Wielding axes and hatchets, a group of forty or fifty soldiers' wives entered Salisbury, North Carolina, on March 18, 1863, intent on obtaining flour and salt. The women approached the shops of Michael Brown, John Ennis, S. Frankfort, K. Sprague, David Weil, and Thomas Foster, merchants whom the destitute women believed had speculated in necessities. The rioting women offered the vendors government prices, about one-half the market value, in exchange for the desired commodities. When the merchants refused, the women broke down Brown's shop door with hatchets and threatened other storekeepers who offered resistance. After collecting thirteen barrels of flour, one of molasses, two sacks of salt, and twenty dollars in cash, the women moved on to Confederate government stores at the North Carolina Railroad Depot, where they took ten more barrels of flour. The "Female Raid" concluded the following morning, according to the Carolina Watchman, when the women met to divide their plunder.¹

In the context of wide disaffection with the Confederate war effort, and even more severe acts of violence and retribution in North Carolina, the Salisbury bread riot stands out.² In Salisbury, women had banded together and used force to acquire needed supplies and condemn the cause of their destitution--speculators and a seemingly indifferent government. Only in Richmond, Virginia, two months later would a more famous bread riot occur.³ The uprising by Rowan County's wives and mothers appears even more unusual in light of a Southern culture that emphasized women's place as matrons and nurturers within the home and forbade any public and political--let alone violent--activity.⁴ Asked to maintain feminine roles within the home while lacking the provision of money, food, and protection usually provided by men and confronted by wartime poverty and starvation, Southern women faced a crisis. Taxation, conscription, and impressment seemed to remove all available resources from their hands, leaving them powerless to provide for their families. In response, many Confederate women silently and individually resisted the war effort. But organized and forceful public demonstration of disillusionment, as at Salisbury, remained rare.⁵

The exact identity of the Salisbury rioters remains unknown. The Watchman failed to mention names, and storekeeper Michael Brown's complaint to North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance spoke only of the mayor and county justices who looked on dispassionately during the riot.⁶ Mary C. Moore, otherwise unidentified, wrote to the governor on behalf of the rioters but revealed no names.⁷ Local officials arrested no women, and none appeared in court on charges relating to the incident. Local tradition offers no clue as to the names of the women. Only the description "soldier's wives," given by Mary C. Moore and the Watchman, hints at the rioters' identity.

Yet the Rowan County community knew the rioters. The circumstances surrounding the riot and the lack of punishment suggest familiarity. Unlike Richmond's inundation by immigrants, refugees, and soldiers' families in search of work, Rowan County's population remained relatively unchanged through the transition from peace to war, as did Salisbury's government and traditional leadership. Absence of immediate and subsequent legal action illustrates a passive acceptance of the women's actions by Rowan's officials. The county's rioters had not acted against a hostile or indifferent ruling class; rather, through their actions, they expressed disillusionment with material decline and their increasingly precarious stake in the society of Southern wives and mothers.⁸

But the same familiarity that had prevented prosecution had failed to protect the soldiers' wives from the conditions against which they had taken action. The war disrupted Rowan's stability, overwhelmed its family- and church-based support networks, and created an anxiety county leaders could not control and a need they could not satisfy.⁹ What happened in Rowan that led to the action by its soldiers' wives? While no particular incident triggered the riot, rising prices, loss of labor, death of family members, and increasingly severe food shortages coincided with a period when these pressing needs were virtually neglected. Hardships converged in the spring of 1863, and Rowan's soldiers' wives took action.

Rowan County's antebellum social and political development reflected the experience of the entire North Carolina backcountry. Families of German and Scotch-Irish ancestry traveling the Great Wagon Road passed through the colonial crossroads at Salisbury to settle the hinterland in the 1750s.¹⁰ Rowan nurtured small farms that grew subsistence crops--wheat, corn, tobacco, and vegetables. Industry complemented agriculture; wealthy planters operated grain mills for profit, while hundreds of British immigrants mined Rowan's gold fields at the ramshackle settlement of Gold Hill in the southeastern corner of the county.¹¹

North Carolina's western Piedmont developed a work ethic and political values that were consciously in opposition to the perceived life of leisure practiced by the eastern planter class.¹² Westerners valued hard labor and self-sufficiency, while they maintained the traditional separation between masculine and feminine labor, as well as public and private life.¹³ In the predominantly yeoman countryside, this self-reliant attitude meant that the bulk of labor was done not by slaves but by family members. Heads of households may have cherished the independence of self-sufficiency, but lacking more developed resources, the loss of a single working family member might mean the difference between bounty and starvation.¹⁴ Extended families and churches proved the only reliable source of aid in times of crisis. A warden of the poor operated in Rowan, but social stigma limited his reach to only the most destitute.

