This broadside was published when the American Civil War was barely a year old yet it reveals to us the pressure that was already being placed on the Confederate economy. The notice is a tariff of food prices in an attempt stop an emerging black market. Wheat is decreed to be worth, depending on its quality, $1.75-$2.25 a barrel and prices for other staples such as salt, beef, corn, sugar, lard and coffee are listed. This broadsides promises that "extortioners, of any shape or kind, that they will be held to a strict accountability, both in person and property, for wrecking so mean and cowardly, an advantage over those whose natural protectors are on the tented field." It was published in Memphis, only two weeks before the city was captured by Union forces.

The Confederacy was always at a disadvantage economically to its northern neighbor from the beginning and an early Union blockade of Southern ports made this difference even more acute. Much of the South’s wealth came from cash crops that could not or would not be sold during the war and so the economy was effectively ruined. Allied to this, Northern agriculture was far more mechanized than Southern resulting in far greater average outputs per area and less input of labor. With the South the producer of two-thirds of the world’s cotton in 1860, their government was convinced that the world’s dependence on this phenomenon would mean diplomatic and possibly military help from the rest of the world. Unfortunately for them this never happened and what followed was isolation and severe pressure on their internal economy. Inflation became rampant as the war went on and the paper money printed by the Confederate Mint became worth less and less. It is said that in 1861, flour was $4 per barrel and coffee 12.5 cents per pound; by 1865, flour had rocketed to $425 per barrel and coffee to $50 per pound. The Southern economy, from a bad start was savaged in late 1864 as William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army marched west through Georgia, destroying anything of industrial and military use in its path.

On the flip side to this, the Union states had an economic leap forward during the war. The banking and monetary system was transformed and “big business” was mobilized into the war effort. Industrial output rocketed. The first income tax was brought in near the beginning of the war and the federal government began to make its presence felt in various areas of public life. The United States economy was changed forever as a result of government policy and the prosecution of the war.

As the first of a new type of war, where economic production was massively important to its conduct, this document on food prices lays bare the economic pressures and importance of this sector to the course of the conflict.

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