Nice bond!
The bond below is a counterfeit Confederate bond that came from the Coutts Bank hoard in London that I purchased as such back in the early 1990's. Beginning in 1879, rumors started floating in Britain that the Federal government was going to assume the Confederate bond debt even though the 14th Amendment prohibited such and transplanted Confederates such as Judah P. Benjamin, who was practicing law and living in England, warned that it was not going to ever happen. Speculators in Britain began to purchase legitimate issued Confederate bonds for $20 gold for every $1000 face value. Long story short... Confederate bonds from Southerners began pouring in to the bond holder committees in London and someone got ahold of unissued Confederate bonds and completed them with fictitious or forged signatures and dates and sent them off to London. As the supply of real and forged bonds began to dry up, counterfeiters in the Netherlands began producing a counterfeit version of the February 20, 1863, 7% "Stonewall Jackson" $1000 bond on pink paper, with fake, incorrect type ink signatures and dates. The counterfeiters soon ran out of pink rag paper so they turned to plain white wood pulp paper and added "Second" or "Third " series to the bonds to alleviate any questions as to why the paper was not pink. Almost $15 million in face value of these counterfeit bonds were sold to the committees in London. In 1885, when it became clear that the United States was not going to assume the Confederate bond debt, about a third of the bonds were returned to their depositers and the remainder were stored in London's Coutts Bank vaults where over the years the bonds became covered in coal dust and rotted from the acidity of the paper until 1982 when the bank returned 21,000 bonds to descendants of the original depositors and the remaining 87,000 were purchased by a large U. S. auction firm that cleaned in a bathtub, pressed them, and the ones that survived the "conservation" ordeal were sold to the general public.
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