Definition
A small Spanish silver coin, historically worth approximately twenty cents or two reales. The pistareen circulated widely in colonial and early American commerce but was never made legal tender under United States law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A Spanish silver coin worth two reales, used as common currency in the Americas in the 18th century.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An old Spanish silver coin of the value of about twenty cents.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is narrow but consequential. In common use, the pistareen was simply a coin — a practical medium of exchange that people accepted in daily commerce. The legal significance is precisely what common usage overlooks: acceptance in commerce did not confer legal currency status. The pistareen's circulation in American markets was a practical reality; its exclusion from the U.S. monetary system was a legal fact with real consequences for debt obligations and tender.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in pre-Civil War sources. Its relevance is narrow but specific: cases and documents concerning debt payment, legal tender disputes, or currency regulation in the late colonial through antebellum periods may reference the pistareen alongside other foreign coins — Spanish milled dollars, pistoles, and doubloons — that circulated in America before a robust domestic currency system took hold.
The critical research trap is assuming that a coin's circulation in commerce implied its legal acceptability for discharging debts. Congress exercised its constitutional authority to regulate the value of foreign coin, and many Spanish-origin coins were either regulated, demonetized, or simply never made current. The pistareen fell in the last category. A creditor who refused pistareens as payment was not being unreasonable under the law — they had no legal obligation to accept them.
The single case anchoring all three historical dictionary entries — United States v. Gardner, 10 Pet. 618 (1836) — is the load-bearing authority here. Any research touching on the pistareen will likely trace back to that decision. Researchers should also situate the term within the broader antebellum currency landscape, where Congress periodically updated the list of foreign coins it recognized as legal tender, a power exercised under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
The pistareen does not appear in modern legal sources. It is a term of exclusively historical significance, relevant to monetary law, commercial dispute history, and the legal history of currency in the American republic's early decades.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's are in complete agreement: the pistareen is a small Spanish coin not made current by U.S. law, with all three sources pointing to the same case. The second edition of Black's provides the full citation — United States v. Gardner, 10 Pet. 618, 9 L. Ed. 556 — where the first edition and Bouvier give only the abbreviated reporter reference.
None of the historical sources explain why the pistareen was not made current, nor do they describe its physical characteristics, denominations, or the practical extent of its circulation. Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary supply the gap on valuation (approximately twenty cents, or two reales), which the legal dictionaries omit entirely. The legal dictionaries are not wrong so much as deliberately spare — their purpose was to flag the legal status, not provide numismatic background.
Worth noting: the typographical error in Black's 2nd edition ("jaws of the United States" for "laws of the United States") is an artifact of the original printing and appears in some reproductions. Researchers using digitized versions of historical dictionaries should be alert to such errors in OCR or transcription.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal question. The currency power belongs to Congress under Article I, Section 8. State courts and state law could not make the pistareen legal tender any more than they could coin money. The relevant authority is federal throughout.