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As George Washington’s rebel army fought for liberty against the British war machine some 250 years ago, the powdered-wig set in Philadelphia faced a monumental cash-flow problem.
The American Revolution was our democracy’s origin story, a tale of seemingly unrealistic optimism and fierce self-determination. Of course, declaring independence was one thing. Paying for it without the economic foundation of British trade was quite another.
Members of the Continental Congress quickly discovered that British muskets, warships, and treason charges levied by King George III were not the only threats to the fledgling union.
Financial failure loomed before, during, and after the war.
Money was needed to pay soldiers, settle debts owed to France and other allies, and to build a stable commercial environment.
They muddled through with experiments in coin design and metals, paper promises of eventual remuneration, and pure American stubbornness.
Their earliest solutions proved unsustainable, but the coins and paper notes produced during that uncertain period in United States history provided a bridge from flat broke colonial upstart to solvent, independent country.
A Spanish Stopgap
Before independence, English law prohibited the colonies from striking their own gold and silver coins. Hard currency was scarce. Foreign money filled the gaps.
They used what they had at hand: English shillings, Portuguese gold, French livres. The Spanish Milled Dollar, the foundation of the famous "Pieces of Eight," provided the primary backing for paper bills issued by the Continental Congress.
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The Spanish Milled Dollar was trusted for its consistent silver content and milled edges that prevented traders from shaving slivers off undetected. For smaller change, the coin was physically cut into eight wedge-shaped pieces, or "bits." A quarter-dollar was literally two of these pieces, or "two bits."
The practice of cutting coins exposed continental consumers to fraud. Expert cutters learned to extract five quarters from a single dollar, so people eventually rejected cut coins except by weight.
Paper Promises, Chalmers Silver
With no taxing authority and no mint, the Continental Congress funded the Revolution by printing paper money backed, in theory, by Spanish Milled Dollars or equivalent gold and silver.
With no reliable revenue and wartime shortages driving up prices, continental currency depreciated rapidly. Hence the term, "not worth a Continental," which entered the American vocabulary as a synonym for worthlessness.
One private response came from silversmith John Chalmers of Annapolis, Maryland. In 1783, Chalmers produced silver coins in threepence, sixpence, and shilling denominations to counter the abuse of fraudulently cut Spanish bits.
Today, the Chalmers pieces are rare and their existence speaks to the improvisational nature of colonial and continental currency.
The Continental Dollar Mystique
No discussion of Revolutionary-era coinage is complete without the so-called 1776 Continental Dollar.
It features a sundial, the Latin motto "Fugio" ("time flies"), and "Mind Your Business" on the obverse, with 13 linked rings on the reverse — but no denomination. Oddly, the word “currency” is misspelled with only one R on a small number of these coins.
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The design is widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin. But here the story gets murky.
No contemporaneous records that mention a Continental Currency dollar coin have been uncovered in the records of the Continental Congress. Scholarly debate about whether these pieces were American-made or struck speculatively in Europe remains in play.
Researchers Erik Goldstein and David McCarthy, whose article, "The Myth of the Continental Dollar" won the American Numismatic Association's 2019 Heath Literary Award, argued the traditional theory of domestic origin is unlikely. The Continental Dollar remains a big part of beloved numismatic lore, but its origins are unresolved.
The Libertas Americana
One iconic Revolutionary piece is not money. The Libertas Americana is a medal, commissioned by Benjamin Franklin while serving as Minister to France to commemorate American victories at Saratoga and Yorktown and honor French support.
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Franklin commissioned it on his own initiative, not by authority of Congress, and it was struck in Paris by engraver Augustin Dupré. He distributed the medals to friends, acquaintances, and political contacts. It was never intended to circulate.
Its numismatic importance extends well beyond its era, however: that Liberty portrait served as the inspiration for U.S. pattern coinage in 1792 and for the first federal copper and silver coins of the 1790s.
A version of the Libertas was used for the pregame coin toss at Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, California, to mark the occasion of America’s 250th birthday.
Nova Constellatio: A True American Coin
Financier and Continental Congress delegate Robert Morris of Pennsylvania was credited with keeping the Revolution solvent. Named Superintendent of Finance in 1781, Morris devised the Nova Constellatio ("New Constellation") patterns of 1783 — the first coins struck under U.S. authority.
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Morris's system was anchored by a small silver unit and was the first proposed coinage in the Western world to use full decimalization. On April 2, 1783, Morris recorded in his diary the delivery of "a Piece of Silver Coin being the first that has been struck as an American Coin."
The surviving patterns — a 1,000-unit mark, 500-unit quint, 100-unit bit, and copper 5-unit piece — are among the rarest coins in American numismatics.
Congress rejected the proposal given the government's precarious finances, but Morris's decimal framework endured: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton later revived the concept, now denominated in dollars and cents.
Bridge to a New Nation
The coins, patterns, and monetary experiments of the Revolutionary period were not false starts. They were rehearsals.
The patchwork of Spanish Milled Dollars, cut bits, private issues like Chalmers's silver, and proposals like the Nova Constellatio led to a monetary system based on reliable silver content, practical denominations, and convertibility with foreign currencies.
By the early 1790s those lessons had been absorbed. The Constitutional Convention granted the federal government exclusive coining authority, a direct response to the monetary chaos of the war years.
With the Coinage Act of 1792 and the opening of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, the republic finally had a currency that was unmistakably, officially, and enduringly American.