The Continental dollar, 1777–1781
When the Continental dollar collapsed, someone had to decide what past contracts denominated in it were worth. The states did this by statute, each enacting a scale of depreciation that assigned to every past month a legal ratio between Continental dollars and specie. This dataset collects those scales, and sets them against what the currency was actually fetching.
Released under CC0. The charted series are also served directly as JSON: state scales, contemporary quotations and the Pennsylvania comparison.
The legal value was not one number
Seven states' scales survive in machine-readable form here, transcribed from the 1828 federal compilation and, for Pennsylvania, from the enacted statute. They diverge sharply. In June 1781 the same currency was legally worth 100 to one in Massachusetts and 350 to one in North Carolina.
What the currency actually fetched
Two contemporary quotation series survive, for Philadelphia and for Virginia, compiled by Pelatiah Webster and reprinted by Phillips. They track each other closely for most of the currency's life and then separate, reaching a ratio of 2.33 by May 1781 — the month Continental money ceased to pass as currency.
One schedule, three printed versions
This is the part worth dwelling on. Pennsylvania's scale was enacted on 3 April 1781. Two standard compilations reproduce it, and they disagree with the statute and with each other — precisely in the months where the argument about legislative behaviour would be made.
The act covers contracts made before 1 March 1781, and its scale ends at February 1781. The federal compilation nonetheless prints values for March, April and May; Webster carries the February figure forward through May. Neither is in the act. They also differ for October 1780, where the statute reads “seventy-three” and the federal printing has 72.
Anyone building a price series from these tables inherits whichever version they happen to pick. Toggle the filter below to see only the months where the sources part company.
Sources
- Amount of Continental Money issued during the Revolutionary War, and the Depreciation of the same, House Doc. No. 107, 20th Cong. 1st sess. (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1828), pp. 30–33 — reissued as American State Papers, Class III (Finance), vol. V.
- Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1904), vol. 10, pp. 283–89 — the Act of 3 April 1781, ch. CMXXXV, whose Section IV carries the enacted scale.
- Pelatiah Webster, Political Essays on the Nature and Operation of Money, Public Finances and Other Subjects (Philadelphia, 1791), p. 501.
- Henry Phillips, Jr., Continental Paper Money (Roxbury, 1866), Appendix D and pp. 217–18.
- Charles J. Bullock, The Finances of the United States from 1775 to 1789 (Madison, 1895), p. 133.
- Anne Bezanson, Prices and Inflation during the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1951), Table 3, p. 65.
Connecticut, New York and South Carolina appear in the same 1828 source and are not yet transcribed.
The repository also carries the Treasury's own 1828 statement of Continental currency emissions authorized by Congress, and an independent contemporary accounting (attributed to Jefferson) that applies depreciation multiples to give each emission's worth in silver dollars — both reprinted in Phillips's Appendix.