Depictions of Slavery in Confederate and Southern States Currency
Original Acrylic on Canvas Paintings by John W. Jones
NEW YORK TIMES, March 6, 2001
Interpreting the Images of Slavery on the Confederacy's Money
By DAVID FIRESTONE

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Without a magnifying glass, it is difficult to see the faces on the slaves as they harvest cotton and hoist overflowing baskets to their shoulders. Minutely engraved on the tattered currency of the old South, the images are faded and smudged, and their message has languished in the vaults of collectors.

About four years ago, a collector took one of the old Confederate bank notes into a North Charleston blueprint shop and asked an employee, John W. Jones, to have it enlarged. Mr. Jones, an artist and commercial illustrator who frequently paints African-American themes, studied the engraving on the note and was struck by the Confederacy's decision to use as its monetary symbol an accomplished image of a black field hand straining at the cotton harvest.

Prowling through hobby shops and Internet sites, he realized that scenes of slave labor were in fact a prevailing image on Southern currency during the mid-19th century. Where other states and nations used historical scenes or pictures of national leaders and resources on their money, the Confederate states often chose to portray themselves as the land of slaves, usually contented and sometimes smiling.

But these historical documents had to be enlarged to be appreciated. Because very few visual depictions of slavery were made at the time, Mr. Jones got out his acrylics and canvas and began painting these vignettes as full-size works, adding nothing but color. An exhibition of about 30 of his paintings opened in February at the College of Charleston in its Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture, and it has been drawing a steady audience of both blacks and whites.

"We built the economy of the South, and here you have the banks saying so," said Mr. Jones, who now works in a studio in Columbia. "But no one had seen these images. No one realized what was on the bills."

Numismatists have long known about the bills' imagery, but historians have recently begun taking a closer look at it as a statement of the South's economic priorities during the war. An Internet exhibition created last year by the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University has more than 75 engravings of slavery from Confederate paper money. The exhibition can be seen at Beyond Face Value.

At the time, money was printed both by the Confederate States of America and by the banks of the individual Southern states. Several scholars who contributed to the online project noted that Southern banks enshrined slavery in their monetary system to remind those who came in contact with their bills that the institution was the region's economic bedrock

"Slaves were the capital of the South," said Henry N. McCarl, an economics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a numismatist who contributed an essay and part of his collection to the online exhibition. "Cultures put on their money objects that are important to them and their economy, and the South had an interest in showing to the world that the slaves were well treated and happy.

There are, of course, no scenes of slaves being mistreated on the bills, and in a few close-ups they are smiling as they move in ragged clothes and bare feet through the cotton fields. In one scene painted by Mr. Jones from a South Carolina $5 bill, a white overseer supervises a group of slaves from his horse with his whip in his hand; in another, a white man and woman gaze down at a quartet of bent-over slaves working with scythes in a wheat field.

The pictures, like the Confederacy itself, are almost entirely agrarian and usually romanticized, etched by engravers who are not now identifiable. Slaves are shown loading sugar cane onto wagons and leading cattle and very frequently working with cotton: planting it, picking it, hauling it, baling it. The cotton images are repeated so often they become iconographic, and some of the bills show classical goddesses of liberty or prosperity — even George Washington — gazing at the cotton scenes with admiration and blessing. In one allegorical picture painted by Mr. Jones from a Georgia Savings Bank bill, a white figure that is apparently that of Moneta, the Roman goddess of money, is in the foreground holding a cotton plant as bags of gold spill open at her feet. In the background, an overseer on a horse supervises a field of slaves as a train arrives to pick up their harvest.

"I was particularly intrigued by that one," said Mr. Jones, most of whose paintings in the series have been snapped up by collectors. "The slaves are doing the work, and she's got the money."

John M. Coski, historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., said that there were more vignettes from classical mythology than of slaves on Southern currency, and that the banks were not so much making a grand statement about slavery as they were simply depicting their world. But several African-American scholars disagree about the statement being made by the money.

"We did this exhibit because of what John showed us about the South," said W. Marvin Dulaney, director of the Avery Research Center and a history professor at the College of Charleston. "We hear a lot these days about how the Confederacy was really about states' rights and not slavery. But the currency itself tells the truth. It shows how they saw us, and how they wanted to keep seeing us."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

The Post & Courier
Avery Exhibit features scenes with slaves on Confederate bills
By Linda Meggett

The economy of the Old South may have been based on slave labor, but artist John Jones never realized that Confederate currency actually contained pictures of slaves at work.

One day, as he worked at a print ship in North Charleston, a customer asked for an enlargement of one of his Confederate bills.

After making the enlargement, an astonished Jones found himself looking at a picture of slaves picking cotton.

He began to investigate, searching the Internet for other Confederate bills. And then he began painting.

Four years later, Jones has an exhibition at the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture in Charleston.

The series, "Depictions of Slavery in Confederate and Southern States" features 55 oil paintings of scenes from Confederate currency.

When complete, the series will number 55 paintings. It's on display at the Avery Institute until October.

The exhibit goes beyond art into history, said Jones, a Columbia native and former Summerville resident.

