At the South at this time coffee was fifty dollars a pound and gloves were one hundred and fifty dollars a pair. Flour was forty dollars a barrel; but you could get a barrel of currency for less than that.
Money was plenty, but what was needed seemed to be confidence. Running the blockade was not profitable at that time, since over fifteen hundred head of Confederate vessels were captured during the war.
The capture of Fort Fisher closed the last port of the South, and left the Confederacy no show with foreign Powers or markets.
The Alabama was an armed steam-ship, and the most unpleasant feature of the war to the Federal government, especially as she had more sympathy and aid in England than was asked for or expected by the Unionists. However, England has since repaid all this loss in various ways. She has put from five to eight million dollars into cattle on the plains of the Northwest, where the skeletons of same may be found bleaching in the summer sun; and I am personally acquainted with six Americans now visiting England who can borrow enough in a year to make up all the losses sustained through the Alabama and other neutral vessels.
PERSONALLY ACQUAINTED WITH SIX AMERICANS.
Captain Semmes commanded the Alabama, and off Cherbourg he sent a challenge to the Kearsarge, commanded by Captain Winslow, who accepted it, and so worked his vessel that the Alabama had to move round him in a circle, while he filled her up with iron, lead, copper, tin, German silver, glass, nails, putty, paint, varnishes, and dye-stuff. At the seventh rotation the Alabama ran up the white flag and sunk with a low mellow plunk. The crew was rescued by Captain Winslow and the English yacht Deerhound, the latter taking Semmes and starting for England.
This matter, however, was settled in after-years.
The care of the sick, the dying, and the dead in the Union armies was almost entirely under the eye of the merciful and charitable, loyal and loving members of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, whose work and its memory kept green in the hearts of the survivors and their children will be monument enough for the coming centuries.
In July, 1864, the debt of the country was two billion dollars and twenty cents. Two dollars and ninety cents in greenbacks would buy a reluctant gold dollar.