Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE YEAR THAT TREMBLED

EAST AND WEST, 1863

Early on the morning of April 1, 1863, an angry group of women gathered in the small, squat brick building of the Belvidere Hill Baptist Church in the Confederate capital of Richmond. They met for complaint, not for prayer. Some of the women had husbands in the Confederate army and were fending for themselves on the pittances they could earn and the broken promises of assistance made by the Confederate government. Others had husbands in the Tredegar Iron Works whose pay fell woefully short of subsistence levels. Food supplies in the Confederate capital had dwindled as the fruits of the last year’s harvest were consumed by Robert E. Lee’s army and the civilian population of the city. What was now offered for sale by Richmond’s merchants, bakers, and butchers went for astronomical prices. One woman, Mary Jackson (who was variously described as a farmer’s wife, a sign painter’s wife, and the mother of a soldier), stood up behind the pulpit of the church and demanded action: let the working-class women of Richmond assemble the next day, march to Governor John Letcher’s mansion on Capitol Square, and force the governor to make good on the promises of assistance. If assistance was not forthcoming, then let them turn on the “extortioners” in the shops and levy their own brand of fairness by ransacking the bakeries and market stalls for what they needed.

The next morning, a crowd of 300 women joined Mary Jackson at a city marketplace four blocks from Capitol Square. Armed with a Bowie knife and revolver, Jackson led a seething procession through the streets to the governor’s mansion, where Letcher met them on the front steps. The governor, however, had nothing to offer them but a few expressions of personal concern, and after a short speech the governor retreated behind his door and left the dissatisfied crowd milling around in his front yard. Another woman named Mary Johnson, “a tall, daring Amazonian-looking woman” with a “white feather, standing erect from her hat,” took the lead of the crowd and pointed them down Richmond’s Main Street. “Clubs and guns and stones” appeared, and the crowd surged down the street toward Richmond’s shops.1

Over the next several hours, all semblance of order disappeared in Richmond’s commercial district as the enraged women broke down doors and windows, seized bread and meat, and then went on to loot jewelry, clothing, hats, “and whatever else they wanted.” The hapless Governor Letcher and Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, appeared on the scene to calm the mob, but the women were beyond listening to the words of the politicians. At last a company of soldiers, normally detailed for service at the Tredegar Ironworks, filed into Main Street. Someone or some people in the crowd pulled a wagon into the street as a hasty barricade, and at that moment, all that was needed for Confederate soldiers to begin shooting down Confederate women in the middle of Richmond was one reckless gesture, one careless word. 2

No one had ever thought of Jefferson Davis as possessing a dramatist’s sense of timing, but on this occasion the president of the Confederacy appeared at precisely the right moment. It is not clear whether someone summoned Davis (who lived only a few blocks away) or whether he was simply following his own ear for trouble, but he found the mob and the soldiers at the point where each was ready to begin a melee. Coolness under pressure had been Davis’s long suit ever since his army days, and he quickly mounted the barricade wagon and began to speak. His speech was conciliatory, reproachful, and threatening by turns. He knew the people of Richmond were hungry, but he pointed out that farmers in the countryside would only be more unwilling to bring their produce to market in Richmond if they knew that it would be stolen by rioters there. He shamed them by pointing to the stolen jewelry and clothing in their hands when their protest was supposed to be for bread. He even offered them money from his own pockets. He closed by taking out his pocket watch and announcing that if the crowd had not dispersed in five minutes, he would order the soldiers to open fire. A minute or two crawled past, and then the crowd slowly began to break up and drift away. Eventually forty-one women, including Mary Jackson, and twenty-four men were arrested on theft and riot charges.3

The Richmond bread riot was not an isolated case. During 1863, similar riots broke out in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama; in Mobile, a crowd of women carrying banners with slogans such as “Bread or Blood” and “Bread and Peace” marched down Dauphine Street, smashing shop windows as they went. A group of “Soldiers’ Wives” wrote to North Carolinian Zebulon Vance to complain that with “our Husbands & Sons… now separated from us by this cruel War not only to defend our humble homes but the homes & property of the rich man,” he should understand that “there are few of us who can make over a dollar a day. … Many of us work day after day without a morsal of meat to strengthen us for our Labours and often times we are without bread. Now, Sir, how We ask you in the name of God are we to live.”4

By 1863, the war that Southerners had entered into so confidently two years before was imposing strains on Southern society that few had imagined in the heady spring of Sumter and the high summer of First Bull Run. The creation of a workable Southern