"Nothing Was Known of the Dead": Coroners and the Massacres of 1866

The New Orleans and Memphis Massacres of 1866 stand as two of the most infamous instances of racial violence of the Civil War era, and they have often been compared in historical scholarship on Reconstruction. Yet, knowledge of these massacres and their victims was mediated through one of the most understudied, yet immensely powerful offices in the nineteenth-century American South, that of the coroner. This article explores the unique power coroners wielded in the postemancipation era by juxtaposing the efforts of the coroner offices of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, and Shelby County, Tennessee, in the wake of the racial violence that wracked both locales in the summer of 1866.