THE CENTS 1835-1857 OF
Although much has been written about the cents of 1793-1814, the late copper cents are equally interesting for collectors. Beginning in 1835, there was a conscious effort to not only improve the artwork on the cent, but also to strike coins for the public at a faster rate.
The story begins in the gloomy days of early 1815, just after the end of the War of 1812. Mint Director Robert Patterson believed that the cent coinage deserved a facelift and asked one of the engravers to prepare a new head of Liberty. It is not quite clear which engraver was asked but, based on available information, it is likely that assistant engraver John Reich got the nod.
As is well known to collectors, the Liberty head of 1816 is not one of the best designs ever to grace a United States coin. However, in those days, the public paid little attention to coinage design and the 1816 design continued unchallenged for nearly two decades.
In 1824, Samuel Moore, the son-inlaw of Robert Patterson, became director but resigned in 1835 to pursue other interests, primarily mining. His successor, who began in early July 1835, was none other than Robert Maskell Patterson, son of Robert Patterson. The new director was an energetic man who not only wanted one of the most efficient mints in the world, but artwork second to none.
As soon as the younger Patterson took office, he began to implement his ideas about the coinage and machinery. Assayer Franklin Peale had been sent to Paris in 1833 to study the latest mechanical techniques and came home two years later with numerous ideas for improvement. Director Moore agreed with these changes but left office before they could be implemented.
Dr. Patterson, as the new director was generally known to the Mint officers and workmen, soon ordered the engraving office to prepare a fresh design
for the head of Liberty on the cent. Patterson intended for the new work to replace the poor artwork of 1816. It is not quite clear, as in 1816, who did the actual work because Christian Gobrecht had just joined the staff in September 1835 as a new engraver when Chief Engraver William Kneass suffered a disabling stroke.
Kneass may have done some preparatory work on the new design, but it seems likely that Gobrecht either did all of the work or finished that started by the chief engraver. The new head of Liberty, though it was to undergo several minor alterations in the next few years, was a marked improvement on that of 1816 and Patterson ordered that the change be made as soon as possible.
The date for the introduction of the new Liberty head is not on record but may have come as early as September or October 1835. The 1835 cent “with head of 1836” is relatively common and is actually worth slightly less than the regular 1835 cents with the 1816 head. In VF-20, the new design of 1835 can be obtained for about $150, according to the price guide that appears monthly in Numismatic News.
The new head was popular with artistically minded people in the Mint, and in 1836 the same head was used again. It is in fact this design, on the cents of 1836, that has the honor of the first coinage by steam power in the Philadelphia Mint.
Prior to 1836, all United States coins had been struck by strongly muscled men swinging the arms of a mighty screw press. Coins were not struck in close collars as is done today and were often slightly oval rather than truly round. The ceremony was carefully planned for Feb. 22, 1836, but something went wrong.
(The Feb. 22 date, Washington’s birthday, was chosen for its historical connotations: the first president was very much interested in the success of our coinage and often visited the Mint to see how the work was going.)
Apparently the new steam press was not able to properly eject the freshly struck coins, and Mint mechanics worked on the press until it was ready for the public demonstration. Special dies had been made to strike commemorative medals with the date of Feb. 22, but these were overdated to March 23, the date of the new ceremony.
The second time around everything went well and distinguished visitors received one of the medals, which were struck on cent planchets. This is the first
known example of the Mint using a coinage planchet to strike a medal, making the piece doubly important to modernday collectors. From this time, the large cent coinage went smoothly on the steam press.
Although Patterson had liked the new design at first, he later began to have doubts. This may have partly been due to some mechanical requirement in the steam coining press. The old design, for example, might have been a trifle too high in relief and needed to be lowered or, conversely, the new press may have made it possible for a higher relief to be accomplished.
During 1837, the Liberty head received a minor redesign, mostly noticeable in the fact that the head has a slimmer bust and beaded cords on the hair. The “head of 1838,” as the new design is known, has about the same rarity as other cents of this year and is worth only slightly more than the new cents of 1835.
Larger or smaller letters will be found on some of the reverses. This was not an experiment, but rather simply the result of the engraver and chief coiner both preparing working dies for the cent coinage.
As early as 1798, the Mint had been supplied with ready-made planchets by two English firms, but in 1838 the last of these companies, Boulton, lost its contract with the Mint. Crocker Brothers of Taunton, Mass., had sold their first planchets to the Mint in 1832, but within a few years had driven its foreign competition from the field.
From 1838 to 1857, Crocker Brothers furnished most of the cent planchets and all for the half cent. In 1844, a Wisconsin firm with political pull attempted to drive Crocker Brothers from the field, but in the end the Massachusetts firm held on. A few other firms sent planchets from time to time in the late 1840s and early 1850s, but these were of little overall importance.
