“If you kill him, you have got to kill me first”: examining individual and collective loyalties during the Memphis Massacre (1866)

Traditionally, examinations of Civil War era loyalty have focused on higher-level loyalties to the Union or Confederacy, conflating loyalty with Unionism. This article takes the Memphis Massacre (1866) and examines the expressions of individual and collective loyalties that took place alongside the violence. Although there have been numerous studies of the Memphis Massacre, they tend to focus on tensions between the city’s Irish and African American population, overlooking the fact that loyalties transcended racial boundaries. Collective and individual loyalties played critical roles during the Massacre, blurring the lines between victim and victimizer, ultimately complicating our understanding of this well-studied event.