Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (124 page)

In any case, the symbolic power of the twenty-Negro law and the actual suffering of poor families gave greater credence to the poor man's fight theme in the South than in the North. After all, "men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives & children to starve," wrote a southern leader in November 1862. The government—more particularly state and county governments—recognized this. Most southern states and many counties appropriated funds for assistance to the families of poor soldiers. These expenditures were financed by taxes on slaves and large landholdings, thus representing an attempt to alleviate class discontent by transferring resources from the rich to the poor. The two states that did most in this line were Georgia and North Carolina—the very states whose governors, Joseph Brown and Zebulon Vance, interposed state's-rights roadblocks to the southern war effort. The common people tended to applaud Brown or Vance and to criticize Davis, not necessarily because they favored state's rights at the expense of the Confederacy but because the state helped them while the Richmond government took away their husbands and sons and their livelihood.
⁴⁷

The Confederate government's taxes and impressments to sustain the army also caused it to appear as an oppressor. By the spring of 1863, runaway inflation finally compelled Richmond's lawmakers to seek alternatives to the printing press to finance the war. In April they followed the Union example and enacted a comprehensive tax law that included a progressive income tax, an 8 percent levy on certain goods held for sale, excise and license duties, and a 10 percent profits tax on wholesalers

47
. Quotation from Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage,"
chap. 6
, p. 12. For progressive taxation and public welfare policies in Georgia and North Carolina, see Peter Wallenstein, "Rich Man's War, Rich Man's Fight: Civil War and the Transformation of Public Finance in Georgia,"
JSH
, 50 (1984), 15–42; and Paul D. Escort, "Poverty and Government Aid for the Poor in Confederate North Carolina,"
North Carolina Historical Review
, 61 (1984), 462–80.

intended to take back some of the money that "speculators" had "extorted" from the people. But the notion that these taxes would make the rich pay their share was neutralized by an additional category of items that were taxed and one that was not. Because money had so little value, Congress imposed a 10 percent "tax in kind" on agricultural produce. After reserving a subsistence for his family, each farmer had to turn over 10 percent of the surplus to one of the three thousand agents who fanned out through the South to collect it. Yeoman farmers bitterly resented this levy. Why should the poor husbandman—or rather husband woman, since so many men were at the front—have to pay 10 percent, they asked, when a clerk or teacher with a salary of $1,500 paid only 2 percent of his income? More pointedly, why was the chief property of the rich—slaves—
not
taxed? The answer: a tax on slaves was considered a direct tax, constitutionally permissible only after an apportionment on the basis of population. No census could be taken in wartime, hence no direct tax was possible. The relevance of this constitutional inhibition escaped most dirt farmers, who saw only that the revenue agents took their produce while the rich man's slaves escaped taxation.

In practice the tax in kind seemed little different from "impressment" of supplies by the army. Desperate for provisions, commissary and quartermaster officers scoured the countryside for food, fodder, and work animals. They paid whatever price
they
(not the farmer) considered fair with promissory notes that deteriorated in value still further before the farmer could cash them. By the end of the war an estimated half-billion dollars of these worthless IOUs were outstanding. Some army units, especially the cavalry, took what they wanted without even pretending to pay. "If God Almighty," wrote an angry Governor Vance to the War Department in 1863, "had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry." Despite the notorious reputation of northern invaders in this regard, many southerners believed that "the Yankees cannot do us any more harm than our own soldiers have done."
⁴⁸
Impressment fell with impartial injustice on the rich and the poor who happened to live near active military operations. But because the family farmer could scarcely afford to lose what little he had, impressment became another source of his alienation from the government and the cause it represented.

48
. Quotations from Escott,
After Secession
, 111.

Responding to the outcries against impressment, Congress in March 1863 passed a law to regulate it by creating commissions to fix and arbitrate "fair" prices. This law was honored most often in the breach, however, and abuses continued. More successful were revisions of the tax law in February 1864. Suspending the requirement for a census-based apportionment of direct taxes, Congress imposed a 5 percent levy on land and slaves. Families with property worth less than $500 were exempted from the tax in kind. At the same time the revision of the twenty-Negro law that impressed 200 pounds of meat per slave got the Confederate government into the food-welfare business.

But these measures came too late to avert the most shocking revelation of internal stress—the bread riots in the spring of 1863. In a dozen or more cities and hamlets from Richmond to Mobile, desperate women raided shops or supply depots for food. Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. Groups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by "speculators" and asked the price of bacon or flour. When informed, they denounced such "extortion," took what they wanted, and marched away.
⁴⁹

By far the largest and most momentous riot occurred in Richmond. Special circumstances made the Confederate capital particularly volatile. Its population had more than doubled since 1861. Military operations had desolated many food-producing areas of Virginia. Lee's army on the Rappahannock, reduced to half-rations by March 1863, competed with the civilian population for dwindling stocks of the previous year's drought-curtailed crops. In late March a freak nine-inch snowfall made roads impassable for several days. Prices for the few goods left on merchants' shelves skyrocketed to famine levels. On April 2 several hundred women—many of them wives of employees at the Tredegar Iron Works—met at a Baptist church and proceeded to the governor's mansion to make known their distress. The governor offered little comfort, and as the delegation moved on it turned into a mob. A middleclass bystander talked to one of the members, an emaciated girl of eighteen. "As she raised her hand to remove her sunbonnet, her loose calico sleeve slipped up, and revealed a mere skeleton of an arm. She perceived my expression as I looked at it, and hastily pulled down her sleeve with a short laugh. 'This is all that's left of me!' she said. 'It seems

