Indian Head cent
The Indian Head cent was a one-cent coin produced by the United States Bureau of the Mint from 1859 to 1909. It was designed by James Barton Longacre, the Chief Engraver at the Philadelphia Mint, and featured a personification of Liberty wearing an Eagle-feathered headdress.
From 1793 to 1857, the cent was a copper coin about the size of a half dollar. The discovery of gold in California caused a large inflation in prices. As gold became more abundant, the price of copper rose. Cent and half-cent manufacture was one of the only profit centers for the Mint and by 1850 it began looking for alternatives. In 1857, the Mint reduced the size of the cent and changed the composition to 12% nickel and 88% copper, issuing a new design, the Flying Eagle cent. The new pieces were identical in diameter to modern cents, though thicker. This was the first use of copper-nickel for United States coins. The copper-nickel made them look brighter and they began to be called "White cent" or "Nicks".
In 1858, the Flying Eagle was replaced with the Indian head design. The Flying Eagle design caused production difficulties and the Mint soon looked to replace it. Mint Director James Ross Snowden selected the Indian Head design and chose a laurel wreath for the reverse, that was replaced in 1860 by an oak wreath with a shield. Cents were hoarded during the economic chaos of the American Civil War, when the metal nickel was in short supply. As Mint officials saw that privately issued bronze tokens were circulating, they induced Congress to pass the Coinage Act of 1864, authorizing a slimmer cent of bronze alloy.
In the postwar period, the cent became very popular and was struck in large numbers in most years. An exception was 1877, when a poor economy and little demand for cents created one of the rarest dates in the series. With the advent of coin-operated machines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even more cents were produced, reaching 100 million for the first time in 1907. In 1909, the Indian Head cent was replaced by the Lincoln cent, designed by Victor D. Brenner.
Inception
The half-dollar-sized large cent was struck from 1793 to 1857. That coin was intended to contain close to a cent's worth of copper, as people expected coins to contain close to their face values in metal. Nevertheless, because of the constitutional clause making only gold and silver legal tender, the government would not accept copper cents for taxes or other payments. By the early 1850s, fluctuations in the price of copper led the Mint of the United States to seek alternatives, including reducing the size of the cent and experimenting with compositions other than pure copper. The result was the Flying Eagle cent, the same diameter as the later Lincoln cent but somewhat thicker and heavier, composed of 88% copper and 12% nickel. The Flying Eagle cent was struck in limited numbers as a pattern coin in 1856, then for circulation in 1857 and 1858.The Flying Eagle cent was issued in exchange for worn Spanish colonial silver coins, which until then had circulated widely in the United States. These "small cents" were also issued in exchange for the copper coins they had replaced. By 1858, Mint authorities found the piece unsatisfactory in production. The high points on both sides of the coin opposed each other, and it was difficult to get the design to be brought out fully in the tough copper-nickel alloy. Mint Engraver James B. Longacre, designer of the Flying Eagle cent, was instructed to develop alternative designs. He produced one, showing a slimmer eagle, which would not clash as much with the reverse wreath. Although that would have cured the production problem, the design was not liked. Mint Director James Ross Snowden suggested a head of Columbus as an obverse design, but Longacre felt the public would not approve of a historic figure on an American coin.
In 1858, the Mint tested new designs for the cent. Between 60 and 100 sets of twelve pattern coins were struck, consisting of the standard Flying Eagle obverse, a "scrawny eagle" pattern, and the Indian Head design, mated with four different wreaths for the reverse. Snowden made his choice of what design would be struck in 1859 from those patterns, and the sets were also sold to collectors. The Indian Head design was apparently prepared by April, as on the twelfth of that month, a Mr. Howard wrote to Snowden that "I have learned that a new pattern piece for the cent has been struck off at the Mint a head resembling that of the five dollar piece and on the reverse a shield at the top of the olive and oak wreath", and asking to purchase a specimen. Other numismatists also sought pieces: R. Coulton Davis, a Philadelphia druggist with ties to the Mint, wrote to Snowden in June informing him of a favorable story in a Boston newspaper, and Augustus B. Sage wrote to the Mint Director the same month, asking for a specimen for himself, and one for the newly founded American Numismatic Society.
According to Walter Breen, Snowden most likely chose the combination of the Indian Head and the laurel wreath because it had the lowest relief of any of the options, and could be expected to strike well. On November 4, 1858, Snowden wrote to Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb about the Indian Head design, and two days later wrote to Longacre, informing him that it was approved. Longacre was to prepare the necessary dies for production, which was to begin on January 1, 1859.
