The Fugio Cent

1787

The Fugio cent is the first coin the United States ever authorized — and it is older than the country's own Constitution. It was authorized in the spring of 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation, the loose assembly that governed the states under the Articles of Confederation, months before the Constitutional Convention finished its work and years before a federal mint existed. It comes, in other words, from the brief window when "the United States" meant a league of states rather than the federal republic that would soon replace it.

That makes it a slightly awkward guest in a reference of United States coins, because strictly it predates the nation in its modern form. It was not struck by the United States Mint, which would not open until 1792; it was made under contract, under an earlier and weaker government, at the very beginning of the American experiment. And yet it belongs here, because it is where American coinage begins — the first official coin a body calling itself the United States ever ordered into being.

For so early and so humble a copper piece, it is a remarkably eloquent object. Its two small faces carry a sundial, a warning about time, a ring of thirteen links, and a declaration of unity — a compressed lesson in the values of the founding era, stamped onto a coin at the moment the country was deciding what it would be.

Older than the Constitution

The timing is the first thing to understand about the Fugio cent. On the twenty-first of April, 1787, the Confederation Congress authorized an official copper coin — the piece later known as the Fugio cent — making it the first coinage the United States sanctioned in its own name. At that date the Constitution did not yet exist; the convention that would draft it was only about to gather in Philadelphia, and the document would not be ratified until the following years. The Fugio cent is thus older than the framework of government the country still uses.

It is also pre-federal in a more practical sense. There was as yet no national mint and no federal coining apparatus, so the coin could not be struck the way later United States coins would be; it had to be made under contract by a private coiner. The Fugio cent belongs to the short, improvised period before the machinery of the federal government was built — a coin from the Confederation, issued by a United States that was still more an alliance than a nation.

The sundial's lesson

The coin's design is a small sermon, and a memorable one. The obverse shows a sundial beneath a blazing sun, with the Latin word FUGIO — "I flee," or "I fly" — set beside it, and the blunt English motto MIND YOUR BUSINESS below. Read together, the elements make a single point: the sun and sundial mark the passing hours, FUGIO tells the viewer that time is flying, and MIND YOUR BUSINESS urges the holder to make good use of it. It is a coin that lectures its owner on industry and the value of time, in the plainspoken idiom of the age.

The design, and especially that MIND YOUR BUSINESS motto, are traditionally attributed to Benjamin Franklin, whose fondness for pithy maxims about thrift and diligence made him the natural candidate, and the attribution is repeated almost everywhere the coin is discussed. It should be treated with some care, though: Franklin's hand in the design is a long-standing tradition rather than a firmly documented fact. Whoever conceived it, the little tableau captures a distinctly Franklinian spirit — a coin that is also a piece of practical advice.

A ring of thirteen

The reverse turns from personal industry to national unity. At its center sits a chain of thirteen linked rings, one for each of the states, encircling the words UNITED STATES and, at the very heart of the design, the declaration WE ARE ONE. Where the obverse counsels the individual, the reverse speaks for the collective, binding the thirteen states into a single ring and stating their union in three plain words.

The image carried real weight in 1787. The union it depicted was, at that moment, fragile and unsettled — the Articles of Confederation had bound the states only loosely, and the question of whether they truly were "one" was precisely what the Constitutional Convention was gathering to resolve. To stamp WE ARE ONE and a ring of thirteen interlocked links onto the country's first coin was to make a small argument in metal for a stronger union, struck just as that argument was reaching its climax. The Fugio cent's reverse is a coin-sized statement of the idea the founding generation was fighting to secure.

The coiner who cut corners

The making of the coin was less high-minded than its designs. The contract to strike the Fugio cents went to James Jarvis, a Connecticut coiner, and the arrangement depended on copper the government was to supply for the purpose. It did not go well. Jarvis diverted much of the metal to other, unauthorized ventures of his own, and the coins that resulted came out lighter than they were supposed to be — underweight copper pieces that fell short of the standard the contract had set.

The public noticed, and the reception was poor. Coins that plainly contained less copper than they should have were met with suspicion and reluctance, and the Fugio cent never circulated as its authorizers had hoped. The country's first coin was undermined by the very contractor entrusted to make it, a small early lesson in the gap between what a government authorizes and what actually reaches the public's hands. What survives today survives from a compromised and incomplete coinage, its production cut short by the scandal of the diverted copper.

Why a first coin is studied so closely

Despite that troubled birth — or partly because of it — the Fugio cent is studied with a care out of all proportion to its size. Struck by hand from individually made dies, it exists in many distinct die combinations, each with its own small peculiarities of lettering and arrangement, and collectors and scholars have long catalogued those varieties in detail. A single humble copper coin becomes, under that scrutiny, a whole field of fine distinctions.

The intensity of that study grows directly from what the coin is. Being the first coin the United States authorized, the Fugio cent occupies a place no other American coin can, and every variety and detail of it carries the interest of a beginning. It is examined so closely not because it is elaborate but because it is first — the opening entry in the long record of American coinage, and therefore repays knowing completely.

Why it matters

The Fugio cent matters because it is the start of the story. Every United States coin that followed — the large cent, the silver dollar, the gold eagle, the coins in circulation today — descends from the moment in 1787 when the Confederation Congress decided the country should have a coin of its own. That the coin came before the Constitution, before the Mint, before the federal government itself, only sharpens its importance: it is the first thing the United States made to declare, in metal, that it existed.

And it declared exactly the right things. On one face it urged industry and warned that time flies; on the other it insisted, at a fragile moment, that the states were one. A compromised little copper piece, undercut by its own contractor and never widely circulated, the Fugio cent nonetheless carried the founding generation's values in miniature — a coin that is both the beginning of American money and a small, plainspoken statement of what the new country hoped to be.