Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Richmond, Va., was the capital of the Confederacy, but by early 1863 it was a miserable place to be. With the Union controlling much of Virginia’s Tidewater and coastal North Carolina, inland cities like Richmond were starving. Fields in central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley went unattended as soldiers were kept at their posts. The rail system and the James River canal were overtaxed trying to provision and equip the men on the front. What food did make it through was sold at sky-high prices by speculators and merchants.
Order broke down. The ranks of police were depleted, with the men off to war. Robberies and burglaries were on the rise. Gangs of rock-throwing youths roamed the hills and the river and canal bottoms hunting prey. “Wartime Richmond had become a city of strangers and camp followers, some with criminal intent,” wrote the historian Michael Chesson.
In November, a brigade of “badly clothed and destitute of shoes” South Carolinians passed through Richmond to relieve Lee’s Antietam survivors, a wake-up call for anyone who thought the war was going to end soon. Then, in early March, an explosion at a huge ordnance plant killed 45 girls and women who had been working there. A few days later, a foot of snow fell, making life even more miserable for a town used to mild winters. The roads were an icy mire. Even the city’s waterworks broke down this bitter winter. To get fresh water, women and children had to trudge to the well on Capitol Hill for drinking water.
On March 27, President Jefferson Davis made an unforgiveable faux pas, calling on Confederates everywhere to spend the day in prayer and fasting. J.B. Jones, a clerk in the War Department, wrote in his diary: “Fasting in the midst of famine! May God save this people!” Divine intervention didn’t come during this long Lent. Instead newspapers reported angry women taking to the streets across the South, railing against grain speculators.
On the night of April 1, inside Belvidere Hill Baptist Church on Oregon Hill, Mary Jackson, a 34-year-old mother of four, and a woman calling herself Martha Fergusson energized a gathering of women over reports of rampant greed by speculators and merchants greed. They decided to take their demands to the governor, John Letcher, first thing the next morning. Before they broke, the women were ordered to bring axes and hammers to extract justice from the extortionists, if talks failed. “Bread and blood” was their cry in the darkness.
The women from the western part of the city and nearby counties were not alone. Women from the eastern reaches, like Rocketts and even faraway New Kent and Hanover Counties, also planned to descend on the Capitol that day. They too would come armed. How coordinated these gatherings were is lost in time, but coincidence is improbable.
Jackson, a huckster at a town butcher’s stall, was at the city’s Second Market on that “very fair” Thursday morning. She told the market’s clerk and two policemen that women from Oregon Hill would soon be arriving. What she didn’t tell them was that they would be carrying old horse pistols, clubs, knives and bayonets. She herself carried an unloaded pistol and a butcher’s knife.
The women showed up at the Capitol around 9 a.m. The governor’s executive aide, S. Bassett French, told the women that Letcher was too busy to be disturbed. than have them escorted away, French left the armed women, some with bayonets visible on belts, angered and milling about the Capitol grounds. Jackson, meanwhile, slipped inside the Capitol to hunt down Letcher. Hearing the commotion outside, the governor came down from his office and addressed the crowd, now numbering in the hundreds. But his words left them even more dissatisfied. By the time Jackson returned, the crowd was out of control.
According to Chesson, “in eerie silence,” the crowd “marched up the steep grade on Ninth and Main Streets,” going toward the river, seizing carts and wagons as they attacked two warehouses in Shockhoe Slip. There, “a toothless old woman with a most determined” fist named May Walker wielded her ax on one warehouse door until it broke and took off with 500 pounds of bacon. The crowd then moved methodically down Cary Street, storming the businesses along the way, pausing just long enough to load “the stolen goods into horse-drawn vehicles driven by women from the crowd.”
Minerva Meredith, 40, “six feet tall, rawboned and muscular,” was busy seizing a wagon loaded with beef destined for a hospital. Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, recorded her husband’s comment that Meredith, a butcher’s apprentice who likely knew Jackson, was as “a tall, daring Amazonian-looking woman who had a white feather standing erect from her hat, and who evidently was directing the movements of the plunderers.”
The longtime mayor of Richmond, Joseph Mayo, was the first local official on the scene, probably alerted by Letcher or Bassett. Trying to restore order, he literally read the Riot Act, ordering the women to disperse. The same scene repeated across the city as the mob spread. Even a public plea by the Catholic bishop fell on closed ears.
Having heard the roaring mob, some merchants brandished weapons in the doorways of their businesses. A few shuttered their shops, fearfully huddling inside. Years later, a male witness recalled “the female Communists went at them without a qualm of conscience.”
