SUBSCRIPTION RATES RAISED
The scarcity of paper greatly increased subscription rates. The prices asked by a few sheets may be mentioned by way of illustration. During 1864 the subscription price of The Macon Daily Telegraph, published by Joseph Clisby, was forty-eight dollars a year; in October, 1864, it raised its subscription price to sixty dollars a year; in December, 1864, it went to seventy- two dollars a year; in January, 1865, it again advanced the price to ninety-six dollars a year; in March, 1865, it boosted the price to one hundred and twenty dollars a year. In view of the fact that The Macon Daily Telegraph was often a small one- page sheet, such a subscription price seems unusually high. The Memphis Appeal, though it continued to be sold at half-price to Confederate soldiers, advanced its regular subscription price in June, 1863, to two dollars and a half per month; again in July to three dollars a month; still again in January of the next year to four dollars a month; and once again in March to five dollars a month these prices were for coin currency and not for paper money. The daily edition of The Georgia Journal and Messen- ger, published at Macon by Knowles & Rose, charged seventy- two dollars a year at the beginning of the war, and later advanced its rate as paper became more scarce.
Evidently the high prices charged for single copies of news- papers must have aroused numerous protests. In one of its wall- paper editions, June 18, 1863, The Citizen, of Vicksburg, printed an item on "The Price of Our Paper and the News Boys," in which the following explanation was given: "The price of our paper at the office is twenty-five cents. Newsboys who charge fifty cents on the streets are not authorized by us to sell at that price; and those who object to the extortion should call at the office and get their papers at first cost. We cannot control the trade nor the prices of newsboys and can only sell our papers to them at the same prices that we get from those who call at the office."
Some of the papers in the South avoided total suspension by leading a peripatetic career. Box cars were transformed into printing-offices and taken from place to place with ea
