The Road to Chancellorsville: Hunger, Riots and Spies in the Spring of 1863

The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad ran north from Richmond through Guinea Station to Fredericksburg. Library of Congress.

By the winter of 1862–1863, two years of war were wearing down the young Confederacy. Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park tells the story of the months before the Battle of Chancellorsville, when supply shortages and unrest weakened the Army of Northern Virginia even as it prepared for what its veterans would call Robert E. Lee's greatest victory. (The park also offers a five-minute video program on the subject with Ranger Maddie, made possible in part by a National Park Foundation grant.)

By the winter of 1862 into 1863, the escalating pressure of two years of war was taking its toll on the fledgling Confederacy. NPS.

An army on short rations

After the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Lee's army spent the winter holding its defenses around the town. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's corps camped around Guinea Station on the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, near today's Stonewall Jackson Road. Guinea Station was the army's main supply depot: soldiers, and enslaved men impressed by the Confederate army, unloaded thousands of pounds of supplies there every day and hauled them to the troops.

By spring 1863 Virginia faced severe shortages, caused by poor farm production over the winter, the U.S. naval blockade of Southern ports and runaway inflation. Civilians suffered most, especially women left to support themselves. In March the Confederate Congress added to the strain with the Impressment Act, which let the government take food, supplies and enslaved people from civilians for the army.

The Richmond Bread Riot

The Richmond Bread Riot of April 1863, as illustrated in Harper's Weekly.

On April 2, 1863, hundreds of women in and around Richmond took to the streets in what became known as the Richmond Bread Riot. Confederate officials arrested roughly 60 people, and the government and Southern press worked hard to keep the news from spreading. John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in the Confederate government, wrote in his diary the next day that "no account of yesterday's riot appeared in the papers to-day, for obvious reasons."

Little news reached Lee's soldiers, and few are known to have written about it. Charles Minor Blackford of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry noted on April 2: "Rumors of a bread riot in Richmond. Lee has enjoined the editors to say nothing about it, and of course there a thousand wild rumors." On April 6, William White of the Richmond Howitzers wrote that "the Richmond papers are teeming with an account of a 'Bread Riot' that took place there a few days since. . . . It will undoubtedly have an injurious effect upon our cause abroad and will give new impetus to our enemies."

Most soldiers wrote instead about daily routine, high prices and the weather. Private Richard Henry Brooks of the 51st Georgia wrote to his struggling wife: "you will have to do the best you can for I do not know what is best for you to do . . . I will say to you that our fair is very bad here we can Live on what we get to eat by spending about all that we make." Some soldiers bought oysters from local people to get by.

Lee tightens his belt

To ease the supply problem, Lee sent 15,000 soldiers under Gen. James Longstreet south to Suffolk, Virginia, to forage and protect the Confederate capital. On April 15, preparing for the coming battle, he ordered his soldiers to carry only what was necessary and to send away every horse that could be spared. His chief of artillery, Gen. William Pendleton, told the troops: "General Jackson takes no trunk himself, and allows none in his corps. The clerks on Gen. Lee's office are not mounted . . . Examples so significant may well be followed throughout the army."

The Union is watching

After a winter of reforms, the Army of the Potomac entered spring confident in its intelligence about Confederate forces. Sketch by Alfred Waud, Library of Congress.

Across the Rappahannock at Falmouth, the U.S. Army of the Potomac knew about the Confederates' troubles. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who took command in January 1863, created a new intelligence unit, the Bureau of Military Information, which watched Lee's army all winter. It learned that Lee had sent Longstreet south and that Confederate soldiers were underfed. The Union also had an inside source: Samuel Ruth, superintendent of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, was secretly a Unionist spy who reported on supply trains from Richmond and sabotaged the railroad whenever he could. With this intelligence, Hooker planned to cut Lee's supply lines, get around his Fredericksburg defenses and draw him into battle.

A victory that solved nothing

Lee's army had won at Fredericksburg, but it went into the Chancellorsville campaign weakened by shortages and inflation, which hit civilians harder still, and with few options. Former Confederates remembered Chancellorsville as Lee's greatest victory, yet it did nothing to relieve the Confederacy's deeper problems, and more bread riots followed later in the war as civilians reacted to policies that shaped their daily lives. Looking at the months before the battle, the park suggests, complicates the usual story of what it meant.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, "The Road to Chancellorsville." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-road-to-chancellorsville.htm
• Quotations from John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary (1866); Charles Minor Blackford's diary in Memoirs of Life In and Out of the Army in Virginia (1896); William S. White, "A Diary of the War" (1883); Richard Henry Brooks's letter of April 20, 1863, in Keep All My Letters (2003); and William Pendleton in William Miller Owen, In Camp and Battle with the Washington Artillery (1885). Quotations keep their original spelling.
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "Samuel Ruth: The Spy Who Starved An Army": https://www.intelligence.gov/evolution-of-espionage/civil-war/union-espionage/samuel-ruth
• The film and any audio are the National Park Service's own files, from the source page.