The 8 Reales of Carlos III
It may seem incredible, but the US dollar has Spanish origins, or more specifically Mexican, since it was on April 4, 1792, shortly after the United States gained independence, when the US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed to President George Washington the need to adopt the Mexican daler as the country's currency.
After that, phonetics did the rest, transforming daler into dollar. In this way, the new US currency fulfilled a remarkable dual function. On the one hand, it put an end to the indiscriminate printing of the continental, the currency with which the American revolutionaries had financed their independence from the British Crown. On the other hand, the dollar helped the rest of the world realize that the United States was a united, independent, and prosperous nation.
From the thaler to the daler
The daler was born in Mexico, then known as New Spain, when the Spanish emperor Charles V ordered that a coin similar to the one used in Europe under the name thaler (short for Joachimsthaler, the Bohemian valley where European silver was mined). Thus, Spaniards living in America began to call the coin daler, which was how it was pronounced in Spanish, and they adorned it with two columns of Hercules shining above a horizon formed by the coasts of the Old and New Worlds. This image, in the shape of an S crossed by two vertical bars, became the great symbol of the daler and, later, of the dollar.
At first, these coins were sent to Europe, until the American market became rich enough to begin participating in world trade. Thus, in the mid-17th century, the daler began to be used in Mexican territory.
Adoption of the Mexican currency
For their part, the English colonies in North America used anything as a means of payment (tobacco leaves, skins, salt, or shells) due to the scarcity of pounds sterling, which arrived from the old continent in dribs and drabs. For this reason, Benjamin Franklin took a printing press with him on a trip to London, which would be used to print all the banknotes that financed American independence, called continentals, but which quickly lost their value after the revolution.
This is how the flourishing US economy decided to adopt the Mexican daler as its own currency. And this custom of using banknotes was also the reason why the US has such an attachment to paper and such a low regard for coins.