Washington Calls for a Uniform American Currency

January 8 • American Coin History Calendar

The United States began under the Constitution without a federal mint and without enough national coinage of its own. On January 8, 1790, George Washington used his first annual address to Congress to call for “uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures.” That brief sentence helped set in motion Alexander Hamilton's detailed coinage plan, the Coinage Act of 1792, and the creation of the United States Mint.

A New Country With No National Coins of Its Own

When George Washington stood before Congress in New York City on January 8, 1790, the federal government itself was barely established.

Washington had been inaugurated less than nine months earlier. The Constitution was new. Federal departments were being organized. Congress was still confronting basic questions about how the new republic would function as a single nation rather than a loose collection of states.

Money was one of those questions.

Americans bought, sold, borrowed and paid debts using a confusing mixture of foreign coins, state-issued paper, privately issued notes and accounting systems inherited from the colonial era. Spanish silver dollars and their fractional pieces circulated widely. British terminology such as pounds, shillings and pence remained embedded in local bookkeeping even though their values could differ from one state to another.

The United States had declared political independence. Its monetary life was still remarkably dependent on the rest of the world.

Washington's January 8 Message

The Constitution requires the president to provide Congress with information on the state of the Union and recommend measures considered necessary. Washington's January 8, 1790 address was the first such annual message delivered under the new Constitution.

It was concise by modern standards. Among recommendations concerning defense, education, commerce and government administration, Washington included a deceptively simple monetary request.

“Uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States is an object of great importance...”

Washington urged Congress to consider these subjects.

He did not lay out the denominations, metal standards or designs of future American coins. That technical work would come later. His significance on January 8 was more fundamental: the president identified monetary uniformity as part of building a functioning national government.

Today, a dollar has the same legal identity whether it is spent in Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia or California. In the early republic, that kind of consistency could not be taken for granted.

Colonial and state monetary systems had developed separately. The familiar terms pound, shilling and pence did not necessarily represent identical values from one region to another. Foreign coins circulated at values established by law or local practice. Merchants had to understand exchange relationships that could vary depending on where a transaction occurred.

That complexity imposed real economic costs. Contracts, taxes, interstate trade and federal accounts all benefited from a common standard.

The Constitution had already given Congress the power “to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.” Washington's message urged Congress to use that authority.

The Spanish Dollar Was Already America's Practical Standard

Creating a national currency did not mean starting from nothing. One foreign coin was already deeply embedded in American commerce: the Spanish milled dollar, often called the Spanish dollar or piece of eight.

Spanish-American mints produced vast quantities of reliable silver coinage that circulated internationally. The dollar could be divided physically into eight reales, which helped produce expressions such as “pieces of eight” and later American references to bits.

The Continental Congress had already moved toward a dollar-based national system during the Revolution. In 1785, it adopted the dollar as the United States' monetary unit, and in 1786 it considered a decimal structure of denominations.

The new federal government therefore inherited both a practical model—the widely accepted Spanish dollar—and an emerging American preference for decimal calculation.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the strongest early advocates of a decimal American currency.

In his 1784 Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States, Jefferson argued for a system centered on the dollar and divided decimally. A decimal structure would be far easier to calculate than the pounds-shillings-pence system inherited from Britain.

The concept was radical in its simplicity. Ten units of one denomination could make the next larger unit, and one hundred cents could make a dollar.

That mathematical structure eventually became one of the defining features of American coinage.

Washington's Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, was given the task of developing a detailed proposal.

On January 28, 1791, Hamilton submitted his famous Report on the Establishment of a Mint to the House of Representatives.

Hamilton approached coinage as an economic system rather than merely a set of designs. He considered the monetary unit, the amount of precious metal coins should contain, the relative legal values of gold and silver, the need for small-denomination copper coins, and the organization of a national mint.

He recommended retaining the dollar as the basic unit because Americans already understood it through the Spanish dollar. He also embraced decimal subdivisions.

The eventual federal system would include the cent at one-hundredth of a dollar and the dime at one-tenth—a structure so familiar today that its novelty in the eighteenth century is easy to miss.

Why America Chose Both Gold and Silver

Hamilton also had to confront one of the hardest monetary questions of his era: whether the country's standard should rest on gold, silver or both.

He recommended a bimetallic system in which coins of both metals would have legal monetary roles. Congress ultimately established a legal ratio of 15 units of silver to one unit of gold.

In theory, this allowed gold and silver coins to circulate together at values defined by law. In practice, market prices for the two metals did not remain fixed at the government's ratio. When the legal relationship differed from the international market relationship, one metal could become more valuable as bullion than as U.S. coin and disappear from circulation.

That problem would trouble American coinage repeatedly during the nineteenth century.