"I didn't know they had slaves on the currency. That's what intrigued me about it," he said. "it's almost like one of the best kept secrets. The stuff on the bills was so small, unless you were looking for it, you'd miss it," Jones said. "I wanted to illuminate what I saw."

It speaks a great deal about how important African-Americans how important to the economic survival of this country. The argument that the Civil War wasn't about slavery wasn't nothing but lies," Jones said.

More than 80 bills depicting slaves circulated throughout the former Confederate states, including the rare $500 bill.

More than half of the paintings have been sold, 11 to Dr. Harold Rhodes of Charleston.

"I've seen Confederate money but never paid attention. These paintings evoked so much emotion, "
Rhodes said. "My only regret is that I didn't have the money to buy the entire collection."

This exhibit is about the truth of how important Africans were to the economy, said Marvin Dulaney, chairman of the history department at the College of Charleston.

It is not a work of revisionist history, Dulaney said: The Confederate state chose the pictures for their own currency.

"We're doing this exhibition because we want to diffuse what have been downright lies that the Confederacy was about states' rights and Southern nationalism. The bottom line is that it was about slavery, using black people to make their millions."

For Reginald Basley, a school counselor who toured the exhibit, the Confederate money was interesting for what it chose to depict.

"That is what slavery was all about - economics," he said after he finished viewing the artwork on display while on tour at the Avery Center. "I am surprised to see it because I had no idea they actually put slaves on the currency."

Coin World Magazine
A new light on an old darkness
Artist recreates CSA note vignettes of slavery
By Michele Orzano
COIN WORLD Staff

Injecting the practice of slavery with the colors of life is one way of looking at the art of John W. Jones.

Jones has taken vignettes of slavery, found on paper money issued by the Confederate States of America and many Southern states, and translated them into color-filled images on canvas. Jones is an artist and illustrator in Columbia, S.C. An exhibit of 30 of his paintings dealing with slavery as a part of the African-American experience are on display at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, S.C., through Oct. 19.

Jones said the reaction since the exhibit opened Feb. 15 has been more than he imagined it would ever be. He's gotten calls from the New York Times, Home Box Office network and People magazine about his work. His acrylic paintings have generated a deep response among the viewers, which surprises him, he said.

"I never dreamed that it would have this type of reaction," Jones said. He added, "It's important to understand why the Confederacy put cotton and slavery on their notes."

Jones was born in South Carolina in 1950 and lived through many of the events he paints but he never encountered this aspect of American life until about four years ago. Jones was working for a blueprint shop in Charleston when a collector asked to have a Confederate bank note enlarged on one of the firm's copiers. Once the note was enlarged, Jones said he was fascinated to see the scene before him - a black field hand picking cotton.

That stirred his creative side and he began to do more research into an area he never knew existed. Jones said he looked on the Internet for more information about Confederate notes and saw the Louisiana State University's online exhibit, "Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency," featuring currency depicting the lives of slaves and ex-slaves before, during and after the Civil War. The online exhibit is found at: http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/BeyondFaceValue/beyondfacevalue.htm

Jones started looking for the notes in flea markets and anywhere else he could find them. He said he thought paintings based on the notes would be a good addition to his ongoing series on the African-American experience from the slave trades through the Civil War and onward to the present day.

He said he can remember drawing when he was 6 years old and becoming more involved with his art while in high school, where his talent was called on to design bulletin boards and paint the backdrops for school theatrical productions.

After high school, he spent 8 years in the U.S. Army including service in Vietnam and Korea. For five of those years he served as an illustrator for Army training materials. In 1976, as part of the U.S. Bicentennial celebration, Jones was selected to paint a wall of the American compound in Seoul, South Korea, measuring 25 feet tall and 150 feet long and giving visitors a black-and-white walk through American history.

"I almost didn't finish in time for the Bicentennial - it was a big wall," Jones said, wondering aloud if the artwork is still to be found there.

Following his Army service Jones worked for a graphics firm in Washington, D.C., for about a year and then started working as a freelance artist/illustrator for clients such as IBM, Westinghouse, NASA, Time-Life Books and the U.S. Postal Service.

After several years, he moved back to South Carolina. About five years ago, he started painting full time and selling his art to the public through several galleries. He said he "paints ... things from my past, old hometown scenes, churches, Buffalo Soldiers and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment." The Buffalo Soldiers were black troops stationed in the West after the Civil War during the Indian Wars period, while the 54th Massachusetts was one of the first black regiments to experience battle during the Civil War. The Massachusetts regiment was the subject of the movie "Glory" and is depicted in a famous sculpture by coin designer Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Jones said when he approached Dr. W. Marvin Delaney, director of the Avery Center, about an exhibit of paintings about slavery on paper money, he said his main challenge was "how was I going to make picking cotton exciting." However, the topic has excited visitors to the exhibit, which shows some a side of history they'd never seen before.

Jones uses the words "astonished" and "amazed" to describe the comments made by viewers.

The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture is located at 125 Bull St., College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C. The gallery is open between noon and 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Group tours must be scheduled by calling (843) 953-7609.

There is no admission charge to view the exhibit.

For more information about Jones' paintings, prints and note cards, contact Gallery Chuma, 43 John St., Charleston, SC 29403 or call the gallery toll free at (888) 249-5286.