September 8, 1863—Women in Mobile, Ala., staged a bread riot protesting high prices and shortages of food, in a sign that the backbone of the Confederate war effort—the will to resist—was being slowly but steadily eroded by Northern military success.
The New York City Draft Riots represent the usual starting point for analyzing discontent among the lower classes during the Civil War. Less remarked upon—but perhaps more important to the denouement of the conflict—were the smaller scale but more numerous bread riots that began to be experienced during this year in the South.
Nearly 20 years ago, American Heritage published an Eric Foner article called “The South’s Inner Civil War,” in which he discussed the discontent roiling beneath the surface of the “Lost Cause.” Though he only treated the bread riots in a single sentence (he focused largely on “upcountry” mountain areas such as eastern Tennessee), the riots became a telling indicator that, beneath the surface, disaffection was widespread within the Confederacy.
Frank E. Vandiver’s Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970) gives a colorful account of the April 2, 1863 food riot in Richmond that is somewhat marred by his portrait of one of that demonstration’s instigators, Mary Jackson. It’s difficult to read his description without thinking “shrew,” especially with such details as her size, her “vixenish eye” (a contemporary’s description), her wielding of a bowie knife and six-shooter at a meeting, and a “tall white feather in her hat.”
Anyone can be made to look ridiculous with the right selection of details. But whatever her appearance or even personality, Jackson’s complaints were impossible for her fellow citizens—or, for that matter, most historians writing today—to ignore.
Only four days before the Mobile riot, Mayor Robert H. Slough recognized the mounting unrest for the threat it was and tried to snuff it out. In a notice addressed to citizens of the city in the Mobile Register and Advertiser, he gave thanks for efforts made already (this included a Volunteer Relief Committee that aided the destitute, a Mobile Military Aid Society that induced soldiers’ dependents to sew uniforms, and the Mobile Supply Association for procuring foodstuffs north of the city). At the same time, he appealed to citizens to do more, asking that subscriptions be taken up “to supply the wants of those who have claims on the community and worth on the public.”
On September 8, many of the mayor’s worst fears were realized—though things could have turned out even worse. More than 100 white women came together on Spring Hill Road, bearing banners reading “Bread or Blood” and “Bread and Peace.” With a number in the group swinging brooms and axes, the feminine phalanx made their way up Dauphin Street, breaking into bakeries and shops, like some sort of American version of the storming of the Bastille.
As news of the march spread, a group of volunteers, the 17th Regiment, was dispatched to quell the uprising—only it didn’t happen. The soldiers were all too familiar with the specter of hunger—those not suffering from it themselves knew others on the homefront who did. Anyway, how could they fire on women? Weren’t women part of what they were defending—their homes? So the volunteers let them pass.
By now, the poverty-stricken marchers had reached the mayor’s office. At this point, Slough must have realized how Jefferson Davis felt that spring when facing the Richmond protestors. The Confederate President back then had given the mob five minutes to disperse. As the seconds ticked away with agonizing slowness, the fate of the Confederacy itself hung in the balance until, at last, that mob dissolved.
Slough’s appeal relied less on conflict—he promised the women to do everything he could to secure food. And he proved true to his word, as more charitable organizations sprang to the relief effort.
Mobile and Richmond were not alone as sources of discontent, however. As time went on, similar protests were staged as well in Georgia (Savannah, Atlanta, Milledgeville, Macon and Columbus), as well as in Petersburg, Va.
What brought the Confederacy to this pass? No single factor—but, as the North began to implement its “Anaconda” plan of splitting the South, the Confederacy began to be caught in a vicious circle involving these factors:
* The Northern blockade, which proved increasingly effective;
* Rampant inflation;
* Failure to control speculation;
* Refusal of more cotton planters to grow foodstuffs;
* Increasing Union control of territory, closing off more and more sources of Confederate food;
* Slave flight from plantations—or open defiance of plantation mistresses or elderly males who were left to fend without husbands in the armed forces;
* The ideological inability of the Confederate Congress to adopt a command economy that would have taken the appropriate steps to secure railroads and horses for transporting food.
In the end, the war would be lost as much at home as in the killing fields of Chattanooga, Richmond, Atlanta, and other campaigns so familiar to us by now.
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