Politically, a lingering Whig tradition divided the county into Unionist and secessionist camps. Though Unionists remained active and strong during the winter months of 1860-61, the actions of President Abraham Lincoln and his call for troops following the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter galvanized nearly every Rowan County citizen in opposition to the Lincoln administration. The people of Rowan, while not particularly interested in dismantling the Union to join a cotton kingdom of Southern states, were intent on preserving the conservative social order of Southern society within North Carolina.¹⁵ Upon the Old North State's secession, the county began to mobilize volunteers for the war.

Rowan supported the Confederacy by sending men to the military while its citizens contributed food and money. The county's two long-established volunteer militia companies, the Rowan Rifle Guard and the Rowan Artillery, sprang to arms first, followed soon by four more volunteer companies. The Scotch-Irish community in northwestern Rowan quickly raised a company. Initially called the "Scotch-Ireland Guard," the amateur soldiers adopted the name "Oakland Guard," after the home of Samuel Kerr, a former Unionist and benefactor who purchased the company's uniforms and equipment.¹⁶ The foreign-born miners at Gold Hill, previously ambivalent to secession, rushed to military service and bullied comrades who did not join.¹⁷

Almost six hundred men from Rowan County enlisted in the early months of 1861.¹⁸ Age and family status seemingly bound certain men for service in the initial wave of enlistment. For instance, the Rowan Rifle Guard left Salisbury with approximately eighty men whose average age was nineteen years old. Fourteen were married, while the remaining 82 percent lived as single men, alone or with other families or groups of people. Of fifty-five Rifle Guardsmen whose occupations can be determined, sixteen were skilled craftsmen and eight were professionals or clerks. Thirteen men listed themselves as day laborers; only five listed their occupation as farming.¹⁹

The young and independent men who left for war did not constitute a critical loss to Rowan County's pool of labor or its ability to sustain commercial activity. Few men with wives and families enlisted, as the early rush to volunteer masked the Confederacy's desperate need for manpower. Two more companies marched to war in mid-June while the Watchman noted that the county had fallen below its required troop quota.²⁰

Since a portion of Rowan's 1861 volunteers were indeed married and with dependent children, the county court took action to provide some assistance. The May session appropriated fifty thousand dollars for the "relief of soldiers wives." However, county officials divided the sum and used a portion for the "arming and equipping of soldiers."²¹ How the wives' money was distributed is not known, but cash designated as civilian relief was not used specifically to buy food and supplies; it was given directly to any head of a household who applied. The Watchman condemned this method of distribution and later commented that "the plan has been subject to the grossest abuses for months, and has failed in accomplishing the end desired." Rowan County was not alone in its early efforts to provide for its citizens. In the absence of state action, most North Carolina counties appropriated money at the beginning of the war to arm their soldiers and feed their civilians.²²

The Confederate government offered no direct aid but nonetheless established a small quartermaster station at the North Carolina Railroad Depot to store supplies and equipment before delivery to the army in Salisbury. A sulfuric acid plant was built adjacent to a weapons factory, and the cotton mill southeast of Salisbury was eventually used as a prisoner-of-war camp.²³ These government installations provided some individuals with a means of support.

