From Blood to Profit: Making Money in the Practice and Imagery of Early America

Abstract

Money, wrote Pennsylvanian Francis Rawle in 1725, is “the vital spirit and blood of the body politick.” Is not money, another pamphleteer contended, “the blood of life, which circulates from member to member, throughout the whole body of all living creatures?” It followed that the tokens acting as the medium of value could be anything, “whether it be pewter, silver, spelter, brass or paper, matters not which.” Americans in fact used provincial tax credit notes for money, along with other specie substitutes: “bills of credit” were issued to public creditors and could be employed by the holder or others to pay public obligations like taxes. They were “in value equal” to coin and, like coin, could be passed from hand to hand in the meantime. It was their circulating property—”the ready currency of the thing”—that controlled.