Even though the American Civil War has been over for 153 years, controversy about this aspect of our history has continued to modern day. Debate rages about the removal of Confederate statues and the Confederate flag still waves proudly all throughout the South, even in my own native state of Kentucky (which has perplexed me for years—apparently these fellow Kentuckians of mine did not get the memo that Kentucky remained neutral in the Civil War and never officially joined the Confederacy—but I digress).

Regardless of your political loyalties on the matter, something I have noticed is that a large amount of attention is placed on the battles and major political events of the Civil War instead of how it affected the people who experienced it—specifically, the citizens of the Confederacy. The assumption among the general public seems to be that everyone in the South supported the secession and the decisions of the Confederacy. However, the reality is a bit more complicated than that.

A great example that demonstrates the complicated nature of the situation is the Southern Bread Riots of the Civil War. Although there were several similar protests and riots all across the South (North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia to name a few), the most famous event took place in Richmond, Virginia in 1863 on the 2nd of April. Something I found in my research, though, is that these protests in other parts of the south seemed to be largely overlooked.

While it is clear this is because the Richmond riot was the largest and wildest by far, I think it is a mistake to not mention the others as well. Dr. David Williams and his wife, Teresa Crisp Williams use Georgia as a case study for the dire situation of the Confederate government and what led to the bread riots in their article “The Women Rising: Cotton, Class, and Confederate Georgia.” Spoiler alert: it’s the rich white dudes’ faults.

By 1863, the Civil War had turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts the young country had seen and was crawling into its second year. It is an understatement to say that the Confederacy was not doing too hot for itself. Even before the war, a clear discrepancy could be seen between the Northern and Southern regions of the country in terms of its modern developments. Where the North had manufacturing, textiles, and railroads, the South was still largely agrarian. This difference almost immediately put the Confederacy at a disadvantage when the North cut off all railway and supply lines in a blockade.

This caused several complicated economic problems to arise, such as wartime inflation (the price of goods rose dramatically in order to pay for the hefty price tag of fighting the better equipped North) and impressment (a fancy term that means the government confiscated goods like food and yarn from merchants as they saw fit in order to help with the war effort). If you are anything like me and have a hard time understanding economics, all of this equals out to a farming region not having enough food to go around.

The citizens of the Confederacy—by which I mean lower-class women and children whose male relatives had been drafted into the army—were starving and there seemed to be no immediate relief coming.

To make matters worse, the price of cotton skyrocketed when the war began, leading many of the greedy plantation owners to focus all their cropland to the lucrative cash crop instead of necessary grain and corn. Apparently, Georgia’s governor, Joe Brown, tried several times to issue laws and statutes that would require plantation owners to plant more food supply instead of cotton in response to all his citizens’ pleas for aid. However, the legislators of Georgia, whom the laws would affect and pushed for secession in the first place, blocked all of Brown’s attempts.

But, before you start to think, oh, poor ol’ Joe Brown just trying to help his people, get this— in 1863, Brown turned around and allowed the government to purchase that cotton on the cheap and sell it to foreign ports. What foreign ports could those be, you may ask yourself? Well, as the South was one of the largest cotton growing regions in the world, they shipped all over, including to the British empire. But who were the people that were willing to pay the most for Southern cotton during the pesky war blockade? Surprise: American textile manufacturers.

YES! You heard that correctly! The Southern Confederacy was selling their cotton to the NORTH! And, believe me, they sure as heck knew about it, too. High Northern prices were exactly why Southern plantation owners refused to minimize their cotton growth in the first place, knowing it was a lucrative opportunity during an unstable economic time. As for the government, Governor Brown received reports about how commonplace cotton smuggling—the illegal trading of cotton to banned countries, like, for example, the country you’re at war with—was and that steamboats would somehow coincidently find their way to ports that held vessels docked for “pleasurable excursions.” According to the report, cotton smuggling was such a fact of life that “no intelligent man in the region could doubt it.”

Dear reader, please tell me that you are outraged right now because I am freaking flabbergasted. I don’t know about you, but I did not learn about any of this in high school American history.

The middle and lower-class citizens of the Confederate South were not stupid; they knew what was happening and that they were getting the short end of the stick. Newspapers raged against the injustice of the situation and reported often about rich plantation owners who were arrested for hoarding food away from the public but were quickly released after paying off their bail (some things never really change, folks). It is also important to note that many southerners did not actually support the secession. In fact, only a little over half of Georgia voted in favor of leaving the Union.

