Chamber’s ‘Dear Abe’ letters part of 175 years
The Greater Memphis Chamber celebrates its 175th birthday next week, meaning it was 23 years old when the Civil War broke out.
According to some “Dear Abe” letters the chamber has dug up, the business organization cared more about green than blue or gray.
The little-known letters to President Abraham Lincoln, which resurfaced as the chamber staff prepared for the anniversary event, provide a glimpse to a time when the city’s leaders were grappling with Civil War consequences.
The chamber pleaded for mercy from Lincoln. Copies of the letters were provided to the chamber by the Library of Congress and are just a few of the historical documents the chamber has been researching in preparation for its birthday bash April 12 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Civil War had been raging about two years and Memphis had been under Union occupation about one year by June 22, 1863, when the chamber passed a resolu-
tion and sent it to Lincoln.
“For more than twelve months the ole and beloved banner of our country has floated honored and undisturbed over our city, and within the last month more than eleven thousand persons have registered their names in Memphis as loyal persons and have taken the oath of allegiance,” the resolution stated.
Of course, the chamber didn’t pass that resolution until a year after the Confederacy lost the brief Battle of Memphis. The merchants were hurting under the trade restrictions of Union control.
Among other hardships, the U.S. imposed an extra 3 percent tax on goods transported into “insurrectionary districts” and an extra 50 percent tax on real estate, the documents state.
The resolution stated that Memphis claimed and felt entitled to all the rights, privileges and advantages of any “loyal” U.S. city.
The resolution’s wording is a bit challenging to follow, but the intent is clear. It states in part:
“That Memphis claims and is justly entitled to all the rights, privileges and advantages any loyal city, situated as she is and at a moment of public trial like the present, can rightfully call her own and that from the moment when she, together with New Orleans and other places as recognized by the government as a loyal city down to the time at which that much prized recognition was withdrawn and she was stigmatized as being a place of insurrection, and to the present pinnacle she has by no act of riot, insult or insubordination to the laws and the government forfeited her claims to a full justification in the lofty privileges of American Citizenship.”
The resolution called for a chamber delegation to seek a meeting with Lincoln. That meeting apparently occurred, as it was cited in a Sept. 28, 1864, chamber letter that began “To His Excellency Abraham Lincoln.”
“During last year we had the honor of an interview with you as a committee appointed by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce and loyal merchants and citizens of Memphis to ask that you revoke so much of your proclamation declaring Tennessee in a state of insurrection as it relates to the City of Memphis,” the letter states.
“On that occasion you seemed anxious if consistent with duty to grant our petition, but on consultation with the Hon. Ex. Secretary of the Treasury, Gov. Chase, you decided to postpone it with a promise however that it should be done as soon as justified by the future good conduct of our citizens.
“... For more than two years has Memphis been occupied by the National Forces during which time no act of insubordination or spirit of revolt has manifested itself.”