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To give the greenback currency thus described a fixed and stable value, I would make it fundable at all times, and at a sufficient number of places convenient to the people, in coupon or registered bonds of $50 and the multiples thereof up to $10,000, bearing interest at 3.65 per cent., payable semi-annually, which bonds should be reconvertible into currency at the pleasure of the holder at every public depository.
Thus I would have a currency better than a gold currency; unalterable in value because founded upon the wealth, power, and property together with all the gold and silver of the country; held by all the people, whose interest it would be to keep it a steady measure of value to which all property would soon accommodate itself, and ultimately the whole national debt would be brought home from abroad and funded into this national bond.
The war as to the currency still went on. In my last term I made a speech upon the question of the greenback being the constitutional money of the
United States, whether issued under act of Congress in war or in peace.
The following is an extract:--
Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I am ready to say with the preacher (Ecclesiastes, v. 10): “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver.”
We want the greenback for our currency and mean to have it. Of that currency I said on this floor nine years ago and repeat now with all the confidence gained by experience :--
I stand here, therefore, for inconvertible paper money, the greenback, which has fought our battles and saved our country; which has been held by us as a just equivalent for the blood of our soldiers, the lives of our sons, the widowhood of our daughters, and the orphanage of their children.
I stand here for a currency by which the business transactions of forty million people are safely and successfully done, which, founded on the faith, the wealth, and property of the nation, is at once the exemplar and engine of its industry and power; that money which saved the country in war, and which has given it prosperity and happiness in peace.
To it four million men owe their emancipation from slavery; to it labor is indebted for elevation from that thrall of degradation in which it has been enveloped for ages.
I stand for that money, therefore, which is by far the better agent and instrument of exchange of an enlightened and free people than gold and silver, the money alike of the Barbarian and the Despot.
Mr. Chittenden, a member from
Brooklyn, N. Y., who was an honest opponent of my doctrine, came to me after I had finished my
