March
6, 2001
Interpreting
the Images of Slavery on the Confederacy's Money
By
DAVID FIRESTONE
CHARLESTON,
S.C. — Without a magnifying glass, it is difficult to see the
faces on the slaves as they harvest cotton and hoist overflowing
baskets to their shoulders. Minutely engraved on the tattered
currency of the old South, the images are faded and smudged, and
their message has languished in the vaults of collectors.
 |
About
four years ago, a collector took one of the old
Confederate bank notes into a North Charleston blueprint
shop and asked an employee, John W. Jones, to have it
enlarged. Mr. Jones, an artist and commercial illustrator
who frequently paints African-American themes, studied the
engraving on the note and was struck by the Confederacy's
decision to use as its monetary symbol an accomplished
image of a black field hand straining at the cotton
harvest.
Prowling
through hobby shops and Internet sites, he realized that
scenes of slave labor were in fact a prevailing image on
Southern currency during the mid-19th century. |
Where
other states and nations used historical scenes or pictures of
national leaders and resources on their money, the Confederate
states often chose to portray themselves as the land of slaves,
usually contented and sometimes smiling.
But
these historical documents had to be enlarged to be appreciated.
Because very few visual depictions of slavery were made at the
time, Mr. Jones got out his acrylics and canvas and began
painting these vignettes as full-size works, adding nothing but
color.
 |
An
exhibition of about 30 of his paintings opened in February
at the College of Charleston in its Avery Research Center
for African-American History and Culture, and it has been
drawing a steady audience of both blacks and whites.
"We
built the economy of the South, and here you have the
banks saying so," said Mr. Jones, who now works in a
studio in Columbia. |
"But
no one had seen these images. No one realized what was on the
bills."
Numismatists
have long known about the bills' imagery, but historians have
recently begun taking a closer look at it as a statement of the
South's economic priorities during the war.
 |
An
Internet exhibition created last year by the United States
Civil War Center at Louisiana State University has more
than 75 engravings of slavery from Confederate paper
money. (The exhibition can be seen at www.cwc.lsu.edu/BeyondFaceValue.)
At
the time, money was printed both by the Confederate States
of America and by the banks of the individual Southern
states. |
Several
scholars who contributed to the online project noted that
Southern banks enshrined slavery in their monetary system to
remind those who came in contact with their bills that the
institution was the region's economic bedrock.
"Slaves
were the capital of the South," said Henry N. McCarl, an
economics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
and a numismatist who contributed an essay and part of his
collection to the online exhibition. "Cultures put on their
money objects that are important to them and their economy, and
the South had an interest in showing to the world that the
slaves were well treated and happy."
 |
There
are, of course, no scenes of slaves being mistreated on
the bills, and in a few close-ups they are smiling as they
move in ragged clothes and bare feet through the cotton
fields. In one scene painted by Mr. Jones from a South
Carolina $5 bill, a white overseer supervises a group of
slaves from his horse with his whip in his hand; in
another, a white man and woman gaze down at a quartet of
bent-over slaves working with scythes in a wheat field. |
The
pictures, like the Confederacy itself, are almost entirely
agrarian and usually romanticized, etched by engravers who are
not now identifiable.
 |
Slaves
are shown loading sugar cane onto wagons and leading
cattle and very frequently working with cotton: planting
it, picking it, hauling it, baling it.
The
cotton images are repeated so often they become
iconographic, and some of the bills show classical
goddesses of liberty or prosperity — even George
Washington — gazing at the cotton scenes with admiration
and blessing. |
In
one allegorical picture painted by Mr. Jones from a Georgia
Savings Bank bill, a white figure that is apparently that of
Moneta, the Roman goddess of money, is in the foreground holding
a cotton plant as bags of gold spill open at her feet.
In
the background, an overseer on a horse supervises a field of
slaves as a train arrives to pick up their harvest.
"I
was particularly intrigued by that one," said Mr. Jones,
most of whose paintings in the series have been snapped up by
collectors. "The slaves are doing the work, and she's got
the money."
 |
John
M. Coski, historian and library director at the Museum of
the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., said that there were
more vignettes from classical mythology than of slaves on
Southern currency, and that the banks were not so much
making a grand statement about slavery as they were simply
depicting their world. But several African-American
scholars disagree about the statement being made by the
money. |
"We
did this exhibit because of what John showed us about the
South," said W. Marvin Dulaney, director of the Avery
Research Center and a history professor at the College of
Charleston. "We hear a lot these days about how the
Confederacy was really about states' rights and not slavery. But
the currency itself tells the truth. It shows how they saw us,
and how they wanted to keep seeing us."
 |
John W. Jones--born
May 11, 1950 in Columbia, S.C. Jones--has been a freelance artist and
illustrator for more than 20 years. His former clients include Time Life
Books, IBM, Westinghouse, Rubbermaid, NASA, Gadded Space and Flight
Center, and the U.S. Postal Service. Jones explores life through art. This multi-talented artist uses
oils, acrylics and watercolors for his painting. Striving for detail in
light and reflection, he meticulously draws each painting first, then
layers it with color, resulting in very realistic interpretations of
everyday life and landscapes, as well as historical insights into our
past.
Jones, who graduated from high school in 1968 and self-taught, has
been drawing since early childhood. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1970,
Jones served in the Vietnam War, where he also took illustration classes
in military School. |
Source: www.colorsofmoney.com
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update 7 July 2008 |
