Change Comes to the Gold Coinage, 1834-1837
TODAY, WE look at the early gold coinage of the United States and perhaps wonder what people who lived two centuries thought of these coins. The plain truth is that they had very little opinion on this subject as U.S. gold did not circulate widely among ordinary citizens. Those who did use gold normally had access to Spanish coins such as the eight escudos (doubloon), which was worth about $16 in American money.
The problem of the gold coins not circulating in the marketplaces was not the fault of the Mint but rather in the law passed in April 1792 and the steps leading up to that legislation. During the 1780s, a coin-starved public had repeatedly asked for a dependable national coinage.
In March 1790, only a few months into the new Federal government, Congress asked Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to prepare a comprehensive report on a mint and coinage. The Secretary enlisted the aid of experts, at home and abroad, in order to amass as much information as possible and the 15,000-word completed document was submitted in late January 1791 for both official and public scrutiny.
The task of formulating a system of coinage was not an easy one. The first decision was whether to use a bimetallic arrangement–where gold and silver are on an equal footing–or to go with either gold or silver as
