Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
With the shutters closed and the curtains drawn tight, they enjoyed their feast, nourished as much by the company as by the delicious food. When they had eaten their fill, they withdrew to the library, where they spread out a map on Father’s desk and traced the progress of the Union armies. Someday soon they would be able to gather in the open, they assured one another heartily, their spirits buoyed by the restful hours spent among sympathetic friends. Someday soon the Union army would capture Richmond, and they would unfurl their illicit star-spangled banners and sing “Hail, Columbia” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to welcome the men in Union blue.
Mr. McNiven was absolutely right—it was dangerous for so many of them to meet in one place, especially when that place was the Van Lew mansion. But Lizzie knew too that their gathering was necessary, a significant act of defiance that would bolster their morale and strengthen their courage for the difficult trials that surely lay ahead.
For many citizens of Richmond, Lizzie knew, a feast such as theirs had become the stuff of dreams and fond memories, and every day was a fast day.
On the first Wednesday of April, after feeding her nieces their breakfast and playing with them in the garden, Lizzie entrusted them to Hannah’s tender care and invited Eliza Carrington to walk with her around Capitol Square. It was a soft, tender spring morning, and they were both eager to slough off the melancholy of winter and reflect upon the seasons of peace that they had once known and, God willing, would see again. The miasma of death still clung to the cobblestones, but the bright sunshine and gentle breezes seemed to clear it away, and the grass upon the square was freshly green, with the bright-yellow pop of dandelions scattered here and there, and songbirds darting and trilling in the boughs.
They chatted as they strolled, and surreptitiously observed officers and politicians going about their business, taking note of anything that might be useful to the Union. As they rounded the second corner, Lizzie realized that the crowd of people milling quietly about was not a chance gathering of citizens innocently enjoying the lovely day, but rather a planned assembly of women, most of them young, some of them clutching children, all of them thin and pale. One young woman with limp, honey-blond hair poking out from beneath her bonnet eased herself down upon a nearby bench as they walked past. “I can no longer stand,” she said weakly, and as she raised a hand to adjust her bonnet, her sleeve fell back and revealed an arm so frail and bony that both Lizzie and Eliza gasped aloud.
“My goodness, dear,” Lizzie said, hurrying to her side. “Are you ill?”
Embarrassed, the girl pulled down her sleeve and gave an apologetic laugh. “No, but this is all that’s left of me.”
“Would you like something to eat?” said Eliza, rummaging in her basket.
“Of course,” said the girl. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?”
As Eliza handed her a pair of shiny red apples, Lizzie nodded to the milling crowd, several hundred strong and steadily increasing. “Is this a celebration of some sort?”
“I suppose,” said the girl, laughing bleakly. “We celebrate our right to live. We are starving.”
“Are you planning to storm the Capitol?” Lizzie asked. “Or perhaps march on the Executive Mansion?”
The girl shook her head, devouring the apples down to the cores. “When enough of us have come together, we’re going to the city’s bakeries and take one loaf each.” She nibbled the last bit of sweet, juicy fruit and flung the cores away. “That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”
The look Eliza threw Lizzie was full of fear. “Forgive me, but that sounds terribly imprudent,” Eliza ventured. “Won’t the governor call out the guard to arrest you?”
“At least we’ll have some food in our bellies when they throw us into Castle Thunder.”
Lizzie knew the women would just as surely starve there. “Have you appealed to the authorities, explained to them your distress?”
“We have, but no one listens.” The girl drew herself up. “We sent a delegation of ladies to Governor Letcher’s house to ask for food. They should be with him right now, unless he was too scared to let them in. Our leaders thought it was right to give him a chance to help us before we go out to help ourselves.”
The crowd was growing, and when Eliza clutched Lizzie’s arm, she knew her friend wanted to be away from there as much as she did. “Do be careful,” Lizzie urged. “I hope Governor Letcher gives you all something to eat and more to take home to your families, but if he doesn’t—”
“If he doesn’t, he’ll wish he had,” the girl said flatly.
