This morning brings yet another new presidential dollar – John Quincy Adams — to bank tellers and into the hands of numismatists around the United States. John Quincy Adams followed in his father’s footsteps leading to the White House, but his presidency was unremarkable compared to his political career both before and after. JQ’s early political career included long, successful stints as ambassador and state representative, and after his presidency he represented Massachusetts in Congress until his death after experiencing a stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1848. Coincidentally, May is National Stroke Awareness Month, and the National Stroke Association is using the release of the JQ Adams dollar to help spread their cause.

As of yet, the release of the John Quincy Adams dollar is quite error-free; after releasing six of these new dollar-styles, the Mint seems to be catching their problems better than has been seen with earlier dollars. JQ Adams dollar errors (from a casual browsing of eBay and other quick-sell sites) seem to be of the unavoidable types: double-strikes and foreign matter in the dies, but nothing yet on the scale of the previous dollars. That’s not to say something won’t appear later — there’s always the possibility of a single batch of rolled dollars sitting on a shelf to reveal untold fortunes thanks to the carelessness of a Mint employee.

As we learned a few months ago, John Quincy Adams is no stranger to coinage. As Secretary of State under James Monroe, John Quincy Adams helped draft the Monroe Doctrine. To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Doctrine, the state of California commissioned the minting of 300,000 collectible coins bearing both Monroe and JQ Adams’ heads.

Not content to decorate the obverse of coins, John Quincy and his father John had both been bitten by the coin-collecting bug during their international travels. The Adams clan had acquired an enormous collection of coins dating back to ancient times, and eventually passed the collection to the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Due to the size of the collection, the MHS determined to sell off a portion of the collection. Stack’s supervised the sale from 1971 to 1973, and as a result there are many collectors who now hold antiquarian coins which also have the provenance of being purchased from the Adams family coin collection.

John Quincy Adams’ wife, Louisa, will join the likes of Martha Washington and her mother-in-law Abigail Adams on the 29th when her Presidential Spouse commemorative coin is released. As usual (and some might think deservedly), the Presidential Spouse coin has 10x the face value of the Presidential Dollar, but is primarily a collector’s piece and unlikely to ever get one in change at the movie theatre. Although not released yet, the Mint will most likely charge in the $425 - $525 range as it has done with the previous Spouses.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 12:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.