The Shield Nickel

1866–1883

For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States ran out of money.

Not out of wealth — out of coins. The Civil War had taught Americans that metal was trustworthy and paper was not, and so the country did what frightened people always do: it hoarded. Gold went first, then silver, then copper. By the middle of the war a shopkeeper making change had almost nothing to make it with. Customers paid in postage stamps, in tokens issued by merchants themselves, and eventually in the small, flimsy paper notes the Treasury printed in denominations of three, five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents — notes the public called shinplasters, and disliked accordingly.

The coin that eventually filled that hole was ugly, difficult, short-lived, and almost universally disparaged. It also invented the American nickel.

The man who owned the metal

The reason a five-cent piece is made of nickel — and the reason Americans call it a nickel at all — comes down substantially to one industrialist.

Joseph Wharton was a Philadelphia Quaker with a talent for cornering things. By the 1860s he controlled effectively the entire domestic supply of refined nickel, drawn largely from a mine in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and he had a warehouse problem: enormous quantities of a metal with no large buyer. There was exactly one customer in America capable of consuming it at scale, and that customer was the United States Mint.

Wharton lobbied, and he lobbied well. He published pamphlets arguing the patriotic and practical virtues of nickel coinage. He cultivated congressmen. In 1865 Congress authorized a three-cent piece in copper-nickel, and the following year, in May of 1866, a five-cent piece in the same alloy — seventy-five percent copper, twenty-five percent nickel, five grams in weight.

It is worth being plain about what happened here. The composition of American pocket change was not settled by metallurgy or by public need alone. It was settled, in significant part, by a man with a great deal of nickel to sell. That the coin took his metal's name as its own is one of the more complete victories in the history of American lobbying.

The odd result was that for seven years the country carried two different five-cent coins at once: the old silver half dime, still being struck until 1873, and this new, thicker, harder thing that shared its value and nothing else.

The last work of a dying man

The design fell to James B. Longacre, Chief Engraver of the Mint, who had already given the country the Flying Eagle cent, the Indian Head cent, and the two-cent piece — the coin that first carried the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. He was sixty-eight, and he had less than three years to live.

For the obverse he reached back to the iconography of the war just ended: a heavy federal shield, crossed by a cross above and framed by laurel, with the motto arched overhead. The reverse carried a large numeral 5 ringed by thirteen stars, with rays radiating out between them. There was no portrait, no allegory, no Liberty. It was the only major circulating design of the era to put no face on the coin at all — a shield standing in for a nation that had just finished nearly destroying itself.

Longacre died on the first day of 1869, less than three years after the coin entered circulation. The shield nickel was his last.

A tombstone with a cross

The public hated it.

Contemporary critics described the obverse as funerary — the most famous jibe holding that it resembled a tombstone surmounted by a cross and overhung by weeping willows. The line has been credited for well over a century to Joseph Wharton himself, which would make it a remarkable piece of self-sabotage from the coin's own patron; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and it is probably wisest to treat it as the era's verdict rather than any one man's.

Either way the verdict stuck. The shield had been chosen as a symbol of union restored, but to a country that had just buried three-quarters of a million of its own, a cross rising above a shield in a wreath read less like victory than like a grave marker. The design was legible in exactly the way its makers had not intended.

The rumor of the Stars and Bars

There is a second criticism, quieter and considerably shakier, that has followed the coin ever since.

Some numismatists have looked at the reverse — thirteen stars with rays running between them — and seen the first Confederate national flag, the Stars and Bars, hidden inside a United States coin. From that reading grew the suggestion that someone with Southern sympathies had gotten into the Mint and encoded it there.

There is no evidence for this. It does not appear in contemporary complaint, it does not appear in Mint correspondence, and the arrangement of stars and rays around a central device was common decorative vocabulary long before the Confederacy existed. The reading belongs to collectors looking backward, not to the public that carried the coin. It survives because it is a good story, and because a nation that had just come apart was primed to find secession hiding in ordinary objects — which is itself the more interesting fact.

The coin that ate its own dies

Whatever the public thought of the design, the Mint had a harder problem: the coin was extraordinarily difficult to strike.

Copper-nickel is unforgiving. The alloy is hard, it flows reluctantly under pressure, and Longacre's design asked it to fill a deep, detailed shield on one face and sharp rays on the other. Dies cracked, chipped and shattered at a rate the Mint had not seen before. It is repeated throughout the numismatic literature that the shield nickel broke more dies than every other denomination combined — a claim that is difficult to verify from records and easy to believe from the coins themselves, which turn up cracked, doubled and misaligned with a frequency no other series of the period approaches.

The Mint's first response came fast. Early in 1867, barely a year into production, the rays were removed from the reverse entirely, leaving the stars alone around the numeral. The coin got plainer and the dies lasted longer.

For collectors this created the series' defining division — the With Rays coins of 1866 and early 1867, and everything after. It also created something rarer. Proofs of the 1867 With Rays design were struck in the narrow window before the change took effect, and only about twenty-five are believed to survive, an estimate drawn from known specimens rather than any recorded figure. It is among the most elusive proof coins of the American nineteenth century, and it exists at all only because the Mint gave up on the rays in a hurry.

Good enough to steal

A design nobody admired was nonetheless worth forging. Counterfeit shield nickels circulated in the 1870s, particularly around New York and New Jersey, some of them well enough made to pass unremarked through ordinary commerce.

The detail says something about the coin's real position. Whatever critics wrote about tombstones, five cents was meaningful money in the 1870s, and the shield nickel was doing the work the fractional notes had failed at. Counterfeiters do not bother with coins nobody uses.

The years it was barely made

Toward the end, the country stopped needing it. Enough nickels had been struck that demand collapsed, and in 1877 and 1878 the Mint produced none at all for circulation — those two years exist only as proofs, struck for collectors. Business-strike mintages stayed thin through the turn of the decade; 1880 is the scarcest of them by a wide margin.

Then, in 1883, the series ended mid-year. The Mint replaced it with Charles Barber's Liberty Head design, and for a few months in that single year both nickels came off the presses at once — the shield going out, the V coming in.

The dynasty it fathered

The shield nickel was struck for seventeen years, insulted for most of them, and retired without ceremony. And yet almost everything that followed descends from it.

The Liberty Head nickel inherited its denomination. The Buffalo nickel inherited that, and the same stubborn alloy that had wrecked Longacre's dies — which is why Buffalo nickels so often lose their dates. The Jefferson nickel, still in production, inherited all of it. The seventy-five/twenty-five copper-nickel composition that Joseph Wharton talked Congress into in 1866 is, apart from a brief wartime interruption in the 1940s, the composition of the five-cent piece in American pockets today.

That is a hundred and sixty years of continuity, running unbroken from a coin that was mocked as a headstone.

Why it matters

The shield nickel is the ugly duckling of American coinage, and it is usually told that way — a homely, awkward, badly behaved coin that nobody wanted and everybody replaced. The telling is accurate and it misses the point.

It was born because a nation frightened by its own war had stopped trusting paper. It was made of the metal it was made of because one man had a warehouse full of it and knew whom to talk to. It was designed by an engraver at the end of his career, in the visual language of a country still counting its dead, and read by that country as a grave marker. It broke its own dies. It was forged, curtailed, and discarded.

And it established the denomination, the alloy, and the name that America has used ever since. The dynasty did not begin with the buffalo or the Indian or Jefferson. It began with the tombstone.