CHAPTER V
TWO DECADES OF FEDERAL LEGISLATION, 1877-1896
Financial Questions
It was inevitable that financial measures should occupy the first place in the legislative labors of Congress for a long time after the War. That conflict had left an enormous debt of more than two billion eight hundred million dollars, and the taxes were not only high, but they reached nearly every source which was open to the Federal government. There were outstanding more than four hundred millions of legal tender treasury notes, "greenbacks," which had seriously depreciated and, on account of their variability as compared with gold, offered unlimited opportunities for speculation and jugglery in Wall Street—of which Jay Gould's attempt to corner the gold market and the precipitation of the disaster of Black Friday in 1869 were only spectacular incidents.
Three distinct problems confronted the national administration: the refunding of the national debt at lower rates of interest, the final determination of the place and basis of the paper money in the currency system, and the comparative treatment of gold and silver coinage. The first of these tasks was undertaken by Congress during Grant's administration, when, by the refunding acts of 1870 and 1871, the Treasury was empowered to substitute four, four and one-half, and five per cent bonds for the war issues at the high rates of five, six, and even seven per cent.
The two remaining problems were by no means so easy of solution, because they went to the root of the financial system of the country. Most of the financial interests of the East were anxious to return to a specie basis for the currency by retiring the legal tender notes or by placing them on a metallic foundation. The Treasury under President Johnson began to withdraw the greenbacks from circulation under authority of an act of Congress passed in 1866; but it soon met the determined resistance of the paper money party, which looked upon contraction as a banker's device to appreciate the value of gold and reduce the amount of money in circulation, thus bringing low prices for labor and commodities. Within two years Congress peremptorily stopped the withdrawal of additional Treasury notes.[28]
Shortly after forbidding the further retirement of legal tender notes, Congress reassured the hard money party by passing, on March 18, 1869, an act promising, on the faith of the United States, to pay in coin "all obligations not otherwise redeemable," and to redeem the legal tender notes in specie "as soon as practicable." A further gain for hard money was made in 1875 by the passage of the Resumption Act, providing that on and after January 1, 1879, "the Secretary of the Treasury shall redeem in coin the United States legal tender notes then outstanding, on their presentation for redemption at the office of the Assistant Treasurer of the United States in the City of New York, in sums of not less than fifty dollars." When the day set for redemption arrived, the Secretary of the Treasury was prepared with a large hoard of gold, and public confidence in the government was so high that comparatively little paper was presented in exchange for specie.
Out of the conflict over the inflation and contraction of the currency grew the struggle over "free silver" which was not ended until the campaign of 1900. To understand this controversy we must go back beyond the Civil War. The Constitution, as drafted in 1787, gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof and forbids the states to issue bills of credit or make anything but the gold and silver coin of the United States legal tender in the payment of debts. Nothing is said in that instrument about the power of Congress to issue paper money, and it is questionable whether the framers intended to leave the door open for legal tenders or notes of any kind.