The Currency Act of 1764 The British Law That Started the Revolution

Truly Right View Video Transcript

Politics
Let The Truth Be Told!

Are you ready to hear the real truth unfiltered by bias media or government intervention?
Subscribe to the Truly Right View YouTube Channel
Subscribe to the Truly Right View Rumble Channel

It’s 1760 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You are a farmer. Your harvest was good. Your land is rich. And you’ve built a fine, sturdy barn. You are by any measure a wealthy man. But you have a problem, a serious one. You want to buy a new iron plow from the blacksmith, but you have no money. You don’t mean you’re broke. You mean you literally do not possess a single gold or silver coin. And neither does the blacksmith, and neither does the merchant he buys his iron from. This was the fundamental crisis of the American colonies. They were rich in everything, land, timber, crops, labor, except for money. The entire economic model of the British Empire was designed to drain all hard money, all specy, all gold and silver, out of the colonies and into the vaults of London. By law, the colonies were forbidden from minting their own coins. And any gold they earned from trade with the West Indies was immediately spent on finished British goods, a deficit that sent the coins straight across the Atlantic. So, how did they function? How did they build an entire civilization from nothing? They came up with a brilliant, radical, and dangerously successful solution. They printed their own. It was called Colonial Script or Bills of Credit. And it’s the most important piece of American history you’ve never been taught. This isn’t just a story about old paper. This is the story of the real trigger of the American Revolution. If you believe, like I do, that the real story is almost never the one they teach you in school, then you’re in the right place. To help this channel dig up these hidden histories, please take a second to hit that subscribe button, ring the bell, and give this video a like. And it’s amazing to see where these ideas reach. Let me know in the comments below what country you’re watching from, what time it is for you. It’s fascinating to see this community grow. Now, back to our farmer. He goes to a land bank run by his own colonial assembly. He stakes a piece of his land as collateral and receives in return a stack of freshly printed paper notes. This paper is, in effect, a mortgage. It’s backed not by gold, but by the real productive value of his Pennsylvania land. He takes this paper, the script, to the blacksmith and buys his plow. The blacksmith uses it to pay the iron merchant, who uses it to pay the ship captain, who uses it to pay his taxes. The script circulates through the entire economy, acting as a lubricant, allowing all this real wealth to be unlocked and exchanged. The colony itself accepts this script for all public payments. And because it’s backed by the full faith and credit of the land and the government, it holds its value. This was the system pioneered by Massachusetts in 1690 and perfected by Pennsylvania that allowed the colonies to explode with growth. It was their own independent sovereign monetary system. It was, as Benjamin Franklin would later testify, the engine of their prosperity. But there was one group of people who absolutely despised this system, the British creditors. Imagine a London merchant. He sells a,000 pounds of British wool to a Boston merchant and he expects to be paid in British pounds backed by gold. Instead, he receives a box full of paper script from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which might have lost 10% of its value due to overprinting. He is furious. He and his fellow merchants, a powerful and wealthy lobby, saw this script as fraudulent, as a cheat. They saw the colonial assemblies, with their ability to print money, as rogue institutions that were defrauding their British creditors. They didn’t care that this script was the only thing allowing the colonial economy to function. They cared that it was cutting into their profits. And so for decades they lobbyed Parliament. They demanded that this funny money be abolished. For a long time Britain practicing its salutary neglect ignored them. The colonies were after all profitable. But in 1763 everything changed. The Seven Years War, the French and Indian War had ended. Britain was victorious. It now ruled the world and it was completely catastrophically broke. The new king, George III, and his prime minister, George Grenville, looked at the massive 130 million pound war debt, and they looked at the prosperous American colonies, and they decided very simply that it was time for the colonies to be brought to heal, to be controlled, and to pay. The era of salutary neglect was over. The era of economic warfare was about to begin. The British merchant creditors had the full attention of a new broke and angry government. And their first target wasn’t attacks. It was something far more fundamental. It was the money itself. In 1764, Parliament under Prime Minister George Grenville fired the first and perhaps most devastating shot in this new economic war. It was not attacks on stamps. It was not attacks on tea. It was called the Currency