by Dan Perkins

Ask artist John W. Jones to show you the money and he will.  In fact, Jones is gaining a reputation for showing money, Confederate money, or to be more precise, images of slavery that appeared on Confederate money, beginning in the 1850s.

Jones began drawing and painting at six years old.  "I started very early," said Jones.  "I use to do bulletin boards for teachers in elementary schools and that sort of thing.  Then later on in high school, I started doing backgrounds for school plays.  I graduated from high school in 1968.  After graduating from high school, I received a letter from the president inviting me to participate in the Vietnam War.  So, for the next eight years I spent time in the military – in the army.  

Jones completed a tour in Vietnam and then another in Korea.  While in Korea, Jones worked on a large mural measuring 25 feet tall and 150 feet long that commemorated Korea's bicentennial.  It was the first major piece to draw major attention.  

After leaving the army in 1978, Jones freelanced as an artist and illustrator in the Washington, DC area for about 12 years.  He left there in 1989, and moved back to Columbia , South Carolina .  He worked at the University of South Carolina for about five years as a senior cartographer for the Earth Sciences and Resources Institute.  As a cartographer, Jones made geological maps.  He was also responsible for all of the graphics for the Institute.

In 1995, Jones moved to Somerville, South Carolina, and began working for a company that specialized in blue prints.  Jones did graphics work and sold large format prints.  One day, in 1996, a customer asked Jones to scan a Confederate note and print an enlarged image of it.  "When I did, I recognized that there were African Americans on this old currency," recalled Jones.  "Having lived in South Carolina , I’d seen Confederate money before, but never really paid attention to what was on it until that day."  

The exposure motivated Jones to research images on Confederate bills, and eventually to do a series of paintings based on those images. "I bought a few notes off of ebay and started looking around at old Civil War shops, thrift shops, and old antique shops; and I began finding a few more of them," recalled Jones.  Once he assembled an adequate number of notes with slave images, Jones decided to do a series of paintings based on those images.  

Shortly after his discovery, Jones moved back to Columbia, South Carolina to tend to his ailing mother.  There, he decided to paint full time.  Jones is a prolific painter with a large body of work.  He  completed several series that reference the African American experience prior to beginning The Color of Money Series.  Among his works is a series of paintings that focus on the plight of Africans as they were captured and brought to the United States.  Jones also produced a series of paintings of African American icons, including Black churches and the Buffalo Soldiers.  

While Jones was still in Somerville, he was introduce to Chuma and Barbara Nwokike, owners of Gallery Chuma, Inc. in Charleston, South Carolina. Jones credits Gallery Chuma with helping his artwork to gain national and international attention.

After Jones completed about 35 paintings based on images of slavery on Confederate currency, he approached Dr. Marvin Delaney of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, South Carolina about the possibility of an exhibition.   Delaney immediately saw the implications of Jones' work and supported an exhibition at the Avery Museum, which ran from February to December 2001.  That exhibition drew the attention of many, including New York Times reporter David Firestone.  After Firestone's article on the exhibition, people began sending Jones currency.  Many of the notes he received contained images he had never seen before. 

Jones learned that approximately 30,000 Confederate notes were issued, and roughly 10-percent of those notes contained images of slaves.  To date, Jones has collected 127 Confederate-period notes, and has painted approximately 90 works based on images found on those notes.  He intends to paint all of the slave images that appear in his collection of currency.

The image that Jones finds most compelling is that of the Roman goddess of money, Moneta, who appears on a $5 bill issued by the Georgia Savings Bank of Macon, Georgia.  “It really tells why African Americans ended up on this old currency,” said Jones.  “She has gold under her arms, gold by her feet, cotton in one hand and slaves in the back picking cotton.”  Jones admits he took artistic license in rendering the goddess, who appears in his painting as a mulatto.  “I tried to make the connection between the white slave owners and the exploitation of the female slaves,” said Jones.

The depictions of slaves on Confederate money covers a broad spectrum of activities that underscore the importance of slavery to the Confederate economy.  Images show slaves picking cotton; tilling fields, slaughtering cattle; gathering wheat, hay, tobacco and corn; and loading enormous bails of cotton onto carts, ships and freight trains.  Jones even found a rare image of a slave working in a factory setting.

Some of the images that appear on Confederate currency originally depicted whites engaged in agricultural labor.  But as the issue of slavery began to threaten the unification of the states, many images of whites were darkened or replaced by Africans and African Americans performing wealth generating tasks.  Jones says it was a not too subtle attempt to remind the North and fellow Southerners that the economic prosperity of the nation depended in large measure on the existence and continuation of slavery.

Jones takes a fair amount of artistic license interpreting the images that appear on the currency.  While most of the Caucasian images that appear on Confederate currency are expressionless, slaves were often depicted as being happy.  Jones admits to adding “personality” to many of the images.  “A lot of these faces are so small that you really couldn’t see what they looked like,” explains Jones.  "I had to add faces to these images and try to bring them back to life, and try to give them a humanity that they didn’t have during that period." 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, currency was issued by numerous institutions, not just banks.  The companion book to the exhibition, entitled Confederate Currency: The Color of Money, includes photographs of many of the notes that inspired the collection.  Most of the currency was issued by state chartered banks, but railroad companies, insurance companies, lumber companies and tobacco companies also issued monetary notes.

Jones’ work is important because it offers Americans, and the world, a glimpse into an important period in our nation’s history.  While Jones’ work does not attempt to weigh in on either side of the current debate regarding the payment of reparations to the descendents of slaves, it does provide context to that debate.  More importantly, Jones' work illustrates the depth and pervasiveness of slavery in the Old South, and the importance of slavery to the Confederacy. 

"I thought that one day I might be known for something, but never in my wildest dreams did I ever think it would be Confederate money," declared Jones.

THE END

To see more of John Jones' work based on Confederate money, visit http://www.gallerychuma.com/ColorofMoney.htm.