Richmond's Second Market

In the morning of April 2, 1863, customers of Richmond’s Second Market watched a woman named Mary Jackson as she waved weapons around in the air. Jackson was a huckster who regularly sold small items at the market, but that day, she brought nothing to sell. Instead, she brought stories of how she and a group of hundreds of other women were to demand the food and supplies owed to them as wives and mothers of soldiers. If the food was not handed over, they would take it by force. By that time, a series of bread riots had already begun to spread in the past month within the Confederate South, starting in Salisbury, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia and slowly moving northwards towards the capitol. Although the riots were ostensibly separate events, with no organization between different ones, they all clearly shared distinct features. All of them were led and perpetrated by soldier’s wives and mothers, and they all demanded that flour, bacon, salt, and other foodstuffs be sold to them at government prices, or else they would seize it.

Despite how crazy the idea of women rioting and looting stores may have sounded to the visitors to the market, Mary Jackson’s plan was anything but. Starting in late March, Jackson had begun recruiting both in the marketplace and in the surrounding area, stating that “there was to be a meeting of the women in relation to the high prices.” On the day before the riot, hundreds of women met at the Belvidere Baptist Church on Oregon Hill just South of the State Penitentiary, where now stands the Virginia Housing Development Authority. One of the co-organizers of the riot, Mrs. Martha Jamison explained later that “the object of the meeting was to organize t demand goods of the merchants at government prices; and if they were not given, the stores were to be broken open and goods taken by force.”

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