June 20, 1864---Speculators

JUNE 20, 1864:         

In Virginia, the Union settles down to the business of besieging Petersburg. Meanwhile, in Georgia, the Spring rains have turned the roads to goo. Sherman’s amazing advance is stuck in red mud up to its shins and its axles. Very little shooting is going on. Wet powder is making all but the most determined men (and men with Spencer repeating rifles) sit out the war until the bad weather clears and the roads dry. In Kentucky, the Union captures one of John Hunt Morgan’s men, a young private by the name of James P. Gold. Gold remains a POW until the end of the war and entirely reconstructed to the end of his days, never agreeing to take the Union’s Loyalty Oath. Gold lives until 1934, one of the oldest Civil War veterans.

This last summer of the war is looking to cost the Confederacy dear. Southerners are scrounging battlefields to find spent bullets that can be melted down and recast. Housewives are saving the contents of chamber pots for nitre. 

The blockade is tightening. Prices are skyrocketing for everything but cotton and tobacco, which are plummeting in the South. The North is growing stronger on the high international price of these commodities. The few Southerners who can manage to sell their cotton and tobacco crops on the world market are becoming obscenely wealthy even as the rest of their nation declines.

In the public mind, “Speculators” are to blame, and these vague and shady “Speculators” are most often described as either Yankees or Jews (and sometimes both). Anti-Semitic diatribes begin to appear with distressing regularity in the “Letters To The Editor” columns of Southern newspapers. Judah P. Benjamin, serving as President Davis’ Secretary of War and (later) Secretary of State is accused of spiriting away millions of dollars in Confederate specie to the West Indies. (Anti-Semitism is also not uncommon in the North --- General Benjamin “Beast” Butler and Vice-President-Elect Johnson are both proud Judeophobes. Butler once writes, “[I] could suck the blood of every Jew, and [I would] detain every Jew as long as [I] can . . . [They are all] traders, merchants, and bankers . . .  supporting the Confederacy with whole heart --- two of them certainly are in the Confederate Cabinet.”  There was actually only one Jew in the Confederate Cabinet, but Butler saw Jews skulking around every corner as other letters of his indicate.)  

Dolly Sumner Lunt Burge, a Yankee-born resident of Atlanta writes in her diary:

"January 1, 1864. … The prices of everything are very high. Corn seven [Confederate] dollars a bushel, calico ten dollars a yard, salt sixty dollars a hundred [pounds], cotton from sixty to eighty cents a pound, everything in like ratio."

 "November 16, 1864. Paid seven dollars a pound for coffee, six dollars an ounce for indigo, twenty dollars for a quire of paper, five dollars for ten cents' worth of flax thread, six dollars for pins, and forty dollars for a bunch of factory thread."  

Much of the runaway inflation is due to poor economic planning on the part of the Confederacy. Manufacturing (of everything but weapons) remains at prewar levels or more often, less. With men at the front, planting is carried on by women, children and slaves (those who have not run off). Crop yields are small. Food stocks are short, and what can be saved is often expropriated for the army. The South is starving. Although worsening shortages have been the rule since 1861, this is no longer a question of shortage, it is a question of lack. And it will only get worse.

Railroad trackage has decreased (due to wartime destruction). It is nearly impossible to get goods to market in places due to deteriorating roads, wartime displacement, and battle lines. Waylaying road agents and nefarious highwaymen are a scourge on the South. The Confederacy, with no international recognition and crushing debt, is merely printing more and more money to cover its expenses. And with every note that gets printed, the value of Confederate money declines. Economics and foreign affairs are the Confederacy’s obscured Achilles tendons, hamstringing the Rebel cause.