UnderMiner
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- Jul 27, 2014
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I was rummaging through a cheap coin bin at a coin store yesterday when I found this curious coin. I decided to part with 25 cents in exchange for it. It is an 1837 hard times token, stylized to look like an American large cent. It features an image of a Phoenix rising from flames. On the edge it says "Substitute for Shin Plasters", "Shin Plasters" is jargon of the times meaning "cheap currency made of paper".
For another 25 cents I also got this worn out and bent American Matron Head Large Cent from the same time period (1816 - 1839).
The coin was privately minted during the free banking era of United States history back when pretty much anyone could start their own private bank or mint/print their own coins/paper notes. The history, as far as I can tell, pretty much entails President Andrew Jackson getting fed up with speculators buying up huge pieces of land with paper money (which was not necessarily backed by tangible assets) and so in 1837 he decided to change the law so that people could only purchase large areas of land with "specie", that is only physical gold and silver coins. This seemed like a good idea at first but all this did was make people who owned large amounts of paper money transfer it into coins and this caused paper money to lose nearly all its value overnight.
As people lost faith in paper money all physical coins were simultaneously taken out of circulation by people desperate to transfer their paper into physical coins. With paper money next to worthless and no coins in circulation many small farmers defaulted on their mortgages and were bought out by already well established large plantation owners.
The lack of coins made people so desperate for physical money that private individuals began to make their own coins, these coins had no official value but people used them as if they were real American currency. Many historians attribute the Panic of 1837 as contributing to the rise of the massive Southern Plantation economy in which a select few wealthy individuals controlled the entire cotton production economy, owned over 90% of the African American slave population, and subjugated many poor white farmers as sharecroppers and indentured servants who could not afford their own land - this would ultimately help lead to the American Civil War.
For another 25 cents I also got this worn out and bent American Matron Head Large Cent from the same time period (1816 - 1839).
The coin was privately minted during the free banking era of United States history back when pretty much anyone could start their own private bank or mint/print their own coins/paper notes. The history, as far as I can tell, pretty much entails President Andrew Jackson getting fed up with speculators buying up huge pieces of land with paper money (which was not necessarily backed by tangible assets) and so in 1837 he decided to change the law so that people could only purchase large areas of land with "specie", that is only physical gold and silver coins. This seemed like a good idea at first but all this did was make people who owned large amounts of paper money transfer it into coins and this caused paper money to lose nearly all its value overnight.
As people lost faith in paper money all physical coins were simultaneously taken out of circulation by people desperate to transfer their paper into physical coins. With paper money next to worthless and no coins in circulation many small farmers defaulted on their mortgages and were bought out by already well established large plantation owners.
The lack of coins made people so desperate for physical money that private individuals began to make their own coins, these coins had no official value but people used them as if they were real American currency. Many historians attribute the Panic of 1837 as contributing to the rise of the massive Southern Plantation economy in which a select few wealthy individuals controlled the entire cotton production economy, owned over 90% of the African American slave population, and subjugated many poor white farmers as sharecroppers and indentured servants who could not afford their own land - this would ultimately help lead to the American Civil War.
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