Supply trains that headed north returned with Rowan County's sick and invalid soldiers. To minister to the wounded who passed through Salisbury, citizens established the Wayside Hospital in July 1862. Under the direction of Dr. Marcellus Whitehead and Matron Jesse McCallum, civilians and soldiers contributed food, clothing, time, and money to patients. The wives and daughters of Salisbury's merchants and officials organized themselves into shifts to work as nurses at the hospital.²⁴ Few, if any, came in from the countryside to aid with the hospital. In addition to individual contributions, hospital supporters held fairs in town to raise money.²⁵ This effort represented an admirable marshaling of resources and organizational skill but only for the ultimate benefit of a very specific group--wounded and sick soldiers. Those resources and skills later went untapped when Rowan's desperate citizens cried out for help.²⁶

In 1862, as food prices rose and material shortages became increasingly commonplace, the need for organized relief for the poor also climbed. At the same time more men joined the army and left the county. The First Conscription Act, passed in April 1862 by the Confederate Congress, spurred a new wave of enlistments in Rowan County.²⁷ Recruits filled five new companies between March and July 1862, while large numbers of men enlisted in the four already established companies. This wave of enlistments took at least 524 more men away from home and into the army.²⁸

The age and marital status of the 1862 volunteers differed markedly from those who had enlisted the previous year. The 112 recruits in Company C, Fifty-seventh North Carolina, averaged twenty-seven years old and represented many more communities within the county, as residents of Back Creek, Miranda, and China Grove stood alongside men from Salisbury and Gold Hill. Communities lost a greater proportion of their heads of households with the volunteers' departure. For instance, of Company C, Fifty-seventh North Carolina's forty-seven volunteers who can be identified in the 1860 census, twenty-six were married--55 percent, compared with 18 percent of married men who had marched away the previous year. Most of these married men had one or more dependent children ranging from infants to adolescents. Even the unmarried men who enlisted had evidently provided support for dependent families. Of twenty-one unmarried men, fourteen lived with elderly parents or in a household without a father. The occupational profile of this company was vastly different as well. Sixty-six percent listed themselves as farmers, and 9 percent were day laborers or farm hands (designations for children or elderly parents). Only eight were young enough to require support from their parents, and only one, James S. Maloney, a shoemaker, did not work in agriculture in some way.²⁹

The departure of these men meant the loss of not only the best source of labor in their households but also families' most experienced link to the public world. For instance, Miranda, a small community of one hundred households, gave four men to Company E, Fifty-seventh North Carolina, in July 1862. The relationship between two enlistees, Joseph and John W. Miller, is unknown but is suggested by their surnames and the proximity of their homes--three doors apart. In Gold Hill, brothers Crawford and Calvin Holshouser, each a head of his own household, lived next door to each other before enlisting in the same company. And in China Grove, four men who enlisted lived within fifteen households of each other. These patterns represented a familial and spatial density not found in the recruiting patterns of 1861.³⁰

Once these men had enlisted in the army they suffered the routine shortages and deprivations of military life in 1862. Levi Fesperman, a private in the Sixth North Carolina, wrote to Caleb Hampton of the Back Creek neighborhood, asking him to gather food and send it to the army, "for you know nothing about hard times to what we do."³¹ Lack of food and pay shortages caused discouragement within the army. These shortages, coupled with conscription, impressment, and other unpopular governmental measures, caused the morale of North Carolina's soldiers to fall; a few even lost the will to fight.³² The most telling sign of this disaffection was the effort of soldiers to discourage civilians from joining the army. Felix Miller, a soldier from neighboring Davie County, wrote to his wife, "...if you can manage to get Levi in to anything to keep him out of this war to try to do so."³³ Civilians needed little encouragement to stay at home. J.B. Harris, an unmarried merchant in Gold Hill, recognized that county officers were exempt from the draft and noted gloomily: "The Conscript Law goes into operation soon. We are all to be enrolled on 8th July & will have to report ourselves on the 15th inst. [Tell] R to find a substitute. Tell Mr. F to try and get me one at almost any price not more than $1000."³⁴

Frustration with conditions at the front also influenced the mood at home, and desertions by Rowan County soldiers began in 1862.³⁵ Advertisements placed by infantry captains listing deserters and offering rewards for their return began to appear in the Watchman.³⁶ Soldiers with dependents at home were most susceptible to the lure of desertion. For instance, on August 11, 1862, captains in the Forty-second North Carolina submitted to the paper the names of Henry Morgan, Henry Basinger, John Fulinweder, William Hess, and others. Morgan, Basinger, and Fulinweder might have been unable to endure the rigors of campaigning at the age of forty-three, forty-five, and thirty-five, respectively, but more important, all three had wives and young children at home. While Confederate authorities searched for absent men, many women protected deserters by providing food and refuge from government agents.³⁷

