18thVirginia
Major
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2012
The Bread Riots are interesting to me because we read a lot about the elite Southern women of the planter aristocracy and their lives during the Civil War. Since many are based on excerpts the diaries of girls, they often seem somewhat frivolous to me. We have a lot of threads where we read about this wealthy Southern woman or that elite Confederate wife and her loyalty to the ideals of the slave owning South. We also have mentions, usually not in Ladies Tea, of the yeoman farmer's wives whose letters from home encouraged their soldier husbands to desert.
But, looking farther into the lives of the soldier wives, we find that they were dealing with huge new bureaucracies that the average farmer and family had not been in contact with prior to the Civil War. With the advent of conscription, the farm wife was confronted by a bureaucracy that controlled her husband's life. Mothers and wives wanted exemptions for their sons and husbands and became the ones writing letters to governors and the War Department, begging that their loved one was needed to keep the family from starvation. One of the aristocratic women mentioned that the farm wife class were now subscribing to newspapers, writing letters and that some were even learning to read and write so they could write letters.
These women suddenly had to deal with bureaucrats who could impress their mules, horses, corn for the War Department and other bureaucrats who were agents for the Tax in Kind, which was greatly resented by the small farmer and family. Stephanie McCurry indicates that these women wrote letters, thousands of letters, to their governors and to the War Department and that it was quite a political awakening for a group of women who had no political rights and started with no skills in the public arena.
It seems to me that we get a sense of how inflation, the Tax in Kind, conscription, impressment, the passage of exemption laws made a difference in the lives of the ordinary yeoman farmer from the words of the soldier's wives and mothers.
A group of Georgia women wrote to inform Governor Brown:
"They can speculate of soldiers' wives make fortunes of them. Just look at the women and children that are begging bread husband in the war or perhaps dead." This was class injustice on a grand scale, they insisted, and it was enough to turn them against the war. "Those that brought the war on us is at home," they raged, "and our boys are fighting for there property. It has been an unholy war from the beginning," they concluded, "the rich is all at home makeing great fortunes"-the rich didn't care "what becomes of the poor class of people so that they can save there neggroes."
Stephanie McCurry. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Kindle Locations 2225-2228). Kindle Edition.
These women were unhappy that merchants wouldn't sell food to them at lower than the price in the marketplace and that they wouldn't accept Confederate money for the exchange.
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