At first glance, they look for all the world like a large pane of funky old postage stamps.

Today the pane, roughly 18” by 18”, lies on a display case in the third room or “history gallery” of the Old School History Museum in Eatonton’s Plaza Arts Center on Madison Avenue. (What visitors see is a laminated copy of the real deal, which is held elsewhere.)

However, the pane does not carry stamps. They are 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. While the 7 percent return on investment was considered good at the time, redemption was contingent on the ending of the war.

Their May 1862 issuance by the state of Georgia carries a history with it, as does this one particular pane. Both stories have touches of Putnam County in them.

The economic, social, and political differences between the northern and southern sections of the fledgling United States had been brewing for decades by 1860. The South was agrarian, with its dependence on land holding and slave labor; strongly distrustful of a central government, and increasingly hierarchical socially. The North was becoming much more industrialized, and immigrants by a 5-to-1 margin chose the opportunities it offered.

In 1860, Lincoln was elected, South Carolina and then six other states seceded from the union, and armed conflict began with the firing on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in April 1861. By mid-summer, Putnam County had quickly sent two companies off to the fight before it was all over.

The trouble was the fighting was not only not over by the end of the summer; it would get even more savage and last for four more years.

And more costly. How did the two governments plan to pay for feeding and arming and moving an army in the field? Neither was prepared.

When the war started, the Confederate government was new and wed to states rights. 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 government with a credit card.) Neither had the authority to raise taxes. Neither had a real currency, which was largely in the hands of private banks and their bank notes, essentially IOUs which people used for trade.

Ways and Means, a recent book by Roger Lowenstein, has been touted as a new look at our Civil War (an achievement in itself, given all the ink spilled over the years.) It is about the financing of the war, mainly from the Northern perspective and the roles of Lincoln and his secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, but also for comparative purposes, 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 pane of coupons fit into all of 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 – effort by the 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 (all of 20,000). The pane in the museum here 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 particular investor’s name appears to be lost as well.

Meanwhile, Memminger was resorting to other, increasingly desperate methods of raising money – an unproductive income tax and, frankly, just running the printing presses. The income tax produced only 7 percent of the Confederacy’s spending, and by the end of the war, inflation had rendered the Confederate dollar to only 2 percent of its stated value in gold.

In 1863 he appointed an old client, William Butler Johnston of Macon, to head up the Confederacy’s Georgia depository. It 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, and set up business in Macon in 1832. 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, railroads (three, including what would become the Central of Georgia railroad), utilities (private gas and water companies). Before, during, and after the war Johnston was an entrepreneur and financier, in other words, an investment banker, in a time and at a place when others were growing crops.

Today he is perhaps remembered mostly for the five-year construction of a 24-room mansion with an intricate ventilation system and adorned with art works and statuary. Today it is called after a later owner, the Hay House in Macon, GA.

And how did the pane of coupons come to the Old School History Museum in Eatonton? A struggling artist looking for cheap picture frames bought the framed coupons at an Eatonton yard sale for $5. He kept the frame and offered the coupon pane to the museum.

Contributed by: Rufus Adair

Board Member and Docent of Old School History Museum

Retired Newspaper Reporter and Teacher