2021-01-15 Other articles >

USA, state of South Carolina, 1873

Southerners ' dollars of the Reconstruction period

This 1873 bill has long been one of the rarest, but a few years ago, employees of the Treasury of the state of South Carolina found in their bins a bag with fully issued monetary obligations of the state. Having the numbers printed in red, and having already been signed by an authorized employee of the state Treasury, this money of the state of South Carolina, for unknown reasons, was never put into circulation and therefore retained its pressed form. Through the auction, they were sold as artifacts from the Reconstruction of the United States and sold to private collections, significantly exceeding their nominal value.

In the history of the southern states, the Reconstruction period from 1863 to 1877 was a time of elimination of the de facto remnants of slavery-something for which Southerners fought so fiercely in the Civil War. And the scope for Reconstruction in the state was extensive – it was South Carolina first announced its withdrawal from the United States after the election of President Abraham Lincoln and it was there, at Fort Sumter, the first shots were fired in an armed confrontation between North and South.

After the lost Civil War, South Carolina, along with the other states of the Confederacy, found itself in a difficult situation not only in the field of politics and ideology, but also in the economy and finance. The liberated black population of the South left the agricultural plantations en masse, moving to the cities in search of paid work. Beginning in 1873, the so-called 'long depression' triggered a decline in cotton prices, which reduced the income of the cotton-oriented South and reduced the tax revenues of the southern states.

When revenues are not sufficient to cover expenditures, the state can finance current expenditures by increasing public debt – both at the national and state levels. South Carolina, like other former members of the Confederacy, was forced to launch a mechanism of internal borrowing by issuing so – called “certificate of independence” - freely circulating debt obligations of the state.

Issued in 1873, South Carolina dollar bills are more like modern dollars than 'wildcat banknotes' they are already double-sided and green on both sides, and the foreground is dominated by the image of a man whose image was equally positively perceived in both the North and the South – the first US President George Washington. And happy black faces on both sides of the president – well, as without it, after all, the southern state.

The bills were printed by American Bank Note Co, New York, and are protected from forgery by micro-printing on a diamond-shaped signature panel.

Due to special circumstances, the cash bill ' State of South Carolina 50 dollars certificate of Independence No. 1226” combined what is rarely combined – the outgoing handwritten signature of an authorized person on the STATE TREASURER panel and the absence of the slightest traces of circulation on the bill itself.