By Edward Elmer for Lew Rockwell.com

Governments are inveterate despoilers of the freedom, wealth, and lives of their citizens. As consolation, the citizens usually receive little more than lofty words and pretentious sentiments from the political leaders in charge of the looting, murder, and enslavement. Less commonly, governments produce something concrete, such as a marble palace for the ruler or an alabaster temple for the commemoration of some supposedly noble public goal.

However, one of the few universal, tangible products of government which citizens experience directly is their government’s medium of exchange. Even this government product usually offers a lopsided exchange for the citizen. Base metals and paper are usually offered to the subject in return for his much more valuable and often unjustified faith in the validity of his government.

At the outset, the numismatic history of the United States is as singular as its political history. Just as the new government was remarkable for the powers its Constitution did not permit, so the new U.S. coinage was unusual for what it did not depict. There were no representations of any political figures, ancient or contemporary. Odd as it may seem to modern Americans, the faces of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson did not make it onto America’s earliest coinage. Such bygone greats as Caesar and Alexander were also notably absent.

Our early American predecessors seem to have bypassed the rich symbols that abounded on the coinage of preceding nations. There were no gods or goddesses, nor was the mint impelled to create a mythological parallel to the Roman she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. Though the new nation was rich in folklore, none of its earliest coins depicted traditional examples, such as Washington’s felling a cherry tree or Franklin’s flying a kite.

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