50 Dollars

Hoyer & Ludwig were primarily a lithographic firm operating out of Richmond — not a specialist banknote printer — and their involvement in producing Confederate currency in 1861 reflects how desperate the new government was for printing capacity. The quality showed. Lithographic notes were far easier to counterfeit than engraved ones, and Northern operatives exploited that almost immediately; the Union ran deliberate destabilization campaigns flooding the South with convincing fakes of exactly these early Richmond-printed issues.

P#11 belongs to the first wave of Confederate emissions authorized under the Act of March 9, 1861, before Richmond was even the capital.