All soldiers suffered hardships, but many succumbed to disease. The winter of 1861-62 witnessed 109 deaths of Rowan County men from disease. Meanwhile, Rowan County men were becoming increasingly involved in combat. The fighting around Richmond during the spring and summer of 1862 claimed the lives of sixty-six local soldiers, and fifteen more died at the autumn Battle of Sharpsburg. Fredericksburg and other actions that year in Virginia claimed another twenty-eight men. In the campaigns of 1862 Rowan County lost 228 men, approximately 20 percent of the soldiers it sent to the army. In addition to deaths, ninety-nine men were wounded and sixteen captured.³⁸

Too often, consequences of battles are given simply in numbers of men killed and military advantages gained or lost.³⁹ However, the death of a husband and its immediate and long-term impact on his family has been largely overlooked. Links between a soldier and his home were critical to both. Food, clothing, moral encouragement, and the ever-watchful eye of the community were directed to the soldier, while he, in turn, provided a focus for patriotic zeal and, through visits and sending letters and money, a source of familial guidance and support.⁴⁰ In addition to anxiety and grief, the loss of a soldier destroyed this focus and could lead to bereaved families becoming unsupportive of the war effort.

The death of a husband or son often sent the next of kin, especially those in perilous situations, in search of monetary support beyond the helping hands of family. The most immediate source of money and property was the estate of the deceased. Application made by the widow to the county court for a year's provisions, or dower, allowed her access to one-third of her husband's estate before division by creditors. The estates of Rowan's 1862 enlistees averaged only $2,464.⁴¹ The number of widows who made applications dramatizes the immediate impact of the high number of deaths in the 1862 summer campaigns and also points to the period in which widespread need began to settle over Rowan County's communities.

Prior to the war, elderly widows petitioned the county court for a year's provisions at the rate of about five per quarterly session.⁴² The onset of the war, however, caused an immediate increase in that rate, and the widows were generally younger. The eight widows who applied to the August 1861 session of the county court were in their thirties and each had one to three children. Soldiers' wives or not, the increasing number of families in need caused a greater strain on the resources of the community. The following year, the August 1862 court received applications from sixteen women with an average age of twenty-seven and two children each. However, the true cost of the summer campaigns of 1862 can be seen in the February session of the 1863 county court. During that session fifty-three women applied for a year's provisions.⁴³ The average age of these women remained high--twenty-nine--reflecting the higher age of recruits during 1862. Again, the widows averaged two children each. The husbands of the February 1863 applicants had enlisted primarily in early 1862, in regiments formed under the threat of conscription. Interestingly, applications for a year's provisions in February 1863 reflected the 1862 geographic enlistment pattern as well. Twenty-five widows lived in Rowan County's back-country communities. Back Creek, Bringles, and Deep Well, each with less than fifty households, had widows who applied. Four women from four different households with seven dependent children applied from Miranda, which had one hundred households.

A deceased soldier's bounty and back pay represented another potential source of support for his family. Soldiers often received bounty money upon enlistment from the county, the state, and the Confederate government that could amount to several hundred dollars. With proof of a son's or a husband's death, the next of kin traveled to the courthouse to place a claim on any uncollected money. At least fifty mothers, wives, and sisters of Rowan County's dead soldiers placed claims during the autumn and winter of 1862.⁴⁴

In some cases needy women could also rely on traditional sources of community support. The Reverend Samuel Rothrock, pastor of the Organ Church and exempt from service, frequently traveled to the army to deliver letters and packages and returned with the bodies of Rowan's dead soldiers. Rothrock recorded in his diary on numerous occasions that he aided widows with their applications for provisions, brought in their hay, and made shoes for his barefooted parishioners.⁴⁵

