I was Googling the other day (alwaysdangerous for me) and I found two nice 19th century articles onthe final fate of the Confederate Treasury in Georgia in1865.

(In light of the article in last week's E-Sylum on"Davis Flight Medals," let me say that the first is"The Last Days of the Confederate Treasury and What Becameof the Specie" by M. H. Clark, who was the last ActingTreasurer of the CSA. His article appeared in the SouthernHistorical Society Papers in 1881 and is available via GoogleBooks.

The second article is "The Story of the Virginia BanksFunds" by Otis Ashmore, which appeared in The GeorgiaHistorical Quarterly in December 1918. It is also available viaGoogle Books.

More interesting for my purposes, I also found ConfederateFinance by Richard Cecil Todd (University of Georgia Press,1954, reprinted 2009), which makes heavy use of the archives ofthe Confederate Treasury Department, which are now part of theNational Archives. And, having been written by a historyprofessor, it has lots and lots of end-notes and a greatbibliography. The book provides an excellent summary ofConfederate finances and includes chapters on the TreasuryDepartment, Loans, Treasury Notes (Confederate currency), Tariffsand Taxes, Seizures and Donations and Financial OperationsAbroad.

And, the best part about the book is that it's availableas a PDF for free (from UGA, I believe): http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/ugapressbks/pdfs/ugp9780820334547.pdf.

Now, as someone interested in the southern mints, this book isa great find!

As you may recall, Breen (in Walter Breen's CompleteEncyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins ) makes a couple ofreferences to what happened to the southern mints' speciefollowing secession (and also what happened to the specie in theConfederate Treasury), but he provided few details and nospecific sources. Clair Birdsall, in The United States BranchMint at Charlotte, North Carolina: Its History and Coinage ,at least, quotes from letters to and from Confederate TreasurySecretary Memminger.

Interestingly, in his bibliography, Birdsall refers to RecordGroup 104 of the National Archives (which, as all us fans ofRoger Burdette know, is where the Mint records are), but hedoesn't refer to Record Group 56 (Archives of the ConfederateTreasury Department), so I wonder if Birdsall relied only on RG104 and not also RG 56.

Anyway, Confederate Finance provides some informationthat is "news to me" - details about what happened tothe southern mints' specie, letters about the Confederatehalf dollar and cent, additional information about Confederatebonds and currency, etc., all with detailed footnotes andbibliography for further reading.

While I presume that this information is known to the CivilWar historians and to the Confederate and southern statescurrency researchers and collectors, I'm not sure it has madeits way to the coin collectors.

It's a useful reminder to a researcher to cast a wide netand look at topics from several viewpoints - one never knows whatthe "other guy" knows until one looks!

To read the Google books articles, see:
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 9
The Georgia Historical Quarterly 1918

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: MORE ON ENGRAVEDCONFEDERATE DAVIS FLIGHT MEDALS(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n15a21.html)