A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (7 page)

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guinea, the Portuguese “joe,” the Spanish doubloon, and Brazilian coins, while silver coins included French crowns and livres.

It is important to realize that gold and silver are international commodities, and that therefore, when not prohibited by government decree, foreign coins are perfectly capable of serving as standard moneys. There is no need to have a national government monopolize the coinage, and indeed foreign gold and silver coins constituted much of the coinage in the United States until Congress outlawed the use of foreign coins in 1857. Thus, if a free market is allowed to prevail in a country, foreign coins will circulate naturally. Silver and gold coins will tend to be valued in proportion to their respective weights, and the ratio
between
silver and gold will be set by the market in accordance with their relative supply and demand.

SHILLING AND DOLLAR MANIPULATIONS

By far the leading specie coin circulating in America was the Spanish silver dollar, defined as consisting of 387 grains of pure silver. The dollar was divided into “pieces of eight,” or “bits,” each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar. Spanish dollars came into the North American colonies through lucrative trade with the West Indies. The Spanish silver dollar had been the world’s outstanding coin since the early sixteenth century, and was spread partially by dint of the vast silver output of the Spanish colonies in Latin America. More important, however, was that the Spanish dollar, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was relatively the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world.2

2The name “dollar” came from “thaler,” the name given to the coin of similar weight, the “Joachimsthaler” or “schlicken thaler,” issued since the early sixteenth century by the Count of Schlick in Joachimsthal in Bohemia. The Joachimsthalers weighed 451 Troy grains of silver. So successful were these coins that similar thalers were minted in Burgundy, Holland, and France; most successful of these was the Maria Theresa thaler, which began being minted in 1751 and formed a considerable portion of American currency after that date. The Spanish “pieces of eight” adopted the name “dollar” after 1690.

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A History of Money and Banking in the United States:
The Colonial Era to World War II

Since the Spanish silver dollar consisted of 387 grains, and the English shilling consisted of 86 grains of silver, this meant the natural, free-market ratio between the two coins would be 4 shillings 6 pence per dollar.3

Constant complaints, both by contemporaries and by some later historians, arose about an alleged “scarcity of money,” especially of specie, in the colonies, allegedly justifying numerous colonial paper money schemes to remedy that “shortage.” In reality, there was no such shortage. It is true that England, in a mercantilist attempt to hoard specie, kept minting for its own pre-rogative and outlawed minting in the colonies; it also prohibited the export of English coin to America. But this did not keep specie from America, for, as we have seen, Americans were able to import Spanish and other foreign coin, including English, from other countries. Indeed, as we shall see, it was precisely paper money issues that led, by Gresham’s Law, to outflows and disappearance of specie from the colonies.

In their own mercantilism, the colonial governments early tried to hoard their own specie by debasing their shilling standards in terms of Spanish dollars. Whereas their natural weights dictated a ratio of 4 shillings 6 pence to the dollar, Massachusetts, in 1642, began a general colonial process of competitive debasement of shillings. Massachusetts arbitrarily decreed that the Spanish dollar be valued at 5 shillings; the idea was to attract an inflow of Spanish silver dollars into that colony, and to subsidize Massachusetts exports by making their prices cheaper in terms of dollars. Soon, Connecticut and other colonies followed suit, each persistently upping the ante of debasement. The result was to increase the supply of nominal units of account by debasing the shilling, inflating domestic prices and thereby bringing the temporary export stimulus to a rapid end. Finally, the English government brought a halt to this futile and inflationary practice in 1707.

3Since 20 shillings make £1, this meant that the natural ratio between the two currencies was £l = $4.44.

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But the colonial governments had already found another, and far more inflationary, arrow for their bow: the invention of government fiat paper money.

