Confederate defeat at Gettysburg reached the public, the Confederate currency depreciated 20%. Confederate President Jefferson Davis asked private citizens to restore the value of the Confederate dollar by mutually agreeing to sell and buy items only at reduced prices. In October 1863, Confederate States Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas said that a Confederate soldier received per month in pay, which was worth the same as had been worth at the beginning of the war. In September 1864, one Confederate dollar was worth the same as three cents of United States currency. People tried to retain their wealth by buying gold to such an extent that, in Richmond, it was impossible to find someone who would sell their gold. At Christmas 1864, the Confederate dollar's worth had decreased to such an extent that a turkey sold for and a ham for . By the war's end, a cake of soap could sell for as much as , and an ordinary suit of clothes was ,700. Near the end of the war, the currency became practically worthless as a medium of exchange. This was because, for the most part, Confederate currency were bills of credit, as in the Revolutionary War, not secured or backed by any assets. The only two exceptions were in Mississippi, where in 1862 a series of notes were issued with the backing of cotton stored by the state's planters and in Florida, where notes were backed, in theory, by public lands. Just as the currency issued by the Continental Congress was deemed worthless (witness the phrase "not worth a Continental;" and see The Federalist Papers, which also addressed this issue in the run-up to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution) because they were not backed by any hard assets, this too became the case with Confederate currency. Even though gold and silver may have been scarce, some economic historians have suggested that the currency would have retained a relatively material degree of value, and for a longer period of time, had it been backed by hard goods the Confederacy did have, such as cotton or tobacco. When the Confederacy ceased to exist as a political entity at the end of the war, the money lost all value as fiat currency. Designs The Confederacy, being limited in skilled engravers and printers as well as secure printing facilities, often had to make do with unrelated designs in early banknote issues.