Thus was American independence purchased, and it is not clear that it could have been bought in any other way.

A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith.  Page 57.

Not all the colonies, it should be said, succumbed; Pennsylvania, New York, New jersey, Delaware, and Maryland exercised admirable restraint. And there is indication that the paper money, sustaining, as it did, prices and trade, contributed to general economic well-being where it was so used. This was certainly the view of Benjamin Franklin, who could have been influenced by being in business himself as a printer of the notes.

Eventually, in 1751, the Parliament in London forbade the paper issues in New England and, a little later, elsewhere in the colonies.  There was sharp anger over this action; paper and its associated leverage remained strongly in the minds of the American colonists as an economic good. Nor should the use of paper be wholly condemned, al- though many historians have done so. Washington's soldiers were paid In Continental notes; by these the Revolution was financed. Tax receipts were then negligible, as was the machinery for tax collection. The cost of the war was thus borne by those who, receiving the so-called Continentals, found their buying power quickly and irrevocably diminishing. Thus was American independence purchased, and it is not clear that it could have been bought in any other way. The stage was now set for recurrent speculative episodes in the new republic.