1866

Mintage for 1866 fell to 3,177,000 coins, a 77% drop from 1865 and the steepest single-year decline the two-cent piece would ever see. The collapse had nothing to do with public taste. Silver coins were returning from wartime hoards, the new three-cent nickel (introduced the year before) was taking over for postage-stamp purchases, and the Shield nickel (authorized that same year) would soon handle five-cent commerce in the same hoarding-resistant copper-nickel alloy. The two-cent piece's one real advantage (being a bronze coin no one wanted to hoard) was becoming irrelevant as the hoarding ended.

1866 was the first full year of Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress in June and began moving through state legislatures. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee by six former Confederate officers. Jesse James committed his first daylight bank robbery at Liberty, Missouri. None of this had anything to do with the two-cent piece, but the coin circulated through all of it, and the year's reduced mintage reflects a country where the immediate crisis of the war had passed and the slower crisis of what the war meant was just beginning.

Surviving 1866 two-cent pieces are available in circulated grades without much difficulty. PCGS certifies more than a thousand examples across all grades, and the lower mintage compared to 1864-1865 creates only a modest premium. An MS66+ Red-Brown sold for $5,400 at Heritage in May 2024. The wear points remain the same as on the 1864: the word WE in the motto, the arrow tips, and the leaves on the olive branch.