ABSTRACT |
The
purpose of this paper is to explore the processes of cultural
re-alignment that set in when beginning in 1861 responsibility for
issuing bank notes shifted from small and local private banks to
large-scale institutions of the central state such as the U.S. Treasury
Department or its equivalent in the CSA. As a consequence, older bank
notes ceased to be legal tender. Among the notes becoming obsolete was
the Louisiana Dix note. The demise of
this and similar notes signifies that the
boundaries within which paper money circulated corresponded to an
ever-increasing degree with the (still expanding) national boundary. In
this process of territorialization, the
fairly local spaces of early paper money were fundamentally reshaped by
a state-imposed spatial regime. For many Southerners of the
Reconstruction era, that regime was identical with the North, whose felt
and visible presence – also in the currency – led to a notable increase
in a self-conscious identification with “the South.” It was the South’s
cohesiveness both as a regional culture and as an identifiable and
distinctive way of life which constituted an alternative that could be
pitted against the encroachments of the central state and, on the
cultural level, against modernization. In this context of power
relations between center and periphery the Louisiana Dix note would
eventually become mythified as the true origin of the name “Dixieland.”
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