Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War

3. “The Pledge of a Nation That’s Dead and Gone”: The Confederate Nation on the Face of Money

3 “ThePledgeofaNationThat’sDeadandGone” The Confederate Nation on the Face of Money Representing nothing on God’s earth now And naught in the waters below it, The pledge of a nation that’s dead and gone Keep it, dear friend, and show it Show it to those who will lend an ear To the tale that this paper can tell Of liberty born of the patriot’s dream, Of a storm-cradled nation that fell Sidney Alroy Jonas, “The Lost Cause” (June 2, 1865) Any nation must meet a variety of conditions before its self-determination can be fully realized. We have discussed to this point the need for a national frame of government—in the American tradition enshrined in a written Constitution—as well as a national literature, and we will discuss the need for settled territoriality and military defense, those areas in which the Confederacy most signally failed. A fully realized nation, however, also requires a stable national economy and monetary system. In that respect as well, the Confederate American experience was problematic . The burdens of war pressed hard on the civilian populations of the Confederate states, and bread riots shook Southern cities, beginning at the end of 1862 in Greenville, Alabama, and spreading into Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and even Texas through the subsequent months.1 Prices of household goods started to rise exponentially , and wages were by no means keeping pace.2 Fissures started to appear as well in Confederate politics, as Vice President Alexander Ste- “the pledge of a nation that’s dead and gone” 71 phens “was spending less and less of his time presiding over the Senate and more and more time at home in Georgia condemning President Davis ’s alleged usurpations of power in general and those that limited the state’s rights of Georgia in particular.”3 Certainly, Confederate economics were not a positive factor in the quest for independence and nationhood. As with so much else related to wartime Confederate nationalism, however, it is important to look past the failures and try to discern what was intended, rather than what was achieved. On the face of their Treasury notes—analogous to a certain extent to modern banknotes—purveyors of Confederate nationalism depicted a changing image of their new nation, one that shifted as the war progressed from antebellum visions of an agrarian and peaceful Worthy Southron accompanied by the faithful Silent Slave, to a bellum vision of a more martial and distinctively Southern Confederate American in defense of one’s cause and nation. The change over time seen in this venue delineates a portion of the progression of the imagined Confederacy from its antecedents to its wartime form. Reviewing the history of Confederate currency and reading them as a unified text, several conclusions are immediately apparent. In particular , even casual observation indicates that the iconographic tone of banknote designs changed dramatically with the fifth congressional issue of currency in October 1862. Prior to that time, the dominant images on banknotes suggested a collection of attributes that connect under the heading of the virtues of the Worthy Southron and an antebellum vision of Confederate Americanism. Under this umbrella are three subcategories : Classical and Allegorical Allusions, Commercial Agriculture, and American History.4 This iconographic trend points to the conclusion that the South was a peaceful agrarian nation with strong roots in the traditional American virtues—liberty, justice, and commerce. These last ideas are significant, first because Southern virtues were often buttressed with identifiably American images, and second because the images of agriculture depicted tend to be commercial in nature.5 This is not something we habitually associate with the Southern plantation system, as it is easy to focus on the inequities of slavery and the paternalistic overtones of proslavery rhetoric and forget that planters were in business to make money. As Lacy K. Ford Jr. noted in his seminal work, Origins of Southern Radicalism, Southern agriculture was basically profitable, and planters were rational economic investors who diversified their holdings into confederate visions 72 commerce and industry as well as slavery.6 This coincides with the image of the South and the Confederacy that emerged in the currency issues of 1861 and 1862, but challenges the historiographical school that argue that planters were quasifeudal seigneurs locked in a premodern economic system. Such a debate is beyond our scope, but we must concede that the prevalence of railway trains, ships, sailors...