Title: Web of Debt - REVIVE LINCOLN�S MONETARY POLICY: AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
Headings: REVIVE LINCOLN�S MONETARY POLICY:
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

REVIVE LINCOLN�S MONETARY POLICY:
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
Lincoln�s Monetary Breakthrough
Building on a Successful Tradition
The Perennial Inflation Question
A Wake-up Call

Content: Taylor�s advice and funded the war by printing paper notes backed by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes or �Greenbacks� represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were tradeable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln�s government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. The Greenback was not the only currency used to fund these achievements; but they could not have been accomplished without it, and they could not have been accomplished on money borrowed at the usurious rates the bankers were attempting to extort from the North. Lincoln succeeded in restoring the government�s power to issue the national currency, but his revolutionary monetary policy was opposed by powerful forces. The threat to established interests was captured in an editorial of unknown authorship, said to have been published in The London Times in 1865: