It might have been a blisteringly hot August in Virginia, but citizens still needed fuel to cook (and it might be prudent to stock up on wood for the coming winter). On August 12th the editors of the Richmond Daily Dispatch compared wood vendors charging $35 per cord to Judas Iscariot. 150 years ago the newspaper published a rejoinder from one of the wood merchants, who detailed his costs.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch August 13, 1863:
The Price of wood.
To the Editors of the Dispatch:
In your paper of this date you (no doubt unintentionally) do great injustice to the wood dealers of this city, or at least to myself as one of them. You state as a fact, from unquestionable authority, that wood is put on the boats in the canal at a “total cost of $9.50 per cord,” and that it is sold at the basin for $35 per cord, thus leaving the impression on the public mind that the dealers (I being one of them,) realize a profit of $25.50 per cord. If this was so you ought to have marked the passage with twenty instead of three points of admiration. What it costs a farmer or wood chopper to put wood on the canal boats I do not know, but presume it cost twice $9.50 from the fact that I have an advertisement in your paper of this date offering to pay $16 per cord to haul wood six miles from town to my office on the basin bank, and have not yet had one offer to do so, although the advertisement has been in the paper one week. Another fact is that I pay from $27 to $28 per cord for oak wood at my yard on the basin bank, pay $4 to haul it out, 87½ cents per cord tax to the C. S. Government, 35 cents to the State, in all $33.22½, whilst I see the same delivered to customers as $34, leaving to me only 78 cents per cord profit to pay yard rent, ($400,) clerk’s hire, and to support a large family. If this is extortion, then the Devil help others, for I am sure God will not.
Richmond, August 12th, 1863.
