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

[948] millions in circulation. I wish I could stop to explain to the House how this can be, but it can easily be seen by examining the bank returns. We find the fact to be that we have not circulation enough. Compare it with what was the circulation before the war. Mr. Chase reported the circulation of this country before the war, including gold, to be about $477,000,000, and upon examination I can see no reason to find fault with that estimate. Now we have only $550,000,000 in actual circulation, though we are doing more than three times the business calling for the use of cash that we were doing before the war. During the ten years from 1847 to 1857 the deposits and circulation of the banks averaged about thirteen dollars per capita. Now, on account of our doing so much more of our business for cash, the deposits and circulation of the banks are about twenty-four dollars per man. And if you take into consideration the currency furnished by the United States, the $300,000,000 of greenbacks, or about that sum, you will find that it is about thirty-four dollars per capita, reckoning thirty-six million people in the United States. This shows that we require in our business three times, or certainly two and a half times, as much cash as before the war. Everybody knows this to be a fact.

How was it before the war with the eastern manufacturer? He sent to New Orleans and bought his cotton, giving drafts for six or eight months. The merchant in New Orleans came East and bought the manufactured goods, giving his notes for from six months to a year; and all the cash that was wanted was enough to settle up the balances.

And now, when we send out for cotton we must send out greenbacks, because of the change in the mode of doing business: and we have a currency that stands at par there, and for what they want from us they must send the greenbacks. Every one knows that the business of this country is done twice or thrice as much in cash as it was before the war; and therefore I think this country will bear from eight hundred to a thousand million dollars of circulation without redundancy as soon as business revives, and that will make it revive. But my friends say “that may be too much.” Perhaps it may be; but it is very easy, it seems to me, for us to have that amount of circulation without redundancy; and as each legal-tender note is, as we have seen, a part of the debt secured by mortgage of the whole property of the United States, without depreciation.

Our debt now is $2,500,000,000, about $2,200,000,000 of it interest-bearing. Suppose we issue our legal-tender greenbacks, as I will call them for convenience, and buy up or redeem our interest-bearing debt that is due to the amount of $1,000,000,000. Then our debt stands,