Act of 1764. And it was a masterpiece of economic strangulation. The act was brutally simple. It did not, as many think, forbid the colonies from printing paper money. It did something far more insidious. It forbade the colonies from ever again declaring their paper script to be legal tender. This is a dry legal term, but it was a dagger to the heart of the entire colonial economy. Legal tender means that if you owe a debt and you offer that currency as payment, the person you owe is legally required to accept it. It is the government’s official stamp that says this is money. By removing this legal tender status, the Currency Act turned Pennsylvania’s landbacked script, which had been the engine of its prosperity, into little more than a private IOU. And now think about that farmer. He still owes his mortgage to the colonial land bank. But more importantly, he owes money to a local merchant who in turn owes money to a British supplier. The British supplier and his army of lobbyists had won. Now that British creditor could legally refuse to accept the colonial script. He could demand payment in the one thing he knew the farmer did not have, gold or silver specy. The act was in effect a massive retroactive gift to all British creditors and a death sentence for all colonial debtors. The entire brilliant functional system that Benjamin Franklin had praised was shattered by a stroke of a pen in London. The economic consequences were not slow. They were immediate and catastrophic. The primary value of the script was that everyone had to accept it, especially the colonial government for taxes. Now that it was no longer legal tender, its value was purely a matter of opinion. And in a crisis, that opinion turned to panic. A massive, crippling deflationary spiral began. The script, no longer trusted, vanished from circulation. The lubricant that had allowed the colonial economy to function was drained away. The farmer could not buy his plow, not because he lacked wealth, but because he lacked a medium of exchange. The blacksmith, in turn, could not pay his iron supplier. The shopkeeper’s inventory rotted on the shelves. A deep, agonizing depression settled over all the colonies. This was not an accidental side effect. It was the policy. It was designed to destroy the colony’s economic independence and force them back into a subservient species-based system that by design they could not win. Benjamin Franklin was in London at the time acting as an agent for Pennsylvania. He was a direct witness to this lobbying. He argued, he pleaded, he testified before Parliament. He tried to explain to these men who held the fate of his homeland in their hands that they were making a terrible mistake. He explained that the script was not a cheat to avoid debts. It was a necessity to conduct basic everyday life. He explained that without it, the colonies would be plunged into poverty and ruin. They, the British creditors and the parliament they controlled simply did not care. They were arrogant. They were ignorant of the realities of colonial life. They were desperate to fill their own empty treasury. They ignored Franklin’s warnings. And so, the colonies found themselves in a new terrible trap. They were in the grip of a crushing depression with all trade seizing up. Unemployment in the cities like Philadelphia and Boston skyrocketed. And it was into this economic wasteland, this dry tinder of financial ruin that they had just created that Parliament in 1765 decided to throw its first great firebomb, the Stamp Act. This is the piece of the puzzle that is almost always missed. The anger over the Stamp Act was not just about the political slogan of taxation without representation. It was about the impossibility of the demand. The Stamp Act was a direct tax on everything from newspapers to legal documents to playing cards. And the law stipulated that this new tax could not be paid in the colony’s own paper script. It had to be paid in gold or silver specy. It was the ultimate sadistic one-two punch. First, the Currency Act of 1764 abolishes the colony’s money and drains all trade to a halt. Then, the Stamp Act of 1765 comes in and demands a new direct tax payable only in the one thing that the first act had already guaranteed no one could possibly possess. It wasn’t just a tax. It was a demand for blood from a corpse. It was seen correctly, not as attacks to raise revenue, but as a deliberate, hostile act of economic destruction. It was a declaration that the colonies were to be plundered, not governed. And that that is when the first true fires of revolution began to burn. The explosion was immediate. It was not a series of polite letters to the editor. It was a detonation of rage. In Boston, a mob formed, led by a new shadowy group of artisans, merchants, and street brawlers who called themselves the Sons of Liberty. They were not abstract political philosophers. They were the men whose livelihoods had just been gutted. They were the blacksmiths, the ship builders, and the distillers who were now unemployed thanks to the currency acts depression and were now being told to pay a new tax in a currency they didn’t have. Their anger was raw, economic, and personal. And they directed it with brutal precision. They