1843-O

The 1843-O Liberty Head Eagle marks the third year of ten-dollar coinage at the New Orleans Mint and the issue at which branch-level production for the denomination first reached scale. After the 2,500-piece inaugural 1841-O and the modest 27,400 of 1842, the 175,162-coin delivery of 1843 represents a more than sixfold expansion over the prior year and aligns the New Orleans eagle program with the bullion flows then converging on the Crescent City via the Gulf and the Mississippi. While Doug Winter and the principal references treat the date as a single Type 1 No Motto issue without recognized eagle die varieties, the 1843 calendar year is sometimes confused with its companion 1843-O quarter eagle, which does carry documented Small Date and Large Date sub-varieties; the eagle does not. The 1843-O therefore stands as the first New Orleans eagle produced in commercial quantity and the working benchmark for how survivability behaves once mintage exceeds six figures in the No Motto era.

The post-Fairmont landscape has improved attainability across circulated grades, but Winter still positions the 1843-O within the scarcer middle band of No Motto New Orleans eagles, with surviving examples concentrated in EF and lower AU and condition rarity intensifying sharply above AU55. He revised his Uncirculated estimate to roughly ten to twelve coins known following the Heritage 2021 ANA sale of a PCGS MS63 at $96,000, currently regarded as the second finest. Standard authentication priorities apply: surface continuity around the O mintmark, font geometry against documented New Orleans punches of the period, and the absence of tooling residue at the punch perimeter remain the front-line diagnostics, since the price spread to the corresponding Philadelphia issue still rewards added-mintmark alteration. Specific gravity verification against the 16.718-gram, 27-millimeter, 90 percent gold standard catches plated or cast counterfeits before grade-level evaluation begins.

Today the 1843-O reads as an accessible-but-meaningful entry point into the early New Orleans eagle run. Winter has noted that a properly original AU53 to AU55 can typically be acquired in the $5,000 range, while a Fairmont-pedigree PCGS MS61 reached $42,000 and a PCGS MS63 sold privately at the high five figures has been recorded. For collectors building the branch by date, the 1843-O completes the first three-year arc of New Orleans eagle production and provides the cleanest example of how mintage scale, rather than rarity alone, governs the supply curve in the Liberty Head Eagle series history.