Design
Longacre advocated his Indian Head design in an August 21, 1858, letter to Snowden:By numismatic legend, the facial features of the goddess Liberty on the obverse of the Indian Head cent were based on the features of Longacre's daughter Sarah; the tale runs that she was at the mint one day when she tried on the headdress of one of a number of Native Americans who were visiting, and her father sketched her. However, Sarah Longacre was 30 years old and married in 1858, not 12 as in the tale, and Longacre himself stated that the face was based on a statue of Crouching Venus in Philadelphia on loan from the Vatican. He did often sketch his elder daughter, and there are resemblances between the depictions of Sarah and the various representations of Liberty on his coins of the 1850s. These tales were apparently extant at the time, as Snowden, writing to Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb in November 1858, denied that the coin was based "on any human features in the Longacre family". Lee F. McKenzie, in his 1991 article on Longacre, notes that any artist can be influenced by many things, but calls the story "essentially false".
Regardless of who posed for Longacre, the facial features of the "Indian" are essentially Caucasian, meaning that a Caucasian woman wears the headdress of a Native American man. Longacre had, in 1854, designed the three-dollar piece with a female with similar features but a more fanciful headdress, and adapted that design for the gold dollar. Officials were aware of this artistic license at the time of issue; Snowden, in his November 1858 letter to Cobb, characterizes the two earlier coins as "the artists at the Mint evidently not realizing the absurd incongruity of placing this most masculine attribute of the warrior brave on the head of a woman". Longacre would not be the last to juxtapose the features of a White woman with an Indian headdress reserved for men; Augustus Saint-Gaudens, for the Indian Head eagle, produced a similar design. Later issues depict more accurate Indians, including Bela Lyon Pratt's Indian Head gold pieces, the Buffalo nickel by James Earle Fraser, who worked from Native American models, and the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar, designed by Fraser and his wife Laura.
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule had mixed emotions about the Indian Head cent: "Longacre enriched the mythology of American coinage in a pleasant if unpretentious fashion. Given his pattern half-dollar designs of 1859 as a yardstick, he could have done worse." In another comparison, Vermeule suggested, "far from a major creation aesthetically or iconographically, and far less attractive to the eye than the , the Indian head cent was at least to achieve the blessing of popular appeal. The coin became perhaps the most beloved and typically American of any piece great or small in the American series. Great art the coin was not, but it was one of the first products of the United States mints to achieve the common touch."
Production
Redesign and surplus (1859–1861)
Production of the Indian Head cent for commerce began at the start of 1859. As issued for circulation, the pieces differ in some particulars from the pattern 1858 cent of similar design; Longacre sharpened some details. The pattern coin had the laurel leaves in the reverse wreath in bunches of five leaves; the issued 1859 cent has them in bunches of six. Cents dated 1858 with the adopted reverse are known, were most likely struck in 1859, and are extremely rare.In 1860, the reverse of the cent was changed to feature an oak wreath and a narrow shield; such reverses are also known on 1859-dated pieces struck as patterns. According to Richard Snow in his guidebook to Flying Eagle and Indian Head cents, this was not due to problems with the "Laurel Wreath" reverse design used in 1859, as full details survive on many extant pieces. Walter Breen, however, suggested that the feathers and curls on the obverse did not strike as well as they would later, and that "this may account for Snowden's decision to change the design again". David Lange, in his history of the Mint, states that it was to give the coin, quoting Snowden, "more National character". All 1859 cents and some from 1860 have the cutoff of Liberty's bust on the obverse end with a point; most 1860 cents and all later issues have it rounded.
Tens of millions of Flying Eagle cents had been issued in exchange for the old American coppers and small Spanish silver. The Spanish silver was still flowing into the Mint in early 1859 and, at Snowden's urging, Congress on March 3 of that year extended the redemption of these foreign coins, legal tender in the US until 1857, for another two years. Neil Carothers, in his work on small-denomination currency, challenged this decision as unnecessary—deprived of legal tender status, the remaining Spanish silver would have been eliminated through sales to banks for their bullion. Those who brought the old coins to the Mint received cents for them, at first Flying Eagle, and then Indian Head. In the year following the renewal, some forty million Indian Head cents were issued, meaning nearly a hundred million copper-nickel cents had entered commerce since 1857. As the coin did not circulate in the South and West due to prejudice against base-metal money, they choked commerce. No one had to take them; no law made them legal tender. At Snowden's urging Congress in June 1860 ended the exchange. Nevertheless, as Snowden admitted in his annual report that year, there were too many cents in circulation. In October 1860, The Bankers' Magazine and Statistical Register reported that there were ten million cents in commerce in New York City above what was needed, and if anyone wished to order in bulk, they could be purchased at a discount.