$500 Confederate States of America - Criswell-75 - Ball-134 -1862 dated Confederate Bond

$500 Confederate Bond. Criswell-75, Ball-134. 34 coupons remain.

This impressive $500 Confederate States of America 8% Loan Bond, authorized under the Act of Congress of August 19, 1861, represents one of the Confederacy's earliest and most ambitious efforts to finance its war effort. The bond promised repayment of the $500 principal on July 1, 1881, together with interest at 8% per annum, payable semiannually upon surrender of the attached interest coupons. Printed by B. Duncan of Richmond, the certificate features an ornate engraved border framing a central portrait of Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, the Confederate Secretary of State and later Secretary of the Treasury. The bond is fully issued, individually numbered, and bears the manuscript signatures of Confederate Treasury officials, along with the embossed Treasury seal, making it both an attractive financial instrument and an important surviving relic of the Confederate government's attempts to establish fiscal legitimacy.

These detachable coupons, each representing a semiannual interest payment, vividly illustrate the mechanics of nineteenth-century government finance and provide a tangible reminder of the Confederacy's ultimately unsuccessful hopes for long-term independence. Because the Confederate government collapsed in 1865, nearly two decades before the bond's maturity date, these obligations became effectively worthless as financial instruments. Today, however, they are prized by collectors and historians as artifacts of Civil War history, admired for their historical significance and the insight they provide into the economic challenges faced by the Confederate States during one of the most turbulent periods in American history.