Uncle Sam: That is the way I like to hear my boys talk. This is really the longest siege we have had, and you all look as though you had been undermined, and so we had better say good night.
UNITED STATES NOTES
Uncle Sam: Here we are again and all present. Not a single man has been sick or even reported as indisposed or indifferent since we began these discussions. You must all be thinking that we are engaged in a religious duty, a patriotic service, or you are mightily interested in the subject.
Before we begin, let me recall what was so fully presented last Wednesday night so that we can keep the mile posts constantly before us.
We then learned that during a hundred years, from 1690 to 1790, every one of the thirteen colonies experimented with "Bills of Credit," "Legal tender" "paper money," or "Greenbacks," as we call them, and that they issued fiat or "legal tender money" in almost every conceivable shape, form and way. They issued money against their own credit; they issued it against real estate mortgages, that is, in the form of loans secured by mortgages; they issued it against the personal credit of men in the form of ordinary loans; they issued it under the authority of the Continental Congress when the Colonies were all united. But in no case did any one of them, or all of them combined, escape the certain and universal fate of all such efforts. The order of events was always the same: (1) Emission of paper money; (2) depreciation of the issue; (3) disappearance of coin; (4) emission of more paper money to make up for the depreciation of that already issued; (5) defrauding of creditors; (6) repudiation; (7) cancelation; (8) reappearance of gold and silver; (9) resumption of species or coin payment; (10) a return of that degree of prosperity that the times and the conditions of the country justified.
Then came that review of the opinions of the framers of the Constitution and the vote in the Constitutional Convention to strike out the power to issue "bills of credit" by the general Government by the decisive vote of 9 to 4, backed up subsequently by the opinions of Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster.