A Counterfeiter's Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

over Boston like a dark cloud. In the streets people could be overheard praying that the ship carrying the payment from England would sink at sea: the coin could do far less damage deposited on the ocean floor, many colonists felt, than in Hutchinson’s hands. After a five-week voyage, the
Mermaid
arrived without incident in the fall of 1749. Onlookers watched the ship unload its cargo, which was carried to the town treasury and secured in a specially prepared underground vault. The spectators’ mood was grim. “Few Tokens of Joy were shewn on its landing,” one newspaperman observed, “but on the contrary, an uncommon Gloominess appeared in most Countenances.” William Bollan, the colonial official who had spent the last four years in England negotiating the reimbursement, feared that the gloom would soon turn to rage. He urged Hutchinson to hide out at his summer home in nearby Milton until emotions had cooled.
    Instead of subsiding, tensions only grew in the coming months. Colonists on both sides of the issue tangled in the pages of Boston’s newspapers, which became inundated with dispatches from the money war. Currency debates in local papers were nothing new: back in August, a pseudonymous author in the
Boston Evening-Post
warned that the abolition of paper money would force Massachusetts to return to a barter economy. “[W]e shall have the pleasant Sight of a Housekeeper groaning under the Burden of a Barrel of Flour to Market, to barter for Mutton,” he wrote. But now that the silver from England had reached Boston, the issue acquired a new sense of urgency. Readers wrote in, complaining that moving to a hard currency—which would considerably decrease the amount of money in circulation—would make it impossible for them to do business, settle debts, or pay taxes. The opposing camp shot back, responding that the plan would restore order and stability to the colony’s economy. Hutchinson himself joined the fray. In a letter to the
Boston Gazette
, he argued that paper money had sown “Fraud, Injustice and Oppression,”and, true to form, spoke up for the colony’s creditors, who suffered under a system where people paid “their Debts with a less Value than when they were contracted.”
    As the bickering continued, the fault lines became increasingly clear: between rich and poor, creditor and debtor, town and country. In a satire published in the
Boston News-Letter
, a country trader named Honestus comes to Boston to pay off his debt to Politicus, a wealthy merchant. Poli-ticus tries to interest his longtime customer in the latest imported goods, but Honestus, reluctant to dig himself deeper into debt, refuses. Eager to make the sale, Politicus promises that when silver dollars replace paper notes, he’ll have nothing to worry about:
    Pol.
Fear not
Honestus
—I don’t doubt
    When once the Dollars shall come out—
    There’l be no Want of Money then:
    Eager you’l catch the glit’ring Coin—
    And bless the golden Æra when
    This Paper Trash is no more seen.
    Hon.
Ah! Sir, we hear the Province Bills
    Do lye recluse within the Tills
    Of some great Men, to wait the Time
    The Dollars shall the same redeem;—
    And what is worse than all,’tis said
    To foreign Lands they’l be convey’d!
    Then what’s our Fate—The Silver gone—
    The Paper burnt—and we undone.
    The dialogue summed up the anxieties of many colonists. Like Ho-nestus, they feared that Hutchinson’s scheme would deprive them of afunctioning medium of exchange, and that precious metals—stockpiled by the superrich, tied up in overseas trade—would forever remain out of their reach.
    PEOPLE HAD A LOT at stake in the currency crisis of 1749. With their livelihood on the line, colonists took a strong interest in policies that would impact them directly. But while the consequences couldn’t have been more concrete, the debate itself often became quite abstract.
    At the heart of the squabble between paper and metal was a philosophical