Flashback, April 1863: Women Riot for Bread in Civil War Richmond

The first distinct sign that the Confederacy would experience a year from which it would never recover came after a cold winter. The citizens of Richmond, Va., already pinched by a Northern blockade of Southern ports, now experienced hunger when a snowstorm two weeks before stopped food shipments to local markets. On April 1, 1863, women gathered in a church decided to demand—and, if necessary, to seize—food. The following day, these women, now grown to a thousand participants, marched for a mile through the Confederate capital, looting stores and stopping only after a tense face-off with the city’s most important officials—the mayor, the governor, and Jefferson Davis himself.

In contrast with the New York City Draft Riots later that year (recounted in a prior post of mine), the Richmond Bread Riot resulted in no loss of life and far less negative publicity. But it was a far more disturbing harbinger of things to come for the South.

Part of what made the Bread Riot such a terrible omen was the blunt manner in which it exposed the South’s feeble foundation of sex, class and race. In the antebellum Southern view, poor whites could not be regarded as the lowest element of society because African-American slaves already occupied that position. Moreover, unlike in the industrial North, women might supervise the household, but they would be spared the hard menial work of men.

But two years into the fighting, a different reality had intruded. With the North already enjoying a manpower advantage at the time of Fort Sumter, there was a significant need for the services of virtually every able-bodied Southern male. But that meant fewer men to help with harvests that were increasingly critical.

The Confederate attempt to counter the problem only worsened.it. The “Twenty Negro Act,” passed in October 1862, exempted “owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves” from serving in the armed forces. While the legislators intended this as an incentive to plant, the lower classes perceived it otherwise. Most Southerner whites did not own slaves, and fewer still owned 20 or more.They saw favoritism at play.

The North had a similar problem that would later be at the root of the New York Draft Riot: $300 would allow a man to hire a poorer one to fight in his place. The South, with its oligarchic society, had an even worse case of what was shaping up to be, in an increasing slogan of the time, “a rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.”

While both incidents were markers of significant dissent in the North and South, the Draft Riots were sui generis, perhaps the worst point in Union feeling over the conduct of the Civil War in terms of how it affected the poor. In contrast, the Richmond Bread Riot was part of a larger wave of hunger-motivated civil disturbances that also affected Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon, Georgia; in Salisbury and High Point, North Carolina; and in Mobile, Alabama. The problem only became more acute as time went on. The need to keep word of this from leaking out, lest it undercut morale at the homefront, became more acute, making a necessity of press management and even censorship.

Nearly two years before, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States had given Davis the power to censor the telegraph. Voluntary censorship guidelines had been distributed later to ensure no information about troop movements was made known. Denial of reporters’ access to battles was an additional weapon to restrict the flow of information, according to Anthony R. Fellows’ American Media History (2009).

Still, the inchoate unrest now made apparent by the bread riot required an entirely different exercise in press management. The Davis administration had to plead directly with reporters not to report the incident, arguing that it would be detrimental to the South. The plea worked, to some extent, as even those newspapers that seldom missed an opportunity to snap at Davis’ heels agreed to his request to spike the story.

Still, this censorship was not airtight. The Northern Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper contained an account of the incident nearly a month after the event, and more and more Southerners became aware, at least generally, of what happened.

The need arose to shore up, to any extent possible, the shaky edifice of Southern values. And so, the desperate women who participated in the march had to be marginalized, even de-feminized.

At the heart of the protest were a group of women who gathered in Belvidere Baptist Church on April 1--workers in Confederate ordnance establishments and the wives of laborers in the Tredegar Iron Works, the major arsenal of the Southern war effort. Besides all of the pressures discussed previously, they also faced problems associated with a bursting new national capital.

Richmond, like its opposite number, Washington, was thronged with transients, but two years into the war it wasn’t only those seeking work in a new capital, but also refugees fleeing war’s horrors. Rents rose drastically, leaving even less money for families.

The women in the church were addressed by Mary Jackson, a thirtysomething mother of four who worked in a local market. Over time, the justice of her complaint—that authorities were doing little if anything about their mounting misery—was cast aside by (largely male) historians, who focused on distinctly unwholesome descriptions provided by some at the time: that she was “large,” that she carried a bowie knife, that she was, variously, a “virago,” an “extortioner.” Those she would lead came in for equally defamatory treatment: “a handful of prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish and Yankee hags, gallows-birds from all lands but our own," in the words of the Richmond Examiner.

The women had determined to take their complaints to Governor John L. Letcher, but they were not satisfied (later accounts differed as to whether he actually met with them or not). At this point, they took to the streets, now joined by a number of men, in what was turning into a mob. A woman raised a rail-thin arm and screamed, "We celebrate our right to live! We are starving!" Other onlookers heard the chant "Bread or blood!"

Making their way toward the central business district, the crowd broke into government warehouses, grocery stores, and various mercantile stores, seizing food, clothing, wagons, jewelry, other luxury goods—whatever came to hand.

