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You're close, but as they say, "no cigar." It turns out that the unsmiling face on the $10,000 bill (which hasn't been printed since 1946) is none other than Salmon P. Chase. Who, you ask. We'll get to that, but first¿ To start our money hunt, we searched Yahoo! using the phrase "US Treasury," figuring that was as good a launching pad as any. Putting in a number like "10,000" usually isn't a good search strategy and since Woodrow Wilson was just a guess, we didn't want to end up on the wrong track. Our search produced a Yahoo! category (under Executive Branch > Departments) that contained several sites related to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The most promising of these looked to be The Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
At the Bureau's site, we quickly located a link titled "Currency" and clicked away. Next, we spotted the "Frequently Asked Questions" section. We browsed the answers and eventually came upon a link to Individuals and Images on Currency. That's where we learned that Salmon P. Chase is one of only three non-presidents to be commemorated on cash money. The other two are Alexander Hamilton ($10) and Ben Franklin ($100). Your original guess for the $10,000 bill, Woodrow Wilson, actually appeared on the $100,000 bill, which was in production for a scant couple of weeks at the end of 1934. And, finally, we cut to Chase: A link from the Treasury's currency page told us everything we wanted to know and more about the enigmatic
Salmon P. As it turns out, he was the 25th Secretary of the Treasury, serving under Lincoln. Due to a monetary crisis brought on by the Civil War, he reluctantly implemented the first printing of paper money in the United States. In fact, Chase's portrait appeared on the original $1 bill, thus earning him the nickname "Old Mr. Greenbacks." The name didn't stick, however, due to the fact that after the war, Chase, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, declared paper currency to be unconstitutional.
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