Remembering The Confederacy: Collectors Snap Up Old CSA Bonds

You have very likely seen some Confederate bills, whether the real item on display somewhere, or a reproduction of the kind on sale in souvenir shops near Civil War battle sites.  Okay, have you at some time perhaps gotten close to a Confederate bond?

Confederate war bonds were used to raise funds for vitally needed food and supplies for the South’s troops in the course of the war. They constituted a primary method for the the CSA to raise money by borrowing from its citizens.  A person would loan funds to the CSA and in return receive a bond, a piece of paper containing a written guarantee to repay the bond purchaser–with a certain amount of–beginning on a date in the future.

With the CSA’s demise, those loans never got repaid, of course, and the bonds languished in drawers and trunks for as long as a century or more.

Nowadays, the bonds that survived these many decades are prized by collectors. And, you can turn around and sell Confederate bonds (and other paper collectibles) on eBay for an excellent profit.

If you’ve ever held a Confederate bond, you certainly grasp why people are buying and collecting them. To begin with, they are quite decorative. Physically, they’re pretty large–much more imposing than a Rebel dollar bill, for example–and highly decorated. They look great hanging on a wall. In addition, they give us a bit of our history. You would have to be fairly well off to acquire a genuine Civil War rifle these days, but Confederate bond certificates are still available of just about any War Between the States buff.

The Confederate government ordered a number of bond issues during the course of the war. For every issue, several different “denominations” (referring to the bond’s face value) were sold.  These all had a variety of differing decorations, and often even different pape colors, to distinguish them one from the other.

From an era in which even a mundane loan document was often an exercise in extreme ornamentation, the Confederacy’s bonds overflowed flourishes, including scenes such as fields and cities, fictional figures, and, naturally, generals and other heroes of the South.

On my wall in the room where I am writing this, I have a $1000 Confederate bond that I acquired and put in a frame a number of years ago. It is lovely, bearing text printed in ornamental italic script and, in its center, a vignette of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. You may recall that he languished and then died in the midst of maneuvers after being mistakenly shot by a Rebel soldier near Chancellorsville. Being one of the South’s greatest heroes, therefore it was entirely predictable that his image would come to grace a Confederate bond.

Many Confederate bonds were actually sold abroad, particularly in Britain, not to the increasingly devastated inhabitants of the South. My “Stonewall” bond came from a hoard turned up in England in the 1980s. These sorts of finds come to light occasionally, driving prices downward in the collectibles marketplace, however, the dip is usually not long lasting.  Of late I have read that Stonewall Jackson bonds are becoming hard to come across, so I’m very glad that I was able to acquire one at the time I did.

If your interest in Confederate bonds perhaps goes beyond merely holding on to and admiring their beauty and historical legacy, you will find them to be a wonderful entry ticket into what is known as “scripophily.” This is the hobby of collecting old financial certificates, which often includes bank instruments, stock certificates, railroad bonds and the like.

If you are a history buff–or if you’re just looking for a different sort of “art” with which to decorate your home–learning about Confederate war bonds and purchasing a handful select examples could transform itself into a fund and reasonably affordable pastime.  As well,It is also a great area to investigate if you cotton to the idea of earning money by selling “paper”–books, magazines, old prints and so on.

Leave it to an enterprising British woman to become the world’s authority on making money–even earning a living–selling pieces of American paper, not only old currency and bonds but even pages torn out from old magazines.  You can learn more about this woman’s surprising eBay paper selling method here.

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