October 9, 1862---The Confederate economy is going South

OCTOBER 9, 1862:              

Inflation continues to bite deep into the Confederate economy. At the start of the war, one Confederate Dollar cost one gold dollar and vice-versa, but by the fall of 1862, a dollar’s worth of gold cost $2.50 in Confederate dollars, a 150% inflation rate, and rising. John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, writes in his personal journal concerning the rising prices in Richmond:

 “My wife has obviated one of the difficulties of the blockade, by a substitute for coffee, which I like very well. It is simply corn meal, toasted like coffee, and served in the same manner. It costs five or six cents per pound-coffee, $2.50.”