The Liberty Head Nickel

1883–1913

In the spring of 1883, a man walks into a shop, picks out a five-cent cigar, and sets a shining gold coin on the counter. The clerk sees the size, sees the gold, sees a familiar profile of Liberty — and hands back four dollars and ninety-five cents in change, certain he's just made change for a five-dollar gold piece.

But he hasn't. The coin was never gold, and it was never worth five dollars. It was a brand-new five-cent nickel, freshly plated, and it had just made its owner a small fortune, one cigar at a time.

That con was possible because of a single missing word — and it's only the first of the strange tales carried by one of the most story-soaked coins America ever made: the Liberty Head nickel.

Barber's clean design

The coin was born out of frustration with the one before it. For seventeen years, Americans had carried the Shield nickel, a busy, cluttered little coin that the Mint itself struggled to strike cleanly. By the early 1880s, they wanted something better, and the job fell to the Mint's chief engraver, Charles Barber — a proud, prickly man whose name would attach to a whole generation of American coins.

Barber gave the nickel a clean, classical profile of Liberty, ringed by thirteen stars for the original states. And on the back, instead of spelling out the value, he placed a large Roman numeral V — five — inside a wreath of corn, wheat, and cotton.

The missing word

That elegant Roman "V" was the flaw that launched a thousand swindles. Because Barber's reverse said "V," and "United States of America," and "E Pluribus Unum" — but nowhere did it say the word "cents." And the new nickel was almost exactly the size of the five-dollar gold half eagle, with a similar Liberty on the front. To a busy or trusting merchant, a nickel lightly washed in gold could pass for a five-dollar gold coin. The difference in value was five dollars against five cents — a hundred to one.

The fraud spread fast. Within just nine days of the coin's release, the Secret Service was so alarmed it issued a public warning, calling the new nickel dangerous and cautioning that a thin coat of gold could fool the public. By that spring, arrests were happening across the country — California, St. Louis, Louisiana, Nashville, Boston. This was never one clever criminal; it was a nationwide rush of opportunists, all exploiting the same missing word.

The man who may never have existed

But it's one man who became legend. His name, the story goes, was Josh Tatum — a deaf-mute peddler who supposedly had a thousand nickels gold-plated and worked his way across New England, buying cheap goods and pocketing the change. And here's the twist that made the tale immortal: when he was finally hauled into court, so the story goes, he walked free — because he had never once said the coin was gold. He simply laid it down and accepted whatever change he was given. He couldn't speak, so he could not have lied. Some even claim this is the origin of the phrase "you're just joshing me."

It's a wonderful story. And it is almost certainly not true. No newspaper of the day, no court record, no census entry has ever been found for Josh Tatum. Historians think he may be pure folklore, or a blend of several real swindlers stitched into one unforgettable character. The man may be a myth — but the gold-plated coins, the "Racketeer Nickels," were absolutely real, and a few genuine ones still survive today.

CENTS

The Mint reacted with real embarrassment and real speed. The superintendent traveled to Washington to defend the design, pointing out that the little three-cent piece also used a Roman numeral without the word "cents" and nobody had gilded those. His argument went nowhere.

Within weeks, Barber was ordered back to his workbench to redo the reverse — and this time he added, in plain letters at the bottom, the word CENTS. On June 26th, 1883, the corrected nickel went out, and the "centless" version was retired after just a few months.

A rumor of scarcity, and a glut

And here the American public did something delightful. Word spread — false, as it turned out — that the Treasury was going to recall the "no cents" nickels and that they'd become rare and valuable. So people hoarded them by the fistful, squirreling the centless coins away in drawers and jars, convinced they were sitting on a windfall.

The recall never came. The joke, in a way, was on them: so many were saved that the first-year "no cents" nickel remains one of the easiest dates in the series to find, while the "with cents" version that people actually spent and wore out is harder to find in nice shape. A rumor of scarcity created a glut.

The coin that ran the machine age

For nearly thirty years after that rocky start, the Liberty Head nickel simply went to work. And its timing was perfect, because America was falling in love with a new invention: the coin-operated machine. Slot machines, vending machines, player pianos, penny arcades — the nickel was the coin that made the automated age run.

This was the era the "nickelodeon" got its name, the five-cent theater where a single Liberty nickel bought you a moving picture. That humble five-cent piece, once the tool of con men, became the coin of cheap entertainment and everyday convenience for a rising industrial nation.

Five coins that were never supposed to exist

The coin was replaced in 1913 by the Buffalo nickel. And that should have been the end of the story. Except for one final, spectacular mystery — maybe the greatest in all of American coin collecting.

Officially, the Mint struck no Liberty Head nickels dated 1913. The design had been retired. And yet, five of them exist. Five 1913 Liberty Head nickels, struck in secret, almost certainly by a Mint employee named Samuel Brown — who, in a move of breathtaking nerve, later placed advertisements offering to buy the very coins he is believed to have made, so he could "discover" them and reveal his hoard without raising suspicion. No records, no authorization, just five phantom coins that were never supposed to exist.

Those five nickels became the most famous coins in the country. They passed through the hands of eccentric collectors; one owner died in a car crash and his specimen went missing for decades before turning up in a closet, once wrongly dismissed as a fake. One of the five has sold at auction for more than four million dollars — making a single five-cent piece one of the most valuable coins on Earth. A denomination born from a con man's trick ended its life as the ultimate prize.

Why it matters

So think about the whole arc of this little coin. A missing word that turned nickels into counterfeit gold. A deaf peddler who may never have existed, immortalized anyway. A public that hoarded the wrong coin over a rumor. The five-cent piece that powered the slot machines and the first movie houses. And five forbidden coins, struck in the shadows, that became a legend.

That is the Liberty Head nickel — the V nickel — proof that in numismatics, the smallest coins so often carry the biggest stories.