Seated Liberty Half Dimes (1837–1873)

Gobrecht's Design and How It Got Made

Mint Director Robert M. Patterson, who took office in July 1835, moved quickly to improve the silver coinage. He found the Capped Bust design insufficiently dignified for a maturing republic and looked to the neoclassical aesthetic of contemporary European medals as a better model. His ideal was a full seated figure of Liberty in the classical manner, holding her symbols, in place of the bust used on earlier coins. He enlisted portraitist Thomas Sully and naturalist and artist Titian Peale to produce initial sketches. The execution of those sketches into workable coin dies fell to Christian Gobrecht, the gifted engraver who had joined the Mint staff in 1835 and would become Chief Engraver in 1840.¹

Gobrecht first used the seated Liberty figure on the silver dollars of 1836, where she sat on a plain field with no stars (the stars ringed the flying eagle on the reverse), in a format closer to a medal than a conventional coin. On the half dime and dime of 1837 the same figure appears on a much smaller coin: Liberty seated on a rock, her left hand holding a pole topped by a Phrygian liberty cap, her right arm resting on a shield inscribed LIBERTY. The date appears at the bottom. The earliest half dimes have no peripheral stars, which leaves the seated figure alone on an open field. The design proved durable enough to carry the half dime through 36 years and five major type listings, outlasting by far any design that had come before it on the denomination.

Five Types Across Thirty-Six Years

The First Branch Mint Half Dimes

The New Orleans Mint opened in 1838 and immediately struck half dimes of the No Stars type, creating the 1838-O, the first branch-mint half dime in the denomination's history. The coins carry their O mint mark inside the reverse wreath. The 1838-O, while not a rarity of the magnitude encountered in the Draped Bust series, is considerably scarcer than the Philadelphia 1837 issue and merits specialist attention in any grade above Fine.²

Weight Reduction and the Arrow Years (1853–1855)

The California Gold Rush drove up the relative price of silver, and by the early 1850s the silver content of the half dime and other subsidiary denominations was worth more than the coin's face value. The predictable result was melting and export of silver coins on a large scale. Congress addressed the problem with the Act of February 21, 1853, which reduced the weight of the half dime, dime, quarter and half dollar while leaving their fineness unchanged. For the half dime, the weight fell from 20.625 grains to 19.2 grains.

Chief Engraver James B. Longacre chose the simplest way to mark the change: arrowheads punched on either side of the date on new half dime dies. The Philadelphia Mint alone struck more than 13.2 million half dimes in 1853, a figure that exceeded the entire Capped Bust series' nine-year output. Arrows were retained through 1855, then removed in 1856 even though the reduced weight standard was kept, a source of legitimate confusion for anyone not paying close attention to the dates.

The rarest issue of these years is the 1853-O without arrows. New Orleans struck 160,000 of them at the old weight before the reduced standard took effect, in the same year that the lighter arrows coinage began, and much of that mintage is thought to have been melted rather than issued. These are among the rarities of the Seated Liberty half dime series, with PCGS estimating about 112 survivors in all grades.³

The Civil War and Its Effect on the Half Dime

Silver hoarding returned with the Civil War. By 1862 gold and silver coins had again vanished from Eastern commerce, driven into hoards by economic anxiety and the collapse of confidence in paper money. The Philadelphia Mint's response was to reduce half dime production to almost nothing: combined Philadelphia mintages for 1863 through 1867 totaled fewer than 100,000 pieces across five years, with the 1866 coming in at approximately 10,000 and the 1867 at roughly 8,000. These Civil War Philadelphia dates are among the most elusive regular-issue coins in the denomination. Even a Fine 1867 is a hard coin to find.

