Abel Buell: the counterfeiter who engraved America's first coins

In 1764, a young Connecticut silversmith was caught raising the value of colonial paper notes — taking a five-pound plate and re-engraving it into a higher denomination. The very skill that made him a fine craftsman made him a dangerous forger. His name was Abel Buell, and he was barely past twenty.

The punishment was brutal and public. He was sentenced to be branded on the forehead with a letter marking his crime, to lose part of his ear, to forfeit his land and estate, and to spend his life in prison. Because of his youth, the colony carried out only the worst of it and spared him a life term. The 19th-century historian John Warner Barber recorded the strange, vivid detail his town never forgot: "The tip only of Buell's ear was cropped off: it was held on his tongue to keep it warm till it was put on the ear again, where it grew on." That last flourish is a local account from decades later, not a medical record — but it is the story that followed Buell for life.

That should have been the end of him. Instead it was the beginning of one of the most improbable careers in early America. Buell talked his way back into society the only way he knew how — with his hands. He invented a machine for cutting and polishing gemstones, made a ring on it, and gave that ring to the very man who had prosecuted him. His sentence was eased. Within two decades, the same colony that had marked him as a criminal would trust him to engrave its money.

Over one restless lifetime Buell was a silversmith, a jeweler, an engraver, a printer, a surveyor, an inventor, a cotton-mill owner, and a maker of coins. The biographer Lawrence Wroth called him "a restless, unstable, inventive genius." He is the reason the United States can point to a piece of metal, or a sheet of paper, and say: an American made this, here, first.

Buell learned the hard way. As a boy he was apprenticed in 1755 to the silversmith Ebenezer Chittenden of Madison, Connecticut — close to home, since Buell would marry into the Chittenden family. Silversmithing in that era meant engraving: cutting fine lines and lettering into metal by hand, in reverse, so the impression came out right. That single skill — carving a clean image into hard metal — sat behind everything he later did, the honest work and the criminal.

What set Buell apart was that he never stopped at one craft, and he built his own tools. In 1769 he cast the first printing type made in the United States, founding the country's first type foundry. Type means the small metal letters a printer locks into a press; before Buell, American printers imported every one from Britain. He cut the punches and cast the letters himself, and printed a sample for the Connecticut legislature in a clean ten-point roman of his own making. The foundry never turned a profit — Buell, forever a step ahead of his debts, eventually fled New Haven to dodge his creditors — but the first was real.

His most famous work shows the same instinct. In 1784 he engraved, printed, and published A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America — the first map of the new nation compiled, printed, and published entirely by an American, on American presses. He cut the copper plates, printed it in four sheets, and colored it by hand; its title cartouche shows the goddess Liberty beside the Stars and Stripes, one of the earliest printed appearances of the new flag. It was also the first map copyrighted in the United States. Only seven copies are known to survive. The best-preserved one sold at Christie's in 2010 for about $2.1 million — then a record for any map at auction — and now hangs in the Library of Congress.

So when Connecticut, and soon the new federal government, needed someone who could engrave a coin die and build the machine to strike it and refine the copper to feed it, there was a very short list. Buell's name was on it.

In 1785 Connecticut authorized its own copper coinage, and a group of New Haven investors formed the Company for Coining Coppers. Most partners put in only money. Buell put in everything else — he became the manager, the machinist, and the engraver, and he is said to have built a press that could strike up to 120 coins a minute, fast for an age when most coining was slow handwork. He cut the dies — the hardened metal stamps that press the design into a blank — for the first Connecticut coppers. The design he settled on, the "mailed bust right," borrowed the look of the British George III halfpenny: a man in armor and a laurel wreath facing right, with the Latin AUCTORI CONNEC ("by authority of Connecticut"). The reverse showed a seated Liberty, closely modeled on Britain's Britannia, with INDE ET LIB — "Independence and Liberty." Connecticut coppers were struck from 1785 to 1788, and Buell's hand is on the earliest of them.

That same New Haven operation is where Buell's story touches the most famous coin in early American history. In 1787 the Congress of the Confederation contracted the merchant James Jarvis — who had gained control of the New Haven mint — to strike copper cents to a federal standard. Jarvis won the deal partly by bribing William Duer, an assistant U.S. Treasurer. The design itself was set by Congress and is traditionally credited to Benjamin Franklin: a sundial under a blazing sun with the Latin word FUGIO ("I fly" — that is, time flies) and the blunt motto MIND YOUR BUSINESS, and on the reverse thirteen linked rings around the words WE ARE ONE and UNITED STATES. These were the Fugio cents — the first coins struck under the authority of the United States.

Buell didn't win the contract, but the dies still had to be cut and the copper still had to be refined, and that work was his. Numismatists attribute the best-executed Fugio dies — the sharp, "pointed ray" coins — to Buell, working inside Jarvis's company at the mint Buell had built and run. The coins were struck on his style of press, by laborers including an enslaved man named Aaron, identified only recently from the mint's ledgers. Aaron worked the press for four shillings a day; the wages went to the man who enslaved him, Levi Hubbard, though Aaron was allowed to keep his overtime. Roughly 550,000 Fugios were struck — back-dated 1787 but coined in 1788 — before Congress cancelled the contract in September 1788 for failing to deliver. Not all of them ever reached the Treasury.

So the honest answer to "did Abel Buell make the first U.S. coin?" is this: he engraved Connecticut's first coins outright, and his dies, his copper, and his machines stand behind the Fugio cent — even though the design was Franklin's and the contract was Jarvis's. For a man once branded for ruining money, it is a remarkable place to land.