Hot on the crowd’s heels were the 70 members of the Public Guard, organized in the early 19th century to put down slave revolts. The guard’s wartime duties included defending public property like the Capitol, armory and penitentiary and protecting state officials. Letcher commanded the elderly lieutenant in charge, Edward Scott Gay, to restore order. Almost at the same time, the old men of the Richmond City Battalion, an armed Home Guard unit, positioned themselves at the Capitol.
Seeing Gay’s men, a few rioters ran up 14th Street toward Franklin to escape while others pressed toward the old City Market. In one account Gay, with tears streaming down his face, told them to go home before there was any bloodshed. By now a few of the braver merchants had begun to make citizens’ arrests, capturing rioters for stealing jewelry, millinery and fine linen.
Davis, standing on a dray cart, offered to share his last loaf of bread with the several thousand women and a few men – “mostly foreign residents, with [draft] exemptions in their pockets” – terrorizing the downtown. “You say you are hungry and have no money. Here is all I have; it is not much, but take it.” That wasn’t enough. They screamed back: “Bread!,” “the Union” and “no more starvation!”
When the appeals failed, the president or the governor — accounts vary — gave the crowd five minutes to leave. Gay then ordered “Load!” With no tears in his eyes now, he intended to fire on the remaining rioters. But they fled to their cramped rooms and crowded flats, and no shots were fired. It was 11 a.m. Jackson was arrested shortly thereafter, close to where she worked.
Before dawn the next day, city and state officials positioned artillery near the Capitol and in the business district. The Confederate Army was on alert to back up city and state authorities. But a second day of demonstrations was called off. Again no shots were fired.
Having regained the upper hand, civil and military authorities rounded up the most conspicuous rioters, including Fergusson, Meredith and Johnson. But prosecutors were soon frustrated when witnesses failed to appear. A conspiracy of silence fell over the capital.
At one of the more prominent trials, Fergusson testified against Jackson. The mysterious woman, who like Jackson had four children and freely used aliases, was fined only $10 and sentenced to a day in jail for her activities that day. What happened to Jackson is unknown, because fire destroyed her court records. As for the ax-wielding Johnson, she was sentenced to five years in the Virginia State Penitentiary. A jury convicted Meredith, fined her $100 with a six-month jail sentence.
In all, about 70 women and men received jail sentences. “Middle-aged and elderly women even if neatly dressed and could afford lawyers did not escape so lightly” as Fergusson did. Letcher, realizing that the city’s jail was overcrowded, pardoned many, including Meredith, because he couldn’t feed them.
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The first reports of the riot reaching the North came from paroled Union officers. They claimed that “three thousand women who were armed with clubs and guns and stones” took bread from bakeries, meat from groceries, flour and other provisions from government warehouses and accused merchants of price gouging, and finally looted stores of jewelry and millinery. Even to Northern editors, the story “looks very fishy.” But the officers were right.
Fearing the propaganda fallout, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon begged the city’s newspapers to suppress the story. His assistant adjutant general demanded telegraph operators remain silent. The shushing didn’t work. The editors kept their accounts to a minimum, but emotionally charged words like “Bread Riot” did appear in print. The Richmond Examiner decried the marchers as “prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish and Yankee hags, gallows-birds from all lands,” egged on by traitors and Yankee spies.
But city residents – free and slave – knew what had transpired. Jones’s diary then was filled with lists of rising prices. He wondered in his diary, “How can we live here?” It was a variation of the women’s “No more starvation!” cry on Richmond’s streets. The president and the governor answered the clerk’s question and women’s plea with guns.
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Sources: Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Vol. 18 and Series 4, Vol. 2. Michael B. Chesson, “Harlots or Heroines,” Virginia Magazine of Biography and History, Vol. 92, 1984; Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, January-September, 1863, Vol. 9; F.N. Boney, “John Letcher of Virginia”; Varina Davis, “Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by His Wife, Vol. 2”; James Ford Rhodes, “History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Return of Home Rule at the South in 1877,” Vol. 5; “Richmond Bread Riot,” Virginia Encyclopedia; John B. Jones, “Diary of a Rebel War Clerk,” Vol. 1; Virginius Dabney, “Virginia, The New Dominion”; “Bread Riot,” Harper’s Weekly, April 18, 1863; “Bread Riots,” Harper’s Weekly, April 25, 1863; The New York Times, April 8, 1863; The Richmond Dispatch, Jan. 20, 1889; The Richmond Whig, Jan. 16, 1864; The Richmond Examiner, April 4, 1863.
John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.