Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

The principal cause of the depreciation of this money, in the last twelve months of the war, was the distrust of success entertained by the classes who controlled the value of the money. The principal causes of its deprecation in the antecedent period, were the excessive issues of it by Government, and the influence of speculation. It is probably useless to declaim against a vice so prejudicial as speculation to both the individual and general interests of a country circumstanced like the Confederacy. It is a display of the worst form of selfishness; a selfishness that feeds upon the privation, want, and necessity of fellow-citizens engaged in mortal struggle with a formidable public enemy; a selfishness that appropriates all that it can grasp, at a time when each individual should give up for the general good all that can be spared; a selfishness worse than that for which Ananias and Sapphira were struck down by the hand of God, inasmuch as it seeks not only to withhold what is one's own, but to engross also whatever else can be compassed by craft and greed. The best communities contain persons of this sordid temper; and the temptation to its indulgence in a country isolated and beleaguered by armies and blockading fleets, where the supplies of every article are limited, are too strong to be resisted by the class whose inclinations are set in that direction. The speculation commenced in such articles as cut nails, salt, and leather. There were but two nail factories in the Confederacy, and the stocks of these establishments were accessible and easily engrossed. Within the first six months of the war, the entire stock of cut nails in the Confederacy were in the hands of less than half a dozen speculators in Richmond; and the price was abruptly put up from four dollars to seven, and then to ten per keg. There was but one considerable saline in the Confederacy, and this was operated by a single firm, which ran up the price of this prime necessary of life, within two years, from the ante-war price of one cent per pound, to twenty-five cents per pound in specie or fifty cents in Treasury notes. Leather was one of those articles which, though tanned in very numerous establishments conducted on a small scale throughout the country, yet was everywhere found to be in smaller quantity than was needed by the people, and which might safely be bought up right and left wherever found. These are but examples of the subjects of the speculation and extortion that became rife throughout the Confederacy. The effect was greatly to augment and aggravate the burden of the war upon the people; but its most serious evil was in the depreciating influence it exerted upon the currency. The great mass of the people were desirous to receive this money at the normal rates; but finding themselves obliged to pay extortionate prices for commodities which they stood in need of purchasing, they were driven, against their will, to demand increased prices for the products and property which they