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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It                296
currency issued by the Union during the war. A fiat currency is a currency that has no real value,
it is not redeemable in gold or silver or any other scarce natural resource. It is merely paper.
Therefore, during this time period the price of gold escalated as people had more confidence in
gold than the paper. The result of this was an increase in the price of gold of over 127 percent
and a corresponding decrease in the value of the greenback currency.
Past Financial Collapses In the U.S.
In its history the US has twice experienced an extreme devaluation or collapse of its
currency. Both crises were created by worthless fiat money (paper money backed on the good
faith of the US government rather than gold or silver). In both situations the creation of the
currency was believed to be a matter of our nations survival. The US was at war and had almost
no other alternatives. The first instance was during the Revolutionary War when the continental
currency was issued and the second was during the Civil War when greenbacks were issued as
mentioned above. Both of these fiat currencies had devastating consequences on the people of
the United States.
During the revolutionary war, since the Continental Congress had no power to tax, it
issued the continental currency; it didn’t have much choice. The continental currency was based
“solely on the confidence of the people in the congress and the revolutionary cause.” Between
1776 and 1791 the continental currency deflated in value until it was virtually worthless despite
every imaginable effort to keep it alive. In 1791 it was discounted 99 percent. Concerning the
creation and attempts to prevent the eventual collapse of the continental currency, historian
Peletiah Webster wrote the following in 1791:
We have suffered more from this cause than from every other cause or
calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of
our Country more and done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our
enemy….
The fatal error—that the credit and currency of the continental money
could be kept up and supported by acts of compulsion—entered so deep into the
minds of Congress, and of all departments of administration through the States
that no considerations of justice, religion, or policy, or even experience of its utter
inefficacy, could eradicate it. It seemed to be a kind of obstinate delirium, totally
deaf to every argument drawn from justice and right, from its natural tendency
and mischief, from common sense, and even common safety.
This ruinous principle was continued in practice for five successive years,
and appeared in all shapes and forms, i.e., in tender acts, in limitations of prices,
in awful and threatening declarations, in penal laws with dreadful and ruinous
punishments, and in every other way that could be devised, and all executed with
a relentless severity, by the highest authorities then in being viz., by Congress, by
assemblies and conventions of the States, by committees of inspection (whose
powers in those days were nearly sovereign), and even by military force; and,
through men of all descriptions stood trembling before this monster of force,
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