Aug 18, 2026 · 30 min · 10 segments
In 1786 the Congress of the United States asked the thirteen states for 3.8 million dollars to pay the debts of the Revolution. It collected 663 dollars. This is the story of the broken money machine…
Martin wrote the war down decades later, and the bitterness had not cooled.
When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses and nothing said about land to pasture them upon.
The land promised to the soldiers, he wrote, was picked over by men who had never carried a musket.
Congress did indeed appropriate lands under the denomination of soldiers' lands in Ohio State or some state or future state, but no one care was taken that the soldiers should get them.
No agents were appointed to seek that the poor fellows ever possessed on their lands.
No one ever took the least care about it except a pack of speculators who were driving about the country like so many evil spirits endeavoring to pluck the last feather from the soldier.
The certificate was the government's answer to having no money at all.
They were IOUs plain and simple, notes the government handed out in place of money it did not have to the soldiers it could not pay and to the farmers and shopkeepers whose grain and wagons and cloth the army had taken.
They paid no interest.
They promised only that someday, somehow, the United States would make good, and nobody believed someday would come.
So the certificates too collapsed in value.
The loan office certificates, the ones sold to men who had lent actual cash, sank to around 20 cents to the dollar.
The certificates handed to the soldiers and supplies sank further to get a dime on a dollar or less.
A veteran holding a note for a dollar in back pay could get in real coin maybe 10 cents if he could find a buyer at all.
And it was not only soldiers.
It was the farmers whose horses the armies had taken, the miller who had ground its flour, the widow whose late husband had lent the cause his savings on the strength of a printed promise.
They had all backed the revolution with something real, and they all held the same worthless paper for it now.
And there were buyers, men with cash, merchants, investors, the well-connected, moved through the country buying the soldiers and the farmers' certificates for those pennies, betting that a government would exist someday to redeem them at full face value.
They rode the back roads of Connecticut and the Carolinas with saddlebags of coin, calling at farmhouses where a discharged soldier had a paper and he could not eat.
Ten dollars now in silver for a hundred dollar promise from a government that might not last a decade.
It was not a fraud.
The soldiers could keep the paper if they liked, and starve holding it.
Most of them took the silver.
The men who had won the war sold their claim on it for a tenth of its worth to men who had risked nothing because the winners needed to eat this winter and the buyers could afford to wait for spring.
Whether that day of redemption would ever come and who would collect it when it did was a fight still years down the road.
Martin wrote the war down decades later, and the bitterness had not cooled.
When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses and nothing said about land to pasture them upon.
The land promised to the soldiers, he wrote, was picked over by men who had never carried a musket.
Congress did indeed appropriate lands under the denomination of soldiers' lands in Ohio State or some state or future state, but no one care was taken that the soldiers should get them.
No agents were appointed to seek that the poor fellows ever possessed on their lands.
No one ever took the least care about it except a pack of speculators who were driving about the country like so many evil spirits endeavoring to pluck the last feather from the soldier.
The certificate was the government's answer to having no money at all.
They were IOUs plain and simple, notes the government handed out in place of money it did not have to the soldiers it could not pay and to the farmers and shopkeepers whose grain and wagons and cloth the army had taken.
They paid no interest.
They promised only that someday, somehow, the United States would make good, and nobody believed someday would come.
So the certificates too collapsed in value.
The loan office certificates, the ones sold to men who had lent actual cash, sank to around 20 cents to the dollar.
The certificates handed to the soldiers and supplies sank further to get a dime on a dollar or less.
A veteran holding a note for a dollar in back pay could get in real coin maybe 10 cents if he could find a buyer at all.
And it was not only soldiers.
It was the farmers whose horses the armies had taken, the miller who had ground its flour, the widow whose late husband had lent the cause his savings on the strength of a printed promise.
They had all backed the revolution with something real, and they all held the same worthless paper for it now.
And there were buyers, men with cash, merchants, investors, the well-connected, moved through the country buying the soldiers and the farmers' certificates for those pennies, betting that a government would exist someday to redeem them at full face value.
They rode the back roads of Connecticut and the Carolinas with saddlebags of coin, calling at farmhouses where a discharged soldier had a paper and he could not eat.
Ten dollars now in silver for a hundred dollar promise from a government that might not last a decade.
It was not a fraud.
The soldiers could keep the paper if they liked, and starve holding it.
Most of them took the silver.
The men who had won the war sold their claim on it for a tenth of its worth to men who had risked nothing because the winners needed to eat this winter and the buyers could afford to wait for spring.
Whether that day of redemption would ever come and who would collect it when it did was a fight still years down the road.
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