20 Dollars Canal Bank, 'Redback'

The Canal & Banking Company was one of the more durable antebellum Louisiana institutions, surviving successive banking crises that wiped out several of its New Orleans contemporaries. The "Redback" nickname derives from the distinctive red-tinted reverse printing, a deliberate anti-counterfeiting measure that Toppan, Carpenter & Co. employed on several Southern issues during this period — the red ink was difficult to reproduce faithfully with the photographic and chemical counterfeiting methods then in use.

Louisiana's 1842 banking reforms, among the strictest in the pre-Civil War United States, required specie reserves against circulation that most other states never demanded. The Canal Bank survived partly because of that discipline.