The county court's efforts at relief for soldiers' wives were limited during the first half of the war. The warden of the poor continued his work, expending $1,609 in 1862.⁴⁶ However, as an extension of the antebellum system, it is unclear who received this money. The first effort to directly address the growing wartime shortages suffered by Rowan County's citizens came in May 1862 when the court appointed Salisbury merchant James McCubbins salt commissioner. The court instructed McCubbins to purchase salt with funds raised on county bonds and distribute it equitably, with preference to families of soldiers.⁴⁷ McCubbins actually expended less cash in the fulfillment of his duty than the warden of the poor; however, he probably reached more people. Needy families reported to McCubbins' home or mill on appointed days and received an allotment of salt. The commissioner's report for 1862 indicated that he distributed salt to "797 families of soldiers." Salt was also given to 1,419 other families without soldiers. Of 354 bushels, the citizens paid for slightly less than half, while the remainder was given away. Altogether, McCubbins reported having aided 2,216 families with approximately one-half bushel per family.⁴⁸ A "Special Committee," also appointed in May 1862, reported the expenditure of fifty-one hundred dollars in "aiding and assisting the families of soldiers now in the service, or who died in the service, whether soldiers were Volunteers, conscripts or drafted men."⁴⁹ It is unknown how this money was spent.

Rowan County's slight expenditures in 1862 predated larger efforts by many other North Carolina counties in 1863. Rowan's fifty-one-hundred-dollar disbursement paled in comparison to the $45,866.85 Orange County spent on its poor. Some within the county actually failed to notice the efforts made by McCubbins and the Special Commission. In February 1863, a full year after poor relief began, the Watchman stated, "It has been suggested...that the County Court should appoint a Commissioner to buy and sell provisions for the relief of the poor in and around town."⁵⁰

McCubbins' unheralded work failed to avert anxiety about food shortages early in 1863, and a general sense of lawlessness and despair spread through the countryside. Robbery of food and household items, condemned as common thievery in early 1862, were recognized as the increasingly bold acts of a desperate populace by 1863. In February 1863, the Watchman reported that a few citizens in the countryside aided neighbors by providing cheap food and help with tending their crops, but these Samaritans were fewer than thought necessary. A soldier in the Fifty-seventh North Carolina agreed. In a letter to the Watchman, he described scenes of home-front starvation that wives related to husbands in the ranks. "One woman writes that she is barefooted and can get no shoes on any pretense; that she has not a stick of wood to burn, and that good people of town will not give her a stick with out the money; that her children often cry from cold and hunger, and all that she can do is mingle her tears with those of the little ones and pray for a brighter to-morrow, and what can a husband do?" He stated that "one should shudder...when it is considered that [such scenes] came from a town boasting the wealth and influence of Salisbury."⁵¹ Advertisements appeared in the Watchman offering salt for barter.⁵² Caleb Hampton wrote his nephews in the army that "We have some talk in old Rowan about peace. But that has very often been the case and would suit us a great deal Better if such talk would be over and peace...[restored]. No news to tell you at this time only plenty of work and but few people remains in this part of the world."⁵³

Indeed, the loss of labor, even of a single man, to the army was acutely felt by a large number of people. Mill owner Edward Rufty appealed to the Watchman that his miller had been conscripted and the mill by necessity would shut down, "leaving 125 women and children who will suffer."⁵⁴

As the war continued, prices of food and other commodities rapidly inflated on the open market. The county court offered salt and food at government-fixed prices, while merchants sold the same items for twice, even three times as much. Government salt and flour, for instance, sold in the spring of 1863 for approximately twenty dollars a barrel, while the market value was nearer fifty dollars for the same amount.⁵⁵ Soldiers' wives might have relied on their husbands for cash, but the eleven dollars a month in soldiers' pay proved infrequent at best.

Inflation was debated in the Watchman and revealed a popular opinion divided on the cause and effect of food and money shortages. "A Citizen" complaining of depreciating money in March 1863 blamed speculators in currency and Salisbury merchants who refused to accept Confederate script. Those who suffered the most, "A Citizen" claimed, were the wives and children of soldiers. In the following issue, in which the Watchman announced a severe shortage of meat, "Justice" replied that the recent rapid depreciation resulted from a flood of currency and the general hardships of war. In the third week of March the paper announced the state legislature's appropriation of a million dollars "for the relief of the Wives and Families of Soldiers."⁵⁶

The appropriation, however, was too late for many to avert extreme helplessness and destitution. Caleb Hampton wrote again to his nephews that same week and expressed frustration with "original Secessionists." Hampton wished "this hellish war will Stop," and if the leadership of the warring parties did not cease hostilities, "I think that Starvation will Stop it."⁵⁷ Nine days later, the soldiers' wives entered Salisbury.

