Most Americans still reckoned money in shillings

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 34.

Most Americans still reckoned money in shillings and never saw an American coin larger than a cent. The loose ties that linked the states together had changed little from colonial times. The new capital was meant to be an affirming symbol of nationhood, but as the historian Henry Adams would later wryly observe, “the contrast between the immensity of the task and the paucity of the means” seemed only to suggest that the nation itself was no more than a “magnificent scheme.” The unraised columns of the Capitol were a symbol not of national affirmation but of a people given to grandiose and loudly proclaimed plans incapable of fulfillment. Pierre L’Enfant’s grand design of broad avenues and long vistas existed only in the imagination across an ugly expanse of tree stumps. Expectations that Washington would grow like any other city and become a place of commerce and culture had been roundly disappointed; the legislators lodged together in boarding-houses, two to a room, living “like bears,” complained one senator, “brutalized and stupefied” by having nothing to do but talk politics morning and night, having to send to Baltimore for all but the most ordinary necessities. “Is national independence a dream?” asked the citizens of Mobile, part of Jefferson’s grand Louisiana Purchase of 1803, struggling as they were to eke out a miserable living on a frontier a thousand miles away.