Sherman — The Man Who Signed Everything Wrote the Gold Clause First

Roger Sherman is the only person to sign all four American founding documents. Most operators have never heard his name. He wrote a pamphlet in 1752 calling paper money “robbery.” Thirty-five years later he wrote the constitutional clause that made it illegal.

The Connecticut cobbler nobody talks about

Roger Sherman was born in Massachusetts in 1721. He learned the cobbler's trade from his father. He had almost no formal schooling. He moved to New Milford, Connecticut in his twenties, opened a general store, taught himself surveying, taught himself law, and won a seat in the Connecticut legislature before he was forty.

Then he signed his name to the Continental Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1777), and the United States Constitution (1787).

He is the only person who signed all four.

Hamilton is the one with the musical. Franklin is the one on the hundred. Jefferson is the one with the memorial. Sherman is the one who actually showed up to every founding moment and wrote his name on the page.

He is also the one who, twenty-four years before the Declaration, sat down and wrote what the Fundamentalist would recognize today as the cleanest pre-Constitutional argument against fiat money ever printed in colonial America.

The pamphlet was called A Caveat Against Injustice, or An Inquiry into the Evil Consequences of a Fluctuating Medium of Exchange. He signed it “A.B.” and published it anonymously in New Haven in 1752.

That is two hundred and seventy-four years ago.

The argument has not aged a day.

What was happening in 1752

The colonies did not yet have a unified currency. Each colony issued its own paper money — “Bills of Credit” — backed by future tax revenue, by land, by promises, by nothing.

Rhode Island was the worst offender. Rhode Island's legislature printed paper currency at a pace its tiny economy could not absorb. The bills traded at deep discounts to silver. By the early 1750s, a Rhode Island bill nominally worth one shilling traded for two or three pennies in silver.

Connecticut law required Connecticut merchants to accept Rhode Island bills at face value when offered in payment of debts.

The Connecticut shopkeeper had no choice. He had sold goods worth, say, ten silver shillings. The customer paid with ten Rhode Island paper shillings worth, in actual silver, perhaps two or three shillings. The shopkeeper had to take the paper. The law said so. And the difference — the seven or eight shillings of silver the shopkeeper had earned and would now never see — was simply absorbed.

The shopkeeper had been robbed.

Sherman watched this happen to his neighbors. He watched it happen to himself. He sat down and wrote.

“It is a principle that must be granted that no government has the right to impose on its subjects any external risk.”

That is the line from A Caveat that the Fundamentalist reads as the foundation of every monetary argument worth having.

Sherman's claim was direct. A government may tax. A government may regulate. A government may not require its citizens to accept, as payment for value already delivered, an instrument that the government itself has debased. That is not policy. That is not currency management. That is theft conducted under color of law.

He went further. The man who accepts depreciated paper as payment, Sherman wrote, “is cheated.” Not “disadvantaged.” Not “exposed to inflation.” Cheated. The eighteenth-century word was sharper than the twenty-first-century word.

And the man who issues the depreciated paper — the colonial legislature, the central authority that prints because it can — is, in Sherman's language, the cheat.

This is the Fundamentalist read. This is monetary theory before the term existed. Sherman did not need Mises. Sherman did not need Rothbard. Sherman did not need Lyn Alden. The shopkeeper in New Milford watching his silver disappear into the cash drawer of a man who paid with worthless paper from Providence had taught Sherman everything he needed to know.

MONEY: what Sherman knew

Sherman's working definition of money was the one every operator class on every continent in every century has eventually come back to:

Money is the thing the seller would have asked for if he had known what he was getting paid in.

If the shopkeeper would have accepted Rhode Island bills at par when he sold the goods, then the Rhode Island bills were money. If he would not have — if he would have demanded silver, or refused the sale, or marked the price up sixfold to compensate — then the Rhode Island bills were not money. They were a claim on money, badly backed, that the law forced him to honor at face.

Sherman understood, in 1752, the distinction that mainstream macro spent two centuries trying to obscure: there is a difference between the money and the claim on the money. A silver shilling is money. A piece of paper that says “redeemable in silver” might be a claim on money — depending entirely on whether the issuer can or will redeem.

The Fundamentalist hears Sherman as the colonial Lyn Alden. The Capitalist hears him as the colonial Saylor. The Maximalist hears him as the colonial Tony Yazbeck. They are all hearing the same thing.

What is the bearer asset? What is the claim? Who has the right to force you to accept the claim as if it were the bearer asset?

In 1752 the answer was: silver is the bearer asset, paper is the claim, and the Rhode Island legislature has the right.

Sherman said: no, it does not. The right does not exist. The government claiming it has overstepped.

FIAT: why Sherman called paper money robbery

Sherman's pamphlet did not use the word “fiat.” The word would not enter monetary vocabulary in its modern sense for another two centuries. But Sherman described fiat money with surgical precision, twice, in language that operators today read as if it were written for the Bitcoin Standard discussion thread.

The first description was structural. Paper money issued by a colonial authority, Sherman wrote, is money by decree rather than by demand. The market did not ask for it. The legislature created it. The market would not voluntarily price it at par. The legislature forced the par exchange through legal tender laws.

Decree, not demand. That is fiat. Sherman had the concept in 1752. He did not have the word.

The second description was moral. Forcing a citizen to accept depreciated paper at face value, Sherman wrote, makes the legislature “the cheat” of every transaction. The injury runs not from the customer to the shopkeeper but from the state to the shopkeeper with the customer as the unwitting instrument.

The shopkeeper is not being defrauded by the customer. The shopkeeper is being defrauded by the legislature that issued the worthless bills and required their acceptance at par. The customer is the deliveryman. The legislature is the thief.

