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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ExoMan, post: 2946066, member: 72588&quot;]Having collected Civil War era exonumia for over fifty years now, I&#039;ll humbly offer my take on this piece. I doubt that even Rich Hartzog, astute as he was, could even authenticate this potential Confederate identification disk. Sadly, Rich passed away just this past month.</p><p><br /></p><p>Had this piece been accompanied by some personal memorabilia and provenance, it&#039;d then be somewhat convincing. Otherwise, it&#039;s plausible, yet nowhere near convincing, for a dedicated collector. Novices or eBay hawkers will surely pay a premium for a highly questionable piece like this though, hoping to score.</p><p><br /></p><p>The misaligned letters were punched by someone who was inexperienced, it seems. However, the neat, smoothed hole looks to me like it was created by a craftsman. While this piece could have been stamped during the war, it could just as likely have been stamped many years later. Perhaps, it was done to display at post war encampments by Johnson, himself? Or, it could have been stamped much later by a family member or even a reenactor? Any or all of these scenarios is just as possible, if not probable, than the most desired scenario of it being a contemporary Confederate &quot;dog tag.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>While the letter punches used to create this piece look to be a 19th century font, these early punches are still quite obtainable. I have a complete set of letter and number punches that once belonged to an early silversmith. They came in a thick,&nbsp; handcrafted box, along with a small, brass hammer and anvil. I also have some holed Bust and Liberty Seated Half Dollars. I&#039;ve contemplated creating one or two pieces like that of the OP, just to use to educate collectors and make them wary.</p><p>Note that I&#039;ve long collected contemporary counterfeit coins and used them to make fellow collectors wary.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the plus side for the OP&#039;s piece is that the subject, Johnson, was not a higher ranking soldier or one of note. It seems to me that a faker would choose someone of rank, akin to the &quot;Vairin&quot; fakes. On the downside, a half dollar was a nice piece of change, during the Civil War, and these were then generally hoarded. So, using a large cent as an ID disk would have made far more sense economically, it seems. </p><p><br /></p><p>From my humble perspective as a collector who&#039;s paid many hundreds of dollars for any single, desired counterstamped coin, I&#039;d value an educational maverick piece like this in the $50-$75 range.&nbsp; That said, the vast majority of coin dealers wouldn&#039;t pay me that much for a piece that I paid $500 for. What the value of exonumia boils down to, more so than coins and paper money, is knowledge.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Some thirty-plus years ago, I spotted a counterstamped coin in a dealer&#039;s case. It appeared to be a desirable logo punch, bearing a name, town and occupation of some late 19th century merchant, on a large cent. Upon examining the piece, I asked the dealer, &quot;How much?&quot; He said it wasn&#039;t for sale and asked, &quot;If it was for sale, how much would you pay?&quot;&nbsp; I told him that because it wasn&#039;t a recognizable, commonly seen classic stamp, I&#039;d offer but $15. He complimented me, adding that he&#039;d been offered far more than that at times. He said he owned the original punch and had stamped the coin, himself; this, so as to caution collectors about counterstamped exonumia.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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