By the time the Revolutionary War had been won by the American colonists, the monetary system was in a state of total disarray. To remedy this situation, the new Constitution of the United States, approved in 1789, allowed Congress to issue money. The individual states could no longer have their own money supply.
A few years later, the Coinage Act of of 1792 made the dollar the official currency of the United States and put the country on a bimetallic standard. In this bimetallic system, both gold and silver were legal money, and the state of exchange of silver to gold was fixed by the government at sixteen to one.