GOVERNMENT PAPER MONEY

Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.4, 5 Massachusetts was accustomed to launching plunder expeditions against the prosperous French colony in Quebec. Generally, the expeditions were successful, and would return to Boston, sell their booty, and pay off the soldiers with the proceeds. This time, however, the expedition was beaten back decisively, and the soldiers returned to Boston in ill humor, grumbling for their pay. Discontented soldiers are ripe for mutiny, so the Massachusetts government looked around in concern for a way to pay the soldiers. It tried to borrow £3,000–£4,000 from Boston merchants, but evidently the Massachusetts credit rating was not the best. Finally, Massachusetts decided in December 1690 to print £7,000 in paper notes and to use them to pay the soldiers.

Suspecting that the public would not accept irredeemable paper, the government made a twofold pledge when it issued the notes: that it would redeem them in gold or silver out of tax 4Government paper redeemable in gold began in the early ninth century, and after three centuries the government escalated to irredeemable fiat paper, with the usual consequences of boom-bust cycles, and runaway inflation. See Gordon Tullock, “Paper Money—A Cycle in Cathay,”
Economic History Review
9, no. 3 (1957): 393–96.

5The only exception was a curious form of paper money issued five years earlier in Quebec, to become known as “card money.” The governing
intendant
of Quebec, Monsieur Mueles, divided some playing cards into quarters, marked them with various monetary denominations, and then issued them to pay for wages and materials sold to the government.

He ordered the public to accept the cards as legal tender, and this particular issue was later redeemed in specie sent from France.

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A History of Money and Banking in the United States:
The Colonial Era to World War II

revenue in a few years and that absolutely no further paper notes would be issued. Characteristically, however, both parts of the pledge went quickly by the board: The issue limit disappeared in a few months, and all the bills continued unredeemed for nearly 40 years. As early as February 1691, the Massachusetts government proclaimed that its issue had fallen “far short” and so it proceeded to emit £40,000 of new money to repay all of its outstanding debt, again pledging falsely that this would be the absolute final note issue.

But Massachusetts found that the increase in the supply of money, coupled with a fall in the demand for paper because of growing lack of confidence in future redemption in specie, led to a rapid depreciation of new money in relation to specie. Indeed, within a year after the initial issue, the new paper pound had depreciated on the market by 40 percent against specie.

By 1692, the government moved against this market evaluation by use of force, making the paper money compulsory legal tender for all debts at par with specie, and by granting a premium of 5 percent on all payment of debts to the government made in paper notes. This legal tender law had the unwanted effect of Gresham’s Law: the disappearance of specie circulation in the colony. In addition, the expanding paper issues drove up prices and hampered exports from the colony. In this way, the specie “shortage” became the creature rather than the cause of the fiat paper issues. Thus, in 1690, before the orgy of paper issues began, £200,000 of silver money was available in New England; by 1711, however, with Connecticut and Rhode Island having followed suit in paper money issue, £240,000 of paper money had been issued in New England but the silver had almost disappeared from circulation.

Ironically, then, Massachusetts’s and her sister colonies’

issue of paper money created rather than solved any “scarcity of money.” The new paper drove out the old specie. The consequent driving up of prices and depreciation of paper scarcely relieved any alleged money scarcity among the public. But since the paper was issued to finance government
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expenditures and pay public debts, the
government
, not the public, benefited from the fiat issue.

After Massachusetts had emitted another huge issue of

£500,000 in 1711 to pay for another failed expedition against Quebec, not only was the remainder of the silver driven from circulation, but, despite the legal tender law, the paper pound depreciated 30 percent against silver. Massachusetts pounds, officially 7 shillings to the silver ounce, had now fallen on the market to 9 shillings per ounce. Depreciation proceeded in this and other colonies despite fierce governmental attempts to outlaw it, backed by fines, imprisonment, and total confisca-tion of property for the high crime of not accepting the paper at par.

Faced with a further “shortage of money” due to the money issues, Massachusetts decided to press on; in 1716, it formed a government “land bank” and issued £100,000 in notes to be loaned on real estate in the various counties of the province.

