John Adams’s 1819 Proposal: Marking U.S. Coins by Weight Instead of Denomination
jch22
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During the Panic of 1819 (America’s first major peacetime financial crisis, triggered by over-issued paper banknotes, speculative land credit, and a sudden specie shortage), an 83-year-old John Adams wrote a March 12, 1819 letter to Virginia statesman and former U.S. Senator John Taylor. The letter replied to Taylor’s February 20, 1819 message and wrapped up their correspondence on government and money, with Adams citing A Treatise on Political Economy by French economist Destutt de Tracy—a book Thomas Jefferson had just translated and sent to him.
Quoting de Tracy, Adams argued that coins should be named and stamped by their actual metal weight rather than given denomination names like dollars or cents. In their view, a Mint stamp only certifies weight and fineness. When coins carry a fixed face value, governments can cut the precious metal content while keeping the same denomination designation—a practice Adams and de Tracy called theft from creditors and the public, who are forced to accept less real metal for the same nominal sum.
Neither man ever pushed the idea as actual legislation. Adams was in his eighties, long retired, with his Federalist Party effectively defunct. Though Taylor returned to the Senate from 1822 until his death in 1824, he never introduced a coinage bill.
Still, their proposal raises interesting historical "what ifs." If the U.S. had followed their model, it would have avoided the bimetallic crises that shaped 19th-century coinage, including the 1853 "Arrows" weight reduction, the Coinage Act of 1873 ("Crime of '73"), and the Free Silver debates. Those conflicts happened because Congress fixed a legal exchange ratio between gold and silver, causing one metal to be hoarded or melted whenever bullion prices shifted. Internationally, a weight-only system would also have prevented foreign merchants from draining U.S. coins whenever American mint ratios drifted out of line with European markets.
In practice, of course, both domestic and international commerce would have been far too clunky. Buyers, sellers, and foreign merchants would have had to calculate changing exchange rates between gold weights, silver weights, and paper notes on the fly instead of quoting fixed dollar prices. Even if the Mint had stamped small change by weight—like "X Grains Copper" for a large cents—copper prices fluctuated too, meaning small change would never have held a fixed fractional value against silver or gold without carving out an exception for token coins.
Admittedly a footnote, but thought of interest as it came from Adams.
Letter from John Adams to John Taylor of Caroline (Mar. 12, 1819), in 10 The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States 375, 375–77 (Charles Francis Adams ed., Bos., Little, Brown & Co. 1856); Letter from John Taylor of Caroline to John Adams (Feb. 20, 1819) (on file with the Mass. Hist. Soc’y, Adams Family Papers) (referenced in Adams’s Mar. 12, 1819 reply); see also Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy ch. VI (Thomas Jefferson trans., Georgetown, D.C., Joseph Milligan 1817).
Comments
Interesting bit of early US history !
One does wonder how such a currency system would have worked out in practice. Would they have kept issuing de-facto dollars, halves and quarters, etc, and continued to use the name "dollars" as the official currency and money of account, or were they proposing abolishing the concept of the "dollar" entirely and switching the US from the "dollar" to the "gram of silver" and/or the "gram of gold" as the official currency units, and then start issuing new coins "denominated" in even numbers of grams? And how, exactly, would the price ratio between gold, silver and copper grams be regulated and determined? I can't see it doing anything other than establishing a dual-currency system, where the "gram of silver" and "gram of gold" were both official currency units, with an official exchange rate needing to be set between them (otherwise tax collection and government expenditure would have been impossible). Which would have gone right back to the problem of different gold:silver exchange rates existing in Europe.
And ultimately, of course, it would not have prevented inflation, nor actually prevented a future government from diluting the coinage. You can find plenty of occasions down through history, right back to the invention of coinage itself 2600 years ago, where a cash-strapped government simply lied about how pure their coins were - they diluted the purity and hoped nobody would notice.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
At that time, foreign coins were prevalent, many were legal tender, and folks already had to deal with conversions in their daily transactions. This may have made more sense in that environment. Also think trade dollar, private gold, and Stella.
Well, great men can have bad ideas, so be kind to Adams.
Coin denominations only had meaning within the issuing country. Until 1857 many foreign gold coins were accepted as valid for trade and acceptance at specific exchange rates, but they were not national coins and had no fixed statutory "face value"
Placing the metallic content in lieu of a denomination would repudiate a national coinage system. Commerce would have to resort to bullion bartering, and the central purposes of a national coinage - independence, stability and convenience - would be lost.
Sapyx makes some excellent points. They should be considered closely.
Here is a transcription of the Adams March 12, 1819 letter referred to above. [Source: Early Access Link Note: this link will eventually disappear! https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7096]
From John Adams to John Taylor, 12 March 1819
Quincy [Mass]
March 12, 1819
Worthy Sir—
The painful difficulty of holding a pen which has been—growing upon me for many years & now in the middle of the 84th year of my age has become insupportable must be my apology—not only for terminating my Strictures upon your enquiry but for the necessity I am under of borrowing another hand to acknowledge the receipt of your polite & obliging letter of Feb’y 20th.
I have never had but one opinion concerning banking from the institution of the first in Philadelphia by Mr. Robert Morris & Mr. Governeur Morris—& that opinion has uniformly been that the banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation, than they ever have done or ever will do good; they are like party spirit the delusion of the many for the interest of a few. I have always thought that Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke a hundred years ago at least had scientiffically demonstratively settled all questions of this kind. Silver & gold are but the commodities as much as wheat and lumber—the merchants who study the necessity & feel out the wants of the community can always import enough to supply the necessery circulating currency as they can broadcloths or sugar—the trinkets of Birmingham & Manchester—or the hemp of Liberia.
I am old enough to have seen a paper currency anihilated at a blow in Massachusetts in 1750, and a silver currency takings its place immediately & supplying every necessity & every convenience I cannot enlarge upon this subject; it has always been incomprehensible to me that a people so jealous of their liberty & property as the Americans should so long have borne impositions with patience and submission which would have been trampled under foot in the meanest village in Holland or undergone the fate of Woods half pence in Ireland.
I beg leave to refer you to a work which Mr. Jefferson has sent me translated by himself from a French Manuscript of the Count Destutt Tracy. His Chapt. “Of Money” contains the sentiments that I have entertained all my life time. I will quote only a few lines from the anylytical table page 21—“It is to be desired that coins had never borne other names than those of their weights & that the arbitrary denominations are called <, Start deletion,, End,> monies of account as £—S—d. &c. had never been used but when these denominations are admitted and employed in transacteions <, Start deletion,, End,> to diminish the quantity of metal to which they answer by an alteration of the real coins is to steal & it is a theft which even injures him who commits it—A theft of a greater magnitude & still more ruinous is the making of paper-money it is greater because in this money there is absolutely no real value it is <, Start deletion,, End,>more ruinous because by its gradual depreciation during all this time of its existence it produces the effect which would be produced by an infinity of successive deteorations of the coins; all these iniquities are founded on the false idea that money is but a sign.” Permit me to recommend this vol. to your attentive perusal.
Athough an intimacy & a friendship between Mr. P. Henry & me in 1774 & continued till his death—& I have a tender veneration for his memory yet I would not strip the laurels from other men to decorate his brows. Indulge me Sir in the vanity of enclosing to You a copy of an original letter from Mr. H. to me now in my hand dated—May 20th. 1776. I had sent him a copy of that Marble covered pamphlet which I once sent to you entitled thoughts on government &c and it is of that he acknowledges the receipts & expresses his opinion—. If you can contribute anything Sir to convince or persuade this nation to adopt a more honest medium of commerce you will have the most cordial wishes for your success / of your obliged & / most obedient humble / servant—
John Adams
With Adams own words and a specific quotation in context, it appears that Adams might be referring to something different than had been presumed.
Thanks for posting the full letter. It supports the point in my opening post, though “Adams’s thoughts” would probably have been a more precise title than “proposal.” In the third paragraph, Adams says that Destutt de Tracy’s chapter “contains the sentiments that I have entertained all my life time,” then quotes de Tracy’s wish that coins “had never borne other names than those of their weights.” As noted above, the letter was written in response to the 1819 specie crisis; it was not a legislative bill.
Sapyx raised compelling points about both the practical and economic flaws of abolishing denominations. Still, purely as a historical "what if," an early shift toward weight-based standards might have accelerated 19th-century moves toward international coinage unions —long before the Latin Monetary Union, the 1867 Paris Monetary Conference, the U.S. Trade Dollar, or the $4 Stella (not to mis-attribute, apologies if I do, but I think that follow the logic of oldabeintx's references).