**(1961) BASHLOW DEFACED DIES RESTRIKE OF LOVETTS 1861 CONFEDERATE CENT** Please grade on your own by viewing all photos, couple are with flash others are without.
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Purportedly, a private engraver and minter from Philadelphia named Robert Lovett Jr. was approached by Confederate agents in a real cloak-and-dagger manner in early 1861 to design a one cent coin on the down low. Lovett came from a family of minters and engravers and frequently made coins and store cards for merchants, while mixing in a healthy dose of political tokens and medals bearing images of figures like George Washington and Henry Clay. Anyway, the story goes that Lovett came up a coin design featuring a bust of Minerva wearing a Liberty cap encircled by "Confederate States of America" and "1861" on the obverse and a reverse bearing the words "1 Cent" and an intricate wreath consisting of various agricultural products including bales of cotton, an ear of corn, tobacco leaves, wheat and other things. According to the story, Lovett minted approximately a dozen samples that matched the specifications of the then-current U.S. Indian Head cent. When it came time to turn his samples over to the Confederacy, however, it suddenly dawned on him that he could be committing light treason , so he hid the coins and dies instead. No one knew anything about it until 1873, when Lovett got drunk at a Philadelphia bar and accidentally used one to settle his tab. Philadelphia numismatist John Haseltine acquired the coin in question and then reached out to Lovett, who told him his story and sold him his sample coins and dies. Haseltine then made restrikes in gold, silver and copper and sold them. Some historians have called this narrative into question. For one thing, it seems odd that there would be no documentation or statute authorizing Lovett to design a one cent coin. Just like the U.S. Constitution, the Confederate version also gave its federal legislative branch the power to coin money. However, in their book , The Lovett Cent: A Confederate Story , Harold Levi and George Corell point out the Confederacy's Provisional Congress had authorized mints to obtain dies for any coin. Levi and Corell also note that a lot of Confederate documents were destroyed in the closing days of the war, meaning you can't rule out official sanction. Robert Bashlow bought the original Lovett cent dies and offered his own "restrikes." In this case, the original dies had been damaged and defaced, so Bashlow created a set of copy dies and marketed the ensuing coins as " second restrikes ." Bashlow used a large copper ingot -- twice the width of a regular U.S. penny -- purportedly "[d]ue to fear that the Secret Service would seize the restrikes under the statutes forbidding 'likenesses' of US coins to be passed." The damages present on the original die -- namely the chisel marks on the obverse and the cracks on the reverse -- also appear on the Bashlow restrike.