With great misgivings, Lizzie bade her farewell and tucked her arm through Eliza’s. As they turned quickly toward Church Hill, a towheaded boy about four years old darted in front of them and began to scale a magnolia tree. A colored maid in hot pursuit snatched her wandering charge down before he had climbed more than a few inches off the ground. “Get away from there, Marse Billy,” she scolded, her gaze darting over the swelling crowd of women. “You might catch something from those poor white folks.”
Lizzie and Eliza hurried on their way, but just as they were leaving the square, a swell of voices brought them to a halt, and they turned in time to see a group of four women, one dressed as gaudily as a brothel keeper, with an elaborately curled white plume sweeping from the brim of her hat, approach the square from the direction of the governor’s residence. Lizzie could not make out what the newcomers reported, but from the lamentations and angry shouts that their address provoked, she could only assume that the quartet was the delegation and that Governor Letcher had given them an unsatisfactory response.
“Let’s go home,” Eliza urged, tugging on Lizzie’s arm. “I don’t like this. It feels ugly.”
Lizzie agreed. A sense of hopeless outrage radiated from the throng, as if they were on the cusp of turning from a gathering of desperate women into an enraged mob.
It was not long after they returned home that Lizzie heard the alarm bell peal from its tower on the corner of the Capitol Square, but it was another day before she learned what had become of the desperate, ravenous women.
Their delegation had interrupted Governor Letcher’s breakfast, so he had asked them to come to his office later, where he would assist them. As Lizzie and Eliza had observed, the crowd disliked his reply, and soon thereafter the angry throng left the square and proceeded down Ninth Street to Main. As the governor ordered the alarm sounded, Mr. Mumford of the Young Men’s Christian Association tried to turn them back, promising to distribute food to them if they came to his office. Some of the women did as he asked, but most swept past him down the street to the government commissary, where they forced their way in and seized provisions from the shelves. There was not enough for all, so they descended on the nearby shops, snatching up bread, flour, hams, and shoes, which they loaded into whatever carts and wagons happened to be parked along the street. When frightened storekeepers forced the women out and merchants all along the street quickly barricaded their doors, the mob turned violent, smashing windows with hatchets and grabbing whatever they could lay hands upon, not only food and necessities but luxuries like bonnets, silks, clothing, and jewelry. Soon hundreds more appeared—men and women both, none starving by the look of it—some merely to watch, others to join in the swiftly escalating riot. Fireman arrived on the scene and hosed down the looters, but that only inflamed their fury. The alarm brought the Public Guard running, and with them at his back Governor Letcher confronted the crowd and ordered Mayor Mayo to read the Riot Act.
“You will disperse immediately or the Guard will open fire,” the governor shouted. The mob ceased looting but continued to mill about, grumbling darkly and refusing to go.
At that moment an ailing Jefferson Davis appeared. He climbed atop a wagon that had been overturned sideways in the street and looked out upon the crowd, stern and sickly. “Go home so the bayonets facing you may be turned toward the enemy instead,” he ordered. “Disorder in our streets will bring only famine, because farmers will refuse to bring food into the city.”
“Some already refuse,” a woman shrilled. “Your commissaries take everything and leave nothing for us and our children!”
As the crowd roared agreement, Mr. Davis raised his palms to quiet them. “I will share my last loaf with you, but you must bear your trials with courage. We must stand united against the enemy.” He reached into his pockets, took out handfuls of money, and flung it into the crowd, provoking shrieks and scrambling for paper and coins. Then he took out his watch. “The Public Guard does not wish to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must cease,” he declared. “I will give you five minutes to disperse, otherwise you will be fired upon.”
He held his watch up and waited as the seconds ticked by.
The crowd waited too, murmuring, shifting—and then it began to break apart, like an ice floe in a river, fragmenting slowly at first around the edges and then with increasing speed as larger sections broke off and drifted away. “There is a power behind the throne mightier than the throne, and that power is the people,” a man shouted, but his defiant call failed to draw the mob back together.
The next day, small groups of protesters gathered at street corners, again demanding food from the government, but this time the Guard easily scattered them, arresting nine. The City Council issued vouchers for free food to the deserving poor, and other authorities distributed flour and rice from government stores.
