Walter Breen
No attempt at completeness in this field could be worthwhile. It would include too many amateur speculations that have long since been forgotten, too many more that should have been forgotten, and too many futile attempts to solve problems whose correct solutions finally appeared in Sheldon's book, or since. Several of those can be found in the anthology United States Large Cents 1793-1857 edited by Warren A. Lapp and Herbert A. Silberman. (Complete details of publication for each reference herein are included in the Bibliography.)
Where the literature on a subject is so vast, one must first determine whether, and why, any given title is to be listed at all. If we now know the correct descriptions and sequence of varieties for a given date, what is the point of listing earlier studies that give incomplete and/ or incorrect ones? There are several reasons; different students might assign different levels of importance to any of these.
1. Some of the earlier studies are among our first sources of historical data about a series of individual varieties. This applies particularly to Crosby on 1793.
2. Advanced collectors cherish individual specimens that were photographically illustrated in some of these monographs. This applies primarily to Crosby-Levick on 1793, Crosby on 1793, Frossard's Monograph of 1879, Frossard-Hays on 1794, Elder-Hays on 1794, Chapman on 1794, Clapp and Newcomb on 1795-1803, Gilbert on 1796, and Clapp on 1798-1799.
3. Every fact has a history. So does every attitude toward it, every conclusion drawn about it, and every system based on these. We can more easily understand any system in terms of these interacting histories.
In this perspective, the study of cents is embedded in the overall history of science. Numismatics is not an art but one of the bridge sciences, integrating findings from metallurgy, economics, history, and fine arts. Many methods developed for these fields and other sciences are valuable in studying coins, and the history of numismatics (even of so specialized a field as early cents) in some ways imitates the histories of several other sciences. One of the earliest tasks in a science is always classification: learning to describe unambiguously what we have observed, in terms of a rational set of organizing principles, whether the subject is humans, mushrooms, or coins. Proper descriptive methods took generations to develop for all such populations. Study of the earlier monographs can help us figure out how not to do it, and eventually devise a method that makes sense. Each classification scheme (including the present book) is, ill a way, an "I can do it better" challenge to all previous attempts, but it helps to know what these were, to provide a context. Text without context is pretext.
Some of the following entries and discussions will overlap with the corresponding chapter in the half cent book. This is unavoidable, because the same people made both denominations in many of the same years, using the same bullion sources and the same technology, and some of the same books are relevant to both.
As with the half cents, our earliest source book is a unique manuscript in Record Group 104, Treasury Sec-tion, National Archives: Cent Book 1796-1803, a workbook kept by Adam Eckfeldt, the assistant coiner, recording daily copper transactions. This book has been of great value in helping disentangle the confused documentation for copper coinage for those years.
Successive annual Reports of the Director of the Mint, beginning in 1795, testify to the official perspective that represented the Philadelphia Mint as part of this country's public relations, answering originally not to the Treasury but (like so much else) to the State Department. The Mint's primary function was to make gold and silver coins (mostly eagles and dollars); each specimen in the hands of foreigners said important things about the new nation that issued it. Among the Mint's secondary functions, one of the more important was to make copper cents to replace the lightweight copper tokens and paper scrip then comprising much of the nation's small change. It was to the Mint's advantage to be able to publicize that each year this institution (though operating on a frayed shoestring) had actually manufactured and distributed a million or more cents. Among many other reasons, these statistics influenced the size of congressional appropriations that would pay for larger orders of cent blanks from Boulton & Watt of Birmingham, England, not to mention paying for equipment and salaries. All relevant information from these reports has been incorporated into the present volume. Texts of the original reports are most conveniently accessible in volumes I and II of American State Papers+Finance (Reprinted by William S. Hein & Co., Inc., Buffalo, NY, 1998.)
Until the mid-nineteenth century, numismatics was primarily the study of ancient Greek and Roman coins, an adjunct to the carefully expurgated classical education, which the upper classes (and the upwardly mobile) inflicted on their children. Relatively few British and continental collectors ever paid attention to "Brother Jonathan" (Uncle Sam's earlier incarnation) as a source of numismatic interest, if only because the United States had not been around long enough to matter. After all, Britain, the French provinces, and the German and Italian states had been issuing coins for nearly a thousand years.
Well before the Civil War, the Philadelphia Mint itself changed all that. Ever since its beginning, the Mint's annual non-coinage duties had included reporting on the weights, metallic contents, and circulating values of foreign coins: an incentive to form and scientifically classify a reference collection of them. In 1838, Adam Eckfeldt, retiring chief coiner, sold to the Mint the archival collection of coins he had accumulated since he first worked with the Mint in 1792, creating the nucleus of the Mint Cabinet Collection; many of the Eckfeldt coins are on display today in the Smithsonian Institution. Congress thereafter annually appropriated small sums for maintenance and additions, over and above the annual Proof sets and the foreign coins received in gift exchanges with other countries. Jacob Reese Eckfeldt and William Ewing Dubois drew attention to the Mint Cabinet Collection in their book on world coinages, A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations, Struck Within the Past Century. This described and illustrated some of the principal designs of United States coins, generating domestic collector interest in the various series, challenging them to assemble date sequences of each denomination.
Three events occurred in 1857 that drew public attention to our domestic coinage as nothing else had since the Mint's birth. These events unquestionably inspired the first public demands for coin books. First, at the end of January, coinage of large cents and half cents stopped for good. Second, on February 21, Congress passed an act abolishing both denominations, and replacing the copper cent with the copper-nickel Flying Eagle cent. Third, on May 25, for the first time in the Mint's history, its director, James Ross Snowden, opened its gates to the public. This followed announcements that he would distribute the new cents ("nickel cents" or "nickels" for short) in any quantity, in exchange for copper cents or for foreign silver coins of certain kinds then in circulation. Lines formed with people waiting, bags in hand, to get to the two booths in the Mint yard, labeled respectively cents for cents and cents for silver (Neil Carothers, Fractional Money, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1930, Chapter XI; Don Taxay, United States Mint and Coinage, New York: Arco, 1966, pp. 237-242; Walter Breen, Half Cent Encyclopedia, p. 463) Now that large cents were becoming obsolete, people began realizing that these would become collectible, and began scrambling to make up date sets. This created a public need for books that would tell just what varieties existed of which dates, and which ones were scarce or rare. (Harry Salyards, in a September 14, 1996, letter to the editor, suggested that the books, organized by date and then by variety, created the demand for the public to collect by date.)