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Personal Overview
by Jules d'HemecourtIn the 1800s, my great-great-grandfather was the city surveyor for New Orleans, the leading port of the Confederacy. My mother is from Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln," where her father was an elected Republican official. I have, then, an almost genetic compulsion to delve continuously into the dynamics of the Civil War and to inquire into the forces that led to it, made it inevitable, and totally restructured the Republic thereafter. This quest has led me to books and photographs, battlefields and museums.
I remember years ago noticing a piece of paper money at Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans: It was a colorful red, unlike the green of today. The note was a $10 denomination of the Citizens' Bank of New Orleans, and it featured both English and French text. The $10 was written "dix," which is the French word for ten.
The caption that accompanied the note described New Orleans as a "divided city," occupied by both English-speaking and French-speaking groups. Businessmen were required to use either English or French currency, depending on where they were in the city. To make business easier, Citizens Bank began to print currency with both French and English text. The resulting notes were nicknamed "dixies," a name that was later used to refer to the entire South.
I was struck by the story, and had to have one of those dixies. Already a member of the American Numismatic Association, I called and asked for a reference. They gave me the name of Col. Grover C. Criswell, Jr., who bragged that he had handled millions of dollars in Confederate- era paper money. Indeed he had: Grover was a leading dealer and author in this area for decades. I contacted him, got to know him, and bought from him my first piece of what is called "obsolete" (no longer viable as currency) paper money. I got to know other collectors, attended shows, and read on the subject. I joined the Society of Paper Money Collectors and started putting together a collection to satisfy the history major in me.
My experience with paper money led me to curate an exhibit several years ago in Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University. The exhibit was titled: "When Cotton was King and Louisiana was Queen," and chronicled the history of Louisiana using paper currency and other financial instruments from the territorial period through Reconstruction.
The study of historical currency has been somewhat of a frontier experience, since only a portion of pre--Civil War notes have been cataloged. Bank notes are well recounted in the landmark four-volume set Standard Catalog of United States Obsolete Bank Notes, 1782--1866 by James A. Haxby. Southern state notes are reported by Colonel Criswell in Confederate and Southern States Currency.
While individual states have received attention (as in Mississippi Obsolete Paper Money and Scrip by L. Candler Leggett), whole categories of paper money have not been thoroughly investigated. In Louisiana alone hundreds of merchants in occupied New Orleans issued their own money or script. There are hundreds of parish notes unique to Louisiana (where governmental units followed the ecclesiastical parish lines of the Catholic Church). No definitive research has been conducted in these and numerous other categories. As a result, collectors and enthusiasts have had to learn on their own by handling notes at trade shows, observing auction write-ups, and talking to experienced collectors and dealers.
After examining hundreds and then thousands of these surviving paper money specimens, I could see that they opened an instructive window onto the period of their creation. One of the themes the material itself suggested is the depiction of the institution of slavery as presented in instruments of commerce.
The plantation aristocracy and financial infrastructure of banks determined how the agricultural South in the 1800s was portrayed on paper currency in circulation before, during, and after the Civil War. In reality, the work of the slaves could be literally backbreaking; a tight social and legal code made escape dangerous. The images on the notes in this exhibit, however, reflect a romanticized "slice of the life" picture of often smiling slaves attending to the harvest and day-to-day plantation activities.
It is not surprising that Southern currency depicted slavery, considering the institution produced more millionaires along the Mississippi River than anywhere else in the nation, accounting for New Orleans's commercial outpacing of New York for almost a decade.
Taken together these images present a visual template of "'Way Down Yonder in the Land of Cotton" as depicted by the influential individuals and institutions within the Confederacy.
"Until the lion writes his own story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." African Proverb
I would like to express my deep appreciation to veteran New Orleans dealer Clarence Rareshide whose knowledge of paper money is encyclopedic. Every new kid on the block needs a mentor, and he has been just that. He has shared without hesitation, and opened, for me, many doors to new discoveries.