The Confederates are reduced to laughable shifts for a circulating medium.

A Cairo letter says the stock of specie at Columbus is entirely exhausted, or to use the very significant expression of the informant, “there are not half dollars enough in Columbus to hold down the eyelids of those that die daily in the hospitals,” so that they have resorted to a very novel mode of making change.  A man goes to a shopkeeper, or sutler, and buys half a pound of coffee, for half a dollar, and tenders a one dollar bill of some of the Southern banks in payment, but as the seller has no “four bits” for change, he tears the bill in two parts, keeps one and returns the customer the other.  When the customer wants to spend the other half of his bill, he goes to the same merchant who takes it, pastes the two halves together, and sends it into the bank to be replaced by another.  The bills of the State Bank of South Carolina, the Tennessee banks, the confederate scrip, constitute all the “circulating medium” afloat, none of which can be sold for over fifty cents to the dollar for gold or silver.  The Tennessee banks have all gone to issuing shin plasters. – {Louisville Journal.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, February 1, 1862, p. 3