Editing United States Note (section)

==Politics and controversy==
The United States Notes were introduced as [[fiat money]] rather than the precious metal medium of exchange that the United States had traditionally used.  Their introduction was thus contentious.

The [[United States Congress]] had enacted the ''Legal Tender Acts'' during the [[U.S. Civil War]] when southern Democrats were [[United States House of Representatives elections, 1860|absent]] from the Congress, and thus their [[Jacksonian democracy|Jacksonian]] [[Hard money (policy)|hard money]] views were underrepresented.  After the war, the [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] ruled on the ''[[Legal Tender Cases]]'' to determine the constitutionality of the use of greenbacks.  The 1870 case ''[[Hepburn v. Griswold]]'' found unconstitutional the use of greenbacks when applied to debts established prior to the First ''Legal Tender Act'' as the five [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrats]] on the Court, [[Samuel Nelson|Nelson]], [[Robert Cooper Grier|Grier]], [[Nathan Clifford|Clifford]], [[Stephen Johnson Field|Field]], and [[Salmon P. Chase|Chase]], ruled against the Civil War legislation in a 5–3 decision.  Secretary Chase had become [[Chief Justice of the United States]] and a Democrat, and spearheaded the decision invalidating his own actions during the war.  However, Grier retired from the Court, and [[Ulysses S. Grant|President Grant]] appointed two new [[Republican Party (United States)|Republicans]], [[William Strong (Pennsylvania judge)|Strong]] and [[Joseph P. Bradley|Bradley]], who joined the three sitting Republicans, [[Noah Haynes Swayne|Swayne]], [[Samuel Freeman Miller|Miller]], and [[David Davis (Supreme Court justice)|Davis]], to reverse Hepburn, 5–4, in the 1871 cases ''[[Knox v. Lee]]'' and ''[[Parker v. Davis]]''.  In 1884, the Court, controlled 8–1 by Republicans, granted the federal government very broad power to issue Legal Tender paper through the case ''[[Juilliard v. Greenman]]'', with only the lone remaining Democrat, Field, dissenting.<ref name="Timberlake" />

The states in the far west stayed loyal to the Union, but also had hard money sympathies.  During the specie suspension from 1862 to 1878, western states used the gold dollar as a unit of account whenever possible and accepted greenbacks at a discount wherever they could.<ref name="Greenbacks"/>  The preferred forms of paper money were [[gold certificate (United States)|gold certificate]]s and [[National Gold Bank Note]]s, the latter having been created specifically to address the desire for hard money in [[California]].

During the 1870s and 1880s, the [[Greenback Party]] existed for the primary purpose of advocating an increased circulation of United States Notes as a way of creating inflation according to the [[quantity theory of money]]. However, as the 1870s unfolded, the market price of silver decreased with respect to gold, and inflationists found a new cause in the [[Free Silver movement]]. Opposition to the resumption of specie convertibility of the Greenbacks during 1879 was accordingly muted.