Barter, Foreign Coin, and a Century of Currency Chaos
The United States did not start with a national currency, it spent nearly a century figuring out what money even was. Colonists bartered, relied on foreign coins that happened to arrive through trade, and watched colony after colony print its own paper money with no coordination between them, a mess the framers of the Constitution were still cleaning up a century later.
A 1776 Continental Currency note, the paper money Congress printed to finance the Revolutionary War before it had any way to back it, and which lost most of its value before the war was over.
Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, The Buck Starts Here: How Money Is Made
- U.S. Mint, Coinage Act of April 2, 1792
- U.S. Mint, History of the U.S. Mint
- U.S. Mint, Historic Coin Production
- U.S. Mint, Mint History: The 'Crime of 1873'
- Federal Reserve History, National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York, How Currency Gets into Circulation
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, The Role of the Federal Reserve (Coin)
- U.S. Department of the Treasury, Currency and Coins
- Library of Congress, [A "Greenback"; one dollar bill, 1862]
- Library of Congress, Fac-simile of the First Money Coined by the United States, Continental Currency 1776
- Library of Congress, Inside Adams, The Cost of Independence: Highlights from the Early American Paper Money Collection
- National Archives, Founders Online, Design of Coinage, [24 March] 1792
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History, National Numismatic Collection
- Wikimedia Commons, Cross of Gold Speech Cartoon (Grant Hamilton, Judge magazine, 1896)
This page draws on the U.S. Mint's and Bureau of Engraving and Printing's own published histories, Federal Reserve and Federal Reserve Bank of New York educational material on currency production and circulation, the Library of Congress and National Archives' primary-source records of colonial and Revolutionary -era currency, and the Smithsonian's National Numismatic Collection. The 1862 one-dollar note and 1776 Continental Currency note images are public domain U.S. government works from the Wikimedia Commons National Numismatic Collection archive; the 1896 political cartoon is a public domain work first published before 1931.