The mischief of such a currency is everywhere, enveloping the whole country and penetrating all its parts.
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
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A greenback is a piece of paper with a promise on its face and green on its back, declared to be money by Act of Congress, but which the Government refuses to pay.
Maimed soldiers, bereaved widows, helpless orphans, whose cup is already full, are compelled to see their scanty dole shrink before their sight till it seems ready to vanish in smoke.
Harder still, innocent pensioners, wards of the Nation, must bear the same doom.
The pay of every soldier in the army, every sailor in the navy, every office-holder from the President to the humblest postmaster, is brought under this tyrannical influence.
Nobody can sell or buy a farm, nobody can build or mortgage a house, except at an unnatural hazard.
The seller is afraid to sell, the buyer afraid to buy.
The reasonable contract of to-day may become onerous beyond calculation to-morrow.
The first condition of business is stability, which is only another form of security; but this is impossible, when nobody can tell from day to day the value of the currency.
Business has its disease also, showing itself in opposite conditions: shrunk at times, as with paralysis; swollen at times to unhealthy proportions, as with elephantiasis.
Already in these remarks I have pictured the financial anarchy of our country, the natural reflection of the political; but the strongest illustration is in a disordered currency, which is present to everybody with a dollar in his pocket.
As I hate war, so do I hate all its incidents, and long to see them disappear.
Like war, it troubles the entire Nation, deranges business, and demoralizes the people.
Like war, whose greatest engine it was, it is the cause of incalculable evil.
Its continuance now prolongs into peace this belligerent agency, and projects its disturbing influence into the most distant places.
While the war lasted, it was a necessity, as the war itself.
It should not be continued a day beyond positive exigency.
As a war measure, it should cease with the war, or so soon thereafter as practicable.
Until this is accomplished, Financial Reconstruction exists in aspiration only, and not in reality.
Other things are means to this end: this is the end itself.
I am now brought to the last branch of this discussion, in which all the others are absorbed: I mean the necessity of specie payments, or, in other words, the necessity of coin in the place of inconvertible paper.
It would seem as if bonds and greenbacks must both gain from this business, and with them the country must gain also.
By this process our greenbacks will be gradually absorbed, and those that are not absorbed will be lifted in value.
It is the same misdeed, taking still another shape,--as Proteus was the same heathen god in all his various transformations.
Any compulsory conversion is only another form of Repudiation.
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