History Of Coin Circulation In Early US

Actually, it's quite possible English shilling coins were in circulation at that time. In fact, it was very common for a number of foreign coins, especially Mexican Reales, to be circulating. All that foreign coinage was legal tender in the U.S. until 1857 when an Act was passed barring them from being legal tender. I think Breen even makes direct mention of the fact that the worker in the 1840's would often see some mismash of currency in their pay envelopes, including shillings. U.S federal coinage was not circulating well enough (or perhaps not enough minted) to provide for commerce needs, so foreign coinage was a necessity.

The coinage was more likely to be older Spanish cins before 1821, or in the Southwest, the liberty cap Mexican coins. By 1833, however, the United States was fairly self-sufficient in its subsidiary coins. No silver dollars were minted from 1804 to 1840, although the Spanish 8-reales piece and French 5-franc piece (tariffed at $0.93)were in circulation gold coins were scarce until 1834. The Spanish 2-escudo piece and French 20-franc piece (tariffed at $3.81) were common. Source: Schilke, America's Foreign Coins.

Larger cities like New York probably had much easier access to federal coinage than outlying areas. If you weren't in a big city, even into the 1850's, you'd probably see your share of foreign currency and maybe quite a bit of it.

Boy do I feel stupid. I honestly never knew Foreign coinage was that prevalent here. Thanks Prethen and Mom, awesome info. Of course thank you Beverly for even posing the question. Good luck.

Very interesting. I've never really thought about how US coins began circulating but this makes a lot of sense.

Thank you all so very much! I knew I would find authoritative and thoughtful folks here as indeed I did. I very much appreciate it and the book acknowledgments will credit the site and this forum. (I'd give you the title but it's not yet decided on - I could write three books in the time it takes us to settle on a title. It won't be out, however, until 2009; that's publishing.) And if I can talk the publicity people into a contest of some sort, I'll come back looking for advice about some rare coin to be the prize. Thanks again.

NumisMattyUK-
In 1837, financial difficulties with the US economy led to the suspension of specie payments(redeeming paper money for gold and silver coinage) and the hoarding of gold and silver coins of US origin. Many copper tokens were privately created to facilitate commerce since gold and silver were not circulating. These copper tokens have become known as "Hard Times tokens" and some displayed political commentary while others were used by businesses for advertising purposes.

BeverlyS-
another thing I forgot to add in my earlier post. The reason that foreign coinage could freely circulate and be redeemed in the US is because the value of money was not based on the face value, but instead the intrinsic value(value based on gold or silver content). This intrinsic value gave the coins their denomination whereas today, face value is assigned to a coin minted with base metals that are worth much less than the face value. Essentially, people didn't worry about the face value of money, the real value was the amount of silver or gold the coins contained. Looking at it from this perspective, it is easy to see why foreign coins circulated for such a long time.