An incidental mention in an old Inland Printer led to this strange book.
The American Accomptant, by Chauncey Lee, pub 1797 in Vermont.
Lee was trying to metricate everything, and he succeeded with money. The rest of his proposal didn’t get anywhere.
He distinguished Vulgar measures from his proposed Federal measures. In each case he used the old names with decimal proportions.
His money table was mostly adopted:
His other measures weren’t:
(His Desm replaced the vulgar dozen.)
Possibly the money succeeded because the currency situation was a complete mess at that time. Different sets of colonies had their own currencies, in a geographical tangle:
NY and NC shared a currency. SC and GA shared. Kentucky shared New England’s currency.
Lee’s money symbols were not the same as British LSD, and not the same as the Peso Dollar that we actually adopted.
There’s a neat additive logic in Lee’s symbols. One slash for mill, two for penny, two slashes and curve for dime, two slashes and double curve for dollar.
Our actual decimal system stopped at pennies, using fractions instead of mills for divisions of a penny. Mills came back in some states as a sales tax token. They were still used in Oklahoma in the 1950s.
Polistra's Mill 