Statue of George Washington

The morning of April 2, 1863, over 300 women slowly gathered at the statue of George Washington in the northwest corner of Capitol Square. At 8:30, a group of the leaders formed a delegation and marched into the Governor’s mansion on the other side of the square. When they marched up the stairs to his office, however, they found not the governor but one of his aides, Col. S. Bassett French, who told them that Governor Letcher was working in the Capitol. The women declared that they “wanted bread and bread they would have or die.” Afterwards, one of the leaders, Martha Fergusson, attempted to find the governor in the Capitol building so that she may address him directly, only to walk out and find him already addressing the rest of the women. Undeterred by Letcher’s threatening speech, the women took to the streets.

At nine o’clock, the women marched out of the western gates of the Capitol onto Ninth Street. The group, however, was quiet as they marched, not shouting nor demanding bread. One of the most important features of the Richmond Bread Riot and the other bread riots across the South was how they attempted to manage public opinion. It was important that before going and taking supplies from the stores, the women addressed state officials. One participant proclaimed later that “the women wanted to go straight to the stores but I told them it would never do to go breaking into the stores without letting somebody know what we were doing.” More than anything, the women saw the supplies that they took as something that was owed to them as the wives and mothers of soldiers. When addressing the public, they made an effort to have others see it the same way, and as a result gained a lot of sympathy from both the public at large as well as from public officials.

Just because the women were quiet, however, did not mean that they meant to be peaceful. An onlooker reported that the women carried “rusty old horse pistols … clubs, knives … bayonets stuffed in belts … and specimens of those old home made knives with which our soldiers were wont to load themselves down in the first part of the war.” The women marched silently but steadily onto Main Street and then onto Cary Street down 12th Street and 13th Street, stealing carts and wagons as the went in order to carry the loot.

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Heisey, Chris E. “Richmond's Bread Riot.” American History, June 2002.

“Inflation Rate between 1635-2020: Inflation Calculator.” U.S. Inflation Calculator: 1635→2020, Department of Labor data. Accessed November 23, 2020. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/.  

McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics In the Civil War South.E-book, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.31471. Accessed 27 Aug 2020.

McCurry, Stephanie. “'Bread or Blood!'.” Civil War Times, vol. 50, no. 3, June 2011.

McCurry, Stephanie. “Women Numerous and Armed.” Essay. In Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: Univ Of North Carolina Pr, 2014.

Worsham, Gibson. “Richmond's Second and Third Markets.” Urban Scale Richmond, January 1, 1970. http://urbanscalerichmondvirginia.blogspot.com/2012/12/richmonds-second-and-third-markets.html.