1 Dollar

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.