20 Dollars Eastern Bank of Alabama

The Eastern Bank of Alabama was chartered in Eufaula, a river town on the Chattahoochee that served as a cotton-shipping hub for the surrounding plantation economy. By 1858, Alabama had more than two dozen note-issuing banks, many of them thinly capitalized and operating on optimistic reserve ratios that would collapse within a few years. The Eastern Bank was among the more solvent of the state's antebellum institutions, but it did not survive the Civil War — Confederate monetary disruption and the postwar repudiation of Southern bank obligations rendered all such notes worthless by the mid-1860s.

The American Bank Note Company imprint places this note among the better-engraved issues of the period. ABNC had consolidated several competing engraving firms in 1858, the very year of this issue.