found Andrew Oliver, the man appointed to be the new stamp distributor for Massachusetts, and they built an effigy of him. They hung it from a great elm tree, which would become famous as the Liberty Tree. That night, they paraded the effigy through the streets, marched to Oliver’s newly built office, and in a symbolic act, stamped it to the ground, leveling the entire building. They then marched to his home where they smashed his windows, broke his furniture, and terrified him into resigning. This scene was repeated with stunning coordinated speed in every single colony, in Newport, in New York, in Charleston. The stamp distributors, the men who were supposed to administer this new economic regime, were universally hunted, threatened, and forced to resign, often under a liberty tree before they had even sold a single stamp. It was the most effective campaign of domestic terror in American history. But the Sons of Liberty were not just a mob. They were the muscle for a much more sophisticated plan orchestrated by the very colonial assemblies that Parliament was trying to crush. The colony’s real weapon was not the tar and feathering of a few tax collectors. It was economic warfare. This is the part that mattered. The colonial leaders, men like Samuel Adams and James Otis, understood what the British merchants had taught them. The only thing Parliament listened to was money. So, they organized the first massive cont continentwide boycott, the non-importation agreements. American merchants from New Hampshire to Georgia signed binding oaths that they would not import, buy, or sell any British goods. No British wool, no British tea, no British iron, no British luxuries. The American docks, which had been the engine of British export profits, would shut down completely until the Stamp Act was repealed. And this is where the genius of the move becomes clear. Remember those British merchants? The ones who had lobbied for the Currency Act so they could be paid in gold. They were now the ones who were screaming. Their colonial debtor books, which they had hoped to collect in Specy, were now frozen. No payments were coming at all. Worse, their new shipments of goods were being turned away at the ports, and their warehouses in London and Bristol were overflowing with millions of pounds of unsold inventory. They were facing their own financial ruin. The colonists had successfully and brilliantly turned the tables. They had taken the economic depression that Britain had inflicted on them and weaponized it, reflecting it right back at the London merchants who had caused it. The panic was now in London. The very same merchant lobby that had demanded the Currency Act was now flooding Parliament, begging, pleading, and demanding the repeal of the Stamp Act. They didn’t care about taxation without representation. They cared that their entire American market, the most valuable market in their empire, had evaporated overnight. The pressure was immense. In 1766, after a long, brutal debate, Parliament caved. They were forced by their own merchant class to repeal the Stamp Act. It was a stunning, humiliating defeat for the Grenville government. The colonists had won. They had used coordinated economic warfare to bring the greatest empire on earth to its knees. Church bells rang, bonfires were lit. They had faced the beast and forced it to blink. But in the euphoria of the victory, most missed the fine print. On the very same day that Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, it passed another short, simple, and far more sinister law. It was called the Declaratory Act. It contained no new taxes. It simply stated that the British Parliament had the full and absolute authority to pass laws binding the colonies in all cases whatsoever. It was a time bomb. It was Parliament, humiliated and angry, reasserting its absolute god-like power. And crucially, while the Stamp Act was gone, the Currency Act of 1764, the root of the economic crisis, was not repealed. It remained in full force, a boot still pressing on the colony’s economic throat. The fight wasn’t over. It was just the end of the first brutal round. The repeal of the Stamp Act felt like a total victory, but it was a mirage. The colonists had won a battle, but the Declaratory Act proved Parliament was preparing for a longer war. And the boot on the neck, the Currency Act of 1764, remained firmly in place. This is the crucial forgotten fact. The economic depression did not end. The money was not turned back on. The colonies remained in a state of crippling deflationary recession, starved of a medium of exchange. The non-importation agreements had worked, but at great cost. The merchants had saved their political rights by bankrupting themselves. It was into this fragile, tense, and impoverished environment that Parliament, now led by the arrogant and flamboyant Chancellor of the Excheer, Charles Townzend, launched its next attack. In 1767, they passed the Townshend Acts. And this, for the colonists, was the moment the conspiracy they had feared was laid bare. On the surface, the Townsend Acts were a different kind of tax. Town, who arrogantly dismissed the colonists as ungrateful children, believed he had found a brilliant loophole. The colonists had