The Two-Cent Piece

1864–1873

The two-cent piece is easy to overlook. It was a small bronze coin of an odd denomination that lasted only ten years and left almost no mark on daily commerce. Yet it carries one distinction that outlived it by a century and a half: it was the first United States coin ever to bear the words "In God We Trust." The motto that now appears on every American coin and banknote began on this short-lived piece, struck in the middle of a civil war.

Both facts — the coin and the motto — grew out of the same emergency. By 1864 the war had swept ordinary money out of circulation, and the government was casting about for anything that would fill the gap and for language that would speak to a frightened country. The two-cent piece was one answer to the first problem and the accidental vehicle for an answer to the second.

It did its job, briefly and well, and then the emergency passed and took the coin with it.

Coins that disappeared

The Civil War produced a strange kind of shortage: not of goods alone, but of money itself. As the outcome of the war grew uncertain, people hoarded anything with intrinsic value, and gold and silver coins vanished from circulation almost entirely, pulled into hiding or melted or simply held. Even the copper-nickel cent became scarce enough to disappear.

What was left was a country trying to make change with whatever it could. Postage stamps were pressed into service as money until they disintegrated in people's pockets, which prompted a government-issued fractional currency — paper notes in denominations as small as a few cents. Merchants and towns, meanwhile, struck their own copper tokens by the millions to fill the gap in the till. It was an improvised, makeshift money supply, patched together from stamps, private tokens, and small paper, and it worked badly. The everyday machinery of buying and selling had seized up for want of small coins, and the Mint's task was to put something back into people's hands that they would actually spend rather than hoard.

A minister's letter

The motto arrived by a separate road that happened to cross the coin's. In the anxious first winter of the war, a Pennsylvania clergyman named Mark Watkinson wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, urging that the nation's coins acknowledge God in some form — a gesture, he felt, that the moment demanded. Chase was receptive. He instructed the Mint's director, James Pollock, to prepare a suitable motto, and the wording went through several candidates — "God Our Trust" and "God and Our Country" among them — before it arrived at "In God Is Our Trust," which was trimmed to the four words that have been on American money ever since.

Congress authorized the new motto in the spring of 1864, in the same legislation that authorized the two-cent piece, and the coin became the place the words first appeared. A minister's private letter and a wartime coinage bill met on a small bronze disc, and the result long outlasted both the coin that introduced it and the war that prompted it.

Why bronze mattered

The choice of metal was the practical heart of the thing. The two-cent piece was struck in bronze — a base-metal alloy that cost far less than the coin's face value — and that was precisely the point. A coin whose metal is cheaper than its stated value gives no one a reason to hoard it or melt it; it stays in circulation and does the work money is supposed to do.

Silver and gold had failed at exactly this during the war, because the metal in them invited hoarding: a coin carrying a full dollar of silver is a store of value first and a means of exchange second, and in an uