Today, banks across America are ready to place the head of yet another president into the hands of its patriotic citizens: the new dollar commemorating 5th President James Monroe. Mostly known for his Monroe Doctrine promising military protection to our hemisphere, adding five states to the nation, and being the third and last president to die on the 4th of July (two is a coincidence; 3 out of 5 is spooky), he led during a time of relative peace and lack of political strife.

As we’ve seen with previous dollars, minting errors are already being discovered in early-release Monroe coins. It appears that up to 140,000 Statehood Quarter blanks were stamped with Monroe instead of the gold dollar blanks, resulting in a large number of silver, smaller-than-usual Monroe Dollars. These were noticed quickly and the majority of these error coins were destroyed, but there’s no telling how many may have slipped through before the error was corrected. Collectors should also expect to see the standard, known-variation in the direction of the edge-text (obverse-up versus reverse-up) , but neither direction is more uncommon. While the Mint seems to have gotten better at printing on the edges of coins without error, the edge-text is the most common place to see errors and collectors should always give their dollars a close look.

This isn’t the first time Monroe has been on the obverse of a coin, although the first time around he had to share the honor with a friend: in 1923, the Mint commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine with a special half-dollar, with the heads of Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (who will appear on a dollar himself May 15th). It wasn’t actually the Mint’s idea for the commemorative dollar: the commemorative coin was part of an elaborate plan to clean up and improve the public image of the California film industry. 300,000 of the coins were minted at the San Francisco mint and distributed in California — they are relatively uncommon, but not unobtainably rare. Several have sold on eBay from $20 to $80, depending on condition.

As we saw with Dolly Madison, Monroe’s wife Elizabeth will appear on a commemorative gold piece to be released February 28th. While her husband get the generic ‘eagle’ back on his dollar coin, Mrs. Monroe’s reverse commemorates her appearance at the reopening of the White House. Burned to the ground by the British, it was rebuilt and ready for the public in 1818. Monroe became president the year before, and was thus the first president to occupy the White House we know today. As we’ve seen, the First Spouse coins have a $10 face value, but sell for $429 to $529 direct from the Mint.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 12:16 am and is filed under collecting fyi, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.