Here, Mitchell is mostly right. Wealthy southern women did support the cause until the end, but the Confederacy also suffered from bread riots in Richmond led by women. In North Carolina, poor white women wrote to the governor telling him, “The time has come that we the comon people has to hav bread or blood … or die in the attempt.”57 After the war, white women provided the leadership, resources, and strategy to vindicate the Lost Cause and preserve Confederate culture in marble and paper.58