49
. E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 422–23.

real funny don't it?' " The bystander asked what was going on. "We are starving," said the girl. "We are going to the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men." Grown to more than a thousand persons, including some men and boys, the mob broke into shops and warehouses. "Bread! Bread!" they shouted. "Our children are starving while the rich roll in wealth." Emboldened by success, some women began to seize clothing, shoes, even jewelry as well as food. The governor and mayor confronted the rioters and called on them to disperse. A hastily mobilized company of militia marched up and loaded their muskets. A few timid souls left but the majority remained, confident that the militia—which contained friends and perhaps even a few husbands of the rioters—would not obey orders to fire on the crowd.
⁵⁰

At this juncture Jefferson Davis himself arrived and climbed onto a cart to address the mob. He commanded their attention by taking several coins from his pocket and throwing them into the crowd. He then told them to go home so that the muskets leveled against them could be turned against the common enemy—the Yankees. The crowd was unmoved, and a few boys hissed the president. Taking out his watch, Davis gave the rioters five minutes to disperse before he ordered the troops to fire. Four minutes passed in tense silence. Holding up his watch, the president said firmly: "My friends, you have one minute more." This succeeded. The rioters melted away. Davis pocketed his watch and ordered the police to arrest the ringleaders. Several of these were later convicted and briefly imprisoned. Military officials ordered newspapers to make no mention of the riot in order not "to embarrass our cause [or] to encourage our enemies."
⁵¹
The lead editorial in the
Richmond Dispatch
next day was entitled "Sufferings in the North."

But the rioters had made their point. The government distributed some of its stock of rice to needy citizens. Apprehensive merchants brought out reserve stocks of food, and prices dropped by half. The Richmond city council expanded its welfare food aid. Other localities did likewise. More acreage than the previous year went over from cotton to corn. But

50
. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor,
Reminiscences of Peace and War
(New York, 1905), 238; Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis: Confederate President
(New York, 1959), 381. Two good descriptions of the riot can be found in Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate State of Richmond
(Austin, 1971), 117—22; and Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate Nation
: 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 201–6.

51
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 18, p. 958.

serious problems persisted, and the South was never able to solve them. Priorities for military traffic on deteriorating railroads caused food to rot at sidings while thousands went hungry a hundred miles away. Union advances further constricted the food-producing areas of the Confederacy. In July 1863 the commissary general warned of a subsistence crisis for southern armies. In September a mob at Mobile, crying "bread or blood," looted stores on Dauphine Street. In October the
Richmond Examiner
declared that civilians were being reduced "to a point of starvation." A government clerk told of the following exchange between a woman and a shopkeeper in Richmond who asked $70 for a barrel of flour. "My God!" she exclaimed. "How can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?" "I don't know, madam," the merchant replied, "unless you eat your children."
⁵²

Refugees exacerbated the South's food crisis. Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes as the Yankee juggernaut bore down on them. Thousands of others were exiled by Confederate officers who turned their cities into a battle zone (Corinth and Fredericksburg, for example) or by commanders of Union occupation forces who insisted that they take the oath of allegiance or leave. All wars produce refugees; these homeless people generally suffer more than the rest of the civilian population; in the American Civil War this suffering was confined almost entirely to the South. As these fugitives packed the roads and crowded in with friends and relatives or endured cheerless boardinghouses in towns and cities, they taxed the South's ever-decreasing resources and added to the uncounted deaths of white and black civilians from disease and malnutrition—deaths that must be included in any reckoning of the war's human cost.
⁵³

52
. Thomas,
Confederate Nation
, 204–5; Jones,
War Clerk's Diary (Miers)
, 296.

53
. Mary Elizabeth Massey,
Refugee Life in the Confederacy
(Baton Rouge, 1964), chronicles the hardships of the refugees but makes no attempt to estimate their numbers or their mortality. Civilians in a fought-over country often suffer a higher number of war-related deaths than soldiers, because there are so many more civilians than soldiers. Probably twice as many civilians as soldiers in Europe died as a direct or indirect result of the Napoleonic wars. The shorter duration and smaller geographical scope of the fighting in the Civil War surely kept the civilian death rate far below this level. And with the exception of a yellow fever outbreak in Wilmington during 1862, there appear to have been no serious epidemics during the American Civil War. Suffering and death were widespread, nevertheless, and a fair estimate of war-related civilian deaths might total 50,000, which should be added to the 260,000 Confederate soldier deaths to measure the human cost of the war to the South.

Most civilians in conquered areas, of course, stayed home to live under their new rulers. And in the material if not the spiritual realm, they lived better than their compatriots who fled southward. The Yankee occupation, indeed, presented lucrative opportunities to interested parties on both sides of the line. Flourishing trade, both licit and illicit, grew up between former and sometimes continuing enemies.