50 Cents - The State of Georgia

Georgia's state-issued fractional notes of 1863 were a direct response to the near-total disappearance of small coinage from circulation across the Confederacy — hoarding had stripped the channels of anything spendable below a dollar. The state treasury at Milledgeville, then still the capital before Atlanta's rise, issued these notes under legislative authority as a practical stopgap rather than a formal banking instrument.

The engraver credit "Howell" almost certainly refers to a local Milledgeville engraver working with whatever equipment was available under wartime supply constraints — far removed from the pre-war southern reliance on Northern or European printing houses.