San Francisco, unaffected by the Eastern coin shortage, produced half dimes regularly from 1863 onward for Pacific Coast commerce, where gold and silver circulated normally throughout the war years. The western production kept the denomination viable even as the Philadelphia issues dwindled to token quantities.⁴

The Legend Obverse and the End of the Design

In 1860 Longacre redesigned the half dime for the last time. The thirteen stars that had surrounded Liberty since 1838 were removed and replaced by the legend UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, previously on the reverse. The reverse was entirely refashioned: the plain open wreath gave way to an elaborate composition of corn, wheat, oak, and maple tied with a bow at the bottom, sometimes called the cereal wreath. New Orleans struck half dimes with the new design in 1860 only, producing the sole O-mint Legend Obverse issue; San Francisco joined in 1863 and continued through 1873.

The Shield Nickel, introduced in 1866, began absorbing the commerce the half dime had served. The copper-nickel five-cent piece was larger, more durable, did not vanish during monetary panics, and required no one to distinguish among several silver coin designs of similar size. The Coinage Act of 1873 reorganized the monetary system comprehensively. The half dime was deliberately excluded from the enumerated list of authorized silver coins in Section 15 of the Act, and production stopped automatically when the law took effect on April 1, 1873. Many old half dimes were later withdrawn from circulation and melted.⁵

The 1870-S: A Coin That Should Not Exist

Official Mint records for 1870 show no half dimes struck at the San Francisco Mint. The second San Francisco Mint building was under construction that year, and coins were struck to be placed in its cornerstone as part of the dedication ceremony. The striking request for the cornerstone included an 1870-S three-dollar gold piece, though which coins were actually placed inside has never been confirmed. For more than a century, no one knew whether any 1870-S half dimes had been similarly struck.

In early 1978, a man walked into Orland Coin and Stamp in Orland Park, Illinois, with a small box of coins. The proprietor, Richard Storm, purchased the lot without recognizing what it contained. When the shop could not find a listing for one of the pieces in the standard references, the coin was referred to Ed Milas at RARCOA in Chicago. Authentication followed at the International Numismatic Society Authentication Bureau, which confirmed the coin was genuine and unaltered: prooflike fields, a wire rim running part way around the coin, and 107 reeds on its edge. The coin was exhibited at the 1978 American Numismatic Association convention. On April 16, 1980, Milas sold it to Michigan dealer John Abbott for $425,000, a price arrived at by formula: $25,000 added to the hammer price of the 1804 silver dollar from the John Work Garrett Collection, auctioned by Bowers and Ruddy Galleries for The Johns Hopkins University the preceding month.⁶

The coin is the only 1870-S half dime known. Its 2004 auction result at Bowers and Merena was $661,250; it sold privately in 2009 for $1,400,000 and at Heritage Auctions in January 2023, as part of the Bender Family Collection, for $3,120,000. Whether a second example lies inside the cornerstone of the surviving San Francisco Mint building is unknown. The building is a National Historic Landmark, and the question has intrigued numismatists for nearly five decades.

Building the Set

Seated Liberty half dimes changed design, weight standard and mint often enough to make the series complicated to collect. A type set of the four major designs (No Stars, Stars, Arrows, and Legend Obverse) requires four coins and is achievable at moderate cost using common Philadelphia dates from accessible years. A complete date-and-mintmark set of every struck date except the 1870-S is within theoretical reach for a patient collector working over years, though the Civil War Philadelphia dates, the 1853-O No Arrows, the 1844-O, and the 1846 are expensive and can take years to find. Only one 1870-S is known, so no date set can include it.

Circulated examples of common dates are inexpensive and make good study pieces for learning the series. Very Good through Very Fine pieces of the Philadelphia issues from 1856 through 1859 and from the early 1860s San Francisco production are plentiful. The series becomes progressively more challenging as collectors move toward completion, higher grades, and rarer dates. Mint State examples of most issues before 1860 are scarce, and Gem (Mint State 65 or finer) examples are rare enough to attract specialist competition when they appear. Al Blythe's The Complete Guide to Liberty Seated Half Dimes remains the essential specialist reference for the denomination. The Liberty Seated Collectors Club, which publishes The Gobrecht Journal, is the main society for advanced collectors of the series, and its journal carries die-variety research not found in general references.