Robert Scot: The Man Who Gave America's First Coins a Face

In the autumn of 1793, yellow fever was killing Philadelphians by the thousands. One of the dead was Joseph Wright, the engraver the brand-new United States Mint had been counting on. The Mint needed someone to cut the dies — the hardened steel stamps that punch the design into a blank coin — for the nation's first money, and it needed him now. The man they chose was a 48-year-old Scot named Robert Scot.

He was born in 1745 in the Canongate, a steep old street in Edinburgh, Scotland. He trained first in close, patient work — and learned line engraving, the art of cutting an image into metal so it can be printed or stamped. By 1775 he had crossed the Atlantic to Virginia, where he engraved the colony's paper-money plates and, during the Revolution, served as Engraver to the Commonwealth of Virginia under a young governor named Thomas Jefferson.

When the British burned Richmond in 1781, Scot moved to Philadelphia, the financial center of the new nation. He cut paper-money plates for Robert Morris — money that helped pay for the siege of Yorktown — and built a reputation as one of the very few skilled engravers in America. So when Wright died, Scot was the obvious choice. On November 23, 1793, he was commissioned the first Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, a post he held until the day he died, thirty years later, at a salary of $1,200 a year.

That is the "so what" of Robert Scot. Almost every coin an American carried for a generation — the copper cent in a farmer's hand, the silver dollar in a merchant's strongbox, the gold eagle locked in a bank vault — bore a design he had cut. He didn't just make coins. He gave a brand-new country its everyday face.

Scot's first silver coins, struck in 1794 and 1795, wore what collectors now call the Flowing Hair design — a portrait of Liberty (the obverse, the "heads" side) with her hair streaming loose behind her. It appeared on the half dime, the half dollar, and the first United States silver dollar of 1794. To modern eyes the work looks raw and a little wild. It was also genuinely new: no one had ever engraved the face of American Liberty for a coin, because there had never been an American coin.

Then came the design that made his name. In the fall of 1795 Scot reworked Liberty into the Draped Bust — a softer, fuller portrait, her hair tied with a ribbon and cloth draped across one shoulder. Collectors tell the story that Scot worked from a drawing by the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart, and that Stuart's model was a Philadelphia society beauty, Ann Willing Bingham. The Stuart connection is widely repeated; the identity of the model is plausible but never firmly documented, so treat it as a likely tradition rather than settled fact. What is certain is that the Draped Bust spread across nearly all of America's copper and silver coins between 1796 and 1807 — the half cent, large cent, half dime, dime, quarter, half dollar, and dollar all carried it.

Scot's reverse — the "tails" side — tells its own little story of a country growing up. The earliest Draped Bust coins show a thin, naturalistic small eagle perched on a cloud. Around 1798 Scot replaced it with the Heraldic Eagle: the broad-winged, shield-breasted bird lifted from the Great Seal of the United States, clutching arrows and an olive branch. The scrawny bird had become an emblem of state.

In 1795 Scot also cut the dies for the first gold coins the United States ever struck. The half eagle ($5) came first — 744 of them delivered on July 31, 1795 — followed within weeks by the eagle ($10), and then the quarter eagle ($2.50) in 1796. Here Liberty wears a soft cloth cap, and collectors call this the Capped Bust Right gold. It is the same hand and the same imagination, now working in the most precious metal the Mint touched.

Here is the harder truth, and an honest page should tell it. Scot was a competent engraver, but he was not a great artist by the standards of Europe — and the Mint knew it. The numismatic historians who have studied his work most closely — Walter Breen, Don Taxay, Q. David Bowers — broadly agree that his tenure was an uneven start for the United States Mint.

By 1807 Scot was 62, his eyesight failing. Mint Director Robert Patterson judged that the engraver, "though indeed a meritorious and faithful officer, is yet so far advanced in life, that he cannot very long be expected to continue his labors." So the Mint hired a gifted German immigrant, John Reich, as Assistant Engraver. Reich started on April 1, 1807, and was cutting dies for his elegant new "Capped Bust" coinage almost at once.

But here is the sting: Reich was paid $600 — exactly half of Scot's salary, about what a common laborer earned — to do most of the engraving, while Scot kept the title of Chief Engraver and the larger paycheck. Reich did much of the Mint's real work for a decade with little of the credit, then left in 1817. Scot, far from done, went back to cutting the coinage dies himself and stayed in the post to the end.

He died in office on the night of November 3, 1823, at 78. Director Patterson's account of the morning is quietly affecting: Scot, he wrote, "returned to rest last night, apparently in his ordinary state of health. He was, on opening his door in the morning, discovered to have recently expired."

There is one last twist, and it is the reason Scot's name turns up in the most rarefied corners of coin collecting. The 1804 dollar — nicknamed the "King of American Coins," and among the most valuable U.S. coins ever sold — wears Scot's Draped Bust design.

But not one of them was struck in 1804. The famous "1804" dollars were made around 1834 and 1835, more than a decade after Scot's death, when the State Department wanted handsome proof sets of U.S. coins to give as diplomatic gifts to rulers in Asia and Arabia — among them the King of Siam and the Sultan of Muscat. Old Mint records suggested 1804 had been the last year a silver dollar was struck, so the new presentation pieces were dated 1804, and Scot's old Draped Bust design was pressed back into service. Just fifteen or so are known across all varieties. One sold for $4.14 million in 1999 — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a coin.

The design is Scot's; the legend that grew up around it is entirely posthumous. It is a fitting epitaph for the first Chief Engraver — his work outlived him and became a king without his ever knowing it.