Give Me Bread Or Give Me Blood

OF MONTREAL: [SINGING] It’s different for girls. They don’t spit on the street. They don’t have to size up every person they meet, or create an elite, or poison the game so no one else can compete.

ED: So, Brian and Peter, in talking about women in politics, one thing that everybody would know is that women during the Civil War era, during wartime, simply didn’t have political power, and especially in the South, where there weren’t even the stirrings of a woman’s suffrage movement. But in the spring of 1963, white women across the Confederacy did something truly unexpected. They rioted.

Now we should make it clear that these women weren’t protesting war or slavery. They simply did not have enough to eat. 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 MCCURRY: There’s not even teenage sons left on these farms.

ED: 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 MCCURRY: (READING) “We have seen the time when we could call our little children and our husbands to our tables and have aplenty. 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 this same letter it would start out like as a begging letter, and then it would turn angry in the middle. “We will have bread or blood.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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 Petersburg, Virginia. The biggest riot took place in the capital of the Confederacy, in Richmond, Virginia, on April 2, 1863.

STEPHANIE MCCURRY: Around 9:00 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 need 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 wharf district, of Richmond. And they threw men off of wagons in the street to commandeer the wagons to haul off the loot. They seized a huge amount of stuff. They siezed–

ED: Well, and if people may know that Richmond is 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 MCCURRY: 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 seemed. 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 MCCURRY: 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 you know 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 ring leader, 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 MCCURRY: 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. The welfare policy in 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 the United States where women were likely to be depoliticized it might have been in the Confederacy. You know, southern ladyhood 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 19th century America 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 MCCURRY: 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. I mean, it’s hard to imagine they could have gotten those results in any other way, rather than threatening to burn things down. So–

STEPHANIE MCCURRY: 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 MCCURRY: 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 to the 21st century, and 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.

[MUSIC – BIKINI KILL, “REBEL GIRL”]

ED: Stephanie McCurry is a historian at Columbia University and author of Confederate Reckoning, Power and Politics in the Civil War South.