After years of suffering and conflict between the North and the South during the highest American casualty conflict ever recorded, the Civil War finally came to an end on April 9, 1865. Over 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died at the hands of each other and the North officially won the war. The Confederacy collapsed and slavery was abolished, leaving the South in ruins.
Monetarily, Confederate paper money was still heavily abundant and the United States government was actively trying to reduce the amount of paper that was expanding in Washington, D.C. When it comes to this accumulation of paper money, it was difficult to know what to keep and discard between the current and older currency. After the Civil War, a large number of Confederate paper notes were taken to Washington from Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate States capital. The money was used to compile a list of records by Raphael P. Thian in connection with the Confederate Treasury. Thian’s list was called the “Register of the Confederate Debt”.
Thian was able to come up with an incredible number of notes, including better ones among the more common kinds that managed to be readily available even half a century later. However, with this purging of notes, the Treasury Department still came up short and was not able to rid Washington of the Confederate currency. The notes remained there until the 1930s until they were finally transferred to the National Archives building. That hoard, however, did not land into the Smithsonian Institute until 1998.
The powers that be no doubt played a huge part in this transfer of the notes and the hoard in all contained nearly half a million Confederate notes. Most of the notes were dated 1862 and 1863, although the last year of issue (1864) was also found among them. The reason 1862 and 1863 notes were so abundant in this hoard, and even when they were properly circulating in the South, is because they were taxed out of existence and replaced by the series 1864. 1864 notes were supposed to be used to pay soldiers and tie up loose ends at the end of the Civil War, but the money mattered very little. By the time April 1865 rolled around, the war was over.
The below poem was written on the back of a Confederate note in June of 1865 by Major S.A. Jones in response to the end of the war and the Confederacy as he knew it.
Representing nothing on God’s earth now, And naught in the waters below it - As the pledge of a nation that passed away, Keep it dear friend and show it - Show it to those that will lend an ear To the tale that this trifle will tell; Of liberty born of a patriot’s dream, Of a storm-cradled nation that fell.
Too poor to possess the precious ores, And too much of a stranger to borrow, We issued to-day our “promise to pay” And hoped to redeem on the morrow. The days rolled on and weeks became years, But our coffers were empty still, Coin was so scarce the Treasury quaked If a dollar should drop in the till.
But the faith that was in us was strong indeed, Though our poverty well we discerned, And this little check represented the pay That our suffering veterans earned. They knew it had hardly a value in gold, Yet as gold our soldiers received it. It gazed in our eyes with a promise to pay And every true soldier believed it.
But our boys thought little of price or pay Or of bills that were over due - We knew if it bought our bread to-day ‘Twas the best our poor country could do. Keep it, it tells all our history over From the birth of the dream to its last, Modest and born of the Angel Hope Like our hope of success, It passed.
Source: Confederate States Paper Money: Civil War Currency From the South (12th Edition) by George S. Cuhaj & William Brandimore