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2 Shillings - Colony of New York
| Issuer | Provincial Congress of New York |
|---|---|
| Year | 1776 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Pound |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | ONE QUARTER OF A DOLLAR THIS BILL shall pafs cur- rent in all Payments in this Colony, for TWO SHILLINGS, (being equal to One Quarter of a Spanish Milled Dollar) or the Value thereof in Gold or Silver; according to the REsolution of the Provincial Congress of New-York, on the fifth Day of March, 1776 |
| Reverse description | The reverse is entirely unprinted, presenting the plain laid paper surface with visible chain and wire lines characteristic of hand-made rag paper of the colonial period. |
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| Comments |
New York's Provincial Congress authorized this emission in June 1776, weeks before independence was formally declared. The colony — soon to become a state — was already functioning as a revolutionary government, and these notes were issued under military and political pressure as British forces massed for what would become the successful seizure of New York City that August.
The 2 Shilling denomination was among the lowest in the series, intended for everyday transactional use at a moment when hard money had effectively vanished from circulation. Counterfeiting of colonial paper was a serious and deliberate problem — the British ran organized forgery operations to destabilize rebel finances — and New York issues from this period used nature-printed leaf patterns as a security measure, a technique pioneered by Benjamin Franklin decades earlier.
Most surviving examples show heavy handling; notes of this denomination were spent, not saved.