
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
The earliest known appearance of this statement is from 1895 (Joshua Douglass, "Bimetallism and Currency", American Magazine of Civics, 7:256). It is apparently a combination of paraphrases or approximate quotations from three separate letters of Jefferson (longer excerpts in sourced section):
I sincerely believe, with you, that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies...
Letter to John Taylor (1816)
The bank mania...is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance...
Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (1817)
Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs.
Letter to John W. Eppes (1813)
Misattributed
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23 http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-9116907
1810s
Context: We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially, that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient. And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112
Posthumous publications, On financial matters
11 September 1813, ME 13:361
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)
Context: The question will be asked and ought to be looked at, what is to be the resource if loans cannot be obtained? There is but one, "Carthago delenda est." Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. It is the only fund on which they can rely for loans; it is the only resource which can never fail them, and it is an abundant one for every necessary purpose. Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation will take the place of so much gold and silver, which last, when crowded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level. Let banks continue if they please, but let them discount for cash alone or for treasury notes.
Speech (27 May 1836); this is the source of the phrase, "Cohesive power of public plunder"
1830s
October 9, 1970, page 117.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council
Letter to Thomas Law, 1813. FE 9:433
Posthumous publications, On financial matters
to George Logan, 1816 http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/049/0600/0642.jpgLetter
Posthumous publications, On financial matters
Source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817
Speech in the House of Commons (23 June 1813), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 11.
1810s