Jacob Perkins revolutionized the creation of money. The processes that he developed worked so perfectly that they remained the basis of security printing for more than a century and a half.

At the heart of Perkins’s processes was the belief that all currency should be and would be identical. Only in that way, he reasoned, would the public have an absolute assurance about which note was good and which bad. The designs he devised were therefore lacking in artistry, but infernally difficult to counterfeit. He set up a security-printing establishment in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and a grateful legislature gave him a monopoly on all note-printing there and in Maine (which formed part of Massachusetts until 1820). Soon Perkins’s homely-but-distinctive products were appearing across New England and well beyond. But the inventor had unleashed far more than he had anticipated.

He had assumed that all bankers would flock to his processes and designs. He was right on the first count but wrong on the second. His techniques had become common knowledge within a decade or so of their invention, and everyone agreed that they were the final word in security printing. But agreement ended there: what the bankers wanted (and what a succeeding generation of printers found it expedient to give them) was variety: far from the universality which Perkins foresaw, the bankers envisioned a broad choice of pictorial design, a host of renditions whose artistry and excellence would distinguish their notes from those of their competitors. Perkins’s successors, beginning with Murray, Draper, Fairman & Company and ending with the American Bank Note Company, would find that they could give their customers what they wanted, using transfer technology. By the mid-1830s, the process was in full swing: the American private bank note was approaching its maturity, and those who created it and those who commissioned it were finding an important new use for their product, beyond the mere buying and selling of goods.

They were finding it useful for telling the country about itself, about where it had been, where it was going, and who was along for the ride. What they found (and what we can learn from them) will form the remainder of this book.

It was inevitable that Liberty would also be found in close conjunction with real figures from our past, depicted in a symbiotic relationship. She supported them, gave strength to their efforts on behalf of the people. And they supported her, spreading her blessings to all.

Among these worthies, no one was more important than George Washington, victorious general, first president, father of the nation. Washington often appeared with Liberty (and with other allegorical figures, as we shall shortly see). But one of the most striking depictions appeared fairly early, and it came from the frontier Northwest. In 1838, a Michigan banker in the hamlet of Saline asked his printer in New York to pull out all the stops. The result was a skillful, if crowded, image of the hero, flanked and sustained by Liberty (whose pole and pileus actually bisect the portrait). Flags and the national shield complete the arrangement

In our second case, the retouching was even less radical. In 1852, the Farmers Bank of Onondaga came into existence, enjoyed a brief and troubled career, and failed the following year. But it ordered currency in several denominations from a New York firm called Wellstood, Hanks, Hay & Whiting, and it placed some of it in circulation prior to its demise.

For its $1 bill, printer and banker agreed upon a vignette of a young white farmhand carrying a basket of corn. A few years later, another banker wanted new paper money. This banker was Southern, and he wanted a slave scene. Wellstood, Hanks, Hay & Whiting (who by now formed part of a new firm, the American Bank Note Company), could easily oblige. They took their white farmhand, blackened his skin, tattered his clothing, and added a patch to his shirt—and he now did duty as a slave in Virginia.

This is all quite amusing to us, but it was serious business to the people of the time. For if the country had become so divided that its security printers were required to supply two sets of images, one for each section, matters were passing beyond mortal control.

The Wall Street Journal featured the book in its April 13, 2013, edition. It’s good to see this hugely important area of American financial history --- 70 years of paper currency issued by thousands of banks and other entities --- getting national recognition in the mainstream media.