Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Lauderdale County, Tennessee
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
==History== Lauderdale County was created in 1835 from parts of [[Tipton County, Tennessee|Tipton]], [[Dyer County, Tennessee|Dyer]] and [[Haywood County, Tennessee|Haywood]] counties. It was named for Lieutenant Colonel [[James Lauderdale]], who was killed at the [[Battle of New Orleans]] in the War of 1812.<ref name=tehc /> Planters developed large cotton plantations along the waterways, and used enslaved African Americans in gangs to work and process this commodity crop. After the American Civil War, many freedmen initially stayed in the area, working the land as [[sharecroppers]] or [[tenant farmers]]. Whites used violence to enforce white supremacy after the war, continuing after Reconstruction. In the period after Reconstruction and into the early 20th century, whites in Lauderdale County committed eight lynchings of Black people. This was the fifth-highest total of any county in the state, but three other counties also had eight lynchings each in this period.<ref>[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf ''Lynching in America, Third Edition: Supplement by County''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023063004/https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf |date=October 23, 2017 }}, p. 9, Equal Justice Initiative, Mobile, AL, 2017</ref> ===Battle of Fort Pillow=== {{main|Battle of Fort Pillow}} In 1861, the [[Confederate States Army]] built extensive defensive fortifications in Lauderdale County along the Mississippi River and named the site for General [[Gideon J. Pillow]]. Because of its strategic location, the fort was taken over by the [[Union Army]] in 1864, which had occupied the state since 1862. In 1864, Confederates attacked and overran the fort's Union defenders, who were about evenly split between white and black soldiers. They were reported to have refused to surrender, but historians have disputed this account. The Confederates gave the soldiers no quarter, and killed black soldiers in twice the proportion of white ones. After the Union Army established the [[United States Colored Troops]] (USCT), made up of numerous recruits who were escaped slaves, Southern military officials vowed to kill them rather than take them prisoner.<ref name="cimprich">John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., "Fort Pillow Revisited", 1982, in ''Race and Recruitment'', ed. John David Smith, Kent State University Press, 2013, p. 214</ref> People in the North considered this event to be a massacre, and blacks in the Union Army used the cry, "Remember Fort Pillow!" to rally during the remainder of the war. [[Fort Pillow State Park]] has a museum to interpret the battle and also has reconstructed fortifications on the original site of the fort.
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
Lauderdale County, Tennessee
(section)
Add topic