Forty-eight-shilling note, issued November 17, 1776, engraved, Boston: Paul Revere.
By July 1775, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts recognized the urgent need for paper money in multiple denominations to support trade and to pay obligations during the Revolution. They commissioned Boston silversmith and engraver Paul Revere (1735-1818) to design and produce the plates. He was paid £8 for engraving the plates and just over £41 for printing the 37,040 bills in the issue. His original design featured a figure holding the Magna Carta—a symbol of traditional rights—but for the November 17, 1776, issue, Revere revised the image to show the figure holding a document labeled “Independance,” a misspelled reflection of the colony’s embrace of the Declaration of Independence adopted that July.