The Bread Riot: April Second, Eighteen Sixty-Three

By the spring of eighteen sixty-three, Richmond was a city under siege from the inside. The Confederate capital had swollen from roughly thirty-eight thousand people in eighteen sixty to more than one hundred thousand, as soldiers, refugees, and war workers poured in from across the South. The Union naval blockade had cut off imported goods.

Supply lines were strained. Food prices had risen to levels that poor families could not meet. In late March, a peddler named Mary Jackson and a butcher's apprentice named Minerva Meredith began organizing among the women of the Oregon Hill neighborhood.

They sought a meeting with Governor John Letcher to demand relief. The meeting was refused. On the morning of April second, a crowd assembled that eventually grew to roughly five thousand people, most of them women.

After the governor again refused to meet with them, the crowd moved through the commercial district, breaking into shops and taking food, clothing, shoes, and in some cases jewelry. Tens of thousands of dollars in goods were seized. Virginia's militia was called out and arrests were made.

President Jefferson Davis appeared and attempted to reason with the crowd. He threw money from his pockets toward them and asked them to disperse, reportedly saying that he had nothing more to give. The mayor read the Riot Act.

Eventually order was restored. The Confederate government suppressed nearly all press coverage of the riot, fearing the effect on troop morale. Most newspapers were ordered not to report it.

The story leaked out anyway, carried in letters and word of mouth. Mary Jackson was among those arrested and tried. The Richmond bread riot was the largest of the Southern bread riots that spring, a crack in the Confederate home front that the government tried its best to plaster over.