One of the more interesting rumors about the coinage of this period is that the Mint was unable to produce enough cents for the public during the Hard Times beginning in 1837 and the mass of private tokens was the result. Unfortunately, the rumor has no basis in fact. To the contrary, the Mint struck plenty of copper coins but had difficulty vending them to the public because of the great number of private tokens in use.
Hard Times tokens, as these private issues are known, had little to do with the Mint but rather were the product of twin evils: politics and greed. Private mints
struck these tokens for politicians and businesses wanting to make profits and, in many cases, attack a particular elected official at the same time. The most common target was President Andrew Jackson, who was widely blamed for the serious depression that struck the country in the late 1830s.
In 1838, the head of late 1837 was used for the cent coinage of the entire year, but in 1839 the engraving department produced several interesting variations of the head. The coining department started the year striking cents with the head of 1838 but soon afterwards modifications were introduced that were not considered as high art by those whose views counted in the Mint.
In the 1850s and 1860s, several collectors noted the strange Liberty Head designs of 1839 and gave them equally odd names, such as Silly Head, Booby Head and Petite Head, the last-named being a much better design than the other two revisions. In fact the Petite Head, with modifications, remained in use until the end of the large cent coinage in early 1857.
One of the more interesting coins of 1839 is also the last known true overdate for the large cents, 1839/6. At first, collectors thought that this particular obverse die was merely the result of an error, in that the engraver punched the last digit of the date upside down and then punched it in correctly. However, later research showed that the style of the Liberty Head had last been used in 1837, and that this was clearly a true overdate.
The 1839/6 overdate cent is quite scarce, especially in top grades. Even in VF-20, the collector can expect to pay the better part of $2,800 for a problemfree specimen. It is by far the rarest variety of the 1835-1857 period. Several of these have been found by eagle-eyed collectors looking through what a dealer thought was normal date cents of 1839. There is little doubt that others are out there waiting to be discovered.
There was a minor change in the reverse die during 1839. Prior to that time there was normally a line under the word “CENT,” but this was now scrapped, by order of the director.
During 1843, Chief Engraver Christian Gobrecht (who had formally obtained the office upon the death of William Kneass in 1840) made further modifications to the Liberty head. The new head is usually referred to as the “Mature” head and it was this particular variant that is used until the end of the series in 1857.
Varieties after 1843 are few and far between. There exists a die error for 1844 in which the date was first punched upside- down and then corrected while 1846 has different sized dates on the obverse. The latter was again due, it appears, to the engraver’s department and chief coiner’s office both preparing dies.
The reason for the different entities preparing dies in the 1840s actually dated back some years, perhaps as early as the 1820s. At that time the engraver was looked on as a person who prepared new hubs but did not overly concern himself with working dies. Chief Engravers William Kneass (1824-1840) and Christian Gobrecht (1840-1844) were content to let workmen from the chief coiner’s office do this work.
When James B. Longacre became chief engraver in September 1844, he protested about this dual authority over the working dies, but Director Patterson, a close friend of Chief Coiner Franklin Peale, ignored the complaints. It was not until 1854 and a new director (James Ross Snowden), that Longacre finally toppled Peale and regained the authority of his own office.
Minor errors, such as the 1851/81 cent (again the original date had been punched upside-down) cannot be attributed to Longacre’s inexperience as a die sinker as previous researchers long maintained. Only in late 1854, after the office was recovered in full, can we blame the new chief engraver or his staff for such errors. It is likely that workmen were responsible, rather than Longacre himself.
During the late 1840s, the price of copper began to rise. By 1850 the profit margin on cent coinage was virtually at the vanishing point and on several occasions the government lost money when cents were struck and issued to the public. Everyone knew that it was just a matter of time until the old large cent was abandoned.
Several patterns were struck in the mint in an effort to find a substitute for the bulky and expensive large cent. At first it was thought that a simple lowering of the weight, as had been done in 1793 and 1795 under similar circumstances, would be sufficient but in the end wiser heads prevailed and a new coinage metal, copper-nickel, was adopted.
In 1848 and 1849, some enterprising citizens of New York decided to go into competition with the Mint in the making of cents. It is believed that the rare small date cent of 1848 is one such counterfeit, though others may be unrecognized. The mint director learned of the scheme and sent federal officials after the counterfeiters. It is not clear if the criminals were captured, but the rising price of copper certainly would have driven them out of business in due course.
The last large cents were struck in early 1857, and this date has long been famous among collectors as not only the final year but also a relatively scarce one as well. The official mintage was 333,456, but it is believed that many of these were melted by Mint Director James Ross Snowden before they could be released for public use.
Proofs are known of every date large cent from 1835 to 1857, but the later dates are considerably more common than the earlier ones. The 1835 with new head seems to be unknown in proof while 1839 is so rare that its existence has been questioned. From the mid1840s, however, proof cents are increasingly available.