Oct 5 • Love
deep layers of meaning through its design
This banknote is more than a relic — it carries deep layers of meaning through its design, context, and imperfections.
- Issuance and promise: This is a $100 bill from 1862, issued by the Confederate States of America. In its text it reads: “Six months after the Ratification of a Treaty of Peace … will pay to bearer One Hundred Dollars … with interest at two cents per day.”
- No backing, just faith: The Confederacy printed this currency without gold or silver reserves, relying solely on confidence that they could redeem it later — a promise ultimately broken.
- Multiple types, subtle variations: Confederate $100 bills from this era are categorized by “types” (T-numbers). For example, T-39 features a “milkmaid and train with straight steam” vignette, while T-40 shows “diffused steam” versions of the locomotive.
- Imagery and meaning: On many issues, a milkmaid or female figure stands at one side, symbolizing rural life and domesticity. A locomotive (steam engine) — a strong symbol of industrial ambition, movement, progress. In times of war and reconstruction, the train suggests hope of connection, expansion, change. In some versions (like T-41, for example), the central vignette features enslaved laborers working a cotton field, a stark reminder of the economic foundations and moral fault lines of that society. Allegorical figures or “Columbia”-type women, graceful robes, ornamental flora — all part of the nineteenth-century tradition of blending realism and idealism in banknote design.
- Uniqueness in the hand inscribed number: The handwritten serial number 27591 makes your note singular in a sea of hundreds — no two were exactly alike.
- Economy, inflation, decline: During the war, the Confederacy repeatedly printed more notes, leading to rampant inflation and loss of confidence. By war’s end, many Confederate notes were worthless.
- Artistry in engraving: Each banknote was engraved with great skill — the tiny details in the border, in the locomotive’s wheels, in the folds of robes, the shading — turning what is nominally currency into miniature art.
- Symbolic tension: The note embodies paradox: promise and failure; wealth and worthlessness; ambition and collapse. It is aesthetic and urgent, beautiful and haunted.
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deep layers of meaning through its design
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