The greenbacks, 1859–1866
In 1862 the United States suspended specie payments and issued an inconvertible paper currency. Wesley C. Mitchell's A History of the Greenbacks (1903) remains the standard quantitative account, and its appendices are among the richest price and wage records of the nineteenth century. This dataset makes them machine-readable.
Released under CC0. The two charted series are also served directly as JSON: gold price of paper and money stock.
The gold price of paper
The clearest single measure of the greenback's depreciation is what $100 in paper currency fetched in gold on the New York market. The repository also carries roughly 1,228 days of daily high and low quotations.
The money stock
Alongside the price series, the Friedman–Schwartz–Mitchell estimates from Historical Statistics of the United States. Three series carry the essential story: the money stock, the non-interest-bearing government currency that was mostly greenbacks, and the total stock of specie, which left circulation after payments were suspended at the end of 1861.
One caveat carried from the source: from June 1861 to November 1864 the figures cover the Northern states only.
Also in the repository
Not every series is charted here. The repository additionally carries
about 120 wholesale commodity series, farm product prices by city,
government purchase prices, and retail prices by town — all verified
against the printed page. The Aldrich Report wage series by industry
and occupation is partly transcribed (establishments
covering pages 470–490 of 470–517); the Tenth Census wage series is
not yet transcribed at all. See the repository's
FINDINGS_TRANSCRIPTION.md for exactly what's verified.
Sources
- Wesley C. Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consequences of Their Issue, 1862–65 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), Appendices A–C and Table V.
- Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Table Cj26-41 — Friedman, Schwartz and Mitchell, contributed by Hugh Rockoff.
Underlies Revisiting Inflation in the American Civil War: Alternative Explanations Beyond Money Supply Growth (APEE, 2026).