At first glance, it looks all over the world like a large pane of funky old postage stamps. Today the pane, roughly 18 inches square, lies on a display case in the “history room” of the Old School History Museum (OSHM) in Eatonton’s Plaza Arts Center on Madison Avenue. (Actually, what visitors see is a laminated copy of the artifact, which is securely held elsewhere.)
Regardless, the pane does not carry stamps. Instead, it features a sheet of coupons for Georgia’s share of bonds sold to investors on behalf of the Confederate war effort.
Not a single coupon from this pane was ever redeemed, though. The seven-percent return on investment was considered good at the time; however, as the fine print notes in fancy engraving atop the coupons, the state of Georgia, at its discretion, would begin redeeming coupons five years after the successful conclusion of hostilities. And we all know how those hostilities ended.
Their May 1862 issuance by the state of Georgia carries a history with it, as does this pane of bonds. And both stories have touches of Putnam County in them.
By 1860, economic, social and political differences between the northern and southern sections of the fledgling United States had been brewing for decades. The South was agrarian, with an increasing dependence on large land holdings, slave labor and the Atlantic trade in cotton. Local and state interests distrusted giving up power to a central government, with at least one result being an increasingly hierarchical society.
Meanwhile, the North was becoming more industrialized and open to population growth, prompting immigrants to choose the opportunities it offered by a 5-to-1 margin.
That same year, Lincoln was elected, prompting South Carolina and then six other states to respond by seceding from the union. Armed conflict began with firing on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in April 1861, and by mid-summer, Putnam County had sent two companies off to the fight, expecting it to be over by summer’s end.
Of course, the fighting was far from over and would only get more savage over the next four years. And more costly. Neither side was prepared for paying to feed and supply an army in the field.
When the war started, the Confederate government was new and wed to states’ rights. Meanwhile, the Union government was broke, having lost its tariff revenues from the sale of cotton for overseas goods. It was financing daily operations with short-term bonds (the equivalent of financing a government with a credit card). Neither government had the authority to raise taxes and neither had a real currency, which was largely in the hands of private banks and their bank notes, essentially IOUs that people used for trade.
Roger Lowenstein’s recent book, Ways and Means, has been touted as a new look at the Civil War, describing the financing of the war, mainly from the Northern perspective, and the roles of Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase.
But for comparative purposes, Lowenstein also considers the ideological constraints of the Confederacy and the problems faced by its secretary of the treasury, Christopher Memminger. One reviewer went so far as to say, “The war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefield.”
So where does the OSHM’s pane of coupons fit into all this?
By the fall of 1861, it was obvious the Confederacy needed money but had to ask the states to raise it. Georgia finally went along with the first—and probably only—an effort by hard-money conservatives to sell bonds to investors. In May 1862, its printed bonds were sent to banks in the state’s two largest cities: Savannah (all of 30,000 souls) and Augusta (20,000). The pane in the Eatonton museum was sold to an unnamed investor by the Bank of Augusta. The bank (definitely) and its records (apparently), did not recover from the war. The investor’s name appears to have been lost, too.
Meanwhile, Memminger also resorted to increasingly desperate methods of raising money, including an unproductive income tax and, quite frankly, just running the printing presses. The income tax covered only seven percent of the Confederacy’s spending and by the end of the war inflation had reduced a Confederate dollar’s worth to only two percent of its stated value in gold.
In 1863, Memminger appointed an old client, William Butler Johnston of Macon, to head up the Confederacy’s Georgia depository in Macon, which would become the Confederacy’s second-largest depository after Richmond.
Johnston was born in Eatonton in 1809, went to New York City in 1829 to learn watchmaking and the jeweler’s trade, then set up business three years later in Macon. He earned his first fortune selling swords to the U.S. government for the Indian wars of the 1830s and the Mexican War of 1846-47, all the while becoming involved in banking, three railroads (including what would become the Central of Georgia railroad), utilities (private gas and water companies), and insurance (Cotton States Insurance).
Before, during and after the war Johnston was an entrepreneur and financier, an investment banker in a time and place when others were growing crops. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for the five-year construction of a 24-room Macon mansion with an intricate ventilation system adorned with artworks and statuary, now known as the Hay House after a later owner.
So how did the pane of Confederate coupons come to the Old School History Museum? A struggling artist looking for cheap frames paid $5 for the framed coupons several years back at an Eatonton yard sale. He kept the frame and offered the pane to the museum. Check it out sometime.