How the First Black Friday Nearly Destroyed the Economy

And how it became the shopping frenzy we know today.

You know Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving when you can get great deals on all kinds of consumer goods and there’s a non-zero chance you could get assaulted in the process. But the first Black Friday happened almost exactly 150 years ago and it had nothing to do with Thanksgiving or retail shopping (but it did inspire some violence).

While today’s Black Friday has anecdotally been the day businesses go from being in the red to in the black — hence Black Friday — the first Black Friday had nothing to do with the colors black or red. It was all about the color gold.

And it nearly destroyed the US economy.

In 1869, the US had two forms of currency — gold and greenbacks. Greenbacks were paper money — pretty much like we have today. But it only came into existence during the Civil War — which ended just 4 years earlier.

See, before the Civil War, all money was based upon gold and silver. Paper money didn’t really exist. All of US finances and the federal budget were tied to the amount of precious metals in circulation.

But the Civil War became too expensive to finance on gold alone. So the government went into debt and started…