Interesting Coin Cartoon From 1896 Regarding Silver US Dollars

Doing a quick search I found that it was an election year with McKinley vs Bryan
Bryan---
"Silver, he said, was in ample supply and if coined into money would restore prosperity while undermining the illicit power of the money trust."

Cool read for history sake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_...ial_election

Thanks for posting!

smat

By the 1890's the Comstock was mined out. The bonanzas were gone by 1880. However, the bullion silver sat...and sat... There was no demand for it as money. Bryan wanted the government to flood the economy with it. Hence his Cross of Gold speech against the gold standard, which was restraining the free coinage of the bullion silver.

Eventually the bullion was coined, mostly into dollars. And these sat at Treasury. 270 million of them were melted and shipped to Great Britain and India in 1918. Peace dollars replaced them, and took their place in storage. Treasury slowly distributed them for the next 40 years.

Liberty with a crown of thorns? I don't get the symbolism there, but maybe I would if I lived during that time.

It's a commentary on what will happen if Bryan wins the election and gets his way with the free coinage of silver at 16 o 1. Finance will have the crown of thorns of silver forced upon her. You note the legend Silver dollar less 47 cents. This was because the metal in a silver dollar as compared to the metal in a gold dollar, was worth 47 cents less. So instead of getting a gold dollar worth a dollar, you would get a silver dollar with an intrinsic value of only 53 cents. The caption below about the size of life, the illustration size is probably that of what a silver dollar would have to be to contain one dollars worth of silver. Some pieces of Bryan Money distributed during the campain illustrated this as well. Such as these. The inner circle is the actual diameter of a silver dollar, 1.5 inches across.

So basically he wanted to take us from the gold to a silver standard? Also, I am confused as to the term "free coinage".

Yes. Bryan wanted us off the gold standard, replaced by the abundant supply of silver the government held. That didn't happen completely until the early 1970's. The sad thing is that when we went off the gold standard, the replacement was not silver but Federal Reserve notes backed only by full faith and credit in the government. Inflation dead ahead.

The direct cause of Bryan's populist appeal was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890. The government's massive purchase of silver, coupled with a Treasury 16:1 exchange rate between the two metals, set off an exchange of silver coin for gold coin, driving the price of silver down from $1.16/oz in 1890 to $0.60 per oz. in 1894. The purchase act had to be suspended before Treasury ran out of gold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherm...Purchase_Act

The suspension of the Sherman Act had the effect of nearly halting Morgan dollar coinage in 1893-1895, creating the scarce dates everyone is looking for.

Free coinage, I believe, is taking your silver to be minted into dollar coins. Much of the 19th century US history was a struggle between the big financial interests who wanted more control over the money supply and democratic forces who sought to put the power of money in people's hands, leading to all of those paper notes issued by local banks (wildcat banks, they were nicknamed) to finance land speculation. The people finally lost out in the late 19th century culminating with the creation of the Federal Reserve in the early 1900s...but the struggle goes on with the cryptocurrency!