5 Dollars

Keating & Ball — originally a jewelry firm in Charleston — pivoted to banknote printing after the Confederacy found itself cut off from Northern engravers and the established security printing houses. Their work is competent but noticeably cruder than the American Bank Note Company output used on earlier Confederate issues, a gap that widened as blockades tightened the supply of quality paper and ink.

The watermark on this series is among the few meaningful security measures the Confederacy managed to sustain. Counterfeiting was nonetheless rampant, much of it originating in the North as deliberate economic sabotage rather than criminal enterprise.