This chapter explores the complex monetary environment of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the earliest years of the nation. Analyzing a wide variety of political, economic, and imaginative texts that attempted to explain and solve the monetary challenges of the new country – especially the collapsing value of the paper money created to fund the war – the chapter calls attention to the important tension between the representation of money as abstract symbol and as familiar object. For example, arguments in support of and in opposition to the redemption of Continental currency engage both complex monetary theories and allegorical stories about talking coins. Reading popular literature about United States money in the 1770s and 1780s thus reveals a community that was comfortable navigating a diverse array of monetary forms even as the unification of monetary functions made the concept of money increasingly abstract.