distribution became increasingly harder, and at times, impossible. The progressive destruction of the Southern railroad network, along with rapid inflation, affected women in the cities especially hard as they found food prices too high to afford. In Richmond, at the end of a long supply chain, the crisis exploded in bread riots in April, 1863, when a large mob of starving women in the city looted stores for food, ignoring the pleas of President Jefferson Davis who stood upon a cart to toss coins to the women, who dispersed only after he threatened to order a company of militia to open fire. In dozens of small towns across Georgia in 1863, working class women raided stores and captured supply wagons to get such necessities as bacon, corn, flour, and cotton yarn. Soldiers at the front did not need to read newspaper accounts. They were all getting letters from home about the rapidly deteriorating situation affecting their own families. Temporary desertion was one solution as "thousands of husbands discharged themselves" to save their families over the course of the war. Despite the Confederacy's strength in cotton production, it produced too little cloth to cover its ragged soldiers - Northern manufacturers dominated North American textile production in the antebellum period, and by the end of the first year of war most of the productive textile manufacturing regions of the South were also in the hands of the Union. Urbanization The Confederacy had very few cities of any size. Using figures from the 1860 census, New Orleans was the largest city under Confederate control. It was the sixth-largest city listed in the census with a population of about one hundred and sixty thousand. New Orleans and its industrial capacity fell to the Union after only 455 days. The next largest city in the Confederacy was Charleston, South Carolina, with only forty thousand and ranked twenty-second in the United States. Richmond, the capital and the industrial center of the Confederacy, was twenty-fifth. During the war, Columbus, Georgia became one of the most important centers of industry in the Confederacy, ranked second to Richmond in the manufacture of supplies for the Confederate army. Manufacturing The Confederacy's industrial workforce, like its agricultural workforce, was characterized by its wide and extensive use of slaves. In the 1850s, anywhere from 150,000–200,000 slaves were used in industrial work. Most, almost eighty percent, were owned directly by industrial owners, with