1804 Small 8

The year 1804 belongs to Lewis and Clark in the wider American memory, but inside the Philadelphia Mint it was the closing chapter of the Draped Bust half eagle. Robert Scot's Heraldic Eagle reverse was now the standard, paired with a Draped Bust obverse adapted from Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Ann Willing Bingham, and the year's combined delivery came in at 30,475 pieces across every die marriage struck for the date. Within that umbrella production, two date-digit varieties emerged from the engraving department's hand-punched logotypes. The Small 8 variant carries a noticeably narrower final numeral cut into the date, distinct from the parallel Small 8 over Large 8 overdate variant in which a smaller punch was driven through traces of a larger digit. Bass-Dannreuther catalogs the Small 8 as its own family of marriages and assigns it the deeper of the two surviving populations for the year. The 1804 issue would also prove to be the last regular delivery of the type before half eagle production paused entirely until the Capped Bust design appeared in 1807.

Authentication of a Small 8 candidate starts at the date logotype itself. The final numeral should measure narrower across the upper loop than the digit on a Small 8 over Large 8 reference image, with no traces of an underdigit visible inside or beside the loop, and the comparison is best made against the Bass-Dannreuther plate photograph at matched magnification. Specifications sit on the long-running 1792 Coinage Act standard at 8.75 grams in 0.9167 fine gold, roughly 25 millimeters across, with a reeded edge and rotated coin alignment, so weight and edge alone cannot separate this variety from the overdate. A Bass-Dannreuther die marriage attribution remains the most defensible single anchor for any raw example.

For modern collectors the Small 8 lives squarely in the Semi-Key band of the Draped Bust half eagle series. Bass-Dannreuther places the surviving population somewhere in the broad range of six hundred to twelve hundred examples across all grades, which makes the variety scarce rather than legendary and keeps a steady stream of certified pieces in the auction pipeline. Provenance through the Bass, Pogue, or Eliasberg cabinets adds material weight at every grade band. See the full Draped Bust Half Eagle series history.