The Maximalist reads this as the cleanest pre-twentieth-century articulation of why “not your keys, not your coins” matters. If your wealth exists as a claim on the issuer's promise, and the issuer can debase the promise faster than you can redeem it, then your wealth was never yours.

The Capitalist reads this as the cleanest pre-twentieth-century articulation of why MicroStrategy's treasury is structured the way it is. The wrapper holds the bearer asset. The wrapper does not hold a claim on the bearer asset. The wrapper does not hold a promise from the issuer that may or may not be honored. The wrapper holds the thing itself.

The Fundamentalist reads this as the cleanest pre-twentieth-century articulation of why Lawrence Lepard quotes Frederick the Great, Lyn Alden cites the Roman silver debasement, and Luke Gromen reads the Eurodollar history. The pattern repeats because the temptation repeats. A state that can print will print. A state that prints will eventually exceed the market's tolerance. And a state that exceeds the market's tolerance will eventually fall back on legal tender laws to force the acceptance of what the market would otherwise reject.

In 1752 the legal tender law was a Connecticut statute requiring acceptance of Rhode Island bills.

In 2026 the legal tender law is the United States Federal Reserve Act, the Coinage Act of 1965, and the network of regulatory enforcement that requires American banks to settle in dollars rather than in the bearer asset their depositors would actually prefer.

The shape is the same. The scale is different.

CENTRAL BANKS: there were none in 1752 — Sherman wrote the clause that delayed America's

There was no central bank in colonial America in 1752. The Bank of England existed, the Riksbank existed, but the institution as we know it had not been imposed on the thirteen colonies.

What existed instead were colonial legislatures with the unilateral power to print Bills of Credit. Each colony was, in effect, its own central bank. The cumulative effect was identical: too many issuers, no discipline, currency depreciation in every direction.

When Sherman walked into the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he carried A Caveat Against Injustice with him. He had been carrying it for thirty-five years. He had watched the Continental dollar collapse during the Revolutionary War — the phrase “not worth a Continental” entered American English specifically because the Continental Congress had repeated, at federal scale, the exact error Sherman had warned about at colonial scale in 1752.

The Continental had been issued without backing. The Continental had been required, by Continental Congress resolution, to be accepted at face value. By 1781 the Continental traded at roughly one-thousandth of its face value in silver. The cheated were the soldiers paid in Continentals, the farmers paid in Continentals, the suppliers paid in Continentals. The cheats were the political class that had authorized the issue and then walked away from the redemption.

Sherman had been correct in 1752. The Continental Congress had proven it on a continental scale by 1781. The Constitution was now being drafted, in 1787, in part to prevent the recurrence.

And so, in Article I, Section 10, Roger Sherman and James Wilson wrote the clause:

“No State shall... coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts...”

Eighteen words. Of those eighteen, eight are the proscription Sherman had been carrying since 1752. No state may emit Bills of Credit. No state may make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.

The wording is Sherman's pamphlet rewritten as constitutional law. The grammar is constrained. The intent is unmistakable. The state may not print and force.

The Fundamentalist reads Article I §10 as the operator-class clause of the entire Constitution. Read it through the lens of A Caveat. Read it as Sherman intended it. The clause does not say “the states should be careful with paper money.” The clause says the states may not do this at all. It is one of the few absolute prohibitions in the document.

What happened to the clause

The clause held for the states.

The federal government, of course, was not bound by the clause that bound the states. And the federal government — Hamilton's federal government, which is tomorrow's Connect — went on to charter the First Bank of the United States in 1791, the Second Bank in 1816, the Federal Reserve in 1913.

But Sherman had at least walled off the lower jurisdictions. No state of the union may, today, emit bills of credit. No state may declare its own paper a tender in payment of debts.

The clause has been read by the Supreme Court a half-dozen times in two centuries. It still holds. It is one of the cleanest pieces of monetary law in the constitutional document.

Sherman wrote it because he had watched Rhode Island do exactly what the clause now forbids. He had written about it in 1752. He had carried the argument for thirty-five years. He had waited for the moment.

And when the moment came he was at the table, signing his fourth founding document, with the clause in his pocket.

What the operator class hears in 1752

The operator class hears Sherman as a man who understood, before the institutions existed to obscure the understanding, what money was, what paper was, what the difference was, and what the state could and could not be permitted to do at the boundary between them.

He did not need the Austrian School. He did not need The Bitcoin Standard. He did not need a hardware wallet, a cold-storage protocol, or a twenty-one-million cap.

He needed only the experience of watching his neighbors get cheated by a Rhode Island legislature with a printing press and a friendly statute.

The lesson he drew is the same lesson the Fundamentalist draws today: the bearer asset must be defined by the market, not decreed by the state. The medium of exchange must be the thing the seller would have accepted if he had known. The state's monopoly on legal tender is the mechanism by which the state cheats.

What Sherman did not have was a bearer asset the state could not debase.

We have one now.

The cap is still twenty-one million.

Sherman would have written that into the Constitution if he could have. He could not — silver was the best the eighteenth century offered, and silver could be diluted, debased, called in, and replaced. Article I §10 was the cleanest constraint the available technology permitted.

Two hundred and seventy-four years later the constraint is no longer technological. The constraint is in the protocol. The bearer asset cannot be debased by any state, any legislature, any central bank, any printing press, any legal tender law. The Rhode Island legislature in 1752 had a printing press. The Federal Reserve in 2026 has the same press at planetary scale. Neither one can print bitcoin.

Sherman, anonymously, in 1752: “No government has the right to impose on its subjects any external risk.”
The network, openly, in 2009: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work.”

Same sentence. Same operator-class read. Two hundred and fifty-seven years apart.