10 Dollars Canal Bank, uniface

The New Orleans Canal & Banking Company was one of Louisiana's oldest chartered banks, founded in 1831 to finance the construction of the New Canal linking the city to Lake Pontchartrain. By the time this note was issued, the bank had long outlasted its original engineering mandate and was operating as a conventional commercial institution. The Civil War severely disrupted Louisiana banking — New Orleans fell to Union forces in April 1862 — and notes from this institution circulating in the 1860s were doing so under radically unstable political and monetary conditions.

Uniface production by the National Bank Note Company was not unusual for smaller-denomination or auxiliary issues of this period, where cost containment drove printing decisions. NBNC was a New York firm, which meant the plates never left the North regardless of where the issuing bank operated.