April 30, 1863, Savannah Republican (Georgia)
In spite of all the efforts of Confederate journals North and South to conceal the fact, or deprive it of importance, no doubt remains that very serious bread riots have taken place in Richmond and other southern towns. In these riots the women have been the leaders; and that fact alone proves that absolute hunger must have been the cause of them. Women do not get up street riots, break open provision shops, and pillage bakeries and flour stores from political sympathies, nor from resentment against high prices. When their children are in peril of starvation, they become capable of anything. Nothing short of that extremity can have provoked the demonstrations admitted by the Rebel papers to have taken place in Richmond, in Raleigh, in Salisbury and many other Southern towns.
In each of these cases the rioters were women–”mostly soldiers’ wives,” say the North Carolina papers, that give account of the latest transactions. And these papers, more honest than those at Richmond, candidly admit that the women were prompted by hunger, their spirit sharpened, perhaps, by “hatred against speculators.” The women armed themselves with hatchets and axes, broke upon stores that were not willingly opened to them, and took barrels of salt, flour and molasses, which they had hauled to the market house and divided equally between those who needed it. This was a real hunger riot, and no cloak for indiscriminate robbery, as pretended in Richmond. The Raleigh, N.C., Standard, in giving an account of it, exclaims with feeling, and with despair: “Bread riots have commenced, and where they will end God only knows.”
We do not wish nor expect to create hopes of advantage over the rebellion by the mere representations of scarcity of provisions in the South. The best reliance–as it is, indeed, the only one–that a wise and powerful government should have, is the arm of military power delivering irresistible blows upon the enemy in the field. But it is certainly sound policy to consider the physical condition of the enemy we are contending with, and take advantage of any moment of weakness and exhaustion that may come upon him. That time with the Rebels we surely believe is now. We have cumulative evidence that a scarcity of food never before paralleled exists in the South, that is weakening the Rebel army, disturbing the Rebel rulers, and upturning the most inveterate traditions and usages of Southern society. This is the time, then, to press our armies upon the enemy, and still further disturb and disorganize his agriculture. Two months hence it may be too late. He may have then harvested his crops and passed the point of famine.–N. Y. Times.