Catalog Reference

A.J.N., II, 110; VII, 90

On its face, Virginia's Happy While United is a simple medal. Its obverse is the state seal; its reverse depicts a white man and an Indian smoking the pipe of peace and the date 1780. Therefore, it must be an Indian peace medal issued by Virginia in the year indicated. However, given that there were no Indian treaties negotiated in the commonwealth in 1780 and given that no information on any substantive aspect of the medal has ever surfaced, the piece is not so simple as it first appears. William Summer Appleton first called attention to the subject. Writing in the American Journal of Numismatics in 1868, he described his "curious copper medal." Two years later, he wrote: "Nothing whatsoever is known about this strange piece nor another specimen. I consider it a great curiosity." Appleton was not the last to profess his ignorance: in 1894, in his master work on historical medals, C. Wyllys Betts places "Indian Medal, Virginia" as number 570 on his list. He notes a pewter specimen in the British Museum in addition to Appleton's piece but, otherwise, can shed no new light on the subject. Charles A. Flagg, curator of the Bangor Public Library, was the next to broach the subject. Writing to the Virginia Magazine of History he described a new example of the medal in "copper or bronze" and noted "It would be a natural inference that we have here a piece struck in commemoration of some Indian Treaty concluded by the State in 1780, but no one seems to have heard of this particular medal. Information will be gratefully received…" After no help was forthcoming, Flagg wrote again to the magazine:

It would seem that some peace or treaty by Virginia with the Indians was commemorated by it. Mr. Howland Wood of the American Numismatic Society of New York writes us that it is one of a number of medals given to Indians in colonial times, regarding which next to nothing is known.

Thus, historians and numismatists alike were stumped. In 1988, George Fuld and Barry Tayman undertook a study of both the New York and the Virginia Happy While United medals. Fuld and Tayman, both outstanding numismatists, did a thorough job of researching the New York pieces. However, on the Virginia medal, they ran into the same blank wall as their predecessors. The paucity of information unearthed on the subject, combined with the unfamiliar fabric of the medals caused them to conclude: "There is little doubt that these medals were not made in or around 1780… Until further data on these Virginia medals are available, they must be relegated to an apochryphal [sic] position in the Indian Peace Medal Series." Years of mystery had begat frustration, and frustration begat an erroneous conclusion.

The year 1780 began poorly for the American cause. The British had transferred their focus to the south and, in the initial action of that campaign, General Clinton successfully laid siege to Charlestown, capturing General Lincoln's entire army in the process. Moving inland, Lord Cornwallis was opposed by a hastily formed Continental Army under the hero of Saratoga, Horatio Gates. In August, Gates met the British at Camden and lost the battle in disastrous fashion. There was now no organized resistance between the victorious British and Virginia, which was their ultimate target. Almost miraculously, an American force sprung up comprised of various militia units from the western frontier. This volunteer army stalked, attacked and, on August 6 conquered a superior force of British regulars at Kings Mountain.

This victory, little known but nonetheless a turning point in the affairs of this country, was followed three months later by Daniel Morgan's stirring triumph at the Cowpens which, in turn, led to the road to Yorktown. Thus, Virginia in 1780 was the epicenter of the American Revolution. To the north lay Washington's main army. To the south lay the Second Continental Army, headed variously during the year by generals Lincoln, Gates, and Greene. To the east lay the Chesapeake Bay, a possible invasion route and one that was, in fact, used by Benedict Arnold with his Tory forces on New Year's Day of 1781. Virginia also possessed western borders that were of consequence to the war. Throughout the colonial period, the commonwealth had taken the lead in pushing its settlers and its land aspirations westward. During 1780, it built a fort on the Mississippi River at the mouth of the Ohio, some 600 miles from the capitol of Richmond. Active campaigns were conducted by the state militia as far to the northwest as Detroit and as far to the southwest as Natchez. The cost of war on all fronts was formidable. Unable to get its tobacco to market, except by way of an arduous trip to New Orleans or via an uncertain voyage to France, Virginia fell behind in its obligations to the Continental Congress. Its paper money depreciated from 40 Virginia pounds to 1 English pound all the way to 150 to 1 in a 12 month period. There were shortages of almost every material and implement needed to maintain the armies. It is not clear why any person would seek public office under the circumstances. However, as 1780 began, Thomas Jefferson was governor of the commonwealth and, on June 4, he accepted a second one-year term. Most of his time was spent on logistics-finding manpower to fill the ranks, supplies to keep them going, and money to pay for the whole. There was little time for reflection amidst the daily struggle. Despite the overwhelming demands of responding to crises, Jefferson did manage one political initiative. He sought to negotiate a formal peace agreement with the Cherokee, the dominant Indian tribe on Virginia's western and southwestern frontiers. The Cherokee, though strategically important to Jefferson, had already begun their decline as a nation. This decline was to culminate a half century later in the infamous March of Tears, ordered by Andrew Jackson as his final solution. Their sad fate notwithstanding, the Cherokee were an enlightened people. In writing about Virginia during this period, those history books that depict the white man as the civilizer and the Indians as the savages are utterly mistaken. The Cherokee were important allies to secure. In summary, Virginia in the year 1780 was a scene of relentless activity. The Continentals fought the British; the Whigs struggled with the Tories; and the white man confronted the Indians. Clearly, a medal that purports to be of that time and from that place has a rich heritage in which to seek a home.

