5 Dollars Bank of Commerce - Georgia

Baldwin, Bald & Cousland operated under that name for only a brief window — the firm emerged from the earlier Baldwin & Gleason partnership and was absorbed into the American Bank Note Company at its 1858 consolidation, meaning this note dates from the printer's final active years. Georgia's antebellum banking sector was notoriously fragmented, with dozens of chartered institutions issuing competing notes of wildly uneven reliability. The Bank of Commerce in Savannah was among the more solvent, benefiting from the city's position as a major cotton export hub.

Southern notes printed in New York were common practice — the engraving infrastructure simply didn't exist locally at the scale required.