Braided Hair Large Cents (1839–1857)

Gobrecht After the Silly Head and the Booby Head

Christian Gobrecht had spent 1839 working through two transitional varieties, the Silly Head and the Booby Head, that represented failed attempts to modernize the Coronet portrait before he arrived at something worth keeping. Toward the end of that year he settled on a new portrait: Liberty facing left, hair drawn back and secured by two beaded cords into a bun, a rope-like braid crossing the forehead beneath the coronet, loose locks falling around the ear and down the neck, LIBERTY on the coronet, thirteen stars surrounding, date below. The reverse continued the closed wreath format from the Coronet series, ONE CENT at center, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA around the border. The portrait is often said to derive from the figure of Venus in American-born British painter Benjamin West's Omnia Vincit Amor (1809).¹ Whether Gobrecht worked from West directly or from the broader aesthetic vocabulary of the period is not documented. The design is good regardless of where it came from.

Gobrecht died in 1844, five years into the series. James B. Longacre succeeded him as Chief Engraver and continued producing coins from the established design without significant modification to the portrait. Cents struck after the change of engravers look the same as those struck before it.

Petite Head Through 1843, Mature Head After

The Braided Hair cent ran in two visually distinct phases. The Petite Head, used from late 1839 through early 1843, tilts Liberty slightly forward, giving the portrait a younger and somewhat more animated quality. The reverse lettering on Petite Head issues is smaller in proportion. In 1843 Gobrecht modified the portrait: the Mature Head sits the bust more upright, the gaze directed forward rather than slightly downward, the proportions fractionally wider and more formal. He simultaneously enlarged the reverse lettering, producing the Large Letters reverse that paired with the Mature Head from 1843 onward.

Both Petite and Mature Head varieties were struck during 1843, which makes that year the series' primary collecting decision point for anyone pursuing the internal typology. The 1843 Petite Head with Small Letters reverse is the most commonly encountered combination from the transition year; the Petite Head with Large Letters reverse is seen less often and brings a premium in Mint State.²

The Same Upside-Down Error, Twice

The 1844 and 1851 cents each carry an overdate variety with an identical and improbable error. In both cases, the engraver first punched the full date logotype into the die upside down, leaving inverted figures that show most plainly as an 81, then recognized the mistake and punched the date correctly over it. The resulting coins read as 1844/81 and 1851/81. Traces of the inverted figures remain visible on struck examples under magnification, and both varieties are immediately recognizable once you know what to look for.³

That the same error occurred twice, in different years, with the same specific inversion, has prompted some discussion. The simplest explanation is that the logotype punch was stored in a way that made the inverted orientation a natural first reach, and that two separate engravers, or the same engraver on two separate occasions years apart, made the same physical mistake before correcting it. Both overdates are actively collected and appear regularly at auction in mid-grade circulated condition.

Refused at the Counter

The Braided Hair large cent circulated during a period of sustained public dissatisfaction with everything about it. The coin was never legal tender in the formal sense: merchants could decline to accept it, and many did. Hard Times tokens, struck privately from about 1833 to 1844 to fill the small-change shortage around the Panic of 1837, still circulated alongside the federal cent in the series' first years. From late 1852 the price of copper passed the forty cents a pound that the Mint treated as its break-even point for making cents, and the coin no longer paid for itself.⁴

Annual mintage between 1840 and 1856 ranged from roughly 1.5 million to a peak near 10 million in 1851, with 1857's final production cut to 333,546 pieces before the Coinage Act of February 21 ended the denomination.

Mint State Survivors of the 1850s

Mint State cents of the 1850s survive in larger numbers than those of the 1840s, and at least one large hoard, of 1855 Upright 5s, is known to have reached the market.⁵

What the Large Cent's Retirement Built

Merchants and the public did not miss the large cent in daily trade. The public had been objecting to its size and weight for years, and the new small Flying Eagle cent was welcomed as an overdue correction. The retirement of a familiar copper coin that many Americans associated with childhood and daily commerce produced an immediate wave of collector interest directed at the old pieces. People tried to assemble one of each date back to 1793. They questioned dealers about early dates.

Edward Cogan, an English-born picture dealer in Philadelphia who had begun selling coins around 1855, held his first auction in November 1858, a mail-bid sale of a date set of large cents in 77 lots. The Numismatic Society of Philadelphia, organized on January 1, 1858, could claim to be the first coin club in the country, and within a decade the American Journal of Numismatics had debuted in New York and Ebenezer Mason had begun publishing numismatic periodicals. The coin the public had refused to use became the first coin Americans set out to collect by date.⁶

Building the Set

The Braided Hair series is the most forgiving of all the large cent types for date-set collectors. No date is a stopper. The 1857 final year is the scarcest by mintage and costs several times as much as a common date in circulated grades, but it is routinely available. A complete circulated date set can be assembled with patience and a budget that would not register as significant for collectors of earlier types.

Uncirculated examples become progressively more available as the dates advance into the 1850s. Coins from 1853 through 1856 in grades up to Mint State 63 appear regularly. The 1840s dates in Mint State are harder and require more searching. The 1843 transition year offers the most collecting complexity: Petite and Mature Head obverses, Small and Large Letters reverses, three known combinations that are valued alike in circulated grades and diverge only in Mint State. The Newcomb numbering system and the Grellman-Reiver attribution guide provide the reference framework for anyone working at the variety level.

Original red copper commands significant premiums throughout the series. Full original red is scarce for every date; for the 1840s dates, it is rare enough that any example should be examined carefully before purchase. Brown and red-brown examples are the norm and nothing to apologize for. Buy honest coins with undisturbed surfaces and the collection will hold its character. Of the large cents struck over sixty-four years, the Braided Hair dates survive in the best condition.