Walter Breen
J. W. Scott's plan to make restrikes of the Confederate half dollar quickly was bruited about and became occasion for libels on him, some of them justified. A couple of the more amusing and less often seen ones may be appropriate to quote here:
The Confederate States Half Dollar
Is it true that "Our publisher" (The New York Great Boaster? Ed.) is about to issue copies of the so-called Confederate States half dollar? The obverse of that coin being from a regular United States mint die, it is an interesting question whether a private individual can legally issue a facsimile or cut, and "in this connection" as the preachers say, the inquiry is pertinent whether, as heirs at law of the defunct Confederacy, the reverse die of that coin ought not to be in possession of the United States government. - W.
(From Frossard's Numisma, September 1879.
"Our publisher" was the designation used for J. W. Scott in Scott's Coin Collector's Journal. "The N.Y. Great Boaster" is Frossard's own epithet for Scott; ct. Numisma, December 1878, p.3, article "The Boaster," which reads quaintly and chucklesomely now, but must have been then enough to raise Scott's blood pressure by 70 or 80 points. The signature W. is doubtless W. Elliot Woodward, who frequently appeared in the Frossard journal.)
The Confederate States Half Dollar
It is said that the Fulton St. postage stamp dealers intend using the reverse die of this piece, at present in their hands, to re-stamp the reverse of genuine 1861, Orleans half dollars. A copy of the obverse die, which is, in fact, the identical obverse of the 1861 0 halves, could not be manufactured with perfect safety, because of certain clauses of a well known U.S. law, which bear rather heavily on these points, but the wonderful fertility of resources of the head of the firm led him to adopt the clever dodge of simply restriking the reverse of genuine 1861 0 half dollar with the so-called Confederate States half dollar reverse die, thus producing exact facsimiles of the original. Unfortunately for the scheme, there is another clause which forbids the wilful defacing, altering, etc., of U.S. coins, and the plan of thus increasing the number of Confederate States Half Dollars will moreover meet, as soon as known, with the marked hostility of the mint authorities, the numismatic societies, and the collecting fraternity. The mint authorities should take immediate steps to recover this reverse die, which being made in a government building, with government tools, and by workmen paid with money stolen from the United States, clearly belongs to the United States, and place the same on permanent free exhibition in the mint cabinet, instead of allowing it to become the means of misleading and of deceiving collectors, in the hands of present or possible future speculative individuals.
This one was unsigned, but may well also have been by Woodward, to judge by style and subject matter. "Fulton St. postage stamp dealers" was intended as an insult - as though any fool could sell stamps, while it took some knowledge of history and numismatics to write coin auction catalogues. J. W. Scott's establishment was at 146 Fulton St., New York City. What Scott's plan met with, for the most part, was indifference. The history of his promotion is well enough known. He bought 500 1861 half dollars (supposedly 0 mints, but of this there is no proof), had the reverses ground off reducing the weight to about 185 grains apiece, affixed a steel ring collar to the CSA die to prevent its breaking (it was already rusted at rim and at various parts of design), and struck 500 white metal store cards with a new obv. reading 4 ORIGINALS STRUCK BY ORDER OF C. S. A. IN NEW ORLEANS 1861. ******* REV. SAME AS U.S. (FROM ORIGINAL DIE: SCOTT), this die breaking during the process. Proskey says this was to supply something in case the CSA die should break before the restrike half dollar operation went to completion. Scott offered these cards at 50¢ apiece. He then had a plain collar made for holding the half dollars at striking, a piece of brass being used to support the obverse, and struck the 500 restrikes as planned, in an old screw press, Proskey supervising the workmen to make sure nothing went wrong. Scott then annealed the die and mutilated it with a chisel mark, making a couple of thin uniface brass splashers from the defaced die. In the meantime he had issued circulars offering the 500 restrikes. (I have not seen one of these circulars.) Whenhe began sending out the coins to the subscribers, Scott enclosed with each one a second circular, dated October 17, 1879 and quoted in Beistle (pp.255-6). This circular offered the white metal cards at 50¢, the defaced original die at $50; claimed that the die had broken at the first trial necessitating manufacture of the collar to protect it from further damage (no break shows on extant restrikes aside from the rusting and chipping at rim, which is progressive); claimed falsely that up to October 10, 1879 there had been orders for 567 pieces, and offered to pay $2.50 for any returned to him so that he could supply disappointed subscribers! Proskey in 1923 doubted that over 250 had been sold, averring that Scott had plenty of them for thirty years afterwards, on which he gradually raised the price to $15 each. The defaced die was bought by J. Sanford Saltus, and supposedly went - with one of the splashers -to the Louisiana Historical Society, but it is not there now; whereabouts unknown. The other splasher was last seen in the F. C. C. Boyd estate, ex Elliott Smith. (Reference W. A. Philpott, Numismatist, April 1950.) There are at least two, possibly three, copy dies of the CSA half dollar reverse, muled with medallic obverses; one of them is the only knowncopy die made by the notorious and much overrated spark-erosion process (a poor thing, indeed, with its ragged edges to letters), the other has very modern lettering unlike the original.
2. Proofs of the United States Provisional Mint at San Francisco. It would have been feasible to list in this section all proofs of pioneer gold such as the thirteen Kellogg & Co. fifties, the Bechtler restrikes, the Massachusetts and California Co. fives (various varieties, some certainly restrikes, some possibly of early manufacture), etc. With present policy of restricting this text at present to proofs connected in some official way with the United States government, about the only California proofs that would qualify are those of the United States Assay Office of Gold (1852-53) under Augustus Humbert in association with Curtis, Perry & Ward of Moffat & Co., San Francisco. This firm operated officially as a provisional mint, submitting monthly coinage reports to the Treasury Department on much the same basis as the Southern branch mints. Its status as ','provisional" follows from the unclear legality of gold coins at other than 900. fineness and in designs not uniform with those of the Philadelphia Mint. This was originally a subterfuge to evade provisions of the 1837 Mint Act which limited the permissible amount of silver in gold coins to under 50 parts per 1000. California native gold contained from 90 to about 120/1000 silver, and to remove the silver and substitute copper to reach legal fineness required vast quantities of "parting acids" (concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids), which could not then be imported either overland or via Cape Horn nor until 1854 made locally. Proof that the Philadelphia Mint regarded the U.S. Assay Office of Gold as a provisional mint: it sent the latter five pairs of regular half eagle dies dated 1853, for use should parting acids become available!
It follows that the U.S. Attorney's 1966 (informal?) opinion that these U.S. Assay Office $50, $20 and $10 ingots represented, then or later, no obligation of the federal government, constitutes repudiation without due process of law.
Proofs of the regular design of U.S. Assay Office twenties come in various varieties. The Zabriskie coin differs from all others and is believed to have been made at the Philadelphia Mint before the hubs went west. Others, of similar 1853 design but from different working dies and using a different edge collar, turned up in the 1950's together with many different kinds of experimental pieces: round $50 coins using altered dies from the same hubs, ingots of various denominations, proofing pieces (999+ fine, used for raising melts to legal 900 fineness), trials of various design elements, etc. These pieces were condemned in 1966 on grossly insufficient grounds; but the details of such grounds -and, their errors -would require over 50 pages of text plus dozens of enlarged illustrations, at best tangential to our purpose here. The controversy has died down in recent years. Many are pictured in Scott. For the moment, all that need be said is that their manufacturer must have had (like Humbert) access to means ofmultiplying working dies by the dozen, and that he must also have had access to some of Albert Kuner's punches, in both perfect and progressively chipped states, which punches were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.