After publication of the Fuld-Tayman paper in 1988, Virginia's Happy While United remained a mystery, but it had now been branded a nineteenth century fabrication. There it might well have languished. The first evidence to the contrary came to our attention, in serendipitous fashion, in the notebook of Pierre Eugene Du Simitière. Born in Switzerland, Du Simitière emigrated to this country in 1764 or 1765 where he became a fierce patriot of his adopted land. As a talented artist by vocation, he sketched most of the prominent figures of revolutionary times before his death in 1784. On the numismatic front, he executed the first Seal of the United States and, less well known, he sketched a design for the Washington before Boston medal, for which he was paid 32 dollars but which was never struck. Du Simitière was also an antiquarian, a naturalist, and an indefatigable collector. His accomplishments in this latter regard have been well chronicled by Joel J. Orosz. In his notebook under the date May 1781 is an entry that reads "A cast copy in copper of a Medal made in Virginia last year to be given to the Indians having on one side Liberty trampling down a Tyrant round it. ' Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.' On the top Virginia. On the reverse a white man and an Indian sitting on a bench, under a tree with a pipe in his hand, round 'Happy While United,' in the exergue 1780, a pipe, an eagle's wing on the top of the medal with an opening to suspend it by, the gift of Isaac Zane. Esq." This entry demonstrates that the piece was indeed made in the year indicated, whatever the motive for its creation. The design of Virginia's Happy While United seems simple enough. The reverse is very similar to that of the Happy While United medals issued by Sir William Johnson in 1764 and 1766, except the composition of the details is a mirror image, as if the design were taken from an impression. Elements common to both Johnson's and the Virginia pieces include the seated figures (an Indian and a white man), the tree under which they sit, the peace pipe being passed, and the ships on the water in the background. Sir William Johnson headed His Majesty's Northern Department for Indian Affairs. The earlier Happy While United medals were originally commissioned by the commander-in-chief for America, General Thomas Gage, for distribution in the Southern Department. Although numismatists have paid little attention to the southern branch, it conducted active relations with the Cherokee in particular. Thus, Indians in the Virginia area were familiar with the Happy While United design and, going one step further, would have been inclined to accept it as official.

The obverse of the medal is the young state's first seal: a classic representation of Virtue with a spear in her left hand and a sword in her right, stands proudly upright, her left foot resting on the prostrate figure of George III. About the periphery is the motto REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD. The initial design, created by a committee of the Virginia legislature headed by the scholarly George Mason, was far more allegorical. Virtue's foot rested on a globe rather than a person and the motto was SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS. The only local artisan capable of executing the seal-Robert Scot, the man who later created the molds for the medal-was occupied in making plates for a new issue of paper currency. Mason sent his plans to Philadelphia where a young delegate to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson, sat on a committee of that body charged with designing a national seal. The chairman of the committee, Benjamin Franklin, proposed his favorite motto, REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD. Jefferson was so struck by the relevance of this idea that he applied it to the Virginia seal as well. He further modified the Virginia committee's design by substituting King George for the globe under Virtue's foot. His reasons for so doing are a matter of conjecture. However, it may be more than coincidence that the substitution followed the deletion by Congress of an extensive section of charges against George III from Jefferson's first draft of the Constitution. Whatever, in his version of the state seal, Jefferson deliberately contravened the expressed intent of the Virginia legislature, a fact which underlines the importance he assigned to the project. Perhaps the ultimate coincidence is that both the Virginia seal and the national seal were executed in the summer of 1776 by the very man whose diaries launched the present investigation, Pierre Eugene Du Simitière. Isaac Zane, who sent Du Simitière his medal, was a prominent Virginian of the time. A member both of the House of Burgesses under the crown and the General Assembly after Independence, he was also the proprietor of the thriving Marlboro Iron Works. His trade combined with his now-known linkage to the medal made him a logical source of the dies-but this proved to be a false trail.

