Mr. Ely, the Yankee member of Congress, who has been in
confinement here since the battle of Manassas, has been exchanged for Mr.
Faulkner, late Minister to France, who was captured on his return from Europe.
Mr. Ely smiled at the brown paper on which I had written his passport. I told
him it was Southern manufacture, and although at present in a crude condition,
it was in the process of improvement, and that “necessity was the mother of invention.”
The necessity imposed on us by the blockade would ultimately redound to our
advantage, and might injure the country inflicting it by diminishing its own
products. He smiled again, and said he had no doubt we should rise to the
dignity of white paper.
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 102
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