Paper Money, Debt Relief, and the Creditors' Constitution: Why Were the Anti-Federalists Silent?

The presentation concerns the so-called "paper money wars" in the United States, 1785-1787 and their effects on the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution.  It focuses particularly on the social and political effects of the paper money controversies that broke out in more than half the American states after the Revolutionary War and how they influenced the constitutional ratification contest.  It was an important cause of the collapse of the American Confederation government, 1783-1787.

Dr van Cleve is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Universities of Virginia and Seattle and author of the acclaimed book A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), work that originated in his masters research in Oxford.

Lunch will be provided. An email to the convenors signalling intention to attend will be appreciated (click on convenors' names, below).