Many citizens began to see the Civil War as a “rich man’s war” since many rich landowners were able to pay their way out of being drafted. So, when soldiers at the battlefront heard the news that their families were starving, many did not hesitate to desert. If they were caught, many would be harshly punished as an example, with some men even being shot. Women whose husbands were deserters or suspected of it were usually deprived of the already limited amounts of supplies. Outrage only grew as time went. Finally, by the spring of 1863 several women had decided to take matters into their own hands.

As early as June 1862, a group of soldiers’ wives in Bartow County, Georgia raided a depot of cotton and quietly marched home with it. On March 16, 1863, another group of about a dozen women went into a store in Atlanta and asked about the price of bacon. At a dollar per pound, the leader of the group explained that as soldiers’ wives and daughters, they couldn’t afford those prices and promptly pulled out a pistol from her bosom—the women took nearly two hundred dollars’ worth of bacon. On April 11th, about 65 women armed with pistols and knives marched through Columbus raiding stores and yelling curses as they went. However, as I said earlier, the largest and most violent riot occurred in Richmond, Virginia and gains the most attention from historians.

Dr. Michael B. Chesson discusses how difficult it is to distinguish what exactly happened on April 2nd due to the sheer amount of confusion and mixed accounts of the event in his article “Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot.” By meticulously going over primary documents, Chesson estimates that there could have been as many as 2,000 people present at the riot, with about half of that number being made up of the protesting women and men. The population of Richmond had swelled drastically during the war, with many people seeking refuge in the large city, causing a rise in crime. However, the events of the Richmond Bread Riot were a direct result of the lack of legal aid to help feed and clothe all the struggling families.

The Southern mommas, many of whom were from the surrounding rural counties, had had enough and were demanding answers.

The riot was planned and organized at the Belvidere Hill Baptist Church on Church street the evening before April 2nd. The morning of, the large group of women had met in the city’s Capital Square in front of a statue of George Washington—which seems interestingly apropos—and marched to City Hall, demanding to be heard by the governor John L. Letcher. It is not clear exactly what happened, but it seems that Letcher at first refused to see them, only to dismiss their concerns when he finally did, infuriating the crowd.

The women marched towards the business district in an eerie silence, gaining hundreds of followers along the way, many of them curious onlookers. When asked what they were doing, many women began screaming “Bread or blood!” This chant quickly spread through the crowd as the women began attacking any supply stores they could find, seizing food, clothing, wagons, and jewelry as well as other luxury items. Some merchants resisted the mob while others looked on helplessly. All in all, not exactly a pleasant situation.

The riot went on for about two hours, with officials like the mayor and the police being unable to corral the women. Finally, either Letcher or president Jefferson Davis himself (it is contested which, though Chesson theorizes it was more likely Letcher) organized cannons in the streets. Stepping onto a barrel, he ordered that if the crowd did not disperse in five minutes, he would order the cannons to be fired. To prove his seriousness, he pulled out his pocket watch and began to count down. Though several tense moments passed where it seemed the crowd would not listen, the crowd did eventually scatter. As a further warning, Richmond officials kept the cannons out for weeks afterward so that no one else would be tempted to try for a repeat.

More than 60 men and women were arrested and tried in connection to the event, including Mary Jackson and Minerva Meredith who are often attributed as being the ringleaders of the riot. However, in further proof of the inefficiency of the Confederate government, anyone who was found guilty either got out of jail or was shortly released due to there being no room in the prisons, which were crowded with Union war prisoners. In fact, it was those prisoners who leaked the story of the riot to the North and on April 8, 1863, the New York Times published a front-page article on it.

As news of these rioting women spread, others followed their example throughout the South.

It deeply hurt the Southern morale for the war and marked the point in the Civil War where the Confederacy’s slow defeat began to nosedive. Many newspapers tried to counteract the negative press by painting the women as harlots, prostitutes, and thieves, not true “gentle” women. Southern patriarchy underestimated the extent to which its mothers would go to take care of their families, and ultimately, the Confederacy’s failure to provide proper relief and planning to its citizens aided in their losing the war. Personally, I find it hard to feel too bad for them.

In conclusion, rich white plantation owners starved women and children for their own selfish gains and suck major butt. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

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