Nova Constellatio

[2] The Nova Constellatio patterns were the culmination of two years of work on the part of Robert Morris,[3] the Founding Father credited with financing the Revolutionary War.

Morris was unanimously elected the Nation’s first Superintendent of Finance in 1781; on February 21 of the following year, Congress passed the following resolution: The financier’s plan, developed with his assistant, Gouverneur Morris,[5] was ambitious: he hoped to unite the fledgling Nation with a monetary unit that would allow for easy conversion from British, Spanish, Portuguese, or State currencies to U.S.

[6] More importantly, Morris’s proposal would be the first system of coinage in Western Europe or the Americas to use decimal accounting – an innovation that has been adopted by every nation on earth in the last two centuries.

: This is the first written description of the monetary system ultimately adopted by the United States, clearly illustrating the historical importance of Morris's patterns.

In the mid-1840s, the 1,000-unit and 500-Unit piece from the set bearing the Legend NOVA CONSTELLATIO (A NEW CONSTELLATION) were discovered by a descendant of longtime Secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson.