The Early Dime Coinage, To 1807
In 2019 we think of the dime as merely something with which to make change but this was not always true. Going back a hundred years or more the dime was an important coin with real buying power. Going back even further, the average unskilled worker in the 1790s, for example, rarely earned more than 75 cents for a twelve-hour day of hard physical labor. Although the dime was an important coin, it was in fact not widely seen in the marketplaces of the United States until after 1820. The reason was that the Spanish one-real silver coin, worth twelve and one-half cents in U.S. money, was heavily used throughout the early days of the Republic. And therein lies a tale.
The first attempts at a national system of money for the United States came in the early 1780s when Robert Morris devised a scheme for a decimal coinage. This plan failed for technical reasons but the idea bore fruit and in 1784–1785 Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Confederation Congress, studied the problem very carefully and also came up with a decimal system, but based on the Spanish silver dollar (eight reales). One of his suggestions was for the coinage of a tenth of a dollar, or dime. He wrote that “The tenth will be precisely the Spanish bit, or half pistareen
