5 Dollars 'Continental Currency' - United States

Hall and Sellers printed Continental Currency throughout the war using a technique Benjamin Franklin had pioneered decades earlier — pressing actual leaves against the plate to create a nature-print border that was, at the time, essentially impossible to counterfeit convincingly. The British tried anyway. Tory-operated presses in New York produced forged Continentals in bulk, a deliberate campaign to destabilize colonial finance by flooding the market with bad paper.

By 1778, the damage was already severe. Congress had been printing aggressively since 1775, and combined with British counterfeiting, purchasing power had collapsed to the point where "not worth a Continental" was entering common speech. This note circulated into that environment.