protested the internal tax of the Stamp Act. Very well, he would give them an external tax. These new acts placed a duty, a tariff on essential goods the colonies could only buy from Britain. lead, glass, paint, paper, and most famously, tea. Townshend believed the colonists couldn’t possibly object to a simple import duty, which was a standard part of British imperial trade. He was catastrophically wrong. The colonists, now highly educated in the nuances of economic tyranny, saw the trap instantly. This was not a tax to regulate trade. The act’s own preamble stated with chilling clarity that the revenue raised would be used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges. This was it. This was the final checkmate. Before this, the only real power the colonial assemblies had over their Britishappointed governors and judges was the power of the purse. The governors could veto laws, but the assemblies paid their salaries. If a governor became too tyrannical, the assembly could simply threaten to not pay him. It was a delicate but vital balance of power. Now, with the town Chandax, Parliament was going to use the tax money, money they were ringing from the colonists to pay those salaries directly. This would make the governors and judges completely independent of the people they governed. They would become in effect a permanent salaried army of occupation loyal only to London. And this is the final horrifying synthesis. Step one, the currency act of 1764 destroys the colony’s independent self-created money, plunging them into depression and making them totally dependent on British credit. Step two, the Towns Hand Act of 1767 taxed them on the British goods they are now forced to buy and use that revenue to seize all remaining political power from their elected assemblies. It was not a tax plan. It was a hostile takeover. It was the complete and total economic and political subjugation of the American colonies laid out in two simple devastating pieces of legislation. The reaction was no longer just a riot. It was a profound unified and radical shift in consciousness. The colonists led by figures like John Dickinson in his letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania argued that the distinction between internal and external taxes was irrelevant. Tyranny was tyranny. The non-importation agreements were renewed. But this time they were not a desperate angry reaction. They were a cold, organized, and deeply philosophical act of war. This time it was about more than just repealing attacks. It was about American maid. It was about self-sufficiency. Women calling themselves the Daughters of Liberty held spinning bees to make homespun cloth, publicly rejecting the British textiles. Drinking smuggled Dutch tea became a patriotic act. The boycott became a marker of one’s virtue and one’s loyalty to the American cause. This, of course, was economic hell for the colonial merchants, who were now the frontline soldiers in this economic war. But the popular pressure, fanned by the Sons of Liberty, was immense. This new boycott was even more painful for the British merchants than the first one. They were once again being ruined by Parliament’s arrogance. But Parliament this time would not back down. And this is when the mask of governance truly fell and the face of raw power was revealed. Their response to the new boycotts was not to negotiate. Their response was to send troops. In 1768, British red coats sailing on warships arrived in Boston Harbor and marched into the city to enforce these economic policies. They were there to protect the tax collectors. They were there to break the boycott. They were there to ensure that this economic subjugation which had begun with the currency act would be completed if necessary at the point of a bayonet. The depression was now an armed occupation. The armed occupation of Boston was a disaster. It was the physical manifestation of the entire British policy. The red coats poorly paid and quartered among a hostile unemployed populace were a constant visible reminder of the economic tyranny that had begun with the currency act. The soldiers looking for work in their offduty hours were now competing for the same scarce day laborer jobs as the very Bostononian dock workers and artisans who had been put out of work by the depression. The tension was not just political, it was economic, personal and explosive. It was a tinder box and on March 5th, 1770, that tinder box ignited. A confrontation between a merchant, an apprentice, and a British soldier escalated in minutes into a street brawl, then a riot. The panicked, surrounded soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five civilians. It was called the Boston Massacre. It was the first blood, and it was the direct inevitable result of using troops to enforce a ruinous economic policy. The news of the massacre, combined with the relentless, grinding success of the non-importation agreements, finally, again, broke the will of the London merchants. They were facing total ruin. They stormed Parliament once more, begging for a repeal, and Parliament once more partially caved. In 1770, they repealed all the towns henacs except one. They repealed the duties on glass, on lead, on paper, but they left