Gresham's Law in Nineteenth-Century America.

This paper examines several nineteenth-century American tests of Gresham's law. These tests include both the conflict between the U.S. silver dollar and foreign silver dollars in the early national period and the conflict between the greenback dollar and the gold dollar during the Civil War and its aftermath. The authors find that Gresham's law worked well and that a rival view, which considers the natural outcome of such conflicts to be the concurrent circulation of cheap money at face value and dear money at a varying premium, did not. Copyright 1995 by Ohio State University Press.