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.

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[652] of the new for the old money, was not effected in the country at large for many months; during which the worthlessness of the currency became an idea too firmly fixed in the public mind to be removed. One sad blunder, committed in the month of August, 1864, gave the money the coup-de-grace. The commissioners of the State of Virginia, charged with the duty of assessing the value of property taken by government, were directed by the Secretary of War, Mr. Seddon, to raise the price of wheat to forty dollars per bushel. At this rate the Secretary of War himself sold a large crop of wheat to the government, as did also a considerable number of his neighbours, who were large farmers on the James River. This action gave great dissatisfaction, and cheapened Confederate money to a degree from which it never recovered. Previously to this action, the people at large had for a long time received and paid the money at the rate of twenty for one. But when a prominent member of the Cabinet put down the value to forty for one, and authorized the commissioners of the government to shift the prices of commodities on this basis, the twenty dollar scale was discarded everywhere; and the public mind conceived a distrust of the money of which it never divested itself. The commissioners soon discovered their blunder, and re-established the old scale; but it was too late. From forty to one the price of the money went gradually down until, in February, it reached the low figure of sixty for one. For several months about this time, and until the evacuation of Richmond, the government steadily sold specie in Richmond at prices approximating that rate; and but for the value thus given, the money would have completely lost its purchasing power.

The statements of insufficiency of food in the army; the distress from the currency, the peculiar temptations which Confederate soldiers had to desert, not to the enemy, but to their own poverty-stricken homes; and the impracticability of executing the death penalty upon an offence which had so many circumstances to palliate it, sufficiently indicate how difficult to deal with was the question of desertions in the armies of the Southern Confederacy. The strong mind of Gen. Lee was long and painfully employed in devising a remedy for an evil which was eating into the vital parts of our resources, and which was indeed “the army-worm” of the Confederacy. But the evil was but little within the reach of any remedy and was logically uncontrollable. Appeals to patriotism were of but little avail, for in nine cases out of ten Confederate desertions had not happened from political disaffection, but from causes which had over-ridden and borne down public spirit. Attempts to reclaim deserters by force were equally unavailing, for whole regiments would have to be detached for the purpose, and there were unpleasant stories of the murder of enrolling officers in some parts of the Confederacy.

The fact is, the prime evil was behind desertions. In contemplating