Colonial Potosi, Bolivia shield 1/4 real silver cob, Philip III, rare, #6028

Description: 

Potosi, Bolivia, cob 1/4 real, Philip III, no assayer, large lion, rare. 0.46 gram. Full castle (in shield) and lion (no shield), lightly toned Fine+ but with small pieces of edge lost to corrosion.

Few people realize that Spanish colonial coinage from the New World was the coin of the realm not just in Spanish colonies but also in English colonies like America until the mid-1800s. Spanish pieces of eight in particular made up the majority of coinage during the colonial period, and most contracts called for payment in Spanish “milled dollars,” the successor to the eight-reales coins. Perhaps half of the coins in use in colonial America were Spanish reales.

The North American colonies formed their union in 1776. By a law of April 2, 1792, the U.S. dollar of 100 cents was created (and first coined in 1794) to be of silver and of weight and fineness approximating the Spanish American piece of eight, or Spanish milled dollar as it was usually called. To create smaller denominations of these coins, they were frequently clipped into halves and then quarters. A quarter of the circle was known as two bits (4 x 2 = 8). Despite the U.S. change to a decimal system so long ago, Americans still sometimes refer colloquially to a quarter of a dollar as two bits or to the vanishing half-dollar piece as four bits, thus unintentionally preserving the Spanish system based on the number eight (from the Practical Book of Cobs). It was not until 1857 that the U.S. finally outlawed the use of Spanish coinage as payment for debts.