Francis E. Spinner: the man who turned postage stamps into money

By the summer of 1862, you could not make change in the United States. The Civil War had people frightened, and frightened people hoard hard money. Gold and silver coins — even humble copper cents — disappeared into mattresses and pockets almost overnight. After New York banks suspended payment in coin late in 1861, small change all but evaporated from daily life. A streetcar fare, a loaf of bread, a glass of beer — everyday transactions ground against a wall, because nobody had the coins to settle them.

Into that mess stepped a man with an unlikely résumé for a financial innovator. Francis Elias Spinner was a saddlemaker's apprentice turned banker turned congressman, and since 1861 he had been Treasurer of the United States. He was not a trained artist. He was not an engraver. But he had a problem to solve, and he reached for the one small, government-backed, universally trusted thing already in everyone's hands: the postage stamp.

Spinner's fix was almost absurdly simple. He took postage stamps — small denominations the public already knew and accepted — and pasted them onto Treasury paper, then added his own signature at the bottom. He passed these improvised slips among the clerks of his department, and the clerks took them. So did the shopkeepers they spent them at. People needed something worth a few cents that they could trust, and a sheet of government stamps over the Treasurer's name fit the bill.

That handmade prototype is the origin of an entire category of American money. On Spinner's recommendation, Congress passed the Act of July 17, 1862, and the first postage currency — paper notes in 5, 10, 25, and 50-cent values — began circulating that August. The country had invented a way to make change out of paper.

It's worth being honest about what kind of "designer" Spinner was, because his story is unusual on a site full of sculptors and engravers. He did not carve a die or cut a plate. His contribution was the idea — and the prototype that proved it could work.

The first postage currency notes wore that idea on their faces. They were not abstract banknotes with allegorical figures; they were, quite literally, pictures of postage stamps. The 5-cent note carried a facsimile of the then-current 5-cent stamp bearing Thomas Jefferson. The 10-cent note carried a facsimile of the 10-cent Washington stamp. The larger 25 and 50-cent notes simply showed the same little stamp images repeated across the paper — a quarter or a half-dollar rendered as a row of "stamps." The engraving and printing was done by the National Bank Note Company of New York; the look came straight from Spinner's pasted-up samples.

The notes even tried to behave like stamps. Early sheets were perforated, so a clerk could tear a note free the way you'd tear a stamp from a sheet. But the perforating machines couldn't keep up with demand, so most notes ended up printed on plain sheets and cut apart by hand — which is why surviving first-issue notes are so often crooked and unevenly sized. The mess was a feature of the speed: the country needed change now.

There's one more piece of craft Spinner is genuinely famous for, and it isn't on the postage notes — it's the signature itself. Spinner spent decades perfecting a wildly ornate, near-illegible autograph, and he did it on purpose: a scrawl that elaborate, he reasoned, was nearly impossible to forge. By his own account he began practicing it in the sheriff's office around 1835 and "brought it to its highest perfection" as Treasurer. That signature went onto the nation's Civil War "greenbacks" and fractional notes, and it made Francis Spinner one of the most recognized — if least readable — hands in America.