The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 18, May 1, 2005, Article 19

TOO MUCH SILVER COINAGE

"Club member David Ginsburg submitted this interesting
article about too much silver coinage in circulation (don#39;t we
wish!): "Recently, while reading the reminiscences of a
19th-century riverboat gambler, [Forty Years a Gambler on
the Mississippi by George Devol (Cincinnati: Devol & Haines,
1887) reprinted by Applewood Books, Bedford, MA],
I came across these sentences:

“At one time, before the war, silver was such a drug in New
Orleans that you could get $105 in silver for $100 in State
bank notes; but the commission men [factors who acted as
business agents and informal bankers for planters] would pay
it out to the hucksters dollar for dollar.” Later in the book,
Devol writes: “There was a man in New Orleans before the
war that supplied the steamboat men with silver to pay their
deckhands. He could buy it at a discount, as it was a drug
on the money market at that time. I have often seen him,
with his two heavy leather bags, on his way from the bank
to the boats.”

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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