Following the action, the women's representative, Mary Moore, through Salisbury attorney Luke Blackmer, composed an apology to Governor Vance. She explained the women's motivations and begged the governor's counsel. Efforts to obtain money were woefully inadequate, and "without much or in many cases any assistance from them [the soldiers] how far will eleven dollars go in a family now...[?]" Sewing uniforms paid less than a dollar a day, and "we still have upon an average from three to five helpless children to support." Soldiers' wives did not want charity, Moore claimed, and were willing to pay government prices. But speculators drove prices up by hoarding and sending food out of state. "Now Sir how We ask you in the name of God are we to live[?]," queried Moore. The soldiers' absence and the deprivation due to war had forced the women to take action. Unlike women from the social elite, they could not retreat to the refuge of large farms and wealth. Rowan's women "were from Stern necessity compelled to go in search of food to sustain life."⁵⁸

Editorializing on the riot, the Watchman's John J. Bruner wrote that he recognized genuine need on the part of poor families: "It is said there are many families in this town and vicinity who have not tasted meat for weeks, and some times, months altogether. Of course they have not had butter, molasses, or sugar. Many of them have no gardens and consequently no vegetables of their own raising; and the scarcity and high prices of potatoes, peas, beans, &c., render it extremely difficult if at all possible, for them to obtain these articles. What, then, have they to support life? Bread and water!" The editorialist laid blame for want squarely on the shoulders of "speculators" and "horders" and equally cast opprobrium on the ineffective poor relief policies of the county court. The editor similarly scolded the women for the arbitrariness of their action, for ignoring some speculators while attacking others, and for bypassing the efforts of the county court and poor relief committees altogether. He concluded by renewing a call for hard work and sacrifice.

Salisbury's brief feminine tumult was a singular action that resulted from conditions that began in the spring of 1862 and culminated a year later, and those conditions would not be duplicated in the future. Indeed, prices continued to rise, food remained scarce, families continued to harbor deserters, and Federal military incursions increased in 1864 and 1865. Yet, unlike in the first half of the war, never in the latter half of the war did Rowan experience the sudden instability caused by a swift reduction in its labor force, the heavy losses of its soldiers to battle and disease, and the rigors of destitution without a functioning poor relief system.

From 1863 to 1865 only eighty-five men from Rowan entered the army, and the widespread rendering of family ties that accompanied the 1862 enlistments was not repeated. Soldiers of Rowan never experienced losses of the same magnitude. The 203 battle casualties and other deaths during 1864 and 1865 were high but spread over a two-year period, as opposed to the 228 deaths in ten months during 1861 and 1862.⁵⁹ The number of new dependencies sinking into destitution did not increase as dramatically as it had in 1862. The large number of deserters who returned home may have provided a modicum of stability, while their struggling families perhaps learned to better cope with hardship.

Families that did seek governmental relief after the spring of 1863 found a more prolific, if not more effective, county system in place. Poor relief in 1862 had been negligible, and the efforts at distributing salt and money reached only a relatively few families. After the riots the efforts of McCubbins and the Special Committee continued at an increased volume. The Special Committee reported that in 1863, $22,147 was distributed. The warden of the poor even increased his expenditure to $2,555. The salt commissioner continued to collect and distribute that commodity to 2,261 Rowan County families. However, the amount Rowan spent on aiding the needy remained less than that distributed by other North Carolina counties.⁶⁰

The women of Rowan were certainly weary of war, but the Salisbury riot was less a conscious subversion of the Confederate war effort than an attempt to simply survive a suddenly much more difficult life. True, many women did actively work against Confederate authority but through more subtle and indirect means. Others remained loyal to the Confederate cause throughout the war.⁶¹ The period from spring 1862 to spring 1863 constituted a vacuum; all of Rowan County's resources in men and money had been drawn away, causing instability for the neediest citizens. Food shortages and other deprivations continued, but organized protest gave way to more mundane and individual efforts to scratch out a living in Confederate North Carolina.