At Mayo Street, the crowd ignored the mayor’s reading of the riot act. Finally, Jefferson Davis himself came out. Accounts vary again about what he told them. Some said that he emptied his pockets of spare change and threw it out to the crowd; others, that he pleaded with the group to peacefully disperse; others, that he gave them five minutes to go, took out his watch, and began to count off the minutes before the crowd would be fired upon. With cannon squarely facing them now, the group gave up and went home. More than 60 men and women were arrested and tried for their role in the greatest civil disturbance to hit the South during the war.

Frightened by their close call, Southern officials stepped up their relief efforts for the poor. But by now, a terrible dynamic had taken control. More land was coming under Federal control, starting across the Alleghenies and radiating east. The spread of Union influence meant that slaves were also abandoning the plantations of their masters, in many cases forcing women and less able-bodied men into the fields.Now, it wasn't only the poor facing starvation, but also wealthy planters. Margaret Mitchell's treatment of slavery in Gone With the Wind might have been wrongheaded, but her description of the privations of Tara--leading to Scarlett O'Hara's climactic cry of the heart, "I'll never go hungry again!"--was based on reality.

At the same time, the Richmond protest—as well as other, smaller-scale ones (such as one six months later in Mobile that I described in a prior post)—demonstrated the growing futility of the national government of the Confederacy. Now local and state officials in the South increasingly interposed themselves when they thought that Davis’ actions were endangering the welfare of their citizens. It was the natural outcome of a movement inspired by the rhetoric of states’ rights. A year after the Richmond protest, Davis himself took to lamenting the turn taken by the movement he had spearheaded before the war: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.”

This Day in Theater History ("Maggie Flynn," NYC Draft Riots Musical, Opens—and Flops)

October 23, 1968 – In a decade when the Broadway musical depicted decadence and Nazism (Cabaret), Russian anti-Semitism (Fiddler on the Roof), and contemporary youth in all its pot-smoking, anti-war glory (Hair), the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 might not have seemed so unpleasant.

But screenwriter William Goldman's complaint about the forecasting powers of Tinseltown—"Nobody knows anything"—might just as easily apply to the Great White Way. The talented real-life husband-and-wife team of Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones did little to smooth the way for Maggie Flynn when it premiered at the ANTA Playhouse. Even in times more forgiving of lackluster box office than ours, the musical was lucky to make it through six previews and 82 performances before its January 5, 1969 closing.

In recent years, interest in the inherent dramatic possibilities of the Draft Riots--a disturbance at the height of the Civil War that became one of the most convulsive urban uprisings in American history--has increased proportionately with historians’ highlighting of the tangled class and ethnic components of the event. Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York) depicted the deadly donnybrook on the big screen (with only intermittent success, as far as I’m concerned), while Peter Quinn and Kevin Baker have done so more successfully in the novel (Banished Children of Eve and Paradise Alley, respectively).

Why did Maggie Flynn tank? It didn’t help matters that critics saw too many similarities between that musical and The Sound of Music, another show about a young woman helping to raise orphans amid a background of prejudice and war. But shows have survived critical pans before.

One problem might have been that even musicals with challenging or even grim subject matter usually have something that lightens the mood. South Pacific, with its scathing denunciation of racial prejudice (“Carefully Taught”), included plenty of comedy and never seriously questioned that American servicemen and their nurses were engaged in a necessary war. Hair possessed novelty, and plenty of it—not only rock ‘n’ roll tunes but nudity.

In contrast, Maggie Flynn possessed no radio-friendly tunes and, despite the presence of a clown, not much in the way of humor; its subject matter darkly mirrored concerns about war and racism that many playgoers were dying to escape; and, unlike the young cast of Hair, Ms. Jones kept her clothes on, hewing closer to her wholesome Laurie character in Oklahoma than to her Oscar-winning turn as the prostitute Lulu Baines in Elmer Gantry.

Maggie Flynn not only didn’t become a hit, but it didn’t even achieve the status of a Sondheimesque success d’estime. Not only has it never been revived on Broadway, but the Internet Broadway Database only lists one other production associated with it: an off-off-off Broadway production at the Equity Library Theater in1976. Even the Goodspeed Opera House of East Haddam, Conn., long famed for bringing to renewed life long-ago shows (and certainly one of my favorite places to catch a musical), hasn’t gone near this one. Set in an orphanage, Maggie Flynn is itself something of an orphan among musicals of yesteryear.

But the factor that makes any show such a crapshoot—the many, many people who may or may not cohere in making it succeed—also offers the opportunity for at least some solitary golden moments. Despite its box-office and critical misfortune, Maggie Flynn was not without these.

Her backup singing behind stepson David Cassidy on The Partridge Family has inevitably colored baby boomers’ perception of Shirley Jones’ musical talents, but they’d be better advised to seek out her work on film in Oklahoma, Carousel and The Music Man (as problematic as those motion picture adaptations could be). What may come as a surprise nowadays, however, is how good the work of her co-star and then-husband, Jack Cassidy, could be.

As I pointed out in a prior post on a more successful musical, She Loves Me, Cassidy was associated with 13 original-cast soundtracks. That might at first only indicate how rich that period was with new musicals, except for the fact that the actor’s work was constantly recognized by his peers. During his lifetime, he was nominated four times for a Tony Award (winning once for She Loves Me). One of those nominations was for his role as Phineas the Clown in Maggie Flynn.

