The Secretary of the Treasury Brandon Beach released two images of a new commemorative coin bearing the bust of Donald J. Trump and his image after he was shot a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. Many of you know about this development last week and you might have heard that many experts have said that putting a living person on a coin or dollar bills is prohibited by Federal law. What you may not know is that the original transgression that led to the law was committed during the Civil War and that the law was passed in Reconstruction.
Before the Civil War, while there were coins made by the United States government, most coins and paper money were made by state governments or by private parties. Banks would release dollar bills with their own name on it to keep currency flowing, similar to what we see today with cryptocurrency. With the beginning of the Civil War, the United States government had to “print money” to pay its soldiers, pay it contractors, and buy supplies. “Greenbacks” were an outgrowth of this need for Federal money. At the time, there were few rules on what images went on money, and so a variety of pictures went on it.
Spencer Clark was the supervisor of the National Currency Bureau during the Civil War. In 1864, Congress decided to put out fractional notes, penny, nickel, dimes, quarter, on paper. Congressional authorization said that one of the new notes, the five cent note, would honor “Clark,” meaning the explorer William Clark who explored the Pacific Northwest in the famed “Lewis and Clark Expedition”. Spencer Clark, however, assumed that he could put whatever Clark he could come up with on the bills. He decided to put his own picture on it!
This transgression occurred in the last year of the Civil War. Soon thereafter, Lincoln was shot and the Confederacy collapsed. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase who had tried to protect Clark, left Treasury to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Clark was the object of great vituperation in Washington. Congress passed a law barring living people from being on currency in the future. Later the bill was used to provide broader protection against living people adorning currency.
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