The Ledger
and the Date

The most consequential footnote in American numismatics appears in the Mint's own annual report, under the master table of coinage by year. It reads, in full:

"NOTE.—Not susceptible of exact statement by years of actual date of coin, the registry of annual coinage being of coin delivered by coiners of mints within the given year, and these deliveries not having been invariably completed within the year of the date of coin, as now required."¹

Translated: the Mint never counted coins by the date they carry. It counted deliveries — batches handed by the Chief Coiner to the Treasurer within a calendar year — and dies were used until they broke, not until the year changed. A delivery made in January 1804 could be, and on the evidence was, full of coins dated 1803. For this series, "mintage" is therefore a trap, and this chapter is the map of it.

Crosby's impossible coins

Sylvester S. Crosby — the author of The Early Coins of America², and not a man to dismiss — drove the point home in 1891 by simply listing what the printed figures literally require you to believe exists:

"…there were eagles of 1802, half-eagles of 1801, quarter-eagles of 1799 and 1803, dollars of 1805, half-dollars of 1804 and 1816, quarter-dollars of 1797 and 1816, dimes of 1810, and half-cents of 1799, none of which, I think, are known to collectors… This shows how weak must be the argument based on the fact of apparent issue taken from the printed figures literally read."³

A ledger that generates a dozen coins nobody has ever seen is not lying — it is answering a different question than the one collectors ask it. The registry shows 321 dollars delivered in 1805⁴; no dollar dated 1805 has ever been reported.⁵ The 321 pieces were real. They were dated something else. Keep Crosby's list in reach whenever anyone quotes you an early mintage; and note, for Chapter 7, that Crosby printed it while arguing the other side of the 1804 question — the fair-minded man publishing the evidence that would eventually sink his own case.

What the record actually says

Here is the delivery record for the series, from the Mint's own printings — the registry table⁶, Boudinot's comparative statement of 1798–1802 and the quarterly abstracts⁷, and the earliest held by-year printing, 1840⁸: 204,791 for 1794 and 1795 together; 72,920 for 1796; 7,776 for 1797; 327,536 for 1798; 423,515 for 1799; 220,920 for 1800; 54,454 for 1801; 41,650 for 1802; 66,064 for 1803; 19,570 for 1804⁹; 321 for 1805; and then zero — "No dollars from 1806 to 1838, except 1000 in 1836."¹⁰

Those numbers check out, and the checks are worth showing because they are the reason to trust the record as a record. The 1802 and 1803 quarterly abstracts sum to their annual totals to the piece.¹¹ The 1804 denomination detail — 19,570 dollars, 156,519 half dollars, 6,738 quarters, 8,265 dismes — sums to exactly the 1804 silver figure in the Mint's modern master table.¹² And the whole series, added to the four later deliveries of 1836–41, lands to the piece on the total the Mint's assayers published in 1842: 1,674,822 dollars struck from 1793 to 1841.¹⁰ Two independent Mint publications, forty-six years apart, close to the piece. The ledger is excellent. It just is not a list of dates.

The soft number and the split

One line above needs its softness stated plainly, every time. The Mint never split 1794 from 1795; the 1,758 figure for 1794 comes from Theodore Venn's 1927 reconstruction, quoting a cyclopedia article of about 1883 he could not fully identify, and it is accepted because it satisfies the Mint's combined 204,791.¹³ Ben G. Green, compiling his checklist a generation earlier, refused to split the years at all because the statistics conflicted — an honest refusal that has aged well.¹⁴

There is, however, a genuinely satisfying check. PCGS's modern allocation of the 1795 dollars between the two designs — 160,295 Flowing Hair, 42,738 Draped Bust — sums to 203,033, which is exactly the 1795 figure Venn's arithmetic forces.¹⁵ A 1927 argument from the Mint's totals and a modern commercial allocation model, sharing no source, land on the same number. That materially strengthens the split — and it also tells you what the trade's per-variety "mintages" really are: the Mint's delivery figure, divided by judgment. The same is true of 1798, where the trade's three type allocations sum precisely to the Mint's 327,536.¹⁵ Quote such figures as allocations, never as records.

Three contradictions, carried openly

This series' printed numbers disagree in three places, and an American Series guide should hand you the disagreements rather than harmonize them.

1796. Every Mint printing in the Archive gives 72,920⁴; the trade's references carry 79,920.¹⁵ A single transposed digit, propagated for decades. The Mint's figure is the record.

1799. The Mint's printings give 423,515⁷; Snowden's 1860 cabinet book gave 429,515, and the hobby press noticed the clash as early as 1899.¹⁶ Same verdict.

1803 — the arithmetic fossil. The Mint's quarterly abstract for 1803 sums to 66,064¹¹, and the registry agrees. The trade's standard 1803 mintage is 85,634.¹⁵ Subtract: the difference is 19,570 — precisely the 1804 delivery. Somewhere in the twentieth century, the 1804 delivery was moved onto the 1803 date, and nobody wrote the move down. As physics, the reassignment is probably right — the coins delivered in 1804 were almost certainly dated 1803 or earlier. As bookkeeping, it is unsupported by any record, and this book publishes it as what it is: an interpretation wearing a mintage's clothes, still sitting in every price guide.¹⁷

Two numbers per year, forever

The doctrine this chapter leaves you with is simple, and it is the spine of everything that follows. Every year in this series has two numbers: what the Mint delivered in that calendar year, which is a record with a source; and how many coins bear that date, which is an estimate with an owner. The first column made this series. Confusing the two columns made its most famous coin — because in 1859 a manual-writer named Dickeson looked at the 19,570 delivered in 1804 and wrote that "the number coined was 19,570," with one type and one variety¹⁸, and the hobby spent the next half-century looking for coins that were never struck. What it found instead is the next three chapters.

PLATE 1EVANS, ILLUSTRATED HISTORY, 1885