I'm not a collector and have no interest in it. My brother's a civil war buff and I'd like to get him a Confederate bill and a US bill of the same year. I've found the confederate money, but I can't seem to find any 1864 US money. Surely the US had paper money in 1864, right? I'm not wanting anything of great value, it's just a gift for him to put on his wall. Where can I search? I've only found a couple of places online that sell currency. wscoins and mindproducts.com If anybody has any advice, i'd appreciate it. Thanks. Jared Drake hikear@yahoo.com
Paper money isn't "dated" each year. I don't believe you will find anything with a series date of 1864, you'll have to look for series of 1862 and I don't think you will find anything that will be cheap. The Confederate currency is inexpensive because once the Confederacy fell the paper money became worthless and was no longer used. The Federal currency continued in use and was wornout, replaced wth new issues and destroyed. Very little of the Federal currency survived while the Confederate currency was put away in large quantities. Your best bet is to go to the eBay coins catagory, look under Paper money US Large size notes and then do a search for 186*. I just did that and turned up 26 listings about half of which were real US paper currency. The cheapest is currently at $155. If you don't insist that the face value be a dollar or more then you might try searching under Fractional Currency instead of Large size notes. There you should be able to pick up some fractional currency notes from te 1860's for $25 or less. Depending of course on how nice you want the notes to be.
A series date is the year during which that series of paper currency was authorized. Thus, the paper currency used in 1864 was authorized in 1862. It may have been printed in 1864, but it would carry the series date 1862. The Confederate currency (as well as some foreign currencies) often listed the day and month, as well as the year. Anyone else on this forum is free to correct me, but I believe that 1862 was the year that the US government tightened its control of the currency. The spiraling costs of the war forced the government to print money in an inflationary way. To prevent the collapse of the US dollar (as happened to the CS dollar at the end of the war), the government began to manipulate the system in 1862. Salmon P. Chase, for all his failings, and they were legion, was an excellent Treasury Secretary.
