In 1787, on the 9th day of January, Washington wrote to Jabes Bowen as follows: "Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
To Mr. Stone, a member of the Senate of Maryland, who appealed to Washington to allow his opinion on this subject to be made publicly known, Washington wrote just three months before the opening of the Constitutional convention, as follows: "As my sentiments thereon have been fully and decidedly expressed long before the assembly either of Maryland or of this state was convened, I do not scruple to declare, that if I had had a voice in your legislature, it would have been given decidedly against a paper emission upon the general principles of its utility, as a representative and the necessity of it as a medium.
"To assign reasons for this opinion would be as unnecessary as tedious. The ground has been so often trod that a place hardly remains untouched. In a word the necessity arising from the want of specie is represented as greater than it really is. I contend that it is by the substance, not with the shadow of a thing, we are to be benefited. The wisdom of man, in my humble opinion, cannot at this time devise a plan, by which the credit of paper money would be long supported; consequently, depreciation keeps pace with the quantity of the emission, and articles for which it is exchanged rise in a greater ratio than the sinking value of the money. Wherein then is the farmer, the planter, the artisan benefited? An evil equally great is the door it immediately opens for speculation, by which the least designing, and perhaps most valuable part of the community are preyed upon by the more knowing and crafty speculators."
In 1785, George Mason wrote "they may pass a law to issue paper money, but twenty laws will not make the people receive it. Paper money is founded upon fraud and knavery."
On the first day of August, 1786, Washington wrote to Jefferson: "Other states are falling into the very foolish and wicked plans of emitting paper money."
In May, 1788, Charles Pinckney, in a speech in the Convention of South Carolina, said: "I apprehend these general reasons will be found true with respect to paper money; that experience has shown that in every state where it has been practiced since the Revolution, it always carries the gold and silver out of the country, and impoverishes it."
John Marshall, the greatest of all our Chief Justices, the man who breathed into the dry bones of a constitutional contract, the soul of nationality, expressed himself at various times in these words: "He had 'an unabated zeal for the exact observance of public and private engagements.' He rightly insisted that the only ways of relief for pecuniary 'distresses' were 'industry and frugality'; he condemned 'all the wild projects of the moment; he rejected as a delusion every attempt at relief from pecuniary distresses' by the emission of 'paper money' or by 'a depreciated medium of commerce.'" George Bancroft said: "These were his opinions through life. He gave them to the public in 1807, and twenty-four years later in a revised edition of his 'Life of Washington,' he confirmed his early convictions by the authority of his maturest life."
James Madison, who was probably more responsible for the Constitution than any other single individual, used these words in addressing the delegates of Virginia in the year 1786: "Paper money is unjust; to creditors, if a legal tender; to debtors, if not legal tender, by increasing the difficulty of getting specie. It is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property, as much as taking away equal value in land. It is pernicious, destroying confidence between individuals; discouraging commerce; enriching sharpers; vitiating morals; reversing the end of government, and conspiring with the examples of other states to disgrace Republican Government in the eyes of mankind." As the result of his words and the well-known opinions of Washington, Lee and Mason, the House of Delegates of Virginia on the first day of November resolved by a vote of 85 against 17 that an emission of paper money would be "unjust, impolitic and destructive of public and private confidence, and of that virtue which is the basis of Republican Government."
Disquieting symptoms having appeared in Virginia, Madison, in April, enjoined Monroe, a member of its assembly, to battle paper money.
Madison enumerated among the evils for which the new Constitution should provide a remedy, the "familiar violation of contracts in the form of depreciated paper, made a legal tender." In his notes for his own guidance in the Federal Convention, he laid down the principle that "Paper money may be deemed an aggression on the rights of other states," and just five weeks before the time for the meeting of the convention, he wrote from Congress, then sitting in New York, to Edmund Randolph, as follows: "There has never been a moment since the peace, at which the federal assent would have been given to paper money."