HARD TIME TOKENS

Although we think that the American public has always used official coined money, this was not always the case. One of the more interesting aspects of American numismatics is the study of those tokens that served in place of coins in the marketplace. The best known of these were made in the late 1830s and today are called Hard Times Tokens because of the economic problems that affected the United States during that era.

Prior to 1837, tokens were little used in the American marketplace, but a series of events that began in 1834 was to change everything. In that year, after many years of debate, Congress finally reformed the gold coinage by lowering the weights. During the 1820s and early 1830s, most coined gold had left the United States for European banks, leaving only silver and bank notes to conduct commercial affairs.

The act of June 1834 was meant to bring United States gold coins into line with the international ratio between gold and silver. The law of 1792 had set the ratio at 15-to-1 ( one ounce of gold was worth 15 ounces of silver), but by the 1820s the world markets used ratios closer to 16-to-1. The result of the 1834 law was that gold flowed heavily into the United States because the ratio had been set a little too high, at