General Briefing

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

jakke:

Seeing i-thaphithin’s (eminently reasonable) desire for a redesign of the US currency that included “rainbow colored bills with brown people on them” reminded me of this pathetic excuse of a currency issued by the Confederate States of America during the US Civil War. Note that slavery was so fundamental to their economy that they actually have a picture of enslaved African-Americans front and centre on their $100 bill.

I call this a pathetic excuse for a currency not just because they were racist scum, but also because if you look closely this currency doesn’t actually become “hard money” (i.e., backed by gold, as was necessary at the time for people to trust banknotes as money) until six months after the end of the US Civil War. Since investors were pulling out of the CSA en masse, they didn’t actually have the gold to cover all the money they were desperately printing to cover the cost of their war - but they absolutely promised they’d have it ready to go by the end of the war (because they wanted people to accept this currency as legitimate).

Obviously once it became clear that the CSA was massively overprinting money to finance a war they’d never win, this led to massive inflation as consumers demanded more and more money in exchange for goods and services. By the end of the war they were worth basically nothing. (And then the US passed a constitutional amendment to make sure they were worth exactly nothing, except to collectors.)

Think about this before you talk about how this wasn’t about slavery.

I have replicas of confederate money for this very reason.  I keep it so I can take it out and look at the pictures and be reminded of what I already know- it was so about slavery and terms like “state’s rights” and “religious freedom” are generally code excuses for hate.  Yeah. I said it.

(Source: commons.wikimedia.org)