WHY??? in 1857 the Spanish silver coin  pieces of 8  is no longer legal tender in the US... why? It has to have something to do with the civil war heating up does anyone know for sure?

quick googlesearch says   The Coinage Act of 1857 (Act of Feb. 21, 1857, Chap. 56, 34th Cong., Sess. III, 11 Stat. 163) was an act of the United States Congress which forbade the use of foreign coins as legal tender, repealing all acts "authorizing the currency of foreign gold or silver coins". Specific coins would be exchanged at the Treasury and re-coined.

Capital control?  Control the money, you control the population.

Wiki actually had some fairly good links and analysis to its article.  A nation-state should be able to control its own currency.  Prior to this time, the US had to let foreign money circulate because it could not physically produce enough coin itself to circulate.

"By the late 1840s and early 1850s, the US mint had finally been able to match demand for foreign coin and could realistically ban its competitor.

The Coinage Act of 1857 repealed prior legal tender laws concerning foreign specie. It fixed the weight and measure of US one cent pieces at 4.655 grams, which was composed of 88% copper and 12% nickel. It also mandated that this new copper/nickel alloy be received as payment for the worn gold and silver coins turned in at the mint. The effective aim was to limit the domestic money supply by crushing European competition. This was the first major step towards the government essentially having a monopoly over the money supply.

The act drastically altered American business. For decades, those who had accepted any form of payment as long as it was made of specie began to immediately only tolerate those newly minted with a fresh seal from the US government. Due to insatiable demand early on for the new federal cents and the profits to be made by collecting the foreign silver, many individuals along with banks competed with each other. The newly minted American silver made much of the foreign silver obsolete in the eyes of some. There also was the ever-present issue of the non-decimal system used in foreign coin making prices subject to fractions of a cent and therefore payments were inconvenient. Even still, some foreign coin lasted for decades longer in the rural interior."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1857


Here's the actual text of the act:








Also, from the abstract of a journal article referenced in the wiki article----

"Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency."

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7556760&fileId=S002205070009478X