If you have ever taken a stroll along Richmond’s well-known Monument Avenue, you will have undoubtedly come across a number of statues dedicated to Confederate Civil War leaders. These Confederate monuments, erected between 1890 and 1929, are a product of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a movement spearheaded largely by elite white women that viewed the Confederate efforts during the Civil War as honorable and courageous.
White elite women—particularly members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—originally led the Lost Cause movement, but today it is working-class people who form the backbone of Confederate memorialization and celebration.
In order to maintain this narrative, neo-Confederates omit or deny central historical facts about the Confederacy. Slavery is the most recognizable omission from the Lost Cause narrative, but poor treatment of white, working-class people—particularly women—is also conveniently left out. The disregard for the white working class was so great that, on April 2, 1863, a number of starving women rioted in the streets of downtown Richmond. Known as the Bread Riots, this Civil War protest sheds a light onto the harsh realities of lower-class life during the Civil War in the Confederacy, and reveals the irony of the commitment of working-class women to the Lost Cause.
In the antebellum South, civilians were organized into a rigid socioeconomic class system. Daniel Hundley, who practiced law in pre-Civil War Richmond, placed “Southern gentlemen” (the social elite) at the top of this hierarchy, followed by “the middle classes, the Southern Yankee, cotton snobs, the Southern yeoman, the Southern bully, poor white trash, and the negro slave.” To be fair, Hundley was himself a member of a wealthy family. Still, Hundley’s categories illustrate that defined, visible socioeconomic classes existed in the pre-war South.
During the Civil War, the government of the Confederate States of America (CSA) passed a number of acts that disproportionately hurt members of the Confederacy’s lower classes. First, the CSA government began printing extra money in order to properly supply its military. While the intent of this action was simply to fund the Confederate army, it caused rapid inflation. Imported goods were hardest hit. Between 1860 and 1863, the price of coffee skyrocketed from 12.5 cents to $5 a pound. Everything became more expensive during the Civil War, and many working-class Confederate civilians struggled to afford these basic goods.
Despite the influx of cash that funded the Confederate military, the CSA suffered a number of major losses to the Union Army during the first few years of the Civil War. In need of a military boost, the government passed the Confederate Conscription Act on April 16, 1862, which ordered that “all [men] residing within the Confederate States, between the ages of 18 and 35 years, and rightfully subject to military duty, shall be held to be in the military service of the Confederate states.”
To avoid this first military draft in American history, a male civilian could purchase a substitute (usually an enslaved person) for $4,000 to replace him in the military. Generally, members of the elite class could afford this payment, but those in the lower classes could not, especially because inflation was tanking the Confederate economy. Then, in October 1862, the CSA government passed the “Twenty Negroes Act,” exempting those Confederate civilians who owned at least twenty slaves from serving in the military. The Conscription and Twenty Negroes Acts kept the wealthy out of combat, while ordinary Confederate families sent their husbands and sons off to battle.
Forcing working-class men into combat left their wives alone at home. Though some Southern women worked in local shops and other family businesses, a majority stayed at home to care for their households while their husbands worked. Now, with their husbands off at war, families had little-to-no income and women sought out work as farmers, factory workers, and wartime nurses. Some even resorted to prostitution. Still, it was still difficult for many women to earn enough to feed themselves and their families.
On March 19 and 20 of 1863, roughly ten inches of snow fell in Richmond. The storm left roads impassable, preventing food and other goods from being brought into the city. When the Confederate army, too, struggled to feed troops in the storm, the CSA passed the Impressment Act, authorizing the Confederate military to take food and supplies from Confederate civilians. The Impressment Act, combined with the Confederacy’s economic inflation and the recent snowstorm, left working-class women and children starving and angry.
White working-class Southerners had not protested any of the aforementioned CSA acts. Though low in status, they supported the Confederacy and its promise that Black people would always be below them on the socioeconomic ladder. To the white working class, saving the Confederacy meant saving their status.
At this point, however, a group of poor white women decided that they had had enough. On April 2, 1863, they gathered outside the George Washington monument, located on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol in downtown Richmond, to discuss their frustrations. They decided collectively to act upon their anger. First, they unsuccessfully demanded a meeting with Governor John Letcher. Led by Richmonder Mary Jackson, these outraged women marched down 9th Street and onto Main Street, where they began smashing the windows of shops with clubs, knives and guns, and seizing food and clothing. Men and children who saw the procession occurring joined the looting. Over the course of the day, an estimated 3,000 people participated in the riot. Main Street was left in shambles. One shop reportedly lost over $13,000 of goods.
Many northern organizations learned of the Bread Riots and used them as propaganda against the Confederacy. For instance, the image to the right shows
an 1863 depiction of the Richmond Bread Riots from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a northern newspaper during the Civil War era. The illustration depicts the rioting women as savages in order to convey the chaos and barbarism of the Confederacy.
Yet, the Bread Riots—and the larger story of white working-class discontent during the War—are largely lost from neo-Confederate memory. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, it is working-class men and women who form the backbone of Confederate memorialization and protest against those who would abandon the Lost Cause.
In Richmond, white working-class support for the Lost Cause can be seen in the protest of the Virginia Flaggers. The “flaggers,” according to their website, “are citizens of the Commonwealth who stand AGAINST those who would desecrate our Confederate Monuments and memorials, and FOR our Confederate Veterans.”
The group formed in 2011 in response to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ removal of a battle flag from the Confederate Memorial Chapel on the museum’s grounds. Today, the Virginia Flaggers “flag” the VMFA roughly twice a week to protest the flag’s removal, and to encourage the VMFA to reintroduce the battle flag to the Confederate Memorial Chapel. The organization also fights to raise battle flags in other parts of Richmond and throughout Virginia.
Most Virginia Flaggers have Confederate ancestors. They feel a deep connection with their Confederate heritage and look back on the days of the Confederacy with nostalgia and pride. Susan Hathaway, a principal organizer of the group, proclaimed at a battle flag raising ceremony in Richmond in 2013:
“As sons and daughters of the South, we have inherited a birthright that is still today the envy of all who know of their valor and courage. Ours is a proud heritage, of men who loved God, family, country, and freedom, and driven by duty and honor, answered the call of their sake to defend the hearth and home.”
In a more recent interview, Hathaway added, “The men that are on Monument Avenue—and that are honored there—are men of valor, courage, and honor.”
The omission of the Bread Riots and the CSA acts that provoked them from the Lost Cause narrative allows Hathaway and other neo-confederates to take leadership of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause. Increasingly, many see this narrative as a means to hold on to the privileges of whiteness Southern elites had used to secure their loyalty since the founding of the republic.
Just as the white working class was largely satisfied with their status in Confederate society over free and enslaved black people, Virginia Flaggers and other working-class neo-Confederates today are dissatisfied with theirs. In the context of socioeconomic anxieties and racial fears, their unwavering loyalty towards the Confederacy makes sense.
Further Reading
Stephanie McCurry. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics In the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.