The Color Of Money, Particularly C.S.A. Currency

I am looking at The Color of Money: Images of Slavery in Cofedeate and Southern States Currency (2002), that includes articles as well as the paintings that were in the exhibition with the same title.  We had looked at many bond, bills and currencies issued by states and institutions of the South while working on The World That Made New Orleans; we included some of what we learned in that book, as well as some of the images.  This art show and its accompanying book are solely devoted to that.  What this has helped provoke also is now in The American Slave Coast (with much, much revision and tweaking still ahead).

The C.S. A currency heralds its slave-based economy to the world.  The mansions are far in the background, though rendered in exquisite detail.  The foregrounding is ragged slaves, working in the cotton fields, toting cotton bales, driving mule-drawn ricks of cotton bales, loading cotton bales onto a steamboat, hoeing cotton, planting cotton.

The C.SA. constitution fills in the silences and absences of slaves and slavery (and women) in the U.S. Constitution by declaring explicitly that their nation is dedicated to exclusion, inequality and the enslavement of black people.

So, also then, the art of the currencies of the slaveholding states fills in the silences and absences of slaves and slavery in those signature contemporary paintings of slaveholders' families.  You have seen these paintings, from colonial times through the antebellum era.  The prosperous plantation slaveowner and his family, situated in the gardens or on the lawn of the mansion, not a 'servant' in sight. Or the other favorite view looking across their enormous acreage of cultivated rich fields, blooded horses, accompanied perhaps by their pedigree dog.  Again, not a 'servant' in sight cultivating the fields, carring for the liverstock, not even a little black boy with a watering can for Mistress's flowers.


The paintings go with the U.S. Constitution -- many of them indeed the homes of the Framers and signers.  You see many of them of Monticello, for instance.

The money, though, goes with the C.S.A. constitution.

It's one of those mirror reversals that will leave you marveling for days.  Particularly when what you got for VD, your BD and for Presidents' Day is a some horrid respiratory infection that means I can't be present tonight for el V's concert and reading at Rock Hall's The Mainstay.  Sob.  Achoo!