10 Dollars New England Commercial Bank - Rhode Island

The New England Commercial Bank operated out of Newport, Rhode Island, during the height of the free banking era — a period when individual state-chartered banks printed their own currency with little federal oversight and wildly varying degrees of solvency. Rhode Island's banking laws were notoriously permissive even by the standards of the time, which made notes from smaller Newport institutions objects of suspicion in neighboring states. Merchants in Boston or New York would routinely discount Rhode Island paper, sometimes heavily.

The Haxby G86b designation places this within a specific plate variety, distinguished by the colour underprint — a relatively early anti-counterfeiting measure that became more common on American obsolete notes through the 1850s. The series ran until the 1865 federal tax on state banknotes effectively killed the entire obsolete currency system.