Endgame

And yes, my phrase die trial for St.Oswald dollars was incorrect. I meant the SP66 was a predecessor for the St. Oswald silver plug dollars.

I split Martin's die state 3 into 2 parts. The first part are the 15 coins (including his former ms64) that show weak US letters. I believe they minted 1758 silver dollars like that and only a small quantity were released. Rittenhouse was forced to sit on them as releasing them would have been embarrassing to the government. Then the proper machinery arrived in mid-1795, they strike Martin's die state 1 and then for whatever reason change back to the original 1794 dies. That explains why there are silver plugs in two different on two different die states. There is no documentation supporting a silver plug in 1794. All of the silver plug activity took place in 1795. We have to remember that authors are creative. Edmund Randolph's one liner describes a neat and simple coin for the President and I do not believe the heavily adjusted silver plug matches that.

In last week's comments RWB and Kbb correctly pushed me for facts. Here they are: 1 There were no more 1794 silver dollars paid out on warrants after October 15, 1794. 2 There is no 1794 silver dollar in President Washington's Last Will and Testament. 3 There are at least 3 1794 silver plug silver dollars. 4 The 1795 silver plug silver dollar proves Strickland was at the mint in June 1795. 5 The Columbian Centinel describes a weakly struck coin. 6 Reports of circulating 1794 dollars did not appear until late 1795. I want to correct one part of last week's comments. The main varieties are: B-1 Original, no silver plug, weak US letters B-2 Restrikes, silver plug and no silver plug, strong US letters I feel positive that aditional new research will confirm the direction that has been laid out. The criticism would have been withering if they had released a quantity of defective originals. The Mint was already on a short string with Alexander Hamilton. A whole new die state order is required for 1794 Silver Dollars and I hope someone will take up the task.

The proper die state order would put die state 3 first followed by die state 1 and the 2. I've explained that I believe the silver plug dollars were minted on the silver dollar press in 1795.

The die state order may change similar to what recently happened with chain cents. Previous research featured obverse differences but I think the reverse explains the timing better. The missing features on the reverse lettering most likely prohibited Rittenhouse from using most of that first mintage as the words United States did not strike up completely. Evidence from the Logies' book reveals that the majority of distinguishable images have silver plugs...very few originals, by my definitions. So yes, there is so much more to learn.

Final thoughts on the matter. Instead of a festive event portrayed in many books, the original coining of 1794 silver dollars was a disaster. All of a sudden Mint Director Rittenhouse was stuck with over 1700 defective silver dollars than could not be distributed to the states because the words United States were missing the tops of too many letters. After all, a half dollar is 80% of the size of a silver dollar and miracles do not occur during the minting process. However the problems were resolved by the middle of the following year with the silver dollar coin press. The two varieties of 1794 silver dollars are: B-1 no silver plug, weak US letters B-2 silver plug, strong US letters It is also clear that Mint Director melted a substantial number of defective original 1794 dollars and the metal was used to produce B-2 coins, as evidenced by the high number of silvers plug dollars in the survivor pool. I was incorrect on two points in my previous posts: there are no 1795 silver plug half dollars and the survival rate is much higher than I initially believed.