A Door in Time: What People in Lower Canada did for Money in 1837-38

The years 1837-38 in Lower Canada were defined by two crises, one political and the other financial. The political crisis led to armed Rebellions against the authority of the colonial government with the aim of establishing a Quebec state independent of the British Crown. An international credit crisis brought on by British uncertainty about the liquidity of American debtors led to a full blown Depression in the United States that became known as the Panic of 1837. The fallout for Lower Canada was the refusal of its banks to pay out silver and gold in redemption of their notes. This financial crisis, coupled with the absence of legal tender copper, was the direct cause of what precipitated a severe shortage of small change.

This book is about the copper tokens and low denomination paper scrip that appeared in Lower Canada in 1837-38 in response to the shortage of an everyday medium of exchange brought about by the crises of those years. The majority of copper tokens are known as bouquet sous from the motif of plants that appears on their obverse. Some were issued by the Bank of Montreal and the Banque de Peuple and approach the weight of legal tender halfpennies; most were lightweight, mass produced imitation sous illegally imported into Lower Canada from New Jersey The scrip comprised nothing more than so many paper chits, issued by various merchants who promised to redeem them against non-existent shillings, reales, and half dollars. This makeshift currency was emergency or necessity money, and it was readily accepted by a needy populace under trying circumstances.  A Door in Time constitutes the most thorough study of the background and description of the bouquet sous to date.