The standard Virginia references in and about the year 1780, are replete with references to Indian affairs. The most suggestive is a letter, dated December 13, 1780, from Indian Commissioner Joseph Martin to Governor Thomas Jefferson:

Sir-On my return to this place, I immediately transmitted your Excellencies' Dispatches to the Chiefs of the Cherokees, which I seconded with some letters of my own-and Divers private messages with meddles [sic] etc. but unfortunately all arrive too late--the British agents had succeeded in their negotiation and the most of the Chiefs and Warriors of the Old Towns had determined to take a decisive part against US.

Confirmation of the British success is to be had from both British and American sources. However, the key point is that the Americans both prepared "meddles" and intended to use them to conclude a treaty. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian Boyd publishes an invoice, buried among contingent fund vouchers in the Virginia archives, dated October 12, 1780, from Robert Scot, the artisan who later became the first engraver of the United States Mint. Scot, then located in Richmond (he did not move to Philadelphia until 1782), submitted a bill for a medal for £4,760.14.0 in local money. By then the Virginia pound had depreciated to an exchange rate of 140 for 1, with the English pound in turn worth 3 Spanish dollars. Thomas Jefferson checked these calculations in his own hand on the back of the invoice, and approved it for payment on October 21, noting that the workmanship was " extraordinary good." Scot's charges included £3,150 for "Engraving and making a Medallion mould in brass and casting patterns," £15 for "pewter for Patterns" (note the plural) and £1,554 for 37 Spanish silver dollars. Working from the known weight of a copper medal and adjusting for silver's greater specific gravity, 37 Spanish dollars would have provided enough silver to cast an even dozen medals.

Boyd goes on to opine that 'There can be little doubt that this [the medals] was done on the occasion of a visit to Richmond by Potclay and other Cherokee chiefs, whom TJ planned to have continue their travel northward to Congress and Washington's army." There is some logic to this conclusion but there are also arguments against it. For example, to have sent Potclay to the nation's capital wearing a Virginia peace medal would have been a diplomatic faux pas. Further, the Cherokee were an honorable people, who would not have accepted Jefferson's medal in October only to exchange it for a British medal six weeks later. Finally, Colonel Martin and Potclay, better known as Oconastote, were close friends; this relationship makes it even less likely that any understanding concluded in Richmond was so soon betrayed. Thus, whereas Jefferson undoubtedly hoped to hand out medals during the visit of Oconastote, the exchange probably was delayed. The Cherokee, it should be noted, were not a monolithic nation. Their lands spread across present day Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and the mountainous corner of Georgia. The Upper Towns, of which Oconastote was a representative, were the moderates. Although they did join the British in 1780, they were quick to come to terms at Holston in July 1781. Previously, they had negotiated a treaty with the Virginians in 1777. It was this latter treaty that occasioned a sharp division within the Cherokee nation. At that time, the hawkish faction led by Dragging Canoe left to form the Lower Towns. These Indians, who became known (by their locale) as the Chicamauga, were at war with Virginia more or less continuously until signing a treaty in the fall of 1783. Beyond the Cherokee, the Chickasaw to the west and the Creek to the south also played an active role in the events of the day. Typically, these tribes were used by the British or the Spanish to inflame the Cherokee and, in turn, to mount joint expeditions against the western settlers. All Indians, be they Cherokee, Chicamauga, Chickasaw, or Creek, had but a single grievance-land. There would have been peace on Virginia's distant borders if its citizens had not been moving relent lessly outward.

