Catalog
1 Dollar
| Issuer | American Colonization Society |
|---|---|
| Year | 1840 |
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| Currency | Dollar (1833-1906) |
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| Obverse description | The central vignette presents two children seated together, one writing and one reading, set within an oval frame at upper centre, flanked on each side by two smaller oval vignettes each bearing a portrait bust and a large numeral 1. The legend 'THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY' arcs above the central vignette, with the promise to pay ONE dollar on demand to the order of the Governor at their Store in Monrovia. A palm tree vignette appears at lower centre, with the imprint of Underwood, Bald, Spencer & Hufty, Philad. and Rawdon, Underwood & Co., N. York at the bottom margin. |
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| Obverse lettering | THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY Promise to pay ONE dollar on demand to the order of the Governor at their Store in Monrovia MONROVIA ONE Gen. Agent |
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| Comments |
The American Colonization Society was never a bank. Founded in 1816 to resettle free Black Americans in West Africa, it nonetheless issued scrip — this dollar among them — to facilitate transactions in Liberia before any formal monetary infrastructure existed there. The notes functioned as a quasi-currency in a colony that had no issuing authority of its own.
Underwood, Bald, Spencer & Hufty were one of Philadelphia's more prolific security printers of the antebellum period, later absorbed into the firm that became the American Bank Note Company in 1858. Their work on ACS scrip predates that consolidation by nearly two decades.