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unless a change in their system of finance might be adopted.
Davis declared that there was no other remedy than a “compulsory reduction of the currency to the amount required by the business of the country.”
To do this, it was proposed to substitute for the outstanding notes, interest-bearing bonds, which the holders of the currency would be obliged to take in exchange, to render their property of any possible value.
Memminger, at the same time, told the victims of his financial mismanagement, that the “Government” found itself “unable to comply with the letter of its engagement,” and with this assurance he offered his bonds to the people.
These bonds, as well as all other “Government” securities issued by the Conspirators, never had a really substantial basis, and were now avoided by every sensible person in the Confederacy, as far as possible.
Through the grossest misrepresentations by the Confederate agents abroad, European capitalists were induced to take their bonds to the amount of $15,000,000, their payment professedly secured by the sales of cotton, to be sent to England.
These bonds were eagerly sought after by confiding and hopeful Englishmen, who sympathized with the Conspirators, and a large number of the members of the Southern Independence Association 1 became heavy holders of the worthless paper.
The Confederate currency, at the close of 1863, had become so nearly worthless, that it was sold at four and six cents on the dollar, and the prices of every necessary of life to be purchased with it, ruled correspondingly.
Producers, such as agriculturists, were unwilling to exchange their products for the detested stuff, and starvation for the army was threatened.
In consequence of this state of things, the “Congress” at Richmond proceeded with a high hand, and, as we have seen, authorized the seizure of supplies for the troops.2 Had not the despotic heel of the Conspirators been firmly planted on the necks of the people, a revolution would have followed.
As it was, no man dared to murmur audibly.
At the same time the railways in the Confederacy were rapidly decaying, and means for transportation were hourly decreasing, while the blockade, rendered more and more stringent by the repossession of sea-ports by the Government, diminished supplies of every kind from abroad.
The country in the vicinity of the great armies was stripped, and poverty and want stalked over the land.
The distress of the people was very great and almost universal, while favored officers of the “Government,” having large ownership in blockade-runners, were living on luxuries brought from Europe and the islands of the sea, and growing rich at the expense of the suffering people.3
1 See page 46.
2 See page 97.
3 Among the members of “Congress” at Richmond, who were not favorites of Jefferson Davis, and consequently not allowed to share in the good things of the “court,” was Henry S. Foote, formerly United States Senator, and then misrepresenting Tennessee at the Confederate capital. His wife, in a letter to a friend, on the 6th of February, 1863, gives us a glimpse of the hardships endured by the “common folk” of the “ruling classes” in Richmond. After saying that her little boy had been named “Malvern,” by his papa, “after the Battle-ground of Malvern Hills,” and that “he spits at Yankee pictures and makes wry faces at old Abe's picture,” she said: “We are boarding at Mrs. Johnson's, in Governor Street, just opposite Governor Letcher's mansion. It is a large boarding-house, high prices and starvation within. Such living was never known before on earth. We have to cook almost every thing we eat, in our own room. In our ‘larder’ the stock on hand is a boiled bacon ham, which we gave only $11 for; three pounds of pure Rio coffee, we gave $4 a pound for, and one pound of green tea, $17 per pound; two pounds of brown sugar, at $2.75 per pound; one bushel of fine apples, about the size of a good common marble, which were presented to me by a member from Missouri; one pound of butter, about six months old, at $2 per pound, and six sweet potatoes, at 50 cents. We have to give a dollar for a very small slice of pound-cake at the confectioner's . . . . Yesterday, for dinner, we had nothing on the table but two eggs and a slice of cold baker's bread, and a glass of water.” She added, in a postscript, that Jefferson Davis looked “care-worn and troubled.” “He is very thin,” she said, “and looks feeble and bent. He prays aloud in church and is a devout Episcopalian.”
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