• A. 12 years
  • B. 35 years
  • C. 71 years
  • D. 94 years

💡 Need a hint?

The United States officially gained independence in 1776. The first official dollar bill didn’t appear until much later, after a long period during which gold and silver coins were the standard. Think about the era of major economic changes in America.

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The correct answer is C. 71 years.

The United States gained independence in 1776, but the first official dollar bill wasn’t issued until 1862 — nearly 71 years later. These first bills were known as “Demand Notes” and were later replaced by the famous “Greenbacks.” An interesting detail: that first one-dollar bill didn’t feature George Washington, but rather Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury at the time. Washington didn’t appear on the dollar until much later.

📚 More background information

In the first decades after 1776, the young nation relied almost exclusively on metal coins as currency. Paper money had a poor reputation, and for good reason.

During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress had already issued paper money, known as “Continentals.” Those bills lost their value so rapidly that the expression “not worth a Continental” became a common saying. That trauma lingered for generations.

It wasn’t until the Civil War that everything changed, as the federal government urgently needed money to finance the war effort. The earliest version of the dollar bill featured a portrait of Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, who as minister was personally responsible for the design. These were later replaced by “Legal Tender Notes,” also known as Greenbacks. The green ink on the back was no coincidence: green was harder to photograph, making counterfeiting more difficult.

And Washington? He didn’t appear on a bill until 1869, and it took even longer before he became the permanent face on the one-dollar bill that everyone knows today. The current basic design dates back to 1963.