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
