The colorful history of paper money before the Civil War
Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a
uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of
loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with
upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even
include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters
of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and
municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for
negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion
consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work,
goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R.
Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the
financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note
transactions.
Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction,
correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents,
legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans,
by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper
financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and
even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency
circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political
screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects
the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual
history.
The book demonstrates that the shift from state-regulated banks and
private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the
Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived
experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy. The
end result, Greenberg writes, has been a diminished public understanding
of how currency and the financial sector operate in our contemporary
era, from the 2008 recession to the rise of Bitcoin.
