This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[225]
then in its infancy, and the prices, which in time of peace were high, by the demands of war were so inflated that the highest of high privates could not aspire to sample them unless he was the child of wealthy parents who kept him supplied with a stock of scrip or greenbacks.
It can readily be seen that his thirteen dollars a month (or even sixteen dollar, to which the pay was advanced June 20, 1864, through the efforts of Henry Wilson, who strove hard to make it twenty-one dollars) would not hold out a great while to patronize an army sutler, and hundreds of the soldiers when the paymaster came round had the pleasure of signing away the entire amount due to them, whether two, three, or four months pay, to settle claims of the sutler upon them.
Here are a few of his prices as I remember them:--
Butter (warranted to be rancid), one dollar a pound; cheese, fifty cents a pound; condensed milk, seventy-five cents a can; navy tobacco of the blackest sort, one dollar and a quarter a plug.
Other than the milk I do not remember any of the prices of canned goods.
The investment that seemed to pay the largest dividend to the puchaser
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.