Nobody knows for certain who invented the dollar sign. Rendered as the letter “S” struck through with one or two vertical lines, its use dates back at least to the late eighteenth century. Some have hypothesized it originated with the Pillars of Hercules appearing on Spanish coats of arms or that it derives from the intertwining of the letters “U” and “S,” standing either for “United States” or “units of silver,” but the likeliest explanation traces its lineage to the challenges of paying for the Revolutionary War. The oldest known example of the symbol that would come to serve as a stand-in for the might of American capitalism appears in the correspondence of an immigrant who worked to finance the Revolution, only to find himself largely abandoned in its aftermath by the nation he had helped bring into being.
Oliver Pollock was born in Ireland in 1737 and emigrated in 1760 to the town of Carlisle in what is now south-central Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter, he began working as a merchant based mostly in New Orleans, which was then in the process of becoming a Spanish city after the French lost the Louisiana Territory as an outcome of the Seven Years’ War. New Orleans struggled to support its rapidly growing population, even to the point of experiencing food shortages, and in the late 1760s Pollock earned the gratitude of Spanish officials by arranging for shipments of flour from Philadelphia that he then sold at a discount. Rewarded by the Governor-General of New Orleans with free trading rights throughout the Louisiana Territory, Pollock quickly became extraordinarily wealthy, mostly by trading among the ports of New Orleans, Havana, and other locales throughout the West Indies.
An early supporter of British colonial resistance to the policies of the home country, and always angling for ways to boost his fortune, Pollock was in an advantageous position to help the colonists when their protests became full-scale revolt. The American revolutionaries desperately needed money to pay for war against the British military, and while the French and Spanish governments offered financial assistance, Pollock both personally donated several hundred thousand Spanish pesos and organized a bond issue to raise funds in New Orleans.