Prices rose so dramatically that the tide of opinion in Massachusetts began to turn against paper, as writers pointed out that the result of issues was a doubling of prices in the past 20

years, depreciation of paper, and the disappearance of Spanish silver through the operation of Gresham’s Law. From then on, Massachusetts, pressured by the British Crown, tried intermit-tently to reduce the bills in circulation and return to a specie currency, but was hampered by its assumed obligations to honor the paper notes at par of its sister New England colonies.

In 1744, another losing expedition against the French led Massachusetts to issue an enormous amount of paper money over the next several years. From 1744 to 1748, paper money in circulation expanded from £300,000 to £2.5 million, and the depreciation in Massachusetts was such that silver had risen on the market to 60 shillings an ounce, ten times the price at the beginning of an era of paper money in 1690.

By 1740, every colony but Virginia had followed suit in fiat paper money issues, and Virginia succumbed in the late 1750s
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A History of Money and Banking in the United States:
The Colonial Era to World War II

in trying to finance part of the French and Indian War against the French. Similar consequences—dramatic inflation, shortage of specie, massive depreciation despite compulsory par laws—

ensued in each colony. Thus, along with Massachusetts’ depreciation of 11-to-1 of its notes against specie compared to the original par, Connecticut’s notes had sunk to 9-to-1 and the Carolinas’ at 10-to-1 in 1740, and the paper of virulently inflationist Rhode Island to 23-to-1 against specie. Even the least-inflated paper, that of Pennsylvania, had suffered an appreciation of specie to 80 percent over par.

A detailed study of the effects of paper money in New Jersey shows how it created a boom-bust economy over the colonial period. When new paper money was injected into the economy, an inflationary boom would result, to be followed by a deflationary depression when the paper money supply contracted.6

At the end of King George’s War with France in 1748, Parliament began to pressure the colonies to retire the mass of paper money and return to a specie currency. In 1751, Great Britain prohibited all further issues of legal tender paper in New England and ordered a move toward redemption of existing issues in specie. Finally, in 1764, Parliament extended the prohibition of new issues to the remainder of the colonies and required the gradual retirement of outstanding notes.

Following the lead of Parliament, the New England colonies, apart from Rhode Island, decided to resume specie payment and retire their paper notes rapidly at the current depreciated market rate. The panicky opponents of specie resumption and monetary contraction made the usual predictions in such a situation: that the result would be a virtual absence of money in New England and the consequent ruination of all trade. Instead, however, after a brief adjustment, the resumption and retirement led to a far more prosperous trade and production—the harder money and lower prices attracting an inflow of specie. In fact, with 6Donald L. Kemmerer, “Paper Money in New Jersey, 1668–1775,” New Jersey Historical Society,
Proceedings
74 (April 1956): 107–44.

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Massachusetts on specie and Rhode Island still on depreciated paper, the result was that Newport, which had been a flourishing center for West Indian imports for western Massachusetts, lost its trade to Boston and languished in the doldrums.7, 8

In fact, as one student of colonial Massachusetts has pointed out, the return to specie occasioned remarkably little dislocation, recession, or price deflation. Indeed, wheat prices fell by less in Boston than in Philadelphia, which saw no such return to specie in the early 1750s. Foreign exchange rates, after the resumption of specie, were highly stable, and “the restored specie system operated after 1750 with remarkable stability during the Seven Years War and during the dislocation of international payments in the last years before the Revolution.”9

Not being outlawed by government decree, specie remained in circulation throughout the colonial period, even during the 7Before Massachusetts went back to specie, it was committed to accept the notes of the other New England colonies at par. This provided an incentive for Rhode Island to inflate its currency wildly, for this small colony, with considerable purchases to make in Massachusetts, could make these purchases in inflated money at par. Thereby Rhode Island could export its inflation to the larger colony, but make its purchases with the new money before Massachusetts prices could rise in response. In short, Rhode Island could expropriate wealth from Massachusetts and impose the main cost of its inflation on the latter colony.