Question About Mexican Liberty CAPS

houston_guy462004 - That bit of legend is confusing to novice collectors.

It reads 10 Ds and 20 Gs. The S's are superscripts. The terms actually are shorthand for 10 Dineros and 20 Granos. It is an indication of the fineness of the silver in the coin. In the Spanish system in use at the time the Cap and Ray coins were made - pure silver is represented as 12 dineros and there are 24 granos in a dinero. Therefore if you do the math it is a fraction 10 and 20 24ths divided by 12. That comes to 0.9027 fine which is the Spanish silver standard. Later on this was changed on the Peso system to a decimal 902.7 thousandths.

Hope that is clearer than mud!

swamperbob - Thank you so much for you time and, as always, excellent explanation and expertise in this very complicated area of numismatics. I also collection foreign coins that were legal tender in the US until 1857, but my library is lacking, even though I do have some good out-of-print books like AMERICA'S FOREIGN COINS by Schilke and Solomon. Just got WORLD CROWNS AND THALERS 1484-1968 (Krause, 1984) from nummisbooks33 on ebay.

jfransch - I just want to clear up a point that is often missed by collectors of Early US currency.

Foreign silver and gold coins circulated as legal tender in the US until 1857. So the foreign coins in circulation were not just colonial imports that remained in circulation after the Revolution. Vast numbers of foreign silver coins dated into the 1840s were imported for use in the US.

A second very critical fact is that US made coinage constituted only a small fraction of the actual hard money in circulation for most of the 1789 to 1857 period. As late as 1844 (55 years after the Revolution ended) 9 out of every 10 silver coins actually circulating in the US was FOREIGN made.

That means that when people used MONEY in the pre-civil war United States they actually meant "foreign" coins not the early US coinage listed in the Red Book.

The simple fact is that the early US did not have substantial silver and gold deposits within their territory. All silver and gold was imported. The early gold mines that the US did have (like the ones in the Carolinas) were tiny by comparison to the western states mines. The US didn't include the area west of the Mississippi until 1803 and didn't include the mineral rich Rockies until after the Mexican War.

This is the reason that I began collecting Mexican silver coins as a kid.