One from Columbia, S.C., offered me two dollars and a half a "thousand" for composition.

As the highest price for such work that I had received before enlisting was thirty cents a thousand, this seemed a chance to accumulate untold wealth.

Since a man working in day time can set from thirty-five to fifty "thousand" a week, this would make weekly wages run from eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents to one hundred and twenty-five dollars--but it was in Confederate money, then worth from ten to twenty cents on the dollar.
Still better offers were made to iron workers of all kinds, to shoemakers, tanners, weavers, tailors, hatters, engineers, machinists, millers, railroad men, and similar tradesmen.

Any of these could have made a handsome thing by accepting the offers made them almost weekly.
As nearly all in the prison had useful trades, it would have been of immense benefit to the Confederacy if they could have been induced to work at them.

There is no measuring the benefit it would have been to the Southern cause if all the hundreds of tanners and shoemakers in the Stockade could have, been persuaded to go outside and labor in providing leather and shoes for the almost shoeless people and soldiery.