America's Silver Certificates and Others

_Really Nice Notes everyone _ Keep up the good work

Excellent Matt. I love seeing completed sets, and the error notes are impressive.

@tomtomtomtom said:
new silver addition

A non fractional!?

😛👍

I have to say I lik the 1899 $1 "Eagle" and $5 "Indian Chief" designs the best. I believe there's also a battleship one out there from around the same time as well. If I were to add any bills to my tiny , they might be the ones to start with - - but I'm sure they have price-tags to match.

Wow great thread...fantastic pics....was there a reason why they changed the design so many times in the 1890's ?

@GoldFinger1969 said:
Wow great thread...fantastic pics....was there a reason why they changed the design so many times in the 1890's ?

The truth is that there were many reasons- a different one for each design change. Also, there weren't as many changes as it might appear as there were more different Federal designs and types in circulation. And there were entirely new types, like the Treasury notes of 1890 and 1891, issued and used for only a few years.

To oversimplify, relative values of gold and silver varied greatly after after the Civil War as Comstock silver came into wider production. Mining interests competed with banking interests as the Country tried to answer questions of which metal would back our currency, and which notes would be redeemable for what metals. Throw in economic volatility and maintaining the inelastic money supply was very difficult. Treasury notes of the 1890s eliminated the arbitrage profits that could be made by exchanging one type of U.S. currency for another. Changes in National Bank laws in the early 1900s helped increase the elasticity of the money supply, too. Laws and new currency were often the 19th century solution that was used until the evolution of the Federal Reserve, which allowed for the retirement of different types of currency and replacement with Federal Reserve Notes, starting in 1914.

Simply put, the 1860s-1914 period represented a time where we were still trying to figure it out, as far as currency goes. Coins were pretty straightforward as you can only strike as many as you have metal for. But currency can be produced in greater amounts-enough to make it worthless. And the U.S. has been very careful to avoid printing too much currency, even if we had to use different types, temporarily.