Early History of Vermont

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GflflPTER 111. BANKS. It was stated in Volume One of this history, on page 205, that an act was passed by the General Assembly June 5, 1785, granting to Reuben Harmon, Jr., the right of coining copper. Nothing but gold, silver and copper coin, was used as money, that was recognized by the State, until 1781. The State issued bills of credit in 1781, to the amount of 25,155 pounds which were afterwards faithfully redeemed. No other paper money was authorized by Vermont until 1806, when an act was passed establishing the Vermont State Bank. The first issue of paper money in America was made by the Provincial government of Massachusetts in 1690, known as bills of credit, for the pur- pose of defraying the expenses of an expedition against Canada. New issues were made from time to time, and in 1712, and again in 1722, acts were passed making bills of credit legal tender, without adequate specie basis, and they soon rapidly depreciated., Those issues were denominated Old Tenor, meaning old tender. The bills of credit issued by Congress, called Continental money, that first possessed the value of specie, which circulated to some extent in Vermont, soondepreciated and became nearly worthless. In September, 1780, $100 of specie was worth $7,200 of Continental Money. For many years after the organization of the State government in 1778, a large majority of the people of the State were decidedly opposed to the issue of paper money. The bills of credit that were issued by the State in 1781. were declared in the preamble to be for the carrying on the war, the payment of the State debt, and the enlargement of the circulating medium. Matthew Lyon, Edward Harris and Ezra Styles were appointed a committee to make a form and device for the bills. Those bills that were for twenty sh...

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.