Congress sets dollar as the official US currency

On this day in US history, the Continental Congress established the dollar as the currency of the early United States on July 6, 1785. Just having recently won the Revolutionary War, creating the national currency was one more step toward stabilizing a newly independent economic system. It is based on the Spanish silver dollar; the founding fathers then adopted a base-10 monetary system. The process took decades before the dollar was widely used and adopted in the US.