I offer this from "Fighting for the Confederacy", the memoirs of Gen. E. Porter Alexander, page 507:

"Just before I went on furlough in January, I remember buying a pair of boots, at a great bargain, from a shoemaker who had made them to order, but his customer was an officer who by some fortune of war did not come for them. And so the shoemaker offered them to me, he said, for $200 less than his regular price or for only $500. And as one of my friends had recently paid $700 for a pair, & the boots were a good fit I thought myself very lucky to save that much money on a single pair of boots."

Alexander doesn't indicate if this was US or CS currency, but the fact that prices of goods in the Richmond area had inflated to that point was striking. In 1864, a pair of cobbler made boots was nye onto impossible for the common CS soldier to afford. I wonder what his wife said when she saw that receipt?  

--Last edited by mstuart on 2009-02-11 10:34:00 --

That's almost certainly CS dollars.  By that point of the war US currency was wildly fibrillating, with a dollar in gold bringing as much as two in paper, but the Confederate dollar was in freefall.  James Jones "Diary of a Rebel War Clerk" gives prices for consumer goods on pretty much a monthly basis through the war.  By midsummer '64 a private's monthly salary was good for about two heads of cabbage.  

Some day I'd like to track the value of both dollars against gold over the course of the war -- the data are out there -- but I just haven't had time.  It would really feed some good first person though -- imagine being a soldier who'd signed up for a year, then got conscrïpted, then had to watch his intermittently-paid salary sink like a stone.

Marc,

It got to the point the Privates were better dressed then their Officers. Eventually, the Confederate QM allowed Officers to buy cloth from the Government and finally buy finished uniforms. By late War, a lot of Confederate company grade Officers, were wearing the same uniforms as their soldiers.

I have read accounts where senior Officers, rented apartments in Petersburg, where they would keep their dress uniforms. God only knows what they were wearing in the trenches.  

Michael:

Interestingly, Alexander mentions on the next pages that he had $700 in a Richmond bank account and asked one of his friends to withdraw it and buy gold. The friend came back with a $10 gold piece, which Alexander gave to his "rented" servant as payment after the surrender.

While I gripe about the cost of groceries now, I can only imagine the headaches they had. Tough times, and tougher people.

Part of the reason for the runaway inflation was that the Confederate Congress was not able to tie their currency to hard specie. The north was able to at least establish a 70% connection to gold, thereby mitigating the worst of it. Federals didn't completely escape it though. I'm reading Hard Marching Every Day and Fisk talks about being in New York to help quell the draft riots. He appreciated the fact that being so far away from the front his money was worth fives times what it would be closer to the lines.  

--Last edited by Private Glover on 2009-02-11 18:56:30 --

I finished Hard Marching Everyday about a month ago.  It is a great book that gives perspective indeed of the volume of marching hither & yon versus the amount of actual fighting time of some regiments.
Also, the stories of the draft riots was interesting as was a few Fisk related where sutlers were "relieved" of their goods by mobs of soldiers.