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HISTORY

OF THE

CITY OF MEMPHIS

TENNESSEE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

OF SOME OF ITS PROMINENT MEN AND PIONEERS

BY J. M. KEATING

SYRACUSE, N. Y.

D. MASON & CO., PUBLISHERS

HISTORY OF MEMPHIS.

PART I.

TH

1541-1827.

I.

HE history of Memphis begins in 1541 with the discovery of the Mississippi by Hernando de Soto, one of the most intrepid of the soldier-explorers of Spain, and it embraces the whole of the three and a half eventful centuries of modern life. The condition of Europe, a minute of which is necessary to our story, was at this time deplorable in the extreme. The masses were steeped in ignorance, beclouded by religious bigotry, and grovelled in the profoundest depths of degradation. They existed to support the lords of the soil, and held their lives at the pleasure of their masters. Without education, without a place in the body politic, other than that of serfs, they were powerless. Life had few charms for them, and but few opportunities opened to them for advancement. The cradle was shrouded in gloom; the grave was the gateway from slavery to rest and peace. A marauding and illy-paid soldiery sustained the grasping tax-gatherer, who anticipated the fruits of the earth, and in the name of the emperor, king or lord, stripped the toiling millions of the results of their labor. The dwellings of the people were mere hovels; homes they had none. Their clothing was rough, insufficient, and cumbersome; body-linen was unknown to them. They fed as the beasts-as they could, of what they could, and from whatever they could. The decency and comfort of the humblest modern table were still more than three hundred years away. Science was under the ban as the work of the devil. It was frightened and subdued; its worshippers burrowed in secret, and were content to satisfy only their own longings for knowledge. The arts had not yet condescended to The church and the palace monopo

cheer the laboring and toiling millions. lised them. Justice slept. Law was subjected to the caprice of might, which was everywhere supreme. Even the chastity of the poor maiden was held at the will of the knight, who was sworn to defend only the sacred temple of his "lady's" virtue. The armies, composed of mere bandits, held together by the

"cohesive power of plunder," divided with the church the ambitions of men. Chivalry was stubbornly disputing the fate which was soon to overtake it. The brooding power of freedom, warmed by the blood of martyrs and contending hosts, only at rare intervals blessed the hungry and longing millions with its quickening impulse.

The relative strength and position of the nations of Europe was as disproportioned as that of the people and the princes. The Russian empire was in embryo. Prussia was yet in the womb of time. Spain was master of the continent "mistress of the world"; she had recently humbled Italy, Germany, and France, and had annexed and acquired an extent of territory quite onethird of the best part of the Europe of to-day. England had just begun the struggle for freedom of conscience; she was Protestant after a fashion under Henry VIII. John Knox was on the threshold of his great career in Scotland. Parts of Germany and Switzerland had declared for the right of private judgment, and the Huguenots of France and the people of the Netherlands were shaming the early martyrs by their constancy and devotion to the great principle that is the basis of all human freedom. Austria was an appendage of the German empire. Hungary was a semi-barbarous kingdom. Italy was subdivided among petty princes, a few free cities surviving to keep alive the spirit of commercial and municipal independence. Sweden and Norway were conjointly a great power, and Poland, still strong, stood sentinel between the hordes of Asia and of Eastern Europe, and the centres of what civilisation there was. But Spain was far above them all. Her navies swept the seas, and her diplomates arbitrated and adjusted the affairs of the world, guided by the church. She was the defender of the faith, and her king was "His Catholic Majesty." Swarming in the wake of Columbus, her adventurous sons had swooped upon the coasts of America; and Peru, Chili, Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies had been conquered and annexed to her dominions. by Cortez and Pizarro. Three semi-civilised nations had been blotted out amid carnage and bloodshed too horrible for words to paint, and a fabulous. wealth had been stolen to enrich the depleted treasury of a power which was. the avowed enemy of the peace and progress of mankind.

In this ruthless, bloody, and piratical work, De Soto learned his first lessons as a soldier. While yet a mere lad, only nineteen years of age (1519), he entered the service of his king, under De Avila, his adopted father and prospective father-in-law, who had recently been appointed governor of Darien. Under this mercenary and merciless tyrant, commissioned to plunder, conquer, and annex, he assisted in the subjugation of that country, and was a protesting witness of many of the fearful excesses of an unbridled and brutal soldiery. But his protests were in vain. De Avila was intent only on enriching himself. Failing in his desire for a humane prosecution of the war, De Soto left Darien, notwithstanding his desire and pledge to marry his commander's youngest daughter, and went to the aid of Hernandez in Nicaragua.

After

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