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

by Murray N. Rothbard

  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 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 confiscation 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 intermittently 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 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 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 operation of paper money. Despite the inflation, booms and busts, and shortages of specie caused by paper issues, the specie system worked well overall:

  Here was a silver standard... in the absence of institutions of the central government intervening in the silver market, and in the absence of either a public or private central bank adjusting domestic credit or managing a reserve of specie or foreign exchange with which to stabilize exchange rates. The market... kept exchange rates remarkably close to the legislated par.... What is most remarkable in this context is the continuity of the specie system through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.10

  PRIVATE BANK NOTES

  In contrast to government paper, private bank notes and deposits, redeemable in specie, had begun in western Europe in Venice in the fourteenth century. Firms granting credit to consumers and businesses had existed in the ancient world and in medieval Europe, but these were “money lenders” who loaned out their own savings. “Banking” in the sense of lending out the savings of others only began in England with the “scriveners” of the early seventeenth century. The scriveners were clerks who wrote contracts and bonds and were therefore in a position to learn of mercantile transactions and engage in money lending and borrowing.11

  There were, however, no banks of deposit in England until the civil war in the mid-seventeenth century. Merchants had been in the habit of storing their surplus gold in the king’s mint for safekeeping. That habit proved to be unfortunate, for when Charles I needed money in 1638, shortly before the outbreak of the civil war, he confiscated the huge sum of £200,000 of gold, calling it a “loan” from the owners. Although the merchants finally got their gold back, they were understandably shaken by the experience, and forsook the mint, depositing their gold instead in the coffers of private goldsmiths, who, like the mint, were accustomed to storing the valuable metal. The warehouse receipts of th
e goldsmiths soon came to be used as a surrogate for the gold itself. By the end of the civil war, in the 1660s, the goldsmiths fell prey to the temptation to print pseudo-warehouse receipts not covered by gold and lend them out; in this way fractional reserve banking came to England.12

  Very few private banks existed in colonial America, and they were short-lived. Most prominent was the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740, issuing notes and lending them out on real estate. The land bank was launched as an inflationary alternative to government paper, which the royal governor was attempting to restrict. The land bank issued irredeemable notes, and fear of its unsound issue generated a competing private silver bank, which emitted notes redeemable in silver. The land bank promptly issued over £49,000 in irredeemable notes, which depreciated very rapidly. In six months’ time the public was almost universally refusing to accept the bank’s notes and land bank sympathizers vainly accepting the notes. The final blow came in 1741, when Parliament, acting at the request of several Massachusetts merchants and the royal governor, outlawed both the land and the silver banks.

  One intriguing aspect of both the Massachusetts Land Bank and other inflationary colonial schemes is that they were advocated and lobbied for by some of the wealthiest merchants and land speculators in the respective colonies. Debtors benefit from inflation and creditors lose; realizing this fact, older historians assumed that debtors were largely poor agrarians and creditors were wealthy merchants and that therefore the former were the main sponsors of inflationary nostrums. But, of course, there are no rigid “classes” of debtors and creditors; indeed, wealthy merchants and land speculators are often the heaviest debtors. Later historians have demonstrated that members of the latter group were the major sponsors of inflationary paper money in the colonies.13, 14

  REVOLUTIONARY WAR FINANCE

  To finance the Revolutionary War, which broke out in 1775, the Continental Congress early hit on the device of issuing fiat paper money. The leader in the drive for paper money was Gouverneur Morris, the highly conservative young scion of the New York landed aristocracy. There was no pledge to redeem the paper, even in the future, but it was supposed to be retired in seven years by taxes levied pro rata by the separate states. Thus, a heavy future tax burden was supposed to be added to the inflation brought about by the new paper money. The retirement pledge, however, was soon forgotten, as Congress, enchanted by this new, seemingly costless form of revenue, escalated its emissions of fiat paper. As a historian has phrased it, “such was the beginning of the ‘federal trough,’ one of America’s most imperishable institutions.”15

  The total money supply of the United States at the beginning of the Revolution has been estimated at $12 million. Congress launched its first paper issue of $2 million in late June 1775, and before the notes were printed it had already concluded that another $1 million was needed. Before the end of the year, a full $6 million in paper issues was issued or authorized, a dramatic increase of 50 percent in the money supply in one year.

  The issue of this fiat “Continental” paper rapidly escalated over the next few years. Congress issued $6 million in 1775, $19 million in 1776, $13 million in 1777, $64 million in 1778, and $125 million in 1779. This was a total issue of over $225 million in five years superimposed upon a pre-existing money supply of $12 million. The result was, as could be expected, a rapid price inflation in terms of the paper notes, and a corollary accelerating depreciation of the paper in terms of specie. Thus, at the end of 1776, the Continentals were worth $1 to $1.25 in specie; by the fall of the following year, its value had fallen to 3-to-1; by December 1778 the value was 6.8-to-1; and by December 1779, to the negligible 42-to-1. By the spring of 1781, the Continentals were virtually worthless, exchanging on the market at 168 paper dollars to one dollar in specie. This collapse of the Continental currency gave rise to the phrase, “not worth a Continental.”

