Render Unto Caesar

Or, "Twenty-Five Cents"

When I was a boy — around five years of age, if I remember correctly — I opened a drawer of my dresser and discovered a brightly colored cardboard slate with fifty tiny circular slots carved on the front. Under each slot read the name of a State, in the order of admission to the United States under the Constitution signed in 1789. These slots were perfectly shaped for a quarter to fit into, snug enough that they’d stay in the slot, loose enough that you could pop them out if you wanted to. Little did I know that such boards had existed for six years up until that point, a part of a Treasury Department plan to repopularize the idea of coin collecting, and specifically collecting quarters.

A United States Quarter Dollar, as the name suggests, is worth exactly a quarter of one dollar, which the slang term “twenty-five cents” developed to describe. All quarters in circulation today are called “Washington Quarters” because their obverse side depicts a profile of President George Washington, aping the style of Roman coinage. Prior to 1932, quarters had been minted depicting different renditions of the Angel Liberty — save for the 1893 quarter, which depicted Queen Isabella of Castile in order to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’s expedition. Like many other things, this changed when FDR was elected to the presidency.

The Washington Quarter was designed by John Flanagan, a man who can be considered the foremost American sculptor of the Progressive Era. His design featured a bust of the first president on the obverse of the coin and an eagle clutching olive branches on the reverse. The decision to introduce, via mass circulation, such heroic imagery of an individual great leader at the beginning of FDR’s presidency was no accident. Every quarter since 1932 has been some variant of Flanagan’s original design.

In 1999, the Treasury Department began minting their “State Quarter” series. Every year from 1999 until 2008, five new designs would be placed into circulation, depicting the fifty States in the order in which they ratified the Constitution or entered into the Union. If the Dear Reader has the eyes to see, he will note that nearly every design of this State series, with a few exceptions, almost perfectly encapsulates the essence of each State. The eagle-eyed observer could likely spot a significant amount of Americana Esoterica on the coins that he carries in his pocket daily.

Take the depiction of Revolutionary hero Caesar Rodney on the back of Delaware’s quarter. Rodney was the President (i.e., Governor) of Delaware during the Revolution, and he performed a Herculean effort to ensure that Delaware kept afloat after its sitting president and a large chunk of its assembly had been captured by the British. Most, even those acquainted with Revolutionary history, don’t even know Rodney’s name.

Or cross the country to California, whose quarter hosts the better-known John Muir — the man who invented the concept of “Naturalism” — gazing upon the Yosemite Valley while a California Condor flies overhead. Or even Utah’s quarter depicting the Golden Spike between the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119, hinting at the epic that was the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

But Connecticut’s quarter, that’s the one to remember. To study. Many may be familiar with the importance of Oak Trees in the Anglo-American tradition, as well as in the tradition of our cousins, the Teutons. Some may also be familiar with the Royal Oak in which the future Charles II (r. 1660–1685) hid while escaping rabid Roundheads hell-bent on his murder. But near none of you may know that America has its own sacred oak, the Charter Oak, which stood on a hill in Connecticut until a storm blew it over in 1856.

Most don’t know that there was an American Revolution nearly a century before the American Revolution. Massachusetts, long settled and cultured by the people we now call “Puritans,” had committed a grave crime against the King of England. They dared to take seriously the precepts of Christianity in the face of looming tyranny under a restored Stuart dynasty. In Matthew 22:21, Christ commanded his followers: “Render therefore unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and John Hull, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Mintmaster, took it very seriously indeed.

Captain John Hull, a scholar, silversmith, and Captain of the Artillery in the Massachusetts militia, was instructed by his superiors in the Massachusetts General Court to mint coins without the permission of the king, and without his personage on the coins’ obverse. And so forth came the “Pine Tree Shillings,” which was the direct precedent to the establishment of the Dominion of New England in 1686.

The newly ascended James II (r. 1685–1688), in an attempt to secure his shaky throne — shaky in large part due to his Catholic faith in an Anglican country — sought among other things to reform the misbehaving colonies in North America. He appointed Sir Edmund Andros, the former Governor of New York, as Governor of the newly created Dominion of New England, while simultaneously revoking the charter of every colony from Massachusetts Bay to New York.

One of the first things Sir Andros sought to do was to confiscate the physical paper charters of each colony, as a symbolic display of sovereignty over the insubordinate colonies who dared to do such things as mint their own currency. As Sir Andros confiscated each charter, resentment for his rule grew. When he arrived in Connecticut to seize their charter in the dark of night, it was presented to him in the candle-lit upper room of a well-known local tavern. Suddenly, the candles were snuffed and the charter slipped through a window into the waiting hands of Captain Joseph Wadsworth, who hid it in a centuries-old oak tree known since Connecticut was first discovered.

The charter was never found, and Sir Andros and his government were overthrown after the Boston Revolt of 1689. And so the first American Revolution came a century before the Revolution depicted on the back of New Jersey’s quarter, where James Monroe holds a flag behind George Washington himself. All of that just by looking at the back of a quarter.

Calling it Americana Esoterica is kind of misleading because it’s not at all esoteric. It just requires you to pay attention to those things you pass by every day. And if the history of a people like the Americans can be found just by looking down at the coins we carry, who says it’s not ours to keep?