Things used to cost something and a half cents. According to wikipedia, at the time it was discontinued it had the approximate purchasing power that a dime does nowadays.
Yes...the purchasing power of a cent was high enough at one time that a half cent was useful in commerce. I don't know what the purchasing power of a half cent was in 1800...but it stands to reason that one day (decades from now)...someone might ask the same question about the half dollar. There was a time when our monetary system was broken down into 4 units (or fractions of those units). That was the cent, dime, dollar, and eagle. 10 cents = 1 dime, 10 dimes = 1 dollar, 10 dollars = 1 eagle. All coins minted in the US are in these units.
When the half cent was eliminated it had the now equivalent purchasing power of a current quarter. Doesn't it just say volumes about how practically useless everything under a dime is today?
It was very useful prior to 1857 when one would often encounter a Mexico 1 Real as payment. Since the Real was "worth" 12 1/2 cents the 1/2 cent was useful in making change.
I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact that England had a halfpenny coin, and they seemed to be essential in commerce; they struck them for hundreds of years.
From what I've read a half cent was a significant amount of change for people back in the day. Every half-cent counted in the early 1800's and had to be accounted for. This is particularly true when citizens were buying groceries. For example if you had a sale of $.10 cents with 5% sales tax you would have a half cent in taxes. The seller would want to get the most out of his good for that half cent while the buyer wouldn't have wanted the seller to round up so the solution was the half-cent. This is more or less the story I heard.
Sales tax before 1857? No way. There would have been a second Revolution. Selective excise taxes on bulk purchases, maybe. But not requiring the half cent coin. Wikipedia: The first broad-based, general sales taxes in the United States were enacted by Kentucky and Mississippi in 1930, although Kentucky repealed its sales tax in 1936. edited
That is true, most sales taxes were not initiated until the 1930s - which was the whole reasoning behind the sales tax tokens in 1 and 5 mills denominations. By the 1960s the last of those tokens, by then plastic in Missouri were phased out. Taxes got rounded up or down to the nearest cent. Taxes in the 19th century would sting us today, ever wonder why people had those wardrobe etc because they couldn't be considered a separate room - households were taxed by the number of rooms they had. I know that was in place in Missouri because all the homes built prior to the Civil War had wardrobes instead of closets.
The more practical answer is that houses had wardrobes because they were cheap -- lumber was one of the cheapest commodities available, especially cherry and walnut, which are now considered cabinet woods, but were considered a nuisance by land-clearing farmers. A wardrobe might have cost 5% as much as adding a closet. Abraham Lincoln writes of attending a huge Halloween bonfire fueled by a fortnight's worth of logs; (wild) cherry was especially despised, because its fruit was poisonous to livestock. Even as late as 1902, the Sears catalog offered three styles of wardrobe, in golden oak, for $6.60 to $7.85 -- they weighed 150 pounds.
Actually not true up until about 1850 sawn lumber was NOT cheap!! All boards had to be sawn by hand or by water powered sawmills up until the invention of the steam engine many pieces that weren't long we're split rather than sawn. Is amazing what I seen in my more then 20 years of working on old houses and antique furniture of how they tried to. Save on lumber especially fine woods like mahogany walnut curly maple etc. was the industrial revolution that changed all that. On another coin and construction note nails were sold by size and larger cost more due to the cost of the iron so a 4 penny nail cost 4 cents a hundred a 16 penny nail cost 16 cents a hundred etc nails weren't cheap back then!!
Nails were so valuable back then that old houses would be burned down so the nails could be recovered and reused.
Absolutely and shortages of supplies especially nails was a big problem for the British during the revolution
When I was young there was an older ca. 1840s farmhouse that burned down and that was just what we did - those old square nails were pretty cool - think they were all handforged. I might still have one of them somewhere. Mainer - I would love to work on old homes in your part of the world. The homes there in Maine are just stunning. Love the architecture, the form etc. My wife's cousin builds barns there and they do theirs with wooden pins because they are the do it the tried and true way. I guess they plan on their barns standing as long as the ones built in the 19th century have. When I get back up there, downeast, I want to visit William Pepperells' home in Kittery Point.
That's a great house I work on a lot of old houses especially in the Portsmouth area I live in a ca 1785 house myself about 20 miles from portland as to the nails I have boxes buckets and barrels of old square nails I probably have a few hundred thousand of various types and sizes I use them daily
It wasn't sales tax as we know it. They were tax stamps (think cigarettes and the small stamps on the packs today) both on sales as well as on tariffs on import/export. The revolution and tax issues from the Boston tea party wasn't about the tax itself but it was taxation without representation. England kept raising the taxes at will without any input from colonial governors in America. They just felt the effect when their breakfast drink went from 2 cents to 4 overnight. The first known tax was on Whiskey in 1791 and it did cause a revolution of sorts with western frontiersmen called the Whiskey Rebellion in 1974. Yet they remained mostly state and territorial very few federal taxes. Excise taxes were levied in 1860's during the Civil war and our sales tax of today started in the 1930's. As for their uses my guess is taxes of some sort or sales/processing of tobacco from the plantations.
