1866 Rays

The Act of May 16, 1866, signed by President Andrew Johnson, authorized the five-cent piece in copper and nickel. Joseph Wharton had won. The Pennsylvania industrialist owned the Gap Mine, the country's largest nickel source, and he had been lobbying Congress for years to put his metal into American coinage. The three-cent nickel had been the first result in 1865. The Shield nickel was the second. Mint Director James Pollock, who had bitterly opposed nickel coinage based on the brittle 12% nickel cents of 1857 to 1864 (they broke dies and damaged Mint machinery), reversed his position only after the third issue of fractional paper currency failed publicly in 1865. The new coin would be 75% copper and 25% nickel, and it would handle five-cent commerce while silver was still scarce from Civil War hoarding.

James B. Longacre, the Mint's Chief Engraver, adapted the federal shield from the 1864 two-cent piece. The obverse carries a shield (with the cross of the Order of Calatrava at its top) flanked by olive branches, beneath the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. The reverse shows a large numeral 5 surrounded by thirteen stars and thirteen rays. Longacre could not use a portrait because the Spencer Clark fractional currency scandal of 1864 (Clark had placed his own face on the five-cent note after Congress was told the explorer William Clark would be depicted) had made portraits politically toxic. Wharton himself, the chief beneficiary of the new coinage, called the result "a tombstone surmounted by a cross overhung by weeping willows."

The technical execution was worse than the aesthetics. NGC reports that more dies were broken striking Shield nickels than all other denominations combined. The dense copper-nickel alloy required tremendous press pressure to fill the recesses, and the opposing high relief of the obverse shield and the reverse rays made the 1866 the worst offender in the entire series. Well-struck examples without die cracks are nearly impossible to find, and weakly-defined central detail is the typical surviving condition.

Philadelphia delivered 14,742,500 With Rays nickels in 1866, the only full year of the variety. PCGS estimates approximately 40,000 survivors across all grades, with around 3,000 in MS60 or better and roughly 500 at MS65 or better. The auction record stands at $17,038 for an MS66+ sold by Legend Rare Coin Auctions in July 2021. The Cardinal Collection Educational Foundation MS66+ brought $11,456 at Stack's Bowers in November 2015. For a first-year coin that was commercially successful, artistically rejected by its own sponsor, and mechanically brutal on the Mint's presses, the 1866 With Rays is exactly what its troubled production history suggests: common enough to find, hard to find well-struck, and dense with context for anyone who cares about the story behind the metal.