² For examples of violence and disaffection In the western Piedmont of North Carolina see William T. Auman, "Neighbor Against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 61 (January 1984): 59-92 and Paul D. Escott and Jeffrey J. Crow, "The Social Order and Violent Disorder: An Analysis of North Carolina in the Revolution and the Civil War," North Carolina Historical Review 52 (August 1986): 373-402.

³ For the Richmond bread riot, see Michael B. Chesson, "Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92 (1984): 131-175.

⁴ A list of literature concerning Southern women and sex roles would be too long to repeat. For a thorough historiographic review and the most recent interpretation see Joan E. Cashin, ed., Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

⁵ For Confederate women in the Civil War see George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbanna: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women and the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

⁶ Michael Brown to Governor Vance, March 16, 1863, Zebulon B. Vance, Governor's Papers, State Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh.

⁷ Joe Mobley, ed., The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, vol. 2, 1863 (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1995), 92-3.

⁸ For Rowan's part in the war see James S. Brawley, Rowan County: A Brief History (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1974), 91-110. Also, for the place of rioters in society see Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 129.

⁹ Rowan differed little from most North Carolina counties whose well-intended efforts ultimately failed to provide food and protection to their most needy citizens. Paul D. Escott, "Poverty and Governmental Aid for the Poor in Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 61 (October 1984): 462.

¹⁰ Robert W. Ramsey, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 51-93.

¹¹ Bruce S. Cheesman, Kerr Mill and the Mill Bridge Community, Rowan County (Salisbury, N.C.: Rowan County Historical Properties Commission, 1980) and Brent D. Glass, "King and Old Rip: The Gold Mining District of North Carolina" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980).

¹² Bynum, Unruly Women, 7-9.

¹³ For examples of this work ethic in operation see Paul D. Escott, ed., North Carolina Yeoman: The Diary of Basil Armstrong Thomasson, 1853-1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996) and Christopher A. Graham, "The Domesticity of Caroline Brooks Lilly" (Graduate Paper, North Carolina State University, 1997).

¹⁴ Only 158 Rowan Countians owned slaves in 1860. Joshua McKaughan, "'Few Were the Hearts...that did not Swell with Devotion': Community and Confederate Service in Rowan County, North Carolina, 1861-1862," North Carolina Historical Review 73 (April 1996): 164n. The thesis of yeoman independence is elaborated by Stephanie McCurry in Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture or the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

¹⁵ Watchman, November 13, 1860, and February 28, 1861.

¹⁶ Brawley, Rowan County, 92; Watchman, May 7, 1861. See also Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

¹⁷ Glass, "King Midas and Old Rip," 185-6.

¹⁸ Jethro Rumple, A Brief History of Rowan County (Salisbury, N.C.: J.J. Brunner, 1881), 321-410.

¹⁹ All census data has been derived from June C. Watson, Patrice B. Beck, and Jerrie B. Peeler, comps., 1860 Census of Rowan County (Salisbury, N.C.: The Genealogical Society of Rowan County, North Carolina, 1990). Joshua McKaughan also notes that a company raised in September 1861 was composed of 64.5% married men. McKaughan, "'Few Were the Hearts...'": 171.

²⁰ Watchman, June 6, 1861.

²¹ Minutes of the May 1861 session of the county court are inexplicably missing from the minute book. Information concerning this appropriation is from the Watchman, March 26, 1863.

²² Watchman, March 26, 1863; Escott, "Poverty and Governmental Aid," 467.

²³ Brawley, Rowan County, 98-9.

²⁴ Brawley, Rowan County, 105; Watchman, July 21, 1862.

²⁵ Watchman, August 11, 1862, and December 8, 1862.

²⁶ Studying Caldwell County, David H. McGee has revealed a coterie of elite women whose compassion for the needy of their county diminished over the course of the war. See David H. McGee, "'Home and Friends': Kinship, Community, and Elite Women in Caldwell County, North Carolina, during the Civil War" North Carolina Historical Review 74 (October 1997): 363-88.

