specie payment

specie payment, the redemption of U.S. paper money by banks or the Treasury in metallic (usually gold) coin.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

Except for a few periods of suspension (1814–15, 1836–42, and 1857), Americans were able to redeem paper money for specie from the time of the ratification of the Constitution (1789) to the onset of the Civil War (1861). The suspensions had occurred during periods of war or economic crisis. With the outbreak of hostilities between the North and the South, the federal government again suspended specie payments late in 1861.

In 1862 the government began issuing paper money, called “greenbacks” and “shinplasters,” and in 1863 it authorized federally chartered banks to issue national bank notes. By the end of the war in 1865, more than $430,000,000 worth of paper money (declared legal tender by Congress) was in circulation.

“Hard money” advocates wanted to resume paying specie for this paper money, while “soft money” supporters feared the deflationary impact resumption would produce. After the Supreme Court sanctioned the legitimacy of the paper money in the Legal Tender Cases (1870–71), congressional backers of a return to specie payments passed the Resumption Act of 1875.

In accord with the Resumption Act, specie payments were resumed on Jan. 1, 1879. But the knowledge that the government could indeed redeem each greenback or bank note at par in gold made the public favourably inclined to keep using the much more convenient paper money.