John Sherman

As a Member of this body, I am armed with high powers for a holy purpose, and I am authorized --nay, required--to vote for all laws necessary and proper for executing these high powers, and to accomplish that purpose.

I have sworn to raise and support your armies; to provide for and maintain your navy; to borrow money; to uphold your government against all enemies, at home and abroad.

We have been taught by recent fearful experience that delay and doubt in this time of revolutionary activity are stagnation and death.

I rest my vote upon the proposition that this is a necessary and proper measure to furnish a currency--a medium of exchange--to enable the government to borrow money, to maintain an army and support a navy.

When I feel so strongly the necessity of this measure, I am constrained to assume the power, and refer our authority to exercise it to the courts.

Justice to our creditors demands that it should be a legal tender; it will then circulate all over the country, and it will be the lifeblood of the whole business of the country, and it will enable capitalists to buy your bonds.

But Congress is expressly invested with all these high powers, and, to remove all doubt, is expressly authorized to use all necessary and proper means to carry these powers into effect.

The power to fix the standard of money, to regulate the medium of exchanges, must necessarily go with, and be incident to, the power to regulate commerce, to borrow money, to coin money, to maintain armies and navies.

The government ought to give, and has the power to give, to that money, all the sanction, authority, value, necessary and proper, to enable it to borrow money.

This currency made a legal tender was necessary to aid in making further loans.

You cannot sell your bonds for gold and silver, which is the only money that can now be received under the sub-treasury law.

As soon as the banks suspended, gold and silver ceased to circulate as money.

They have said to us, in the most solemn form, that this measure was indispensably necessary to maintain the credit of the government, and to keep these notes anywhere near par.

He declares, not only in his official communications here, but in his private intercourses with the members of the committee, that this clause is indispensably necessary to the security and negotiability of these demand notes.

This security of coin payment enabled the government to sell bonds at a far higher rate than they would have commanded without it, and tended also to limit the depreciation of United States notes.

I do not hesitate when I have made up my mind, however much regret I may feel over the necessity of the conclusion to which I come.

It is true that I came with reluctance to the conclusion that the legal tender clause is a necessity, but I came to it decidedly, and I support it earnestly.

Such discrimination should, if possible, be prevented; and the provision making the notes legal tender, in a great measure at least, prevents it, by putting all citizens, in this respect, on the same level, both of rights and duties.

It is not unknown to them that I have felt, nor do I wish to conceal that I now feel, a great aversion to making anything but coin a legal tender in payment of debts.

Undoubtedly we owe to him, more than to any other individual Member, the important and radical changes made in our currency system by the act reported by him to the House and amended in the Senate.

He discussed these two plans at length, but concluded by recommending a system of national banks, the advantages of which would be uniformity in currency, uniformity in security, an effectual safeguard against depreciation, and protection…

The other proposed a system of national banks authorized to issue notes for circulation under national direction, to be secured as to prompt convertibility into coin by the pledge of United States bonds and other needful regulations.

One plan proposed the gradual withdrawal from circulation of the notes of private corporations, and the issue in their stead of United States notes, payable in coin on demand, in amounts sufficient for the useful ends of a representative…

He recommended two plans by either of which he held that these banks might be absorbed, and a national currency be substituted in the place of their issues.

He described with great force the weakness of the state banking system, and the repeated losses by the people of the United States on account of the failure of such banks.