March 21

[In my March 21, 1819 letter to John Adams, my longtime friend, revolutionary compatriot, and former presidential rival, I write from Monticello to express my deep alarm over the devastating economic crisis caused by unbacked paper currency. I argue that the ruinous effects of this financial deluge cannot be halted until the public is educated enough to silence the deceptive sophistry of banking institutions, warning that the volatile nature of paper money leaves citizens with a measure of value less stable than Indian wampum and reduces our society to primitive barter. My furious condemnation of the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers highlights my fierce, deep-seated hostility toward financial speculation, and my core belief that paper money and modern banking were not tools of economic progress, but rather corrupt moral and political evils designed to rob honest citizens of the fruits of their labor.]

The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed, until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions. Till then we must be content to return, quod hoc, to the savage state, to recur to barter in the exchange of our property, for want of a stable, common measure of value, that now in use being less fixed than the beads and wampum of the Indian, and to deliver up our citizens, their property and their labor, passive victims to the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers.