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Message:: [QUOTE="cwtokenman, post: 187273, member: 2100"]Nice post clinker! Hopefully you will not mind my adding a bit of additional information. The Civil War was one of two periods of American history that saw a tremendous need for private (token) coinage because of the reigning authority's inability to provide a circulating metallic medium of exchange sufficient for the needs of commerce. The other period was the Colonial/Early Republican era. The first significant wave of Civil War tokens appeared in late 1862, but there are a handful that were issued in 1860 & 1861, as well as 1865. The uncertainty of the outcome of the war lead to widespread hoarding of hard money, until there were virtually no metallic coins of any denomination in circulation. Since even a cent had considerable value at the time, coins were essential for conducting business. Merchants were forced to find alternate means of exchange. To illustrate, the mint had increased production of cents for several months, making $1000 to $2000 worth of cents per day and was sending a large portion of this unprecedented production to New York City, yet at the end of September, 1862, all of the banks in the state of New York (the most prosperous state in the nation) had only $943 in cents total. The banks were begging for more. By March, 1863, a 20 % premium was being paid for cents, which was the most commonly used denomination in commerce. Try to imagine such a situation and the hardships that would be created. I just returned from Guatemala a few days ago, and had a taste of large scale money problems there (among many others). The government has not printed any new money for a while. Banks are going out of business. Funds are being paid on private account withdrawals at a rate of only 20%. ATMs are empty. While there are 5 different centavo denominations for the quetzel, they are seldom seen. I have not experienced anything like that in the U.S. In addition to the small denomination government paper money called shinplasters, fractional currency was also issued by individual merchants in large quantities. Some merchants issued cardboard scrip. Postage stamps were also used - first with no protection (resulting in short life, as well as not easily used during foul weather -  secondly stamps were placed in waxed envelopes with the value written on the outside of the envelope, but it did not take long for some stamps to begin disappearing from the envelopes - third came the encased postage stamps where the stamp was encased in a metallic housing with a mica window to enable viewing of the stamp's denomination. The encased stamps worked well, but were expensive to the merchant as the full price of the stamp had to be paid as well as paying for the encasement of the stamp, but the value was only that of the stamp. A price many merchants were willing to pay to be able to conduct business. Production of encased postage stamp was greatly reduced when the Post Office Department ordered local post offices to stop selling stamps for use as currency after the high stamp sales of July and August, 1862 (stamps could not be produced fast enough to meet demand, and many post offices were frequently "out of stamps"). Then along comes the Civil War token, a cost effective substitute for the cent. Patriotic tokens cost a merchant about $4.00 per thousand, and close to face value for the custom store cards. Store cards had the advantage of having the advertising aspect, as well as a customer was more likely to return to that merchant's store when the time came to spend his token. Either type of token was beneficial to the merchant. Acceptance of this token was widespread, even to the extent that the government changed the U.S. cent to a similar size and composition mimicking that of cwts in 1864. It is estimated that between 25 to 50 million Civil War tokens were issued, although some think that there may have been closer to 100 million. It is commonly held that somewhere around 1 million of those are still in existence. Considering that a few merchants such as Oliver Boutwell, Gustav Lindenmueller (who had issued a million tokens himself), and Robinson & Ballou may make up as much as 20% of the market population of store cards, one can see why most of the rest of the 12,000+ varieties of cwts are rather scarce. I have rambled on for quite a while, but one more point I would like to bring out is that it is commonly believed that cwts are the reason behind the passage of laws (by an act of Congress in 1864) forbidding the private issue of money. It is said that the Third Avenue Railroad of New York approached Gustavus Lindenmueller about redemption of a large number of his tokens, which he laughingly refused to do. The railroad had no redress, but likely bent the ears of their political allies concerning their situation, and likely pushed for legislation to prevent such a situation from occurring again. I feel that cwts are extremely interesting, provide an opportunity to purchase true rarities for small amounts of money (I have purchased cwts with 5-10 known for under $10), as well as afford opportunity to discover new varieties.[/QUOTE]

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