[Speech of Joseph C. Hendrix at the fifteenth annual dinner of the New
England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1894. The
President, Robert D. Benedict, introducing the speaker, said: "I do
not remember ever to have heard at any of the New England festivals
which I have attended any discussion of the currency questions which
plagued the Pilgrims. We cannot doubt that they had such questions for
such questions must arise where there are different currencies. But
the attention of our committee this year has naturally been drawn in
that direction, and they have selected as the next subject one of the
currencies with which the Pilgrims had to deal: 'The Wampum of the
Indians.' Upon this subject they have invited the Hon. Joseph C.
Hendrix to speak. Doubtless he may draw from that subject lessons that
will be of interest and of use for the present day."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--While
your poetic souls are attuned to the sweet music of the last speech, I
must chide the Fates which compel me to so suddenly precipitate upon you
a discussion of a practical nature, especially when at the very outset I
must begin to talk about clams. [Laughter.] For when we begin to
consider wampum we have to begin to consider the familiar hard-shell
clam of daily use, which was the basis of wampum. At this stage of the
feast, after the confections contained in that eulogium passed upon you
by the Governor of Massachusetts [Frederick T. Greenhalge], and after
that private parlor-car, canvas-back-duck, cold-champagne view of
consolidation taken by the great trunk-line president [Chauncey M.
Depew] [laughter], can you endure anything savoring of the clam? Would
you not prefer to go home and sleep upon what you already have? Yet
every loyal son of Long Island ought to be partial to clams. The Mayor
[Charles A. Schieren], who typifies what a German head can do in a
contest with an Irish appetite, should love them because they reside
within the city limits, and have ceased to vote in Gravesend. You, Mr.
Chairman, as a lawyer, ought to tolerate the clam, for there are two
sides to the case, and there's meat inside. Our friend the preacher
[Rev. Samuel A. Eliot] knows that they are as good every day in the week
as they are on Sunday. Dr. Johnson [Dr. J. G. Johnson] there favors them
as part of his internal revenue system. The Mugwumps cannot object to
them, because they change from side to side so easily. The Democrats
ought to like anything that is always digging a hole for itself, and the
Republicans cannot but be patient with what comes on top at the change
of the tide. [Laughter.] So, gentlemen, I present to you the clam.
Professor Hooper [Franklin W. Hooper] tells me to call it the _Venus
Mercenaria_, but we shall have to wait for our free public library
before venturing so far.
You remember, when you were children, looking over the old story-book
handed down to you by the Puritan fathers, that one of the conundrums
with which the gayety of their times was illustrated was, "Who was the
shortest man in the Bible?" The answer was, "Bildad, the Shuhite;" but
now, in the revised text it is Peter, because Peter said: "Silver and
gold have I none," and no one could be shorter than that. The North
American Indian was no better off than Peter in his gold reserve or
silver supply; but he managed to get along with the quahog clam. That
was the money substance out of which he made the wampum, and the
shell-heaps scattered over the island are mute monuments to an industry
which was blasted by the demonetization of the hard-shell clam. Wampum
was a good money in the Indian civilization. It was the product of human
labor as difficult and tedious as the labor of the gold-miner of to-day.
It had intrinsic value, for it was redeemable in anything the Indian had
to give, from his skill in the chase to his squaw. It took time,
patience, endurance and skill to make a thing of beauty out of a clam,
even in the eyes of an Indian, but when the squaws and the old men had
ground down the tough end of the shell to the size of a wheat straw, and
had bored it with a sliver of flint, and strung it upon a thew of
deerskin, and tested its smoothness on the noses, they had an article
which had as much power over an Indian mind as a grain of gold to-day
has over us. There were two kinds of wampum, the blue and the white. The
Montauks to this day know that there is a difference between the two.
The blue came from our clam. The white, which was the product of the
periwinkle, did not need so much labor to fit it for use as wampum, and
it was cheaper. The blue was the gold; the white was the silver. One
blue bead was worth two white ones. The Indians did not try to keep up
any parity of the beads. They let each kind go for just what it was
worth. The Puritans used to restring the beads and keep the blue ones.
Then the Indians strung their scalps.
Why was wampum good money in its time? The supply was limited. It took a
day to make four or five beads. It was in itself a thing of value to the
Indian for ornament. It was easily carried about from place to place. It
was practically indestructible. It was always alike. It was divisible.
The value attached to it did not vary. It was not easily counterfeited.
So it was that it became the money of the colonists; a legal tender in
Massachusetts and the tool of the primitive commerce of this continent.
