Alexander Hamilton, in June, 1783, set forth explicitly in a resolution for a new Constitution of the United States of America his deliberate opinion in these words: "To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part in the Constitution, nor ever hereafter to be employed; being in its nature pregnant with abuses and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of Government and to the morals of the people."
In 1786, Thomas Paine, the author of "Common Sense," in an opinion on Paper Money used this language: "The laws of the country ought to be the standard of equity and calculated to impress on the minds of the people the moral as well as the legal obligation of political justice. But tender laws of any kind operate to destroy morality and to dissolve by the pretence of law what ought to be the principle of _law_ to _support_, reciprocal justice between man and man; and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be _death_."
In the summer of 1785 Richard Henry Lee, then president of Congress, warned Washington of a plan formed for issuing a large sum of paper money in the next assembly of their state, adding as his opinion: "The greatest foes in the world could not devise a more effectual plan for ruining Virginia. I should suppose every friend to his country, every honest and sober man, would join heartily to reprobate so nefarious a plan of speculation."
Washington replied to Lee in these words: "I never have heard, and I hope I never shall hear, any serious mention of a paper emission in this state. Yet ignorance is the tool of design and is often set to work suddenly and unexpectedly."
In 1787, on the 9th day of January, Washington wrote to Jabes Bowen as follows: "Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
To Mr. Stone, a member of the Senate of Maryland, who appealed to Washington to allow his opinion on this subject to be made publicly known, Washington wrote just three months before the opening of the Constitutional convention, as follows: "As my sentiments thereon have been fully and decidedly expressed long before the assembly either of Maryland or of this state was convened, I do not scruple to declare, that if I had had a voice in your legislature, it would have been given decidedly against a paper emission upon the general principles of its utility, as a representative and the necessity of it as a medium.