§ 1365. The next prohibition is, that no state shall "make any thing but gold and silver coin, a tender in payment of debts." This clause was manifestly founded in the same general policy, which procured the adoption of the preceding clause. The history, indeed, of the various laws, which were passed by the states in their colonial and independent character upon this subject, is startling at once to our morals, to our patriotism, and to our sense of justice. Not only was paper money issued, and declared to be a tender in payment of debts; but laws of another character, well known under the appellation of tender laws, appraisement laws, instalment laws, and suspension laws, were from time to time enacted, which prostrated all private credit, and all private morals. By some of these laws, the due payment of debts was suspended; debts were, in violation of the very terms of the contract, authorized to be paid by instalments at different periods; property of any sort, however worthless, either real or personal, might be tendered by the debtor in payment of his debts; and the creditor was compelled to take the
Province of Massachusetts in 1714 and 1716, and had the same general objects in view by the same means, viz. to make temporary loans to the inhabitants to relieve their wants by an issue of paper money.[a 1] The bills of credit issued by congress in 1780 were payable with interest. So were the treasury notes issued by congress in the late war with Great Britain. Yet both circulated and were designed to circulate as currency. The bills of credit issued by congress in the revolution were not made a legal tender.[a 2] It has also been already seen, that the first bills of credit ever issued in America, in 1690, contained no promise of payment by the state, and were simply receivable in discharge of public dues.[a 3] Mr. Jefferson, in the first volume of his Correspondence, (p. 401, 402,) has given a succinct history of paper money in America, especially in the revolution. It is a sad but instructive account.
