On March 10, 1862, the United States government did something it had almost never done before: it printed paper money. The Civil War was tearing the country apart, and Abraham Lincoln's government desperately needed to pay soldiers and buy supplies. There simply wasn't enough gold and silver to go around. So Congress passed a law authorizing $150 million in new paper notes, and the first ones rolled off the presses with green ink on the back. People nicknamed them "greenbacks," and the name stuck.
Before this, Americans had used a confusing mix of coins, foreign currency, and notes printed by individual banks. There were thousands of different bank notes floating around, many of them fake, and shopkeepers had to check thick books to figure out which ones were real. Some colonies had experimented with paper money during the Revolution, but it had crashed in value so badly that the phrase "not worth a Continental" became a joke. Greenbacks were different - they were issued by the federal government itself and accepted everywhere in the Union.
After the war ended, the United States kept printing paper bills, and today every dollar in your wallet is a descendant of those 1862 greenbacks. The back of the bill is still green. American paper money is now used all over the world, with about 80 percent of $100 bills circulating outside the U.S. Pretty incredible for an emergency invention from the middle of a war, designed to help a struggling country keep its soldiers fed and its government running.
