Whether due to toadying or honest reverence, this fact alone raises questions about relying on the Bulletin as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Nonetheless, the Bulletin was for all intents and purposes the only game in town . For minor crimes and misdemeanors tried in Recorders Court, page three of the Bulletin represents the sole remaining historical record. These types of crimes were marginal and thus exist not on the main street of history but along the sidewalks. And few historians have written about the events taking place on the sidewalks of the past.