Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[936] If you once admit that doctrine you will involve Congress in difficulties which it will take a long time and great wisdom to unravel.

But no one of the secretaries ever has said that the contract is that the principal of this loan is payable in coin; and if there has been disingenuousness on this subject it has not been on our part, but on the part of the secretaries in their attempts to interpret this law so as to sell the loan. The first thing said about the probability that this debt would be paid in gold was in the answer of Secretary Chase to a letter sent him from abroad — Frankfort, I believe. It was said in that letter — I do not give the words, but the substance--“It is not understood here in Frankfort that these bonds are payable in gold. If it should be so understood they would bring a much higher price.” Why was it not so understood? Because a foreign lawyer reading the act would never think of such a thing for a moment. The bonds were selling — for what? For forty cents on the dollar, and that at a time when the Confederate loan was at a premium in Europe.

Now, I will not think so meanly of this country as to believe it could be supposed these bonds were payable in gold, and then were at this discount even in Europe, which was against us. And I will not think so meanly of this nation as to believe that there could have been any question in the minds of the people of Europe as to our being able to pay more than thirty per cent. of our debt in gold if such had been our plain contract and obligation. No, sir; the bankers in Europe of that day were simply betting as to whether we should pay our paper money in gold; they were betting on that proposition when they were buying our bonds at from sixty to seventy per cent. discount. They knew that every other government that had issued paper money had depreciated it, and the question was whether we, who set out here so differently from other governments, would in the end depreciate our paper money.

This letter was sent over here as a stock-jobbing proposition to Mr. Chase. How did he answer it? Through his assistant secretary. The answer all will remember: “The Government of the United States has always paid all its obligations in gold, and it is to be presumed that it always will.” It was an evasive answer — an answer tending to mislead; whether intended so to do I do not know or say.

I have a bone to pick with Mr. Fessenden upon this subject. I am very glad he has been brought in here. Mr. Fessenden, as Secretary of the Treasury, was called upon to say whether the three-year loan treasury notes, issued in 1861, when there was nothing but gold to pay with, and for which gold was paid by the people to the government, was payable in coin or in currency. He decided that these gold-bought and