The Puritan took it for firewater and gave it back for furs. Long Island
was the great mint for this pastoral coinage. It was called the "Mine of
the New Netherlands." The Indian walked the beach at Rockaway, dug his
toes in the sand, turned up a clam, and after swallowing the contents
carried the shells to the mint. Gold and silver at the mouth of a mine
obtain their chief value from the labor it takes to get the metals;
wampum was the refinement by labor of a money substance free to all. The
redemption of wampum was perfect. To the Indians it was a seal to
treaties, an amulet in danger, an affidavit, small change, a savings'
bank, a wedding ring and a dress suit. To this day the belt of wampum is
the storehouse of Indian treasure. In the Six Nations, when a big chief
made an assertion in council, he laid down a belt of wampum, as though
to say, "Money talks." The Iroquois sent a belt of it to the King of
England when they asked his protection. William Penn got a strip when he
made his treaty. The Indians braided rude pictures into it, which
recorded great events. They talked their ideas into it, as we do into a
phonograph. They sent messages in it. White beads between a row of dark
ones represented a path of peace, as though to say: "Big chief no longer
got Congress on his hands." A string of dark beads was a message of war
or of the death of a chief, and a string of white beads rolled in mud
was equivalent to saying that there was crape on the door of Tammany
Hall. So you see that it was a combined post-office, telegraph,
telephone, phonograph and newspaper.
The Iroquois had a keeper of wampum--a sort of secretary of the treasury
without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity.
This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one
could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude
himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly
would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as
he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value of the
white wampum after the Puritans started in to make it out of oyster
shells by machinery. Nor would he have bought it, not needing it, and
have issued against it his promises to pay in good wampum as fast and as
often as they were presented.
It was said that wampum was so cunningly made that neither Jew nor Devil
could counterfeit it. Nevertheless a Connecticut Yankee rigged up a
machine that so disturbed the market value of the beads that in a short
time the Long Island mints were closed to the free coinage of clams.
Wampum was demonetized through counterfeit, overproduction and
imitation; but when this occurred the gentle Puritan didn't have enough
of it left to supply the museums. The Indian had parted with his lands
and his furs, had redeemed all the outstanding wampum with his labor,
and when he went to market to get firewater, he was taught that he must
have gold and silver to get it. Then he wanted to ride in blood up to
his horse's bridles. Commerce had found a better tool than wampum had
become. The buccaneers and the pirates had brought in silver and that
defied the Connecticut man's machinery or the Dutchman's imitations. The
years pass by and commerce finds that silver, because of overproduction,
becomes uncertain and erratic in value, and with the same instinct it
chooses gold as a standard of value. A coin of unsteady value is like a
knife of uncertain sharpness. It is thrown aside for one that can do all
that is expected of it. Gold is such a tool. It is the standard of all
first-class nations. It is to-day, and it will remain, the standard of
this Republic.
The value of the gold dollar is not in the pictures on it. It is in the
grains of gold in it. Smash it and melt it, and it buys one hundred
cents' worth the world over. Deface a silver dollar and fifty cents of
its value goes off yonder among the silent stars. Free coinage means
that the silver miner may make fifty cents' worth of silver cancel a
dollar's worth of debts. This is a greenback doctrine in a silver
capsule. Bimetallism is a diplomatic term for international use.
Monometallism with silver as the metal is the dream of the Populist and
of the poor deluded Democratic grasshoppers who dance by the moonshine
until they get frost-bitten.
The free-silver heresy is about dead. It has cost this country, at
to-day's price for silver, $170,000,000. The few saddened priests of
this unhappy fetich who remain active find their disciples all rallying
round the standard of currency reform. The report of the Secretary of
the Treasury is a confession of national financial sins, and a
profession of faith in sound money doctrines. Every business man will
watch with keen interest the progress of a plan for the reform in our
currency. You all know that the straight road is the retirement of the
greenback and the Treasury note, and the withdrawal of the Government
from the banking business, and you will naturally distrust any makeshift
measures. The greenback is a war debt, and a debt that is now
troublesome. We are funding and refunding it in gold daily, and are
still paying it out as currency to come back after gold. Any scheme to
sequestrate, to hide it under a bushel, or to put it under lock and key,
is a shallow device. The way to retire it is to retire it. It has served
its full purpose, and there never was a better time than now to call it
in.
In twelve years all our Government debt matures. The national banking
system based upon it must expire with it, unless existing laws are
changed. This system has served the nation well. No one has ever lost a
dollar by a national bank note. The system is worth preserving, and
with a little more liberal treatment it can be made to serve until a
currency based upon commercial credits and linked to a safety fund, a
system which works so admirably in Canada, can be engrafted upon it.
There is a great hurry to create such a system now on a basis of the
partial sequestration of the greenback and the Treasury note, but the
bottom principle is wrong. The Government should discourage a commercial
credit currency based upon a public credit currency, which, in turn,
rests upon a slender gold deposit, exposed to every holder of a
Government demand note. A credit currency is a double-edged tool, and
needs to be handled with great care. We have had so much crazy-quilt
finance that I am sure that we want no more of it. We have been sorely
punished for our financial sins in the past, and now that we are
repentant, we want to get everything right before we go ahead with our
full native energy. We have suffered from the distrust of the world, and
then from our own distrust. In retracing our steps let us be sure that
we are on solid ground, and make our "wampum" as good as the best there
is in the world. [Applause.]