15 Cents State of South Carolina

The Bank of the State of South Carolina — a state-owned institution from its founding in 1812 — issued fractional notes like this 15-cent piece to address the acute small-change shortage that plagued the Confederate states almost from the outset of the war. Federal coin had vanished from circulation almost immediately after secession, hoarded by a public with no faith in paper alternatives, and the void was filled by a chaotic patchwork of municipal, corporate, and state-issued scrip.

South Carolina's fractional issues were printed locally under wartime constraints, which shows. The 15-cent denomination is among the more awkward of the series — a product of necessity arithmetic, not monetary logic.