Made In America - Bill Bryson [45]
With so many types of money floating about, the situation would appear to have been hopelessly confused, but in fact it was a huge improvement on what had gone before. Throughout the long colonial period, the British had allowed very little British specie to circulate in the colonies. Though businesses kept their accounts in pounds, shillings and pence, they had to rely on whatever tender came to hand. A bewildering mixture of home-minted coins and foreign currency – Portuguese johanneses (familiarly known as joes), Spanish doubloons and pistoles, French sous and picayunes, Italian and Flemish ducatoons, American fugios (so called because the Latin fugio, ’I fly’, was inscribed on one side) and other coins almost without number – circulated throughout the colonies, and business people had to know that 1s. 4d. was equal in value to one-sixth of a milled peso (the original ‘piece of eight’), that a Spanish or Mexican real was worth twelve and a half cents, that a Portuguese johannes traded for $8.81, that 2s. 3d. was equivalent to half a Dutch dollar. Along the eastern seaboard, a real was generally called a shilling, but elsewhere it was more racily known as a bit. First found in English in 1688, bit may be a translation of the Spanish pieza, ’piece’ (which metamorphosed into peso), or it may be that the early coins were literally bits broken from larger silver coins. Because a bit was worth twelve and a half cents, a quarter dollar naturally became known as two bits, a half dollar as four bits, particularly west of the Mississippi. Ten cents was a short bit; a long bit was fifteen cents. Even after America began minting its own coins, foreign coins remained such an integral part of American commerce that they weren’t withdrawn from circulation until 1857.
To add to the confusion, values varied from place to place. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, a half-real went by the alternative name fipenny bit or fip because it was equivalent in worth to an English five-penny piece. But in New York it was worth sixpence and in New England fourpence halfpenny. It is something of a wonder that any business got done at all – and even more wondrous when you consider that until after the Revolution there wasn’t a single bank in America. Philadelphia got the first, in 1781; Boston and New York followed three years later.7
Not surprisingly, perhaps, many people dispensed with money and relied instead on barter, or country pay as it was often called. The goods used in barter were known as truck (from the Old French troquer, meaning to peddle or trade), a sense preserved in the expression to have no truck with and in truck farm, neither of which has anything to do with large wheeled vehicles. (In the vehicular sense, truck comes from the Latin trochus, ’wheel’.)
The decimalized monetary system based on dollars and cents was devised by Gouverneur Morris as assistant to the superintendent of finances, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson, and adopted in 1784 against the protests of bankers and businessmen, most of whom wanted to preserve English units and terms such as pounds and shillings. The names given to the earliest coins were something of an etymological rag-bag. In ascending order they were: mill, cent, dime, dollar and eagle. Dollar comes ultimately from Joachimstaler, a coin that was first made in the Bohemian town of Joachimstal in 1519 and then spread through Europe as daler, thaler and taler. In an American context dollar is first recorded in 1683.8 Dime, or disme as it was spelled on the first coins, is a corruption of the French dixième, and was intended to be pronounced ‘deem’, though it appears that hardly anyone did. The word is not strictly an Americanism. Dime had been used occasionally in Britain as far back as 1377, though it had fallen out of use there long before, no doubt because in a non-decimal currency there was no use for