The assistant adjutant general had urged the Richmond press not to mention the riot in their pages lest the shameful events embarrass the Confederacy and encourage the enemy, but the editors promptly refused, so Lizzie and the rest of Richmond learned every detail of the bread riot and its aftermath. For days after the upheaval, Mayor Mayo plowed through the trials of the nearly four dozen people arrested on various charges, and listened, unsympathetic, to their testimony. “There is no reason why there should have been any suffering among the poor of this city,” he addressed the courtroom. “More money has been appropriated than has been applied for. It should be, and is, well understood that the riot yesterday was not for bread. Boots are not bread, brooms are not bread, men’s hats are not bread, and I never heard of anybody’s eating them.”
Almost without exception, the elite of Richmond society—longtime citizens, military officers, and politicians alike—denounced the lawlessness and declared that the women’s complaints were absolutely without merit. There was scarcity in the city, they acknowledged, but little want, and no one was in danger of starving. Even Jefferson Davis concurred, publishing an address to the Confederate nation in which he seemed to intend to shame the rioters and discourage anyone who might follow their selfish and misguided example. “Is it not a bitter and humiliating reflection that those who remain at home, secure from hardship and protected from danger, should be in the enjoyment of abundance,” he protested, “and that their slaves also should have a full supply of food, while their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers are stinted?”
Lizzie had no idea where this abundance Mr. Davis and his compatriots referred to was hidden, for she certainly saw no portion of it, not in the markets, not in the prisons, and not even in her own home, where no one had ever gone hungry before.
How could Mr. Davis fail to recognize the ugly consequences of war suffered by the people of his own city—and if he could not see even that far, how could he possibly understand what secession and war had inflicted upon an entire nation?
Chapter Sixteen
APRIL–SEPTEMBER 1863
N
ot two weeks later, Lizzie was presented with inarguable proof that Mr. Davis and his administration were not as blind to the troubles plaguing Richmond as they had seemed.
Reports of atrocities in Castle Thunder had become so grave that the Confederate Congress had ordered an investigation. Captain George W. Alexander, the commandant, was accused of excessive violence and cruelty to the prisoners under his supervision, and a steady stream of inmates, detectives, and prison officers testified for and against him. The committee listened to grim descriptions of inmates tied up by their thumbs, flogged up to fifty strokes with broad leather straps, confined to a windowless sweat house, forced into the painful restraints known as the buck, shut outside in the prison yard in all manner of foul weather, denied food as punishment for impudence, and menaced by Captain Alexander’s ferocious, one-hundred-eighty-pound Bavarian boarhound, Nero. One detective attested that he had observed prisoners wearing the same clothes for months until they were ready to drop off in rags. The prison hospital steward testified that he once found a deranged prisoner lying behind a door in the quarters, clad in nothing more than a short swallow-tailed coat, mired in his own filth, with his skin completely covered with scabs and vermin. The abhorrent details that emerged from the sworn statements depicted Castle Thunder as a veritable hell on earth, and Captain Alexander and his underling Detective John Caphart as devils in human form.
Poring over the lurid reports in the papers, Lizzie was impressed by the courage of the men who testified against Captain Alexander and Detective Caphart, employees and prisoners alike, for they risked much in speaking against the men under whose authority they served or suffered. Again and again, one witness’s allegations corroborated another’s, until Lizzie was convinced that the congressional committee would have no choice but to rule against the commandant. Lizzie prayed that his conviction would frighten other prison officials and compel them to treat the captives humanely, and she dared hope that the entire prison system would be subsequently reformed.
She hoped and prayed to no avail.
On the first day of May, the committee released its report on the management of Castle Thunder—and it left Lizzie first incredulous, and then annoyed with herself that she had naively believed justice might be done. The majority of the members had concluded that considering the desperate and abandoned characters of the inmates—“in the main murderers, thieves, deserters, substitutes, forgers and all manner of villains”—Captain Alexander’s tenure was not marked by such acts of cruelty and inhumanity as to warrant condemnation. On the contrary, his traits of character, especially his promptness and determination to enforce rigid discipline, eminently fit him for the management of a military prison. In a minority report, one dissenting member of the committee insisted that the evidence sustained the charges of cruelty and injustice against Captain Alexander, and that he and General Winder both had shown “a want of judgment and humanity in the management of that prison deserving not only the censure of Congress but prompt removal from the position they have abused.”