Credit a Revolutionary struggle for cash

“Money! Money! Money! … I want money so much that I would do almost anything for some.”

These comments were written by the paymaster general of the American Army during the Revolutionary War, John Pierce. Having received no money for his department for six months, he warned that without funds, military operations “may entirely cease.”

If these were the times that tried men’s souls, as Thomas Paine wrote, it was also the wretched epoch that obliterated hope. Emptiness permeated the Treasury, want shadowed the soldiers, and desperation snuffed out any flicker of success. There was no money. Letter after letter said so.

George Washington wrote in 1775: “If the evil is not immediately remedied … the Army must absolutely break up.” The next year: “I think the game is pretty near up.” In 1778: Without more money the army would “starve, dissolve or disperse.” In 1779: “A dissolution of the Army … is unavoidable.” In 1780: “If our condition should not undergo a very speedy … change … it will be difficult to point out all the consequences.”

In 1781: “The aggravated calamities and distresses … are beyond description,” and without “a foreign loan, our present force … cannot be kept together.” In perhaps a moment of resignation, Washington wondered: “But why need I run into the detail … we are at the end of our tether … now or never our deliverance must come.”

Paine claimed that even if the Army had the necessary provisions, it didn’t have the money to transport them. Benjamin Franklin knew, as people wondered, why soldiers in Boston had not fired their cannons: “We could not afford it.” (Franklin was not joking when he suggested that soldiers be supplied with bows and arrows.)

Gen. Nathanael Greene lamented the dire situation: “We have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer.” James Madison was shocked to find in 1780 “the public treasury empty, public credit exhausted,” and one historian noted that at one point in 1782, “there was not a single dollar in the treasury.”

A Board of Treasury originally handled the government’s finances but proved ineffective. In June 1781, Robert Morris, named superintendent of finances, took over. Along with the money shortage, he faced the confusion of multiple coins and paper currencies, which made for easy counterfeiting and fraud.

A British officer observed that New York money was no good in New Jersey, New Jersey money no good in Pennsylvania, “and so on.” Each state “entertained little opinion as to the value of their neighbor’s money.”

In addition, as one writer put it, there were: “Ninepences and fourpence-ha’-pennies, there were bits and half bits, pistareens, picayunes, and fips. Of gold pieces there were the johannes, or joe, the doubloon, the moidore, and pistole, with English and French guineas, carolins, ducats, and chequins. Of coppers there were English pence and half-pence and French sous.”

The war cost approximately $135 million to $170 million, excluding amounts expended by foreign governments. Finances became especially desperate, and inflation skyrocketed in 1777 when the Continental dollar collapsed; hence the expression “not worth a continental.”

Many blamed profiteers and speculators. Government price controls were tried. However, as Paine explained, when they tried regulating the price of goods such as salt, “the consequence was that no salt was brought to market.” Price fixing, “reprobated by many and obeyed by few,” proved ineffective.

Washington and fellow Founding Father Caesar Rodney of Delaware blamed army contractors. Rodney called them “as active and wicked as the Devil,” and Washington said he’d like “to hang them all on a gallows higher than Haman.” Thomas Jefferson laid all the blame on the money glut, calling other explanations “nonsensical quackery.”

The soldiers got hit the hardest. With little or no food, supplies or clothes, they were, according to Greene, “naked as the day they were born.” Baron Johann de Kalb said those who had not “tasted the cruelties” felt by soldiers in the war “know not what it is to suffer.” A private complained, “we vent[ed] our spleen at our country … our government … and then ourselves for our imbecility in staying there and starving … for an ungrateful people.”

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