September 2, 1776 in Continental Congess...

RYK

an approved list of world coins authorized to circulate in the United States was created. This would make an interesting collecting theme for someone interested in coins of the era. (Thanks to Pistareen for making me aware of the list)

http://memory.loc.gov/ll/lljc/005/0300/03110726.gif">Link to table

ricko

That is very interesting.. thanks for posting..Cheers, RickO

DoubleEagle59

Very interesting chart.

We should re-write that same chart but this time use 'present' day US dollar values.

It would be an inflation 'eye-opener'.

Longacre

Great post! That Pistareen is the bomb.

Pistareen

Foreign coins are stupid. They aren't even American. Who cares?

Go on some other forum, America-hater. If it's not in the Redbook, please don't bother me with it ever again.

Pistareen

Oh, just to add a little something ...

That list shows just the specie -- gold and silver -- authorized by Congress to serve as payment to Congressional coffers. For whatever reason, as you can see, references to the Portguese half Joe was marked out in the original journals and left off the list. No one knows why, as these were the single most common gold coins in colonial America! Maybe they were just taken for granted, or maybe they were going to serve as a peg but Congress never got around to further legislation.

What the list does not include is copper or other base metal coins, which were not legal tender (you couldn't pay government debts with them) and circulated at the whim and need of the populace. It also doesn't include a lot of fractional denominations that would have been taken for granted, things like 2 reales, 1 escudos, half ducats, etc. And archaeology has shown that lots of other stuff circulated in small proportions -- I have a Russian coin of the era that was dug in an 18th century settlement in Rhode Island, for instance.

But that list is cool, succinct, and remarkably telling about the variety of silver and gold coins in early America. Colonial Williamsburg has a complete set of these, custom built to echo the September 2, 1776 resolution. That's the only such complete set I know of, past or present.

Longacre

<< <i>Oh, just to add a little something ...

That list shows just the specie -- gold and silver -- authorized by Congress to serve as payment to Congressional coffers. For whatever reason, as you can see, references to the Portguese half Joe was marked out in the original journals and left off the list. No one knows why, as these were the single most common gold coins in colonial America! Maybe they were just taken for granted, or maybe they were going to serve as a peg but Congress never got around to further legislation.

What the list does not include is copper or other base metal coins, which were not legal tender (you couldn't pay government debts with them) and circulated at the whim and need of the populace. It also doesn't include a lot of fractional denominations that would have been taken for granted, things like 2 reales, 1 escudos, half ducats, etc. And archaeology has shown that lots of other stuff circulated in small proportions -- I have a Russian coin of the era that was dug in an 18th century settlement in Rhode Island, for instance.

But that list is cool, succinct, and remarkably telling about the variety of silver and gold coins in early America. Colonial Williamsburg has a complete set of these, custom built to echo the September 2, 1776 resolution. That's the only such complete set I know of, past or present. >>





Who is this guy, and why doesn't he just rattle off the date, mintmark, TPC grade, and price of the coins he sells????

coinsarefun

Saying that this is would be an understatement!





Stefanie

RYK

Colonial Williamsburg has a complete set of these, custom built to echo the September 2, 1776 resolution.

Perhaps I should be #2.

Tvac897

This is super interesting...

bidask

Bump! ??

ricko

Nice to see this thread again, since there have been several recent posts about early

circulating coins in America... Cheers, RickO

Sonorandesertrat

It is indeed interesting. A few years ago, I took a Colonial Americana course that JK co-taught with Erik Goldstein at the ANA Summer Seminar. We spent a lot of time discussing foreign coins, and the differing valuations of such coins in the various North American colonies of Great Britain. As John noted, many types of coins have been found in archaeological excavations of various sites in the Atlantic seaboard states, not just what are listed in that excerpt. More importantly, many of these coins circulated until the mid-19th century in the U.S. One of my sub-collections is Spanish Colonial silver coins bearing the counter-stamps of U. S. merchants, and some of them must have been stamped in the 1850's (based on my research).