Posted 09/14/2016 6:55 pm
Counterfeiting has always been illegal in the United States, as the invention of coinage predates the founding of the United States by a couple of millenia. Under the Articles of Confederation, anti-counterfeiting laws were the responsibility of individual state legislatures, each one having inherited different laws from their colonial periods. Congress had to beg the states to each pass laws prohibiting the counterfeiting of Continental Currency.
With US coinage only forming a small part of the actual money in circulation in the US up until the 1840s, most of the early laws regarding counterfeiting were not specifically about coins made by the US Mint. An example is this law from 1838, aimed at prohibiting the ownership of counterfeits with intent to try to utter them later. The wording of this law implies that the law up to that time only focussed on actual utterance (ie trying to spend them).
With US coinage only forming a small part of the actual money in circulation in the US up until the 1840s, most of the early laws regarding counterfeiting were not specifically about coins made by the US Mint. An example is this law from 1838, aimed at prohibiting the ownership of counterfeits with intent to try to utter them later. The wording of this law implies that the law up to that time only focussed on actual utterance (ie trying to spend them).
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