We do know that on May 30, 1781, Jefferson wrote Scot from Charlottesville requesting him to "make a medal of the kind formerly made "and to send it at once so that it could be presented to an Indian chief from Kaskaskia (Illinois) then visiting. Thus, the Governor 's supply was exhausted at that date. Martin, who possessed the original batch of medals, was on the frontier making preparations for peace talks at the time.

Presumably, he distributed the medals at the treaty of Holston, negotiated with the Cherokee in July 1781. There was no earlier occasion in 1781 worthy of commemoration. Between 1781 and 1789, when the federal government took over Indian affairs, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed numerous treaties with the Cherokee, the Chicamauga, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Relations were also conducted with a number of the northwestern tribes, including the Kaskaskia, the Shawnee, and the Delaware. It is clear that medals were handed out at some, if not most, such occasions. Five silver medals were made for the Cherokee in June 1780 - before the Scot molds had been engraved. In June 1787, the durable Joseph Martin wrote to Governor Edmund Randolph thanking him for "the letter enclosing silver medals, which I shall deliver agreeable to your Excellencie's request."

All of which serves to create a new mystery: if so many silver medals were handed out, why have none survived? Almost certainly, one or more silver medals have survived and will some day come to light. However, the reason that they are extremely scarce is straightforward: many if not most of the Virginia medals were exchanged for Federal replacements. In a talk given at the Cherokee village of Chota, Tuskegetchee (Long Fellow) gave his opinion of the prospect of such an exchange: "I have long taken the Virginians by the hand and have at this time one of their meddles around my neck. I would be sorry to throw that off and put on a strange one." In like manner, in a conference with the Secretary of War Knox on January 5, 1792, Bloody Fellow returned two medals "that had been presented by Colonel Martin about four or five years ago. "Perhaps somewhere in our musty national archives there exists a chest filled to overflowing with these magnificent signposts of the past. Fortunately, there do survive a handful of Virginia's Happy While United medals that have been made in other metals.

The diameters of five of these pieces (one from a photograph, three from recordings by others) range between 72.4 and 73.0 mm; the two medals available for physical inspection weighed 73.75 and 77.76 g.

Other than Scot's invoice for brass molds, there is no contemporary documentation as to the method of manufacture. However, surviving specimens tell the story with sufficient eloquence. The pewter example in the British Museum has smooth surfaces and its devices stand out in sharp relief. Circular lines used to position the motto are clear as is the preliminary outline of Virtue's sword. Though described as a cast by Fuld and Tayman, the piece is clearly struck. Scot probably used a screw press to apply his brass molds to a rolled sheet of the soft pewter. The bronze specimens, all of which possess rough surfaces and rounded details, are obvious casts. Indeed, the one specimen available to the author for direct inspection, had a "blow hole" on its edge. Because bronze has a higher melting point than brass, the medals could not have been cast directly from the molds. The two processes available to an eighteenth century Virginia artisan would have been the lost wax method and sand casting. The latter process seems to have been used, given the roughness of the surface and the scattered sand particles in the medals. Sand casting involves impressing a matrix in a box of fine French sand. The reverse side is then impressed in a second box and the two boxes joined after making provision for a channel into which to introduce the molten metal and other smaller channels through which to exhaust gases emitted by the heated metal. It is unlikely that the British Museum pewter medal served as a matrix because its diameter is roughly the same as the diameters of the surviving bronze specimens. Normally, the cast metal would undergo some shrinkage while cooling, resulting in a diameter that was some two to five percent smaller than its source. It would seem that another piece existed and was the matrix used for the bronze medals.

The Happy While United medals issued by New York in 1764 and 1766 appear to have been cast by a different process. The artisan, Daniel Fueter, achieved higher relief and smoother surfaces. All available pieces of this design are in silver so that, lacking pewter and bronze examples, direct comparison is not possible. According to the Scot invoice, the pewter medal was struck as a pattern. As with the Du Simitière example, copper examples were probably made for collectors, dignitaries, and those who could not afford the high cost of silver. No doubt, some parallel exists with the Comitia Americana series although, with Virginia's Happy While United, it would seem that the original population of silver examples far exceeded the copper. Silver, pewter, or copper, the medal now emerges as one of the most important in the entire American series:

Here, indeed, is a story with a happy ending.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the September 2011 Philadelphia Americana Auction, where it realized $109,250.