BOOK REVIEW: CONFEDERATE FINANCE

I was Googling the other day (always dangerous for me) and I found two nice 19th century articles on the final fate of the Confederate Treasury in Georgia in 1865.

(In light of the article in last week's E-Sylum on "Davis Flight Medals," let me say that the first is "The Last Days of the Confederate Treasury and What Became of the Specie" by M. H. Clark, who was the last Acting Treasurer of the CSA. His article appeared in the Southern Historical Society Papers in 1881 and is available via Google Books.

The second article is "The Story of the Virginia Banks Funds" by Otis Ashmore, which appeared in The Georgia Historical Quarterly in December 1918. It is also available via Google Books.

More interesting for my purposes, I also found Confederate Finance by Richard Cecil Todd (University of Georgia Press, 1954, reprinted 2009), which makes heavy use of the archives of the Confederate Treasury Department, which are now part of the National Archives. And, having been written by a history professor, it has lots and lots of end-notes and a great bibliography. The book provides an excellent summary of Confederate finances and includes chapters on the Treasury Department, Loans, Treasury Notes (Confederate currency), Tariffs and Taxes, Seizures and Donations and Financial Operations Abroad.

And, the best part about the book is that it's available as a PDF for free (from UGA, I believe): http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/ugapressbks/pdfs/ugp9780820334547.pdf .

Now, as someone interested in the southern mints, this book is a great find!

As you may recall, Breen (in Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins ) makes a couple of references to what happened to the southern mints' specie following secession (and also what happened to the specie in the Confederate Treasury), but he provided few details and no specific sources. Clair Birdsall, in The United States Branch Mint at Charlotte, North Carolina: Its History and Coinage , at least, quotes from letters to and from Confederate Treasury Secretary Memminger.

Interestingly, in his bibliography, Birdsall refers to Record Group 104 of the National Archives (which, as all us fans of Roger Burdette know, is where the Mint records are), but he doesn't refer to Record Group 56 (Archives of the Confederate Treasury Department), so I wonder if Birdsall relied only on RG 104 and not also RG 56.

Anyway, Confederate Finance provides some information that is "news to me" - details about what happened to the southern mints' specie, letters about the Confederate half dollar and cent, additional information about Confederate bonds and currency, etc., all with detailed footnotes and bibliography for further reading.

While I presume that this information is known to the Civil War historians and to the Confederate and southern states currency researchers and collectors, I'm not sure it has made its way to the coin collectors.

It's a useful reminder to a researcher to cast a wide net and look at topics from several viewpoints - one never knows what the "other guy" knows until one looks!

To read the Google books articles, see:
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 9
The Georgia Historical Quarterly 1918

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: MORE ON ENGRAVED CONFEDERATE DAVIS FLIGHT MEDALS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n15a21.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web