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Notes
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, 1933), XXIX, 663, n. 1.
For copy I have used the advertisement in The United States Chronicle: Political, Commercial, and Historical (Providence, R. I.), Sept. 29, 1785, p. 4.
The proposals, with samples of type, paper, and workmanship, have been preserved in manuscript and are bound together in Volume 46 of the Papers of the Continental Congress in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Quotations from the various proposals will be identified only by the names of the printers, since page references to the bound volume would be difficult to make.
For purposes of comparison it has seemed most practical to convert English pounds, shillings, and pence into 'dollars' since most of the estimates were given on the dollar basis. American dollars as such had not yet been authorized by Congress, but the Spanish dollar, the most widely current coin in the several states, had achieved a fairly constant stability for business transactions, especially in the Middle-Atlantic states. In all but one of the states where the printers resided, the dollar was worth 7/6; in the remaining state, New York, the value of a dollar was set at 8/0. These ratios seem to have remained constant from at least 1782 to 1788. See "Coinage System Proposed by Robert Morris, Superintendent of Finance, January 15, 1782," reprinted in Report of Proceedings of the International Monetary Conference, 1878 (Washington, 1933), p. 430, and also The Virginia Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1788 (Richmond, 1787).
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