The process that Washington had encouraged in 1790 and Hamilton had detailed in 1791 culminated in the Coinage Act of April 2, 1792.

The act established the Mint of the United States and created an extraordinary range of denominations:

• the gold eagle, half eagle and quarter eagle;
• the silver dollar, half dollar, quarter dollar, disme and half disme; and
• the copper cent and half cent.

The word disme—pronounced “deem”—was the original statutory spelling of the denomination that became the dime.

The act defined the dollar in terms of silver and established the decimal relationship among the denominations. A dollar contained 100 cents. A dime represented one-tenth of a dollar. A cent represented one-hundredth.

The United States had transformed the abstract idea of a uniform currency into a legal coinage system.

The First Mint Becomes a Physical Reality

President Washington appointed Philadelphia scientist David Rittenhouse as the first Director of the Mint.

Philadelphia was then the national capital, so the first federal Mint was established there on Seventh Street. The government purchased property, adapted an existing building and erected a purpose-built brick structure for coin production.

According to the U.S. Mint, that building was the first federal structure erected under authority of the Constitution.

Within it, workers installed furnaces, rolling equipment, cutting machinery and screw presses. Henry Voigt became the first Chief Coiner. Other officers were appointed to assay metal, engrave dies, manage accounts and safeguard deposits.

The monetary uniformity Washington had described in a presidential speech was becoming machinery, brick, iron and skilled labor.

The Mint experimented with coin production during 1792, producing small quantities of pattern and trial pieces. Among the most famous are the 1792 half dismes, which occupy a special place at the beginning of federal coinage.

Regular coin production began in 1793 with copper cents and half cents. The first substantial delivery of federal cents came on March 1, 1793, when the Mint delivered 11,178 Flowing Hair Chain cents.

Silver coinage followed in 1794, including the first federal silver dollars. Gold coins entered production in 1795.

Progress was gradual because a national mint was a complex industrial institution. Metal had to meet precise standards. Dies had to be created. Machinery had to work reliably. Officers handling precious metal had to meet statutory bonding requirements.

Nevertheless, within five years of Washington's January 1790 address, the United States was producing copper, silver and gold coins under its own authority.

Foreign Coins Did Not Disappear Overnight

Creating American coins did not instantly remove foreign money from circulation.

The young Mint could not produce enough coins to satisfy the needs of the growing economy, so Congress continued to recognize certain foreign gold and silver coins as legal tender. Spanish dollars remained especially important.

In fact, foreign silver coins circulated legally in the United States well into the nineteenth century. Congress did not finally remove legal-tender status from foreign coins until 1857.

Uniform national coinage was therefore a long transition rather than a single event. The 1790 speech identified the goal; the 1792 law created the system; the Mint began producing the coins; and decades of expanding federal production gradually made the country less dependent on foreign money.

The most enduring achievement was not any particular 1790s coin design. It was the monetary architecture beneath the designs.

The dollar became the national unit. The cent became one-hundredth of that unit. Decimal calculation became normal in American money.

Individual coin designs changed repeatedly. Liberty appeared with flowing hair, drapery, caps, coronets and seated poses. Eagles changed shape. Presidents eventually replaced allegorical Liberty on many denominations. Metals and weights were altered as economic conditions demanded.

The basic dollar-and-cent relationship survived.

A Short Sentence With a Long Legacy

Washington's January 8, 1790 statement can look almost incidental when read inside his broader address. It occupies only a small portion of the speech.

But it captures one of the essential tasks facing the new federal government: making the United States economically coherent.

A nation needed more than borders and elected officials. It needed common standards that allowed people in different states to trade, pay taxes, keep accounts and understand value in the same terms.

Hamilton's 1791 report supplied the technical blueprint. Congress's 1792 act supplied the legal authority. Rittenhouse, Voigt and the first Mint employees supplied the physical coins.

The chain begins, however, with the new president telling the new Congress that uniform currency was “an object of great importance.”

The coins in American pockets in January 1790 were a reminder of the country's colonial past and its economic dependence on an international mixture of money.

The coins that began emerging from Philadelphia a few years later represented something different. They carried denominations established by American law, designs authorized by the United States and a decimal structure intended to work from one state to another.

The transition was neither immediate nor perfect, but it gave the country a monetary identity of its own.

On January 8, 1790, George Washington did not design a coin or strike a die. He did something more fundamental: he placed uniform national currency on the agenda of the United States government.

• Alexander Hamilton Lays the Foundation for the United States Mint
• Congress Authorizes the Establishment of a United States Mint
• Congress Takes an Early Step Toward an American Mint
• Robert Morris Proposes a National Mint for the United States