As I understand it, the USA (till 19330 had a currency backed by gold. Other nations (China was one) backed their currency by silver. anyway, in the USA, gold production had ground to a halt (excluding the brief Alaskan God Rush); hence, the gold supply not expanding kept the dollar strong. Holders of debt (farmers) were squeeezed, because the resultant deflation made their debts more onerous. So, ta movement arose (under William Jennings Bryan), to decouple the dollar from gold-and back the currency with silver instead. Was this in essence what “Free Silver” was all about?
And, did countries on the silver standard experience greater inflation?
“Free coinage of silver” doesn’t mean “manufacturing silver coins with great despatch and abandon”.
The way mints used to operate was this. We were on a gold standard, so if you possessed gold, say as a successful prospector, or perhaps an assayer to whom a prospector had sold his findings, you would take this gold, physically, to the Mint in San Francisco, Denver, or wherever, and they would make it into coins for you. Less a small deduction for processing, you would receive that gold back, or its equivalent, in coin form. Gold was a shade over $20/oz in those days, so if you gave them 5 ounces of gold you would get $100 back in coins, or maybe gold certificates.
The free silver advocates wanted the mints to accept silver on the same principle. They wanted it so that if you brought enough silver, by weight, to manufacture a silver dollar, then the mint would pay out a silver dollar to you (or silver certificate). Trouble was, the value of silver had plummeted sharply with major silver strikes of the 19th century, like the Comstock lode. So for the mint to handle silver in this way would have significantly increased the money supply and led to inflation. Labor and farm advocates were in favor of this because it would have led to easy credit, and been a boon to debtors.
I suspect the cheapness of silver in this era is why many of us have sterling tea sets and flatware from our ancestors who lived at that time; those things are now extravagantly expensive and beyond the reach of most people.
Shout out to Samclem our resident numismatist, who can correct any errors in my explanation. But I think I got the gist of it right. Almost never do I see the meaning of “free coinage” explained properly, and it isn’t something the average person would automatically understand today, after generations of base-metal coinage.
That, of course, created too many gods, causing god inflation and the rise of cults. It’s said by some that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a result, though the California God Rush has its advocates.
Actually, silver is currently cheap, historically speaking. Silver prices cratered in the 1980s, reaching a low of < $5 / ounce in 1992. Here’s a 600 year chart in 1998 dollars:
You can see that in the 19th century, silver was $70 - $100 / ounce in 1998 dollars. You may question how they are calculating “1998 dollars”, but the fact remains that silver is cheaper for us than for our great grandparents. Silver is currently between $13 and $14 / ounce.
What you are referring to was known as “Bi-metallism” or somesuch. The problem vexed the US (and probably other countries) - how to set the exchange ratio between silver and gold. Great Britain in earlier years tapped Sir Isaac Newton to try and determine the optimum ratio, which seemed to hover around 16-to-1 for a long time.
For many years the US suffered a lack of smaller coinage and money (hard money, or specie), primarily because of problems setting the exchange rate. In practice this meant that one or the other, silver or gold, would disappear from circulation at certain times, probably leaving the country to be melted due to arbitrage speculation.
Still, large amounts of silver was extracted from Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado - and under legislation passed by congress, staggering amounts of silver had to be bought every month by the government. They minted an awful lot of “Morgan” dollars because of this. They didn’t circulate much in the east, but were highly favored elsewhere. Banks sat on hefty bags of these for decades, until finally disgorged in the 1960’s and 1970s.
For all that, the real problem for debtors was that under earlier legislation - “Crime of '73” lenders were able to specify the terms of repayment - silver or gold, effectively demonetizing silver. I think they (silver dollars) were only “legal tender” in amounts up to $5 ; but for large purchases payments had to be in gold. So Bryan and others were in favor of “easy money” as it were.