The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (29 page)

In January 1863, Memminger renewed his consistent plea for taxation as a necessary method of producing revenue and of restraining inflation. The treasury note authorization of March 23 was only half of the government’s financial policy in 1863. The other half was a collection of measures designed to generate revenue to support government paper. On April 24 Congress passed a tax law which was stern to the point of being confiscatory. The act levied an 8-percent ad valorem tax on agricultural products grown in 1862 and taxed bank deposits and commercial paper at the same rate. The act levied a 10-percent tax on profits from buying and selling foodstuffs, clothing, and iron, thus requiring speculators in these commodités to share their profits with the government. It levied a license tax on just about every form of occupation or business, a graduated income tax whose scale varied from 1 percent of incomes less than $500 to 15 percent of incomes over $10,000, and a tax-in-kind tithe on agricultural produce and livestock: 10 percent of everything grown or slaughtered in 1863.
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The tax law was bitter medicine. The unchallenged income tax, for example, anticipated the United States federal income tax by fifty years. Nevertheless at first Congress received praise for its courage and wisdom. Before long, however, the difficulties of equitable enforcement became apparent. The tax in kind, especially, proved onerous, and the “TIK men,” agents appointed to collect the tithe, too often acted like licensed thieves. Some dissenters declared the tax unconstitutional, and it probably was, but the President countered with the plain truth that the nation’s survival depended upon collection of the tax.
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The tax bill and other significant legislation of 1863 dealt with the problem of distributing wealth, food, and supplies among armies and people. The year before, the main thrust of government activity had been the organization of manpower when Confederates faced the challenge of reconciling state rights and individual liberties with the demands of a multifront war fought by the largest bodies of armed men ever assembled in North America. Actually these two efforts, material distribution and manpower organization, were opposite sides of the same coin. The Confederates were learning the hard lessons of modern warfare: to survive, a combatant nation must be able to mobilize its military population, its economy, and its social institutions in support of the war. The Confederates had submitted to conscription and martial law; now they faced impressment, confiscatory taxation, and fiat currency.

For the military campaigns of 1863 the South placed more troops in the field than it ever had before or would after.
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To sustain so large a body of consumers, the Southern economy had to do two things: produce or purchase food, equipment, and arms to supply its armies; and produce or purchase the necessities to support its civilian producers. In the spring of 1863 the nation reached critical points in each of these efforts. Southerners achieved their greatest degree of self-sufficiency in war industry and supply, but at the same time the Confederate civilian economy displayed its most alarming and dramatic symptoms of disease. Contrary to the sacred truism, a nation of farmers could indeed go hungry.
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The winter of 1862–1863 had been hard for Confederates. Those who lived on farms or plantations away from the war zones missed the farmers and planters who were away in the army, but as long as gardens grew and livestock survived, they could eat. Life was more difficult in areas where armies of friend or foe had marched, camped, or fought, and in areas under Union control. Those who remained on the land had to contend with broken fences, plundered chicken coops and smokehouses, and trampled crops. Many left their homes and migrated as refugees to cities and towns to find safety at the cost of privation.
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During the winter of 1862–1863 Southerners discovered to their alarm that their economy was far more fragile and interdependent than they had previously realized. A fundamental fact of economic life in the Confederacy was that wherever Southerners congregated in cities, towns, or armies, there was the threat of hunger. There were several reasons for this. First, Southern agriculture in ante-bellum times had thrived on the production of staple crops—cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and the like—but tobacco provided little nourishment, cotton even less, and Federal armies occupied or threatened the South’s rice and sugar-producing lowlands. Obviously Southern agriculture needed to convert to food production, and to that end Congress adopted resolutions and state legislatures passed laws which limited the number of acres to be planted in inedible staples. But the transition required more time and self-sacrifice than the new nation could afford. Ante-bellum agrarian inertia proved a formidable obstacle.
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A second reason for food shortages in the Confederacy was military. By the end of 1862 Federal troops occupied extensive croplands in regions adjacent to population centers, most significantly Southern grain-and livestock-producing areas in central Virginia and middle Tennessee. Farms and plantations which lay in the path of the war produced little or no food for the armies sent to defend them. And as the sphere of Union control increased, Confederate cropland contracted; fewer acres had to feed almost as many people.
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The ratio of defenders to producers in the Confederate economy was a third source of Southern supply problems. Farms and plantations were less efficient when farmers and planters were away in the army. When a Southern farmer left his fields to take the field, the farmer’s wife, parents, or children were simply not able in many cases to take the place of the producer turned consumer (as soldier). Slaves on plantations and farms remained, and overseers were exempt, but masterless plantations, like masterless farms, were less productive, and plantations which continued to grow cotton or To bacco provided no sustenance for armies or urbanites.
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Finally, the Southern transportation system severly hindered distribution of food supplies. Railroads in the Old South had been largely farm-to-market facilities, a fact which limited their military usefulness but seems likely to have aided the Confederacy’s supply effort. However, Confederate tracks and rolling stock quickly became worn as immediate military requirements commanded priority attention. The Confederates spent their limited resources maintaining the lines which linked military theaters and connected Southern subregions. The Western and Atlantic road, which connected Chattanooga and Atlanta, continued to function; the Richmond and York River line, which “merely” ran from the Confederate capital into tidewater farmlands, suffered neglect and cannibalization.

