The Bread Riots

So now is go to the spring of 1863. You have white women across the Confederacy taking to the streets, but they’re not protesting against the Civil War, they’re not protesting against slavery, they just don’t have enough to eat.

ED: Last summer our co-host, Ed Ayers, explored this unexpected protest for show we did on women in politics. We’ll let Ed do his thing from here.

PETER: Here’s what happened. By the second winter of the Civil War, white women throughout the Confederacy could not feed their families, because most able-bodied white males were in the Confederate army.

STEPHANIE: There’s not even teenage sons left on these farms.

PETER: This is historian, Stephanie McCurry. She says that, at first, these soldiers wives wrote letters to state and local officials begging for help. McCurry discovered hundreds of these letters, and here’s one written by a North Carolina woman in 1863.

STEPHANIE: We have seen the time when we could call our little children and our husbands to our tables and have a plenty. And now we have become beggars and starvers, and no way to help ourselves. And then she said that she and the other soldiers wives could not do enough field work to get subsistence from the land.

Sometimes in the same letter it would start out like a begging letter and then it would turn angry in the middle. We will have bread or blood.

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ED: And they meant it. In March and April of 1863, mobs of white women broke into stores and government warehouses across the Confederacy to steal food in what were known as bread riots. There were more than a dozen of these uprisings, from Mobile, Alabama and Salisbury, North Carolina, up to Pittsburgh, Virginia. The biggest riot took place in the capital of the Confederacy, in Richmond, Virginia on April, 2nd 1863.

STEPHANIE: Around 9 o’clock in the morning, a clerk in the government office, John Jones, who left this amazing diary, describes being pulled to his window by the sound of these women– about 300 women, with another crowd of men and boys behind them. And he said, totaling about 1,000 people, they converge on particular merchants, and they demand– they sort of interview the merchants. They say, how much is bacon a pound? And the guy says, you know, well, it’s $1.20 a pound. And they say, how can women in our position pay $1.20 a pound for bacon? You needs to give it to us at government prices. And he says, no. And then they break down the door. And they begin this basically four hour riot in the warehouse district or the war district of Richmond. And they threw men off of wagons in the street to commandeer the wagons to haul off the loot. They took up– seized a huge amount of stuff.

ED: Well, people may know that Richman’s the capital of the Confederacy. You would have thought they would have had some soldiers there or something. Why did they let this rage for four hours? Why didn’t they try to nip this in the bud?

STEPHANIE: They did eventually put this thing down by force, they called out troops to put down this riot and then a lot of them were arrested.

ED: Confederate officials were puzzled by how well organized these riots seem. The leading Richmond newspaper offered the standard explanation, men did it, or even Yankee conspirators had put these women up to it. But in Richmond, the trial records provided some clues to the contrary.

STEPHANIE: When they get into court, they find out that this is not the work of men or Yankee operatives, it’s the work of one woman, Mary Jackson, a huckster and meet at the city market. And, the night before the riot, she called a meeting of 300 town and country women– some of them from as far as 11 miles away– people she had recruited. And they had a meeting in the Belvedere Baptist Church. She got up into the pulpit– so how acceptable that was– and she kind of rallied her troops, and she told these women that they were going to organize themselves, they were going to behave peaceably, they were going to explain their reasons, but that they were to come tomorrow and they were to leave their children at home. That is to say, we’re going to have a riot, you’ll need a babysitter, and come armed.

ED: More than 70 Richmond rioters were put on trial. Many were fined or sent to prison, although Mary Jackson, the ringleader, was not.

Despite the clampdown in Richmond, the riots had a positive outcome for women. They forced officials throughout the Confederacy to pay attention to the needs of civilians, not just soldiers.

STEPHANIE: First of all, they started to return food from the Army to the worst hit counties, so they gave back food that they had seized by the tax in kind. They created food relief programs that the welfare policy and the Confederacy expanded enormously. And they allowed county relief officials to buy corn at government prices, which is what the women had wanted in the first place.

