Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(orig. US) used in combs. to denote something worthless, e.g. continental cuss, continental copper, continental damn.

1841		W.G. Simms Kinsmen 98: I wouldn’t give a continental copper for the safety of your skin, colonel .
1868		Brudder Bones’s Stump Speeches 36: De man dat tried to eat soup wid a fork wouldn’t gib a continental mill-dam fur a whole cart-load ob ’em.
1872		Schele De Vere Americanisms 276: The slang term, Continental Damn, [is] almost universally applied to the utterly valueless Continental paper-money of those days.
1881		‘Bill Nye’ Bill Nye and Boomerang 198: The great, throbbing world [...] don’t care a brass-mounted continental cuss one way or the other.
1881		Arizona Sentinel (Yuma, AZ) 5 Feb. 2/4: Yuma don’t give a continental expletive what they do.
1888		Dly Morn. Astorian (OR) 28 Oct. 2/2: The New York and Indiana folks don’t care a continental imprecation whether Astroia has a railroad or not.
1890		Bulletin (Sydney) 26 July 11/1: Working man: ‘If you don’t open the door we’ll have to break it open.’ / Gillies: ‘Don’t ask me to open the door for a continental Sunday.’.
1890		Princeton Union (MN) 27 Nov. 1/5: The old man looked contemptuously at the speaker, and then said in a don’t-give-a-continental tone: ‘G’way niggers; I don’t care’.
1908		L.W. Payne Jr ‘Word-List From East Alabama’ in DN III:iv 300: continental damn, n. Used to express the trifling or worthless nature of something. ‘It ain’t worth a continental damn,’ i.e., a plain, unequivocal damn.
1912		Day Book (Chicago) 8 Nov. 12/2: They put me up again in ’79 when I didn’t give a tinker’s continental and they beat me again.
1917		Mills & Scott ‘Cheerio! Sailor Boy, How Do?’ 🎵 In storm or calm, whatever the luck may be / Jack doesn't care a continental ‘D’.
1921		Mt Sterling Advocate (KY) 6 Sept. 3/5: We do not give a continental rap how the girls dress so long as their stockings are rolled at the top and do not wrinkle at the ankles.
1935		J. Conroy World to Win 232: I wouldn’t take a million fer ary one, but I wouldn’t give a continental cuss fer another.
1936		(con. 1920s) Dos Passos Big Money in USA (1966) 912: The old Continental sonofagun.