The same set of priorities which usually dictated the distribution of the Confederates’ railroad energies and resources applied to other kinds of roads as well, and military necessity established first claim to the South’s wagons and draft animals. Hence, for what seemed at the time the most rational of reasons, people went hungry in the midst of full cribs, barns, and smokehouses. A bountiful harvest counted for little if local railroad tracks were destroyed by foes or cannibalized by friends, if the road to town were a quagmire, or if wagons and mules were impressed to serve the army.
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The best case study of the results of Southern food supply problems occurred under the nose of the Confederate government in its capital. As in other cities and towns in the wartime South, Richmond’s population had swollen enormously and rapidly during the two years since 1861. The increased number of government employees and wage laborers were, like salaried people everywhere, especially hard hit by currency inflation. Because the summer campaign of 1862 had despoiled the adjacent countryside, local farmers reaped an especially meager harvest in the fall, and Richmond residents had to share that harvest with a major field army. The situation was most critical in the early spring, before the new planting yielded and as supplies stored the previous autumn ran lowest. In the spring of 1863 a set of natural and artificial circumstances rendered Richmond’s food situation critical.
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Always before, residents of the capital, like other town dwellers, had blamed high prices and short supply upon “extortioners,” an omnipresent but seldom identifiable group of Yankeelike war profiteers in foodstuffs. When in March 1863 Congress passed the impressment law, however, the city’s economic enemies became more visible. In their zeal to feed the troops and restock government storehouses, commissary agents took immediate advantage of the new law by impressing food in Richmond marketplaces and along the roads leading to the city. Such indiscriminate impressment not only cut more deeply into the limited supply of food, it also discouraged farmers and gardeners from bringing produce to Richmond and thereby risking impressment at less than market value. The ardor of impressment agents soon cooled, and in time a series of court injunctions, laws, and informal understandings ameliorated the worst abuses of urban impressment, but moderation of impressment practices did not come in time to avert a crisis in the spring of 1863.
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Even before the advent of systematic impressment, the business of transporting produce and staple food to Richmond was tedious at best. In the absence of enabling legislation from Congress, some features of martial law persisted in the capital. Specifically, the passport system remained, which meant that to satisfy the needs of internal security, local farmers had to stand in lines and undergo delays coming and going to their market stalls. Then, on March 19 and 20, 1863, nature compounded the conspiracy to keep producers at home. Nine inches of snow fell and rendered travel difficult; then nine inches of snow quickly thawed, and travel was next to impossible on the sodden roads.

On the morning of April 2, a group of Richmond women gathered in a Baptist church near their homes. Most of them were wives of iron workers from the nearby Tredegar Works, and all of them believed that the price and supply of food in Richmond had reached intolerable levels. They determined to seek redress from Virginia Governor John Letcher. The group left the church and began walking toward the governor’s mansion on Capitol Square, and as they walked their number grew. By the time they assembled to present their plight to Letcher, there were several hundred, and men and boys had joined the female petitioners.
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While Letcher listened to the complaints, a Richmond gentlewoman out for a stroll noticed the growing throng and asked a young girl on its fringes what was happening. “Is there some celebration?” she inquired.

“There is,” said the girl solemnly; “We celebrate our right to live. We are starving. As soon as enough of us get together we are going to the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. This is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”
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Letcher offered his personal concern, but no tangible answers. When the Governor went inside his mansion, the crowd in the front yard turned angry and began to move toward Richmond’s commercial district. Knives, hatchets, and a few pistols emerged from pocketbooks and skirts. Within a short time a small group of distraught housewives had become a crowd and then a mob; petition became riot.

Throughout a ten-square-block area the women and their male allies broke into shops and stores and took what they wanted. Most took only bread and other food items, but some helped themselves to jewelry, clothing, and hats. One merchant claimed a loss of more than $13,000 worth of goods, and the rioters took more than three hundred pounds of beef belonging to the City Hospital as the crowd broke into bands of leaderless looters.

Governor Letcher, when he heard the news, hurried to the scene and tried to reason with the mob. Richmond Mayor Joseph Mayo read the riot act to those within the sound of his voice. Letcher’s and Mayo’s words, however, had no effect upon the rioters, if indeed many heard them. The riot had been in progress for some time when the vanguard neared one of the city’s two marketplaces. There the looters met a company of reserve soldiers drawn from workers in the Confederate armory. In haste some of the rioters pushed a horseless wagon across the street as a makeshift barricade. On opposite sides of the wagon, citizens confronted citizen soldiers.
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Then into the midst of the impasse strode the President of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis climbed into the wagon and shouted above the confusion. First he emptied his pockets and threw what money he had with him into the mob. The gesture served to get the attention of crowd. Then Davis took out his pocket watch, glanced at the troops behind him and stated, “We do not desire to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must stop. I will give you five minutes to disperse, otherwise you will be fired upon.”
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For long minutes no one moved. Davis had no way of knowing whether the troops at his back would actually carry out his threat. Indeed it was likely that some of the reserve soldiers recognized friends or relatives among the mob. The captain in command of the troops, however, gave his men no opportunity to ponder moral alternatives. “Load!” he commanded, and the men obeyed. Then the crowd broke and moved off. The Richmond bread riot was over.
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The government took no chances with its hungry citizens. The next day cannon guarded the riot scene. The War Department kept two battalions of infantry on the alert to quell any further domestic disturbance, and the military ordered newspapers and telegraph operators to reveal nothing about the “unfortunate disturbance.” Accordingly on April 3 the lead editorial in the Richmond
Dispatch
concerned “Sufferings in the North,”
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But in time, of course, news of the riot spread to the Confederate hinterland.

Significantly, the bread riot in Richmond was no isolated occurrence. During the spring a wave of riots broke out in Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, and Augusta, Georgia, and Salisbury and High Point, North Carolina. Later, on September 4, despite assurances from the Mobile
Register and Advertiser
that “there is enough food to carry army and people through to the next harvest,” a Mobile mob bearing signs demanding “bread or blood” looted Dauphine Street.
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