Hey, the Confederate States Of America were a racist slave state that was founded in the name of maintaining a white supremacist state forever, and its eventual fall was a moral good. But don’t worry, while that state existed, they also made a bunch of shitty, self-glorifying art that even when it’s technically well crafted, is all built out of a fascist, white supremacist ideology that was so bad and so obviously evil that even The United States was their moral superior. Whatever aesthetic value their culture has is, like the art of Rhodesia, entirely predicated on them being a nation whose significance in modern culture is entirely about clinging to an ideology of racism, and you do not, in fact, got to hand it to them.
Anyway, I think that sets the tone right.
I have said, many times, that your culture’s money is probably the most commonly reproduced piece of art your culture makes in your name. It is the ideology of a nation, in its most common piece of civic art, art that’s meant to represent who you are and what you value, and that’s why it’s meaningful to care about what it depicts. I’ve said that the United States currency is some of the worst, both in term of its accessibility, but also its devotion to depicting nothing but the institution of its own governance from a very narrow window of time. Basically, US money depicts nothing as much as it depicts the importance of a small handful of people who maintained and operated the mechanisms of creating the country of America.
They still have Andrew Jackson on a bill and they’ve had seven years to put Harriet Tubman on a bill, and that hasn’t moved past prototype stages, so you can see how important it is to the people making choices.
But that’s America America; what about America America America, the America that insists it’s even more America than America America? What did the Confederacy put on their money?
lol, they put Greek gods and slaves on their money.
Literally, a bunch of the art on the confederate money shows different Greek mythic figures, like Thetis and Minerva. Don’t worry though, the slaveholding states also put Liberty on their money, the humanised personification of not owning people as slaves which I guess they didn’t get the memo on. And I can’t get past ‘we put slavery on the money.’
Beyond that, mostly it’s just people. Political figures, just like on the other America’s money. There were a shocking number of versions of the Confederate currency. For a state that existed for something like four years, they had seven print runs of their money, totally up seventy two different banknotes (for some values of different). They had a $1,000 bill, a $500 bill, a $100 bill, $50, $20, $5, $2, $1, and oddly to me, a $.50.
Most of these bills depicted Confederate or at least Confederate-inclined politicians like Andrew Jackson and John C Calhoun. If you don’t know who they are, Andrew Jackson is the kind of famous shithead that personally conducted genocides, but gets remembered for a whimsical cheese incident (and also all the people he murdered at the White House (and I guess a weirdly pro-sex-worker wife guy situation)). Calhoun was his Vice President, and Jackson was apparently distressed that by the end of his presidency he never got around to killing him.
They also had George Washington on multiple bills, which meant George didn’t get to represent a single currency value, which is amateur money design shit, seriously, you fucking people.
Jefferson Davis got a spot on the bill, and that’s the guy who you might see quoted as saying ‘All we ask is to be let alone,’ which sounds nice until you know he also said ‘You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be,’ and that guy managed to live until after the War and didn’t die kicked to death in the street. See, he was hard to try for War Crimes, because despite his starting a war over a right to enslave people they couldn’t work out anything he did that they agreed was really that bad.
Christ.
Anyway, he’s on one of the $50 bills, and his vice president, Alexander H Stephens was on another. That dude looked like one of those reconstructions of a skull that’s been shot in the face. This dude argued to Christian Abolitionists that hey, hey, the Bible justifies slavery. He promoted the Curse of Ham!
Lucy Pickens, the ‘queen of the confederacy’ is on another bill, who was regarded as important because she was ‘beautiful, brilliant and captivating’ and the iconic ‘southern Belle,’ but who ‘struggled in her later life’ to ‘maintain her plantation without the work of hundreds of enslaved people’ so ‘fuck her.’ She shares the bill with a guy called George Randolph, whose family famously didn’t own slaves, but they did own property that owned slaves, isn’t that a neat little loophole.
Along with that there was a guy called John Elliot Ward, whose wikipedia page is brief and that’s the greatest mercy of him, Robert Hunter, who was a dude who got kicked out of Virginia for treason (and appointed Jefferson Davis’ secretary of state), Clement Clairborne Clay, who amongst other things was married to the woman who helped kick off the Lost Cause myth, Christopher Gustavus Memminger, who wrote the provisional confederate constitution and opposed fiat currency (like he was printed on), and Judah P Benjamin who I don’t know much about but was apparently part of a very good deep-cut joke by Atun’Shei films.
That’s the people depicted on the Confederate money. No scientists. No artists. No researchers. They were all, to a person, people defined in history by their support for and enabling the Confederacy or its ‘Peculiar Institution’ of slavery (hi, George Washington, you slavekeeping fuck). Calhoun is a bit of an oddity there but I think he’s there because he was Jackson’s VP.
Except.
There is one person depicted on these banknotes who’s not a specific secessionist and confederate. On one of the bills, there’s a baby. This baby is an artwork by a guy called Thomas Sully, who’s a very important artist to the look of American Fine Art, and I don’t have any specific ‘wow, what a racist’ lines about him. The baby is named Alfred L Elwyn, which is the same as the baby’s dad’s name. That dad, Dr Alfred L Elwyn, was an eye doctor and who founded the Pennsylvania Institution For The Instruction of the Blind. What’s surprising for a doctor of the time is that a quick wikiwalk around the guy fails to show like, some shocking quotes about eugenics or explicit racism (though I mean, he lived in the confederacy).
What’s fun though, is that Dr Elwyn wasn’t on the money. His infant son was. By the time that painting was used on the money, Aldred Elwyn The Younger was a young adult, and that dude? An abolitionist.
There’s the civic art of the confederacy. An adulation for their own existence as a slave-holding state, a worship of a mythic vision of their own importance, and a complete lack of contribution of their own to culture that wasn’t in its own way, pugnacious and evil and a failure. Couldn’t even find a racist baby!