  To top this calamity, several states issued their own paper money, and each depreciated at varying rates. Virginia and the Carolinas led the inflationary move, and by the end of the war, state issues added a total of 210 million depreciated dollars to the nation’s currency.

  In an attempt to stem the inflation and depreciation, various states levied maximum price controls and compulsory par laws. The result was only to create shortages and impose hardships on large sections of the public. Thus, soldiers were paid in Continentals, but farmers understandably refused to accept payment in paper money despite legal coercion. The Continental Army then moved to “impress” food and other supplies, seizing the supplies and forcing the farmers and shopkeepers to accept depreciated paper in return. By 1779, with Continental paper virtually worthless, the Continental Army stepped up its impressments, “paying” for them in newly issued paper tickets or “certificates” issued by the army quartermaster and commissary departments. The states followed suit with their own massive certificate issues. It understandably took little time for these certificates, federal and state, to depreciate in value to nothing; by the end of the war, federal certificate issues alone totaled $200 million.

  The one redeeming feature of this monetary calamity was that the federal and state governments at least allowed these paper issues to sink into worthlessness without insisting that taxpayers shoulder another grave burden by being forced to redeem these issues specie at par, or even to redeem them at all.16 Continentals were not redeemed at all, and state paper was only redeemed at depreciating rates, some at the greatly depreciated market value.17 By the end of the war, all the wartime state paper had been withdrawn from circulation.

  Unfortunately, the same policy was not applied to another important device that Congress turned to after its Continental paper had become almost worthless in 1779: loan certificates. Technically, loan certificates were public debt, but they were scarcely genuine loans. They were simply notes issued by the government to pay for supplies and accepted by the merchants because the government would not pay anything else. Hence, the loan certificates became a form of currency, and rapidly depreciated. As early as the end of 1779, they had depreciated to 24-to-1 in specie. By the end of the war, $600 million of loan certificates had been issued. Some of the later loan certificate issues were liquidated at a depreciated rate, but the bulk remained after the war to become the substantial core of the permanent, peacetime federal debt.

  The mass of federal and state debt could have depreciated and passed out of existence by the end of the war, but the process was stopped and reversed by Robert Morris, wealthy Philadelphia merchant and virtual economic and financial czar of the Continental Congress in the last years of the war. Morris, leader of the nationalist forces in American politics, moved to make the depreciated federal debt ultimately redeemable in par and also agitated for federal assumption of the various state debts. The reason for this was twofold: (a) to confer a vast subsidy on speculators who had purchased the public debt at highly depreciated values, by paying interest and principal at par in specie;18 and (b) to build up agitation for taxing power in the Congress, which the Articles of Confederation refused to allow to the federal government. The decentralist policy of the states’ raising taxes or issuing new paper money to pay off the pro rata federal debt as well as their own was thwarted by the adoption of the Constitution, which brought about the victory of the nationalist program, led by Morris’s youthful disciple and former aide, Alexander Hamilton.

  THE BANK OF NORTH AMERICA

  Robert Morris’s nationalist vision was not confined to a strong central government, the power of the federal government to tax, and a massive public debt fastened permanently upon the taxpayers. Shortly after he assumed total economic power in Congress in the spring of 1781, Morris introduced a bill to create the first commercial bank, as well as the first central bank, in the history of the new Republic. This bank, headed by Morris himself, the Bank of North America, was not only the first fractional reserve commercial bank in the U.S.; it was to be a privately owned central bank, modeled after the Bank of England. The money system was t
o be grounded upon specie, but with a controlled monetary inflation pyramiding an expansion of money and credit upon a reserve of specie.

  The Bank of North America, which quickly received a federal charter and opened its doors at the beginning of 1782, received the privilege from the government of its notes being receivable in all duties and taxes to all governments, at par with specie. In addition, no other banks were to be permitted to operate in the country. In return for its monopoly license to issue paper money, the bank would graciously lend most of its newly created money to the federal government to purchase public debt and be reimbursed by the hapless taxpayer. The Bank of North America was made the depository for all congressional funds. The first central bank in America rapidly loaned $1.2 million to the Congress, headed also by Robert Morris.19

  Despite Robert Morris’s power and influence, and the monopoly privileges conferred upon his bank, it was perceived in the market that the bank’s notes were being inflated compared with specie. Despite the nominal redeemability of the Bank of North America’s notes in specie, the market’s lack of confidence in the inflated notes led to their depreciation outside its home base in Philadelphia. The bank even tried to shore up the value of the notes by hiring people to urge redeemers of its notes not to ruin everything by insisting upon specie—a move scarcely calculated to improve ultimate confidence in the bank.

  After a year of operation, however, Morris, his political power slipping after the end of the war, moved quickly to end his bank’s role as a central bank and to shift it to the status of a private commercial bank chartered by the state of Pennsylvania. By the end of 1783, all of the federal government’s stock in the Bank of North America, which had the previous year amounted to five-eighths of its capital, had been sold by Morris into private hands, and all U.S. government debt to the bank had been repaid. The first experiment with a central bank in the United States had ended.20