America's First Silver Dollars, 1794 to 1804, and the 1804 Dollar Not Made in 1804

The first American silver dollar is eighty-four years older than the Morgan. This film covers its first ten years: three designs, an order to stop, and a dollar dated 1804 that was made thirty years later as a diplomatic gift. THE LAW OF 1792. The Coinage Act of 2 April 1792 created the Mint and defined the dollar: 416 grains of standard silver, 371.25 of them pure. The first Mint stood on Seventh Street in Philadelphia under its first director, David Rittenhouse. Silver waited until 1794, because the assayer and the chief coiner could not post the ten-thousand-dollar sureties the law required. Congress lowered them on 3 March 1794. THE FLOWING HAIR DOLLAR, 1794 AND 1795. On 15 October 1794 the Mint delivered its first 1,758 dollars. The press had been built for half dollars and many came out weakly struck, so a heavier press followed in 1795, and that year the Mint struck more than 160,000. About 130 of the 1794 dollars are known. The law said 89.24 percent silver; the Mint made them 90. THE DRAPED BUST DOLLAR, 1795 TO 1803. From the fall of 1795 a new portrait, usually credited to Gilbert Stuart, with plaster models by John Eckstein and dies cut by Robert Scot. The small eagle ran until 1798, then the heraldic eagle from the Great Seal. The smallest year was 1797: 7,776 dollars. THE ORDER TO STOP. Merchants were buying the new dollars to export them. The last were struck in March 1804, still dated 1803. On 1 May 1806 James Madison wrote to the Mint that no silver coin was to be larger than half a dollar. THE DOLLAR DATED 1804. In 1834 the State Department ordered sets of American coins for Edmund Roberts's mission to Asia, and the dollars in them were dated 1804. Roberts gave sets to the Sultan of Muscat on 1 October 1835 and to the King of Siam on 6 April 1836. Eight originals are known; the Mint made more in the late 1850s. The dollar came back in 1836 with the Gobrecht dollar, then the Seated Liberty dollar. That film: The Silver Dollar Nobody Collects,    • The Silver Dollar Nobody Collects: America...   No prices or values. No narration. Music, type, and the coins themselves. CHAPTERS 0:00 Three dollars 0:55 The First Silver Dollars 1:18 The law of 1792 2:16 The first dollar 3:27 A new face 4:23 The eagle from the Great Seal 5:18 The order to stop 6:21 The dollar dated 1804 7:45 Thirty years without 8:34 The first dollars at a glance SOURCES James Madison to Robert Patterson, 1 May 1806 (Founders Online, National Archives). Q. David Bowers, Silver Dollars and Trade Dollars of the United States. Mint delivery records via the Flowing Hair and Draped Bust dollar histories. Every figure checked against two sources. IMAGE CREDITS All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Coins: National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. The 1804 dollar: United States Mint and Smithsonian Institution. The first Mint: Philadelphia: The Birthplace of the Nation, 1904. Portraits: David Rittenhouse by Charles Willson Peale; Anne Willing Bingham and James Madison by Gilbert Stuart; Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale. The Great Seal, a bronze at the National Museum of American History, photograph by Daderot. No dealer or grading-service photography is used on this channel, and no photographs of anyone's private collection. #silverdollar #flowinghair #drapedbust #1804dollar #coins #numismatics #coincollecting #silverorclad ------------------------------------------------------------------------