Counterfeit

A year into the Civil War, Sam Upham, the owner of a stationary store in Philadelphia, began selling facsimiles of the Confederate Graybacks as souvenirs. He sold these notes in all denominations, $1, $5, $10, $100, for mere pennies. Each note had, “Facsimile Confederate Note” printed at the bottom, but they looked so authentic, that many Union soldiers going off to fight in the south, or northerners doing business down there, started buying these bills, cutting the disclaimer off the bottom, and passing them off as real Confederate bills.

From March of 1862 to August of 1863, Sam Upham’s shop printed over one and a half million facsimile Confederate notes, worth over fifteen million dollars. As the war progressed, many other shops began printing and selling counterfeit Confederate bills as well. This massive influx of new bills backed by nothing into the South’s economy, dramatically decreased the value of their dollar. By August 1863, a Confederate dollar’s buying power had dropped so low that it took $10 to buy what a year before cost $1. A pound of tea cost $35; a barrel of flour was going for $1,000. The cost to finance the war had increased ten times. The inflation was so destructive to the Confederacy’s war effort that Jefferson Davis put a $10,000 bounty out on Sam Upham’s head. The South lost the Civil War primarily because the cost to fight the war had become unsustainable. It was economics 101: the more you increase your money supply, the less valuable your money becomes.

In March 2020, in a misguided response to the pandemic, our government locked down the entire country, closed businesses and restaurants, and essentially crashed our economy. In four trading days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 6,400 points, losing 26% of its value. 14.6 million people lost their jobs due to these lockdowns. And because many citizens were destroyed financially by these government policies, Congress passed a series of Covid relief packages totaling $5.2 trillion to help the affected people get by. Government outlays in 2020 and 2021 increased by over $2 trillion more than fiscal year 2019, which ballooned our national debt to $29 trillion, and forced the Federal Reserve to print of billions of new dollars out of thin air and inject them into our economy.