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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’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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