The Bread Women of Richmond
A Novel of the 1863 Riot

About this book:

April 1863. Richmond starves while the cannons roar. Forty thousand refugees cram the Confederate capital, and a government clerk's forty-dollar salary buys a single pair of boots—or a bushel of cornmeal at thirty dollars, if you can find it. Mary Jackson watches her husband bury himself in ledgers that no longer match reality, while the women of Oregon Hill and Shockoe Bottom count beetles in their cornmeal rations and calculate exactly how many days until their children stop crying. When the commissary doors open, they don't hand out bread—they hand out guilt, short weights, and the cold arithmetic of a war that feeds its armies by starving its wives.

*The Bread Women of Richmond* follows the women who history forgot—the dressmakers, the widows, the cartridges-factory hands—who turned a bread line into a rebellion. From the damp dawn queues at the Cary Street warehouse to the shattered glass of Main Street merchants, from the whispered meetings in dark kitchens to the bayonets aligning on Capitol Square, this novel reconstructs the 1863 Richmond Bread Riot through the eyes of those who lived it: hungry, furious, and refusing to die quietly. Mary Jackson and Martha Allen don't want glory. They want flour. They want their children fed. And they are done waiting for permission.

Rich in the grit of daily survival—the smell of rancid salt pork, the weight of a baby too light to hold, the sound of silk parasols laughing above starving streets—this is Civil War fiction stripped of romance and armor. Here is the war not on the battlefield but in the pantry, where the enemy wears a quartermaster's badge and the weapons are market baskets and sheer, terrifying resolve. For readers of *Cold Mountain* and *The Invention of Wings*, a searing, unforgettable portrait of the women who brought the Confederacy to its knees—not with rifles, but with empty hands and the courage to demand they be filled.