(Cassidy’s stage and TV persona was as a preening narcissist. As I contemplated this, I thought he might have made an interesting Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d actually been considered for the role. It’s probably just as well that he didn’t end up on the show. Had he played the part instead of Ted Knight, we would have seen the egotistical anchorman constantly lose not because he was an insecure yet lovable idiot, but because he was too clever by half, thereby diluting the warmth of one of the all-time great ensemble comedies in the history of television.)

I should also mention that Maggie Flynn added to the resumes of three young actors who would go on to greater prominence in the late ‘70s and ‘80s: Stephanie Mills (The Wiz), Irene Cara (Fame), and Giancarlo Esposito (“Bugging Out” in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing). Mills especially showed quite a bit of spunk in landing her role as Pansie, the orphaned child of a runaway slave, auditioning three times before she won it.

This Day in Civil War History (New York City Draft Riots)

July 13, 1863—Two days after the start of a new draft lottery and 10 days after massive bloodshed at the Battle of Gettysburg, a large mob of New York City's working class expressed their frustration over the Civil War and their economic misery by launching four days of what remains the bloodiest race riot in American history.

Throughout a dozen years of parochial school, I learned nothing about the New York City Draft Riots—nor about one of its necessary antecedents, Ireland's Potato Famine of the 1840s. It took the late, great Columbia University history professor, James Patrick Shenton, to spell out the facts behind these agonizing episodes in Irish-American history, with an actor’s sense of timing and a progressive’s identification with society’s dispossessed.

Millions were not as lucky as I was to sit in on those classes. Despite one or two terrific set pieces in Martin Scorsese's depiction of the period, Gangs of New York, film fans would have encountered a production that was a) sometimes historically inaccurate, b) at times woefully miscast (please raise your hand if you really, truly found Cameron Diaz believable as a pickpocket—then buy yourself a duncecap); and c) without well-motivated characters one could care about. (A mistake most emphatically not made about the South's side of the War Between the States in Gone With the Wind —a novel and film, incidentally, that featured an Irish-American protagonist named O'Hara!)

A magnificent corrective for my readers, for any who may not have done so, is to go out and buy Peter Quinn's historical novel, Banished Children of Eve. In a culture that has yielded to the demands of “dumbed-down” textbooks on every educational level and the distractions of the Internet by catering to shortened attention spans, some readers may feel beleaguered by a novel that not only dares to exceed 500 pages but that even follows multiple major characters. But the best writers demand as much from their readers as from themselves.

(Readers have taken to administering a drubbing to Wikipedia over the last few years for its assorted sins. Here’s one of my problems with it—its entry on the Draft Riots mentions John Jakes’ fictional portrayal of the disturbances, even Newt Gingrich’s, for Pete’s sake, but not Quinn’s. Let’s run that back again, shall we? Two potboilers get mentioned, but not a 1995 American Book Award winner. Go figure.)

Quinn exhibits the same quality as the George Orwell praised in Charles Dickens—a “generous anger”—but also an abiding sense of one of the ironies of American history: how one of the most marginalized groups in the 19th century (Irish immigrants) could turn their collective fury on another despised group (African-Americans) in an urban uprising that cost more than $1 million and the lives of at least 120 civilians and an additional 2,000 injured. (An additional irony: the tumultuous multicultural atmosphere of the early 1860s sounded more contemporary to many readers—including myself—than the relatively more quiescent early 1960s.) The riots’ suppression required Abraham Lincoln to dispatch a part of the Army of the Potomac, many of whom had just finished fighting at Gettysburg.

I could go on and on about how Quinn mastered subjects as disparate as Tammany Hall, the Roman Catholic Church, freedmen in New York, minstrel shows, Stephen Foster, the “orphan trains,” the Know-Nothing Party, the New York underworld, and even the beginnings of baseball—but this would sound as if I think you should read it because it’s Good For You. Heaven forbid! Just glory in the sharp, often comic period dialogue, the deep insight into principal characters, and an expert control of the plot strands until he gathers them up and uncoils them in the swiftly moving, shattering final chapters.

Earlier in this post, I implicitly contrasted Scorsese’s treatment of the period with Quinn’s, with the advantage decidedly in Quinn’s favor. A moment’s further reflection makes me wonder how well any film, no matter how well-intentioned, can depict the draft riots and the forces that gave rise to it. It’s not just that, following a half-year of discontent, I’ve begun to think of American cinema as hopelessly imitative and juvenile when it’s not veering toward the transgression-for-its-own-sake indie film style. No, I’ve come to think of the mini-series as a more accommodating genre for Quinn’s careful treatment of men and their motives.

True, like the long, Dickensian urban novel, the mini-series has seen better days. But, as HBO has proven with John Adams, viewers are prepared to support an entertainment medium that demands their attention and intelligence. Surely they’d be interested in a similar venture on a book that tells us many an uncomfortable truth about the American Experience?