the tax on tea. This was a fatal, arrogant mistake. They did it specifically to prove the point, to show that they still held the power given to them by the Declaratory Act. They were still asserting their right to tax the colonies. And even more importantly, the two root causes of the entire conflict remained untouched. The Declaratory Act was still law, and the Currency Act of 1764, the act that had started the Depression, starved the colonies of money, and created the crisis in the first place, was still the law of the land. The colonists were now in a state of cold, simmering, and highly organized resistance. They had a taste of victory, but they knew the war was not over. And then in 1763, Parliament made its final greatest blunder. It was called the Tea Act. The Tea Act is famous, but it is almost always misunderstood. It was not a new tax. The tax on tea was the old lingering towns and duty. The tea act was something far more modern and insidious. It was a corporate bailout. The British East India Company, a politically connected, too big to fail corporation, was on the verge of bankruptcy, partly because the American boycott had left it with mountains of unsold tea. So, Parliament passed a law giving the company a complete monopoly on the American tea trade. The actum allowed the company to bypass all the colonial merchants, the very merchants who had been the backbone of the resistance, and sell its tea directly to the public through its own handpicked agents. This was the final perfect synthesis of all their fears. This one act was the entire tyranny in a nutshell. One, it was a monopoly that would bankrupt an entire class of American merchants, the final stroke in the economic war. Two, it carried the tax on tea, forcing the colonists to at last pay the one tax that symbolized their subjugation. Three, it was all happening under the power of the Declaratory Act, enforced by a government that had already destroyed their sovereign money with the Currency Act. This was the last straw. It was not a protest against high taxes. The tea was in fact now cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea. It was a protest against the entire system. It was a rejection of the principle of taxation, of monopoly, and of a distant unaccountable power that had spent a decade of systematically destroying their economic independence. On the night of December 16th, 1753, the Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three tea ships in Boston Harbor. This was not a riot. It was a disciplined military-style operation. They were not dumping tea. They were destroying the physical symbol of this entire decadel long economic war. They were rejecting the monopoly, the tax, and the crown’s claim to absolute power. The Boston Tea Party was the moment the argument became a revolution. Parliament’s response was no longer about economics. It was pure, unadulterated punishment. In 1774, they passed the intolerable acts. They closed the Port of Boston, an act of economic execution, starving the city into submission. They revoked the Massachusetts charter, dissolving its elected government. They quartered troops in private homes. They placed the entire colony under direct military rule. This was the end. There was no more debate. There was no more petitioning. The British government had made its final move. It had responded to a protest about economic subjugation with total political and military subjugation. The other colonies, watching in horror, knew they were next. In September 1774, the first Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. They were no longer meeting to debate the price of stamps. They were meeting to discuss how to respond to an act of war. The shot heard around the world at Lexington and Conquered in 1775 was not an accident. It was the final inevitable spark in a forest that had been drying for a decade. And the first most important log in that fire, the act that had proved to the colonists that their own government was not their protector but their plunderer, was the Currency Act of 1764. It was the law that took away their money, their prosperity, and their independence. It was the law that started the American Revolution. Experience Politics

Welcome to the Conversation on Free Speech!

Welcome to Truly Right View!
We’re here to explore real, unfiltered truths—unswayed by media bias or government agendas.

What do you think? Are you ready to hear insights you won’t find elsewhere?
Subscribe to the Truly Right View YouTube Channel | Rumble Channel and join our community dedicated to open dialogue.

What Does Free Speech Mean to You?

In today’s world, where tech giants and news outlets hold so much influence, is free speech at risk?

From silencing certain viewpoints to heavy censorship, the freedom to speak without fear is under threat.

Tell us your thoughts:

Is free speech still a right everyone enjoys?
Do you think we’re protecting it well enough?

Let’s dive into the heart of this discussion. Add your voice below!

The Founding Fathers and Free Speech—Is This the Future They Envisioned?

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, yet today, we see more restrictions than ever in the name of “misinformation” and “hate speech.”

What do you think?