As often as I return to this subject I am impressed by the damage the country has already suffered through menacing propositions affecting the national credit.
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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Through these agencies our currency will be improved, and we shall be brought to specie payments, while the national credit will be established.
In harmony with this effort the expenditures of the Government should be revised and cut down to the lowest point consistent with efficiency.
The mass of financial obligations should be promptly adjusted in some new form at smaller interest; taxes must be reduced; the payment of the national debt must be left in part to posterity; specie payments must be provided for.
I doubt if ever before any nation has attempted to deal at once with so large a mass of financial obligations, being nothing less than the whole national debt of the United States.
Because I desire to secure this great boon for my country I now make this effort.
There is strong reason why this is the very moment for this effort.
That done or provided for, all the rest will be easy; the best credit and the lowest rates of interest will follow.
In any practical scheme to improve the Government finances and credit, or to restore prosperous activities, or both at once, the first thing to be done must be the restoration of a sound currency.
President, I am not alone in asking for the reformation of our currency as the first stage of our financial efforts.
I would change the relation of master it now occupies to that of servant, where it properly belongs; and I would inflate the currency with it to the extent that we possess it.
Strike out of existence in a single day the legal-tender notes, and I fear that the bank-note would for a time fall in comparative value: so would everything else.
I would issue a bank-note for every dollar of Treasury obligation cancelled; but I would issue no bank-note that did not absorb an equal obligation of the Treasury.
To withdraw that currency without giving a substitute is to create stringency, burden trade, and invite chaos: at least, so it seems.
The difficulties that impede the reduction of the national liabilities lie in the fact that such obligations are a part, and a large part, of the currency of the country.
It therefore devolves upon the National Legislature to take the initiative in the effort to resume specie payments.
To my mind we must lessen the demand obligations of the Government, while the Secretary of the Treasury at the same time strengthens the reserves in the national vaults.
Sound financial authorities unite in declaring, that, if the Government resumes specie payments, the banks of New York can resume; and when the banks of New York resume, the whole country can resume.
This reserve must bear a proportion to the aggregate of liabilities so large as to remove mistrust, and this can be accomplished only by presenting as in the vaults of the Treasury an amount of coin nearly equal to the sum of liabilities.
In our present legislation we encounter this mistrust wide-spread among the people; and so long as we ourselves exhibit so great timidity in our attempts at legislation upon this subject, just so long do we minister to and strengthen this…
A convertible currency is nothing more nor less than the servant of coin.
Surely I am not wrong, when I suggest that the proposed requirement is impracticable as well as mischievous; and at the proper time I shall move to strike it out.
The proposed requirement seems to go on the idea that bank-notes, like cows, return from pasture at night; whereas we all know, that, until specie payments, they are more like the wild cattle of the prairies and the pampas; you cannot find…
Therefore, I ask, how can the proposed requirement be carried into execution? how can you bring back these runaways, when once in circulation on their perpetual travels?
The credit of the nation is behind them; and everybody knows, when he takes one of them, that he is safe.
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