Numismatic?: Did Canadian Coins Circulate In The US In 1861?

Interesting question.
We take it almost for granted today that you will get some canadian coins every now and then, but it is becuase most people dont even notice the difference.
That would be similar to someone trying to pass a canadian bill in the US today since they are impossible to confuse, and I would imagine that a penny then could buy more than a dollar could now.

Actually they did not circulate. Certainly not in the settled east such as Buffalo, NY.

The US coinage act of 1853 removed the legal tender status of ALL foreign coins. It setup a very beneficial exchange rate for Spanish and Mexican silver dollars to buy in the silver to the US Treasury for minting of US coins.

The act also corrected the coin weights so that the silver content was slightly below face, stopping the export of US coins (that is why there are arrows on the date, to indicate the new less valuable coins so the older ones could be pulled to be reminted)

Big difference between the early 1800s and 1861.

Certainly, EVERYTHING circulated in 1800s, and much of it was even legal tender (you have to read the old coinage acts to see, but it's there and unlike today's laws, they are just 2 or 3 paragraphs). And it made sense - the US couldn't mint enough coinage to meet the demand.

Merchants had a book (I wish I could remember what it's called) that showed them drawings of all the common coins from all over the world and their worth. So you could take in a Spanish dollar and a half Shilling and for a $2 purchase and make the correct change.

But the point of the 1853 act (http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampag...&recNum=181) was to move all of the foreign coinage out. So it was no longer legal tender, BUT the treasury - for the mint - was BUYING Spanish and Mexican dollars at good rates.

Actually that's not the impression I get reading "The United states Trade dollar" by John M Willem. Yes a law had been passed to make non US coins no longer legal tender......but in China the mexican dollar was preferred and US traders purchased it for trade to the far east. I find it hard to imagine that foreign coins that were necessary to mediate trade, did not circulate in the USA. The US Trade dollar was developed to compete with the Mexican.

You may not get a definite yes or no answer. But it is highly probable that he received a Canadian coin or two in change.

Several comments.

The Act of 1853 did not remove the legal tender status of foreign coins. You are thinking of the Act of Feb 1857. And even that allowed a two year grace period which was later extended for another two years and then had one year cut from it. So all the legal tender status for those coins that had it was not removed until late 1860. (Contrary to common belief, not all foreign coins were legal tender in the US before the act of 1857. in fact only a select few were legal tender.)

Just because a coin isn't legal tender, that doesn't mean it won't circulate. Near the border canadian coins can still be found circulating in the US and they aren't legal tender. And the government continued to post rates at whixch Spanish and Mexican silver would be accepted at the post office and other government offices until the 1870's. Something they would not have done if they weren't still circulating at least to some extent.

The chances of getting a Canadian coin in 1861 probably would not have been very good. The mintages of the 1858-59 coinage was rather small and probably didn't get around much. Canadian coins would have been seldom seen. (In fact if you had gone over into Canada you would have found that almost all the coins in circulation would have been US coins and this would become the trend even more so over the next couple years. So much so that there was no need for Canada to issue more coins until 1870.)

And the sizes and weights of the coins were not that different. Yes the size of the cents were much different but maybe not so much the weights. The Canadian large cent was 4.54 grams, but the US cent was 4.67 grams. The heavy US Large Cent was becoming scarce by 1861 and the coppernickel cent would have been more common. (And if size difference between the two US coins didn't cause a problem here why should the size difference between the large canadian and smaller US cent have problems?) The Canadian 5 cent was 1.16 grams compared to the US Half Dime at 1.24 grams. And the Canadian 10 cent was 2.32 grams to the US 2.49 grams. So those two coins were almost interchangeable.



that was the accepted view in the 19th century, legal tender meant it had to be accepted. This is not the current legal viewpoint.

The Trade dollar was created because the US dollar had too little silver in it. When we tried to "break in" to trade with China the Spanish 8 Reales and later Mexican Peso had already been long established. We came in with the US dollar which we tried to say was equivalent to the other two coins but it had significantly less silver in it and it was rejected. We had to buy Mexican pesos at a premium to carry on trade. So the heavier Trade dollar was created to compete at par. The face value of the coin was still slightly higher than the metal content, and the had legal tender status to five dollars so they also circulated here. When silver values fell in the mid 1870's their value in China where they were accepted by weight also fell. But since they were legal tender here they were now worth significantly more as money here than they were as silver in China and they all started flooding home. But we wanted the silver to LEAVE the country so we stripped the Trade dollar of its legal tender status hoping that would keep them out of the country.