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A worsening war situation, rising food prices, and an indifferent government compelled the women of Rowan County, North Carolina, to take action.
By Christopher A. Graham for Columbiad Quarterly Magazine
Wielding axes and hatchets, a group of forty or fifty soldiers' wives entered Salisbury, North Carolina, on March 18, 1863, intent on obtaining flour and salt. The women approached the shops of Michael Brown, John Ennis, S. Frankfort, K. Sprague, David Weil, and Thomas Foster, merchants whom the destitute women believed had speculated in necessities. The rioting women offered the vendors government prices, about one-half the market value, in exchange for the desired commodities. When the merchants refused, the women broke down Brown's shop door with hatchets and threatened other storekeepers who offered resistance. After collecting thirteen barrels of flour, one of molasses, two sacks of salt, and twenty dollars in cash, the women moved on to Confederate government stores at the North Carolina Railroad Depot, where they took ten more barrels of flour. The "Female Raid" concluded the following morning, according to the Carolina Watchman, when the women met to divide their plunder.1
In the context of wide disaffection with the Confederate war effort, and even more severe acts of violence and retribution in North Carolina, the Salisbury bread riot stands out. In Salisbury, women had banded together and used force to acquire needed supplies and condemn the cause of their destitution--speculators and a seemingly indifferent government. Only in Richmond, Virginia, two months later would a more famous bread riot occur.3 The uprising by Rowan County's wives and mothers appears even more unusual in light of a Southern culture that emphasized women's place as matrons and nurturers within the home and forbade any public and political--let alone violent--activity. Asked to maintain feminine roles within the home while lacking the provision of money, food, and protection usually provided by men and confronted by wartime poverty and starvation, Southern women faced a crisis. Taxation, conscription, and impressment seemed to remove all available resources from their hands, leaving them powerless to provide for their families. In response, many Confederate women silently and individually resisted the war effort. But organized and forceful public demonstration of disillusionment, as at Salisbury, remained rare.
The exact identity of the Salisbury rioters remains unknown. The Watchman failed to mention names, and storekeeper Michael Brown's complaint to North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance spoke only of the mayor and county justices who looked on dispassionately during the riot. Mary C. Moore, otherwise unidentified, wrote to the governor on behalf of the rioters but revealed no names. Local officials arrested no women, and none appeared in court on charges relating to the incident. Local tradition offers no clue as to the names of the women. Only the description "soldier's wives," given by Mary C. Moore and the Watchman, hints at the rioters' identity.
Yet the Rowan County community knew the rioters. The circumstances surrounding the riot and the lack of punishment suggest familiarity. Unlike Richmond's inundation by immigrants, refugees, and soldiers' families in search of work, Rowan County's population remained relatively unchanged through the transition from peace to war, as did Salisbury's government and traditional leadership. Absence of immediate and subsequent legal action illustrates a passive acceptance of the women's actions by Rowan's officials. The county's rioters had not acted against a hostile or indifferent ruling class; rather, through their actions, they expressed disillusionment with material decline and their increasingly precarious stake in the society of Southern wives and mothers.
Wow Dawna,
This hits close to home. My family's history has been traced waaa-aay way back, but the roots of both my husband's and my family begin in this country in Rowan County, North Carolina.
Although his family eventually settled in Tenn., Mississippi, and mine settled in Georgia, predominantly Alabama, and various other Southern states, it's noted that some preferred to remain in Rowan County, not being as adventurous as my closest forebearers.
I can just see an earlier Thea rising up in indignation if she had starving children!
(Message edited by thea_447 on September 23, 2004)
__________________ Thea
No one has permission to use any material from any of my posts on any CWT forum, the archives, or any other forum without my express written permission.
And considering the mortality rate was one in six children would not see their first birth day, that was high! So no wonder they wanted it so bad!!! I'd have done way worse!
"If I have to lie, steel, cheat or kill, as God is my witness I'll never go hungry again. Nor any of my folks. As God is my witness, I"ll never go hungry again" I think Scarlete had something there.
OOpps, had the numbers wrong on that one: three in twenty babies did not live to see their first birthdays, and those who did survive infancy lived only till about 42. Now that is just rough census numbers. We know that allot of men who fought at the battle of Gettysburg lived way past that bench mark, many of which were 90 when the 75 reunion took place. But even still, three in twenty. That's not real good chances no matter which way you slice it.
Great story. I remember reading about it in my research years ago on Zeb Vance. What man of the county could arrest anyone during this riot? Since it was likely his own family.
Regarding statistics, the “average” life span is tricky. The high infant mortality rate brought the average life span statistic down fast. For every infant who died, he dropped his statistical living counterpart’s “average” age in half. If you subtract infant mortality from the statistical equation, the average goes way up. I cannot remember the exact age but it well exceeded 50 years as an average IIRC, if the cause of death was natural causes, naturally. i.e. Not war etc.
I know my grandfather survived the CW, went out to Texas during the wild 70's & 80's.. Married 3 times and fathered close to a dozen or so kids. He married my grandmother and died in 1922. He died right before my fathers birth. At 73 years old.
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.” --Homer Simpson
Please forgive my babbling. All this actually made sense when I was thinking it. Basically my point was it was a great story and statistics are tricky things.
That's way too much math way too early in the morning for me thank you Tommy. But what a family history. Sounds like your grandfather was a wild one! Oh the things he saw in his life! I wish I could know more about my family. But ours I know isn't as colorful. Strict French Canadians who worked the logging trails in Wisconsin, is about all I have.
Absence of immediate and subsequent legal action illustrates a passive acceptance of the women's actions by Rowan's officials. The county's rioters had not acted against a hostile or indifferent ruling class; rather, through their actions, they expressed disillusionment with material decline and their increasingly precarious stake in the society of Southern wives and mothers.
But the same familiarity that had prevented prosecution had failed to protect the soldiers' wives from the conditions against which they had taken action. The war disrupted Rowan's stability, overwhelmed its family- and church-based support networks, and created an anxiety county leaders could not control and a need they could not satisfy. What happened in Rowan that led to the action by its soldiers' wives? While no particular incident triggered the riot, rising prices, loss of labor, death of family members, and increasingly severe food shortages coincided with a period when these pressing needs were virtually neglected. Hardships converged in the spring of 1863, and Rowan's soldiers' wives took action.
Rowan County's antebellum social and political development reflected the experience of the entire North Carolina backcountry. Families of German and Scotch-Irish ancestry traveling the Great Wagon Road passed through the colonial crossroads at Salisbury to settle the hinterland in the 1750s.10 Rowan nurtured small farms that grew subsistence crops--wheat, corn, tobacco, and vegetables. Industry complemented agriculture; wealthy planters operated grain mills for profit, while hundreds of British immigrants mined Rowan's gold fields at the ramshackle settlement of Gold Hill in the southeastern corner of the county.
North Carolina's western Piedmont developed a work ethic and political values that were consciously in opposition to the perceived life of leisure practiced by the eastern planter class. Westerners valued hard labor and self-sufficiency, while they maintained the traditional separation between masculine and feminine labor, as well as public and private life. In the predominantly yeoman countryside, this self-reliant attitude meant that the bulk of labor was done not by slaves but by family members. Heads of households may have cherished the independence of self-sufficiency, but lacking more developed resources, the loss of a single working family member might mean the difference between bounty and starvation. Extended families and churches proved the only reliable source of aid in times of crisis. A warden of the poor operated in Rowan, but social stigma limited his reach to only the most destitute.
Politically, a lingering Whig tradition divided the county into Unionist and secessionist camps. Though Unionists remained active and strong during the winter months of 1860-61, the actions of President Abraham Lincoln and his call for troops following the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter galvanized nearly every Rowan County citizen in opposition to the Lincoln administration. The people of Rowan, while not particularly interested in dismantling the Union to join a cotton kingdom of Southern states, were intent on preserving the conservative social order of Southern society within North Carolina. Upon the Old North State's secession, the county began to mobilize volunteers for the war.
Rowan supported the Confederacy by sending men to the military while its citizens contributed food and money. The county's two long-established volunteer militia companies, the Rowan Rifle Guard and the Rowan Artillery, sprang to arms first, followed soon by four more volunteer companies. The Scotch-Irish community in northwestern Rowan quickly raised a company. Initially called the "Scotch-Ireland Guard," the amateur soldiers adopted the name "Oakland Guard," after the home of Samuel Kerr, a former Unionist and benefactor who purchased the company's uniforms and equipment.16 The foreign-born miners at Gold Hill, previously ambivalent to secession, rushed to military service and bullied comrades who did not join.
Almost six hundred men from Rowan County enlisted in the early months of 1861. Age and family status seemingly bound certain men for service in the initial wave of enlistment. For instance, the Rowan Rifle Guard left Salisbury with approximately eighty men whose average age was nineteen years old. Fourteen were married, while the remaining 82 percent lived as single men, alone or with other families or groups of people. Of fifty-five Rifle Guardsmen whose occupations can be determined, sixteen were skilled craftsmen and eight were professionals or clerks. Thirteen men listed themselves as day laborers; only five listed their occupation as farming.
The young and independent men who left for war did not constitute a critical loss to Rowan County's pool of labor or its ability to sustain commercial activity. Few men with wives and families enlisted, as the early rush to volunteer masked the Confederacy's desperate need for manpower. Two more companies marched to war in mid-June while the Watchman noted that the county had fallen below its required troop quota.Since a portion of Rowan's 1861 volunteers were indeed married and with dependent children, the county court took action to provide some assistance. The May session appropriated fifty thousand dollars for the "relief of soldiers wives." However, county officials divided the sum and used a portion for the "arming and equipping of soldiers." How the wives' money was distributed is not known, but cash designated as civilian relief was not used specifically to buy food and supplies; it was given directly to any head of a household who applied. The Watchman condemned this method of distribution and later commented that "the plan has been subject to the grossest abuses for months, and has failed in accomplishing the end desired." Rowan County was not alone in its early efforts to provide for its citizens. In the absence of state action, most North Carolina counties appropriated money at the beginning of the war to arm their soldiers and feed their civilians.
__________________ Thea
No one has permission to use any material from any of my posts on any CWT forum, the archives, or any other forum without my express written permission.
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