United States Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had already anticipated the coming financial crisis, proposing to Congress the establishment of a system of national banks, each empowered to issue banknotes backed not with gold but with federal bonds. This December 1861 proposal was initially ignored by Congress, which in February 1862 decided instead to pass the First Legal Tender Act, authorizing the production of not more than $150 million of these legal tender United States Notes. Two additional issues were deemed necessary, approved in June 1862 and January 1863, so that by the end of the war some $450 million of this non-gold-backed currency was in circulation.