$20 · Confederate States · 1864

The note

The $20 of 17 February 1864 (Pick 69, Criswell and Fricke T-67, Numista N#202478) is the twenty of the Confederate Treasury’s last issue. The black face on cream paper carries the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville — colonnade and cupola — at center and, at right, an oval portrait of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. The upper medallions read the redemption clause: “TWO YEARS AFTER THE RATIFICATION OF A TREATY OF PEACE” and “THE CONFEDERATE STATES AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” Beneath the vignette, “THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA” promises to pay TWENTY DOLLARS to the bearer on demand; the printed date is “Richmond, February 17th 1864.” TWENTY runs vertically at left; a scalloped 20 sits at upper right. Manuscript serial 74523 is written twice; the plate letter is A. The signatures are those of clerks “for Register” and “for Treasurer.” The imprint is Keatinge & Ball, Columbia, S.C. The blue back shows TWENTY on a guilloche field and a 20 in each corner. The upper-right margin of this piece carries a manuscript annotation “Joseph.” The collection note, circulated and unslabbed, is shown in a sleeve.

The issue

The Confederate Treasury opened almost empty. Southern wealth sat in land and enslaved people, not in coin; the Union blockade cut off the cotton exports that might have bought gold. Wikipedia dates the first bills of credit to March–April 1861, at Montgomery, Alabama, before the capital moved to Richmond. Christopher G. Memminger, secretary of the Treasury, turned to the press: taxes and bonds covered only a fraction of the war. The grayback was not a redemption in gold. It was a promise to pay if the South won.

Almost all the engravers and bank plates sat in New York and Philadelphia. Wikipedia records the first plates of the National Bank Note Company and of its New Orleans branch, the Southern Bank Note Company, until that route closed. Then Hoyer & Ludwig printed in Richmond, Keatinge & Ball — Edward Keatinge had engraved portraits for the Southern Bank Note Company; the firm moved from Richmond to Columbia in 1862 — and Archer & Daly, often by lithography, on uneven paper and plates under the blockade. The result was easy to copy. Samuel C. Upham of Philadelphia sold “fac-simile Confederate notes” as souvenirs from 1862; smugglers trimmed the imprint and passed them in the South.

The faces carried Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, Memminger, and Judah P. Benjamin, classical allegories, and scenes of Southern commerce and slavery. Wikipedia notes that five of the 72 types depicted enslaved people. This twenty is Stephens’s, with the Nashville Capitol, already in Union hands since February 1862. Manuscript signatures by clerks — the Treasury eventually hired as many as two hundred for each office, often women — were the rule on whole-dollar notes; only the 50-cent issue carried printed signatures. Early series promised payment six months after a treaty of peace. The 1864 clause, the one on this note, stretched redemption to two years.

Between 1861 and 1864 there were seven series. Wikipedia puts the authorized total at $1.7 billion. Unbacked by specie, the grayback sank with the bad news: by the end of 1863 it was worth about six cents in gold; by September 1864, three. The act of 17 February 1864 — the act behind this T-67 — authorized $200 million in new paper and tried to force the exchange of old notes at a discount. It did not restore trust. After Appomattox the paper lost all value as currency. Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment holds debts incurred in aid of rebellion illegal and void: neither the United States nor any state may assume them.

Scarcity and printage

Wikipedia puts T-67 at about 4,150,000 notes. The late 1864 issues — this twenty among them — survived in attics and boxes by the million; the Montgomery notes of 1861 are another scale. It is the most common Confederate twenty and often a collector’s first grayback in a type set. The Bank Note Museum numbers it P-69, without splitting printed series or plate letters. The market treats circulated examples as common; the keys are high grades, full margins, and the absence of cut cancels. This record does not invent a printage by series or letter.

Population

A PMG or PCGS census for serial 74523 has not been independently verified. The note is shown in a sleeve, circulated, unslabbed.