Sept. 2nd, 1861 Confederate States Of America $5 Dollar Bill CT-33

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All of these notes are guaranteed to be 100% authentic. NO COPIES! Free shipping is for U.S. address only. All others will have to pay for their shipping. and a money back guarantee. Serial No. 2278, Plate J, Total Notes Issued unknown, Rarity? CT-33/250A,1861 $5 MEMMINGER Center MINERVA Right., Green tint, Printed signatures & serial numbers, no "OR" below eight percent. I t was the early days of the Civil War, March 1862. The public on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, naturally enough, was hungry for any news about this upstart, self-proclaimed Confederate States of America. It seemed that they were actually serious, having elected a Congress and President, written a constitution, adopting a flag.They’d even started printing money! The Philadelphia Inquirer ,one of the major newspapers of the day, was able to get its hands on one of the new bills that had made its way though the lines, and it printed an image of the new currency. This in itself was a rather big deal since newspapers didn’t usually contain images of any kind.You’d find them in the big weeklies out of New York— Leslie’s Illustrated and Harper’s Weekly —but the daily papers as a rule didn’t carry illustrations. Each image had to be painstakingly engraved and that was a big deal since it took both time and money (actual photographs wouldn’t begin to appear in daily papers for another 60 years or so). So when the image of this new Confederate currency hit the streets it was a bit of a sensation from several points of view. That edition sold out almost immediately. All this came to the notice of one of Philadelphia’s merchants/entrepreneurs. Samuel Curtis Upham (February 2, 1819-June 29, 1885) owned and ran a successful shop on Chestnut Street, selling stationery and toiletries. He produced and sold his own patent medicines (“Upham’s Pimple Banisher”) for example. And he was doing well with patriotic envelopes, too. Each of these would carry a political cartoon that would ridicule Jefferson Davis or some facet of these new Confederate States, or would be emblazoned with eagles and shields, or the likeness of Columbia. The story about the new money got him to thinking. So he paid a call upon the editorial offices of the Inquirer and purchased the plates used to print the image of the new currency. And he went into the counterfeiting business. He didn’t call his paper counterfeit, of course. Counterfeiting was illegal. He added a line to the bottom of the notes: “Fac-similie (sic) Confederate Notes Sold, Wholesale and Retail. By S.C. Upham, 403 Chestnut Street,Phil.” The first batch was of a $5 note, and these were sold for a penny each. They were to be viewed as novelties; something fun.“Mementos of the Rebellion” is how Upham referred to them in his advertisements in the New York Tribune and Harper’s Weekly . Other entrepreneurs got in on the fun. By simply clipping off the “fac-similie” bit, Upham’s notes were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Cotton speculators started passing them as real. And they were being accepted in the South. Upham was onto something. He expanded his offerings to include other denominations and eventually Confederate postage stamps. By the end of the war, he had printed nearly $15-million in fake Confederate currency (equal to about 3% of the entire CSA money supply). He produced a quality product.In fact, many of his notes were better than the authentic ones. His paper was better. And he had access to engravers more highly skilled than the ones employed by the Confederacy. There are stories of how Southrons, when confronted with both legitimate and counterfeit bills would accept the counterfeits just because they looked more real than the genuine articles. This came to the attention of officials in Richmond. Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Memminger wrote to Vice President Alexander Stephens, in August 1862,of the growing number of counterfeit bills in circulation and “the fact that they ... read more

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