James A. Bayard, of Delaware, used this language: "The thing is to my mind so palpable a violation of the Federal Constitution, that I doubt whether in any Court of Justice in this country, having a decent regard for its respectability, you can possibly except that this bill, which you now pass, will not, whenever the question is presented judicially, receive its condemnation as unconstitutional, and void in this clause."
Roscoe Conklin used this language in the House: "I propose to assign my reasons briefly for voting against the attempt by legislation to make paper a legal tender. The proposition is a new one, no precedent can be found in its favor; no suggestion of the existence of such a power can be found in the legislative history of the country; and I submit to my colleague as a lawyer, the proposition that this amounts to affirmative authority of the highest kind against it. Had such a power lurked in the Constitution as construed by those who ordained and administered it, we should find it so recorded. The occasion for resorting to it, or at least referring to it, has, we know, repeatedly arisen, and had such a power existed, it would have been recognized and acted on. It is hardly too much to say, therefore, that the uniform and universal judgment of statesmen, jurists and lawyers has denied the constitutional right of Congress to make paper a legal tender for debts to any extent whatever....
"It will, of course, proclaim throughout the country a saturnalia of fraud, a carnival for rogues. Every agent, attorney, treasurer, trustee, guardian, executor, administrator, consignee, commission merchant, and every debtor of a fiduciary character, who has received for others money, hard money, worth 100 cents on the dollar, will forever release himself from liability by buying up for that knavish purpose, at its depreciated value, the spurious which we shall have put afloat. Everybody will do it, except those who are more honest than the American Congress advises them to be. Think of Savings Banks, entrusted with enormous aggregates of the pittances of the poor, the hungry and the homeless, the stranger, the needle woman, the widow and the orphan; and we are arranging for a robbery of 10 per cent, if not of 50 per cent, of the entire amount, and that by a contrivance so new, as never to have been discovered under the administrations of Monroe, Adams or James Buchanan....