"The American Revolution was a revolution in the minds of people unlike any other they had known or read about. To change from one form of government to another was not going to be easy. Kings had been rulers of nations for thousands of years. The idea of governing yourself, of meeting together and voting on things: that was a revolutionary idea.

"The only surprising thing was that it wasn't bloodier than it turned out to be, and it turned out to be bloody enough, from one end of the country to the other. If you think that every American got together in 1776 and suddenly decided to throw out allegiance to the King, with all his soldiers and navies standing by... if you take even a minute to think about it, you'd realize how foolish an idea that was.

"Instead, it was very messy. And most often, where the "rubber met the road" was in the currency. What was to be used as the real currency? How was it to be valued? How could you make a change in it? What did it buy?"

Chris Weber, The Weber Report