America's money is named after a dead deer.
A buck was a deerskin. Through the 1700s hides came out of the backcountry by the hundred thousand, and on the frontier they were the currency. In 1748 a trader in Ohio recorded a cask of whisky changing hands for 5 bucks. When the dollar arrived it took the word, and it has kept it.
The scale is the point. In a good year in the 1750s Charleston alone shipped around 150,000 deerskins to London. Add Savannah, Philadelphia and New York and it runs to well over a million skins a decade. Every one had been a deer somebody put a bullet in and ate, most of them Cherokee and Creek hunters, the rest backwoodsmen who had learned from them.
In England, at the same time, a man caught armed in a deer park could be hanged under the Black Act, and a labourer with a hare in his coat lost three months' wages to the magistrate.
The deer in an English park belonged to the lord. The deer in Pennsylvania belonged to whoever shot it, and the skin bought powder and lead at the store for the next one. A single animal fed a family for a week and paid for its own replacement.
That is what the ships were sailing towards. Not an abstraction about liberty. A country where the animal that could get you hanged at home was so plentiful it had become the small change.
Every time an American says he is short of a few bucks, he is describing the one shortage his ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
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