The Currency Act Repeal Movement: A Study of Imperial Politics and Revolutionary Crisis, 1764-1767

Abstract

N April I764 Parliament passed a currency act for the regulation of I paper money and the protection of British investments in the colonies outside New England. Ambiguous in its wording, the new law, as administered, forbade the issue of additional legal-tender paper and the reissue of old notes as they came due. Existing supplies of currency remained intact. Nevertheless, within a year a rapid contraction of wartime emissions and a growing shortage of specie led New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina to instruct their colonial agents to lobby for repeal of the law. Backing the agents were many of the same London merchants who, in their anxiety to secure their sterling debts in Virginia and North Carolina, had been instrumental in obtaining the Currency Act in the first place. By 1766 these merchants were working for an expansion of lawful currency to boost flagging American sales and remittances. During the same years the alliance of merchants and agents proved its political effectiveness in helping to repeal the Stamp Act and amend the Revenue Act of 1764. But the alliance failed either to repeal or revise the Currency Act for reasons having more to do with the growth of antagonism between Britain and the colonies than with the problems of paper money. Most important, the attack on the Currency Act became enmeshed in the crisis over parliamentary taxation and the continuing search by a succession of postwar ministries for an American revenue. As a result, the Currency Act repeal movement became one of the more tangled strands in the fabric of imperial politics during the opening years of revolutionary crisis.