(11) And for quite a while the Treasury minted gold and silver coins according to the constitutional principle of "free coinage", whereby an individual who brought some weight of gold or silver bullion to the Mint would receive, after a time, coins containing the selfsame weight of metal, struck at no charge to him; or, if he preferred immediate receipt (and the Mint concurred), could accept coins containing some lesser weight according to a fixed formula.
The principle of "free coinage"--with its implicit recognition of the premium between coinage and bullion, and its allocation of the cost of generating new coinage to the public in the first instance--constitutes an integral part of Congress's constitutional power "[t]o coin Money" under Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 of the Constitution, (12) and therefore must be taken into consideration il a State chooses to employ bullion as alternative currency in conjunction with "Coin", so that nothing the State does in the course of "mak[ing] ...
But the greater source of official coins is to be through so-called "free coinage": the requirement that the government mint coin, at the minimum possible (or even no) charge, whatever silver and gold private parties bring to them, the resulting coins then being spent into circulation by those parties.
* Second, reestablishment of "free coinage" as the primary means for creating official coinage, along with complete allowance of all forms of nonfraudulent private coinage.
Farmers in the West and South were in desperate economic plight, and backers of the new party, thinking eastern bankers were hoarding gold, advocated
free coinage of silver.
The
free coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 was asked for by a minority of House Democrats.
The
free coinage of silver was their primary campaign issue.
It put an end to the free silver controversy, although William Jennings Bryan and other advocates of the
free coinage of silver continued to agitate for ten years more.
The convention demanded
free coinage of silver at 15 1/2 or 16 to 1 in return for repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.
The reference was to the insistence by the gold faction, which opposed
free coinage of silver, on gold alone as the basis for U.S.