²⁷ Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan Co., 1924), 12-26.

²⁸ Rumple, A Brief History of Rowan, 321-410.

²⁹ Louis H. Manarin and Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comps., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, vol. 9 (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1966), 123-135; Rumple, A Brief History of Rowan, 321-410.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Letter, Levi Fesperman to Caleb Hampton, December 28, 1861, Caleb Hampton Papers, Special Collections Department, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina.

³² Reid Mitchell perceptively analyses the hardships inherent in the Confederate experience. See Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 148-83.

³³ Felix Miller, Civil War Letters and Family, typescript in Edith M. Clark History Room, Rowan Public Library, Salisbury, North Carolina.

³⁴ Letter, J.B. Harris to sister, March 13, 1862, J.P. Clark Papers, Special Collections Department, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina.

³⁵ For desertion among North Carolina soldiers see Peter S. Bearman, "Desertion As Localism: Army Unit Solidarity and Group Norms in the U.S. Civil War," Social Forces 70 (1991): 321-42 and Richard Reid, "A Test Case for the 'Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War," North Carolina Historical Review 58 (1981): 234-62.

³⁶ See for example, Watchman, August 11, 1862, and January 12, 1863.

³⁷ Bynum, Unruly Women, 130-50.

³⁸ Rumple, A Brief History of Rowan, 321-410.

³⁹ The scores of monographs that fail in this regard would be too lengthy to list here.

⁴⁰ See for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, "'Trying To Do A Man's Business': Slavery, Violence and Gender in the American Civil War," Gender & History 4 (1992): 197-214; James Marten, "Fatherhood in the Confederacy: Southern Soldiers and their Children," Journal of Southern History 63 (May 1997): 269-92.

⁴¹ McKaughan found that the average wealth of 1861 volunteers was more than twice that of the 1862 volunteer. McKaughan, "'Few Were the Hearts...'", 171.

⁴² See Minutes of the County Court, August, 1858, term [n.p.], November, 1858, term [n.p.], May, 1859 term, [n.p.], and August, 1859, term [n.p.].

⁴³ Minutes of the Rowan County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, August, 1861, term [n.p.], August, 1862, term [n.p.], and February, 1863 term [n.p.], State Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh.

⁴⁴ Applications for Bounties of Deceased Soldiers, Rowan County. County Papers. State Archives, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh.

⁴⁵ Samuel Rothrock, Diaries of Samuel Rothrock, typescript in Edith M. Clark History Room, Rowan Public Library, 276, 284, 286, 288-9, 291.

⁴⁶ Minutes of the County Court, May, 1863, term [n.p.]. Interestingly, this amount was just one hundred dollars more than the county schools received the same year.

⁴⁷ Minutes of the County Court, May, 1862, [n.p.]; for a biographical sketch of McCubbins see Cheesborough, Kerr Mill, 58-9.

⁴⁸ Minutes of the County Court, May, 1863, term [n.p.].

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Escott, "Poverty and Governmental Aid," 467, 468, 471.

⁵¹ Watchman, October 12, 1862.

⁵² Watchman, February 16, 1863, January 12, 1863, and January 16, 1863.

⁵³ Letter, Uncle Caleb to nephews, February 11, 1863, Caleb Hampton papers.

⁵⁴ Watchman, April 20, 1863.

⁵⁵ Watchman, March 26, 1863; Uncle Caleb to nephews, March 9, 1863.

⁵⁶ Watchman, March 2, 1863, March 9, 1863, and March 16, 1863.

⁵⁷ Uncle Caleb to Nephews, March 9, 1863, Caleb Hampton Papers.

⁵⁸ Mobley, ed., Papers of Zebulon B. Vance, 92-3. For elite women's reactions to hardship, see McGee, "'Home and Friends'"; and Faust, Mothers of Invention.

⁵⁹ Rumple, A Brief History of Rowan .

⁶⁰ For samples, see Escott, "Poverty and Governmental Aid," 471.

⁶¹ Gary W. Gallagher calls attention to a continued home-front devotion to the Confederate war effort in The Confederate War (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17-59.