Money: paper, silver & gold – Government sources
1. In a 1786 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Washington wrote, “Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”
2. In a 1787 letter to Jabez Bowen, George Washington stated, “If in the pursuit of the means we should, unfortunately, stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body.”
3. “ . . . I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 26 November 1798
4. It is apparent from the whole context of the Constitution as well as the history of the times which gave birth to it, that it was the purpose of the Convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. . . . These, from their peculiar properties which rendered them the standard of value in all other countries, were adopted in this as well to establish its commercial standard in reference to foreign countries by a permanent rule as to exclude the use of a mutable medium of exchange, such as of certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some states as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of a paper currency. The last, from the experience of the evils of the issues of paper during the Revolution, had become so justly obnoxious as not only to suggest the clause in the Constitution forbidding the emission of bills of credit by the States but also to produce that vote in the Convention which negatived the proposition to grant power to Congress to charter corporations. (Andrew Jackson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. 3, p. 246)
5. “All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.” — John Adams, 2nd US President, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787 (Works 8:447)
6. “Paper money, polluted the equity of our laws, turned them into engines of oppression, corrupted the justice of our public administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had confidence in it, enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of our country, and went far to destroy the morality of our people.” – Peletiah Webster, 1789
7. “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, . . . James Madison, Federalist #10
