Years ago a lady gave me a shoe box full of CSA notes of all denominations and there were even a few printed by some railway company which, as far as I can remember, were authorised by the CSA to print.
A number of these notes had handwritten notes on them, ie, “worthless” ,“jst bak in?” and a few more I forget.
Not being a collector I searched the net and ended up shipping them to an American store in Washington, they paid me the princely sum of about £120 for around $5000 worth of CSA currency.
I should mention that most of these notes were in pristine condition altho’ a few were creased and torn.
[HIJACK]
UNLESS you count things like prosthetic limbs (which according to Ken Burns Civil War documentary accounted for 25% of the budget of the State of Mississippi during one year of the late 1860s) and veterans pensions, which were sometimes masked as “pensions for aged and or infirm white men who were of the age of military service from 1861-1865” (i.e. no actual saying “Confederate pensions”); other times they were flat out “Confederate pensions”. Old slaves of course got no pensions.
Confederate veterans were ineligible for pensions, which was a MAJOR hot potato issue in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Editorial after editorial and Congressional speech after sermon denounced the sad state of affairs for pensions for Union soldiers and the “refusal” of the government to do anything about it. (Harriet Tubman, for instance, got $8 per month as the widow of a Union private [she got nothing for her own role as laundress/nurse/spy/leading-troops-on-raids-in-SC], which even then was next to nothing.) The reason the Feds never upped the amount significantly was that almost every Southern/border-state Senator and Rep. blocked and filibustered and railed equally loud against increasing veterans benefits because their own constituents, regardless of whether they served a day or served at every campaign from Ft. Sumter to Bennett Place, received nothing but state pensions and for quite understandable reasons (ethics of the war completely aside) they’d be dead level damned before they’d see their state’s tax monies go to give $4 per month extra to the guys who burned grandma’s house or killed Uncle Roy and cost Big Daddy his arms. [/HIJACK]