Dear group;
With all due respect, I find various purported figures to be out of line with actual numbers. Very much out of line, as it were. The gross export of textiles(upland cotton) for the ENTIRE state of the North Carolina for the year 1860 was 45,514 bales with each bale weighing 477lbs. and an average market price of 12.4 cents per pound, for a total of $5,597,594.80USD. Therefore, it seem to be rather incredible that a single man, or even family, would have been able to amass a $50,000,000.00 fortune in a single lifetime, taking into account that the South would have to wait until 1870 to see it's cotton exports rise once more to their former 1860 levels. In other words, entire financial structures went bankrupt, or approached near insolvency during and immediately after the Civil War.
That there may have been 37 million US dollars aboard a train, during a time when the nations' entire public debt was under $65,000,000.00USD seems to be highly improbable, at best.
Now, if we may, let us factor in the alleged lost gold itself, shall we? With gold prices fixed at $20.00USD per ounce, and there being 12 troy ounces per troy pound, $50,000,000 USD in gold in 1860 would translate into, hold onto your seats everyone, TWO MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND OUNCES! That's 208,334 Troy POUNDS of gold! All I can say is, the hole they would have had to dig in order to bury all of this alleged gold in must have been a big one!
Again, that $37,000,000USD worth of gold on board a train translates into 1,850,000 troy ounces, which in turn translates into 154,166 troy pounds. It's highly doubtful that any single locomotive engine at that time would have been able to pull away from the station with that amount of weight onboard, to say nothing of having to ascend a grade.
And now, for the purpose of illustrating a point, let us assume for just a moment that there actually was 37,000,000$ in gold aboard a train. An average mule can carry 80 pounds Troy lbs. all day without overly tiring, so that means that it would have taken 1,927 mules just to be able to transport all of this imaginary wealth from one place to another! That'd be one long mule train, my friends!
And what of these so-called 'diaries' which seem to be such a popular fount of information? Have any of them been authenticated as genuine, and if so, who performed the authentication and what methods did they use to determine the validity of these diaries? It may be assumed that less than one person in hundred keeps an actual diary in our time and back in the 1800s that number would have been far lower, due to high rate of illiteracy, the high cost of pens, inks, paper, etc.
It seems odd to me that there are so many 'diaries' floating around which just happen to provide the reader with salicious bits of information, such as there being $37,000,000 tucked safely away aboard a train. That a young lady would have been privy to such information, let alone have been permitted to board a train that most assuredly would have been guarded to the teeth, seems highly likely.
And now, for an explanation of the minds' thought processes, everyone. Once an average person reads a figure such as $50,000,000.00USD, the mind automatically surges forward, and when coupled with a likely and difficult to disprove story, we now have sowed the seeds of a treasure tale. Once we factor in our acceptance of large numerical figures, from our higher standard of living, and from seeing such high amounts, such as a $10,000,000 lottery jackpot, most people today will not take into consideration what the sum of $1,000,000.00 represented back in the 1860s.
To make such claims, there would need to be a substantial documentation to back the claims up with, yet strangely enough, there seems to be no official state or bank records of the Banks of Tennessee losing, misplacing, overlooking or having $600,000 dollars purloined from them. The same may been stated of the banks of South Carolina. As an aside, Cheraw happens to be in South Carolina and not in North Carolina. Again, oddly enough, the towns' official records state that while Shermans' Union troops did in fact occupy the town, they left it amazingly intact, albeit there was an accidential explosion in the business district, however damage was minimal and the Union troops even assisted the towns' citizenry in extinguishing the flames. Again, there exists no known public records of any ransacking of the bank by Union troops or anyone else.
Once again, when we examine the historical plats of the actual township in the 1860s, we may soon discover that the population of Cheraw, South Carolina was less than 1,000 inhabitants. This would mean, that in order for the bank of Cheraw, South Carolina to have had $200,000 on deposits, that every man, woman and child in the township would have had to had an average of $200.00 deposited in the bank proper. This would seem to be highly improbable, taking into account the monthly average wage scale of the period, not to mention the fact that the South was still struggling from the effects of the Civil War.
To touch on the subject of cotton harvesting in India during the American Civil War for just a moment, it seems that once more, the facts of the matter have been reversed. During the time of the Civil War, India was a British colony, and as such, was a subject of the King of England. When American cotton production dried up because of the Civil War, India drastically increased it's own cotton production, however, practically none of the profits realized from this increased production were realized in India, due to heavy taxes levied against cotton imports by the Crown of England.
Mahatma Ghandi, who was an Indian patriot, summed it all up very neatly in a statement:
1)English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
2)This cotton is shipped on British bottoms, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
3)The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England.
4)The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
5)The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.
And therein lay the crux of the cotton dilemna in India during the Civil War. It would seem that ones who were profiting the most from the dwindling cotton exports caused by the Civil War were not the citizens of India, rather the British Crown and the British textile mills.
On another note pretaining to India, it has been surmised that perhaps 50% of all gold wrested from the bowels of the Earth currently resides in India, however it is not stashed away in caches in the ground, or even in bank vaults, rather it is worn as jewelry by the ladies. As a part of the Hindu religion, gold is considered to be a sacred metal, as is in evidence by the ornate jewelry and the lavish use of gold leaf on temples, statues and religious buildings.
And now I may close this discourse as all of my main points have been touched upon.
Your friend;
LAMAR
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