ED: So, I think that if people were imagining places in the United States where women were likely to be depoliticized, it might have been in the Confederacy. You know, southern lady hood and all that sort of stuff. And yet, we have here, one of the most visible and, in some ways, effective rebellions of women in [INAUDIBLE] Central America are coming out of the South. Do you think it’s mainly a condition that they were put in such conditions that they had no choice? Did this have a Southern accent in any way?

STEPHANIE: Absolutely. This is desperation. But people can just lie down and die in moments of desperation, and these women got up and fought back, and they fought back and sort of forced officials to answer to them, like, you took our men, you promised to protect us, now you better act. So the fact that these women, who have no legs to stand on, no ground on which they can think of themselves as citizens of the nation with rights that are being violated– none of that is within their grasp, and yet still, when the government forces them into this really intimate relationship with them, it starts to take their husbands, and their sons, and their food, people respond.

ED: Yeah. What that suggests is that this grassroots rebellion had very direct results in what people do think of as politics, and the public policy of the state. So, it’s hard to imagine they could have gotten those results in any other way, rather than threatening to burn things down.

STEPHANIE: It’s just so fascinating, I think, and so moving in a human sense to recognize that, when we go into the archives and dig around, we find these unexpected things.

ED: Exactly.

STEPHANIE: And one of them is that, no matter how many times we’re told– and the history we read is really men do this and men do that– I mean, really, it’s quite outrageous. You get the 21st century, you can still basically write a history of the world without any women in it. It infuriates me. There is lots of evidence of how women made history, and I think this is a great example of that. It’s like a rip in history, and that’s, I think, why historians write so much about wars, because wars create conditions of rapid change, they also leave records.

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PETER: That was Columbia University historian, Stephanie McCurry, interviewed by our own

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So, the thing that jumps out to me, right off the bat, from Professor McCurry’s remarks, is this notion of having intimate relationships with the government. Right? This idea that the government and you have a kind of bond, and if that bond is violated, then violence can be the result.

JOANNE: You know, we’re talking about a female protest, right? And part of the power of that is the fact that they’re women, and I believe that Professor McCurry, in the interview, talks about, in a way, this is making a new politics, it’s people who have been excluded, who are now asserting, in a way, that they are part of the system. But, when I listen to that piece, what it made me think of was a complaint that Thomas Jefferson made about France and about women in France during their revolutionary moment. And what upset him was, he said that women, at that moment, they weren’t part of the official system, and so they were able to go between the lines and behind the scenes and get to people in power and assert demands and make claims in a way that no one can put their finger on. Now, in this case, this is, in a sense, the opposite. These people are putting themselves in the middle of the public sphere and watching them protest. But, I wonder, at the degree to which the fact that they were women, how that shaped the perception of what was going on.

PETER: So, this notion that there are legitimate expectations, that as a citizen, as a woman, as a child, that one can expect the kind of care that one can expect I think is really powerful, and I think it goes a long way to explaining the nature of protest, regardless of what period you’re talking about. If you believe you struck some kind of social contract with the government, and that was effectively violated, it can lead to some pretty explosive consequences. You know, the one thing that–

JOANNE: Revolutionary.

PETER: Revolutionary, exactly. No, it’s true, it’s true. I mean, I’m always amazed, for instance, when you think about these kind of riots or rebellions, you know there’s always a kind of, again, intimate quality. There’s almost a surgical quality to them. Like, the women in Richmond, they know exactly where to strike when the bread is not provided. Right? You think about cities that were burning during the 1960s, or even race riots or in the 1920s, the merchants who were charging you too much money for that second-hand TV, that story had to burn, right? In a place like Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, if there was a black employer with a white employee, that employee, during the race riot there, would go to the black boss and try to burn his business down as an expression of a relationship that had simply gone awry. And so it’s a powerful example of these things that seem really personal. Right? These riots, these explosions, at the street level and at the personal level, are profoundly intimate.

JOANNE: And it’s a reminder that, although, on the one hand, protests can and probably are meant to often have a broad sweeping impact, that they’re also meant to and do have a local and a personal impact as well that’s part of their power.

PETER: I don’t think that’s right.

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BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break. When we get back, how media coverage help or hurt protests. A words from today’s sponsor.