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1738 Rhode Island LAND BANK Related Fiscal Mortgage Bond Document

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Paper Money - Colonials Start Price:650.00 USD Estimated At:800.00 - 1,000.00 USD
1738 Rhode Island LAND BANK Related Fiscal Mortgage Bond Document
Rhode Island Currency
1738 Rhode Island “Land Bank” Related Fiscal Document
February 12, 1738-Dated Colonial Period, Partially-Printed Mortgage Bond Document Signed, related to the Rhode Island Colonial “Land Bank,” Providence, Rhode Island. Official Fiscal Document. Choice Extremely Fine.
This lovely quality, Partially-Printed Document measures about 8” x 6” and is Signed with the red wax seal of Joseph Weaver of East Greenwich, and is witnessed by John Jenkins and Thomas Spencer. The Document is printed on fine laid period paper with an unusual “inkwell” design watermark, being exceptionally clean, fresh and well printed. This bond is made to the Trustees of the Colony in the amount of “Eleven Pounds in Bills of public Credit of said Colony... due in 1755.” Amazing quality, fully original and an actual Mortgage backed document relating to the Land Bank financial system of that era.


Very few private banks existed in Colonial America, and they were short-lived. Most prominent was the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740, issuing notes and lending them out on real estate. The land bank was launched as an inflationary alternative to government paper, which the royal governor was attempting to restrict.

The land bank issued irredeemable notes, and fear of its unsound issue generated a competing private Silver Bank, which emitted notes redeemable in silver. The Land Bank promptly issued over £49,000 in irredeemable notes, which depreciated very rapidly. In six months' time the public was almost universally refusing to accept the bank's notes and land-bank sympathizers vainly accepting the notes. The final blow came in 1741, when Parliament, acting at the request of several Massachusetts merchants and the royal governor, outlawed both the land and the silver banks.

One intriguing aspect of both the Massachusetts Land Bank and other inflationary colonial schemes is that they were advocated and lobbied for by some of the wealthiest merchants and land speculators in the respective colonies.

Debtors benefit from inflation and creditors lose; realizing this fact, older historians assumed that debtors were largely poor agrarians and creditors were wealthy merchants and that therefore the former were the main sponsors of inflationary nostrums. But, of course, there are no rigid "classes" of debtors and creditors; indeed, wealthy merchants and land speculators are often the heaviest debtors. Later historians have demonstrated that members of the latter group were the major sponsors of inflationary paper money in the colonies.

From: The Origins of Government Paper Money

by Murray N. Rothbard