My grandfather's math book from 1899...

That's such a cool find! Congrats! Amazing.

Oh, I think they did give a passing thought to it. That's why there are so many Civil war tokens. People didn't know which side would win, and they didn't have confidence in paper. So much of the silver and gold coinage (viewed as genuine wealth) was hoarded throughout the war forcing businesses to come up with tokens in order to do business.

Also, look at the dates with arrows after 1853 when they had to reduce the size for a while. It would appear that most people were very mindful of the value of an ounce of silver and as soon as silver even barely crept by face value of these coins, they were hoarded. Forcing congress to lower weights for several years.

I guess I can't really blame them for taking gold and silver out of the coins. The U.S. is not the sole controller of the Worldwide silver market or Worldwide inflation. They were going up in value no matter what we did. How could they put any amount of silver in coinage again without everybody hoarding, again, until there were no coins for circulation?

I guess you could peg silver at $20.00 an ounce and put 0.005 of an ounce of silver in our dimes, but that's so miniscule, the end wouldn't justify the means. Then what happens when silver goes to $25 on up?

Then everybody would have another reason to hoard everything again. Plus the demand is so great now. The population is so much larger, it's just not feasible anymore. I'm afraid it's faith based forever now.

Anyway, from what I understand, a lot of people back then never even saw a gold piece in circulation. $20 DE's were primarily bankers coins for large transactions. $10 was a lot of money back then. It's hard to envision now. But I'm sure most people didn't have the luxury to hoard large quantities of $5 or $10 gold pieces. Or $500 or $1000 bills. A single one probably would have been a major investment that most people would have scoffed at or never even thought of.

As for what they would think today? They're turning over in their graves! I don't think they'd be a bit happy with our monetary system or our government. In fact, I'd venture to say they'd be enraged.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

those little snapshots into the past are very educational...

 

Great piece of history , interesting thread .
rzage

 

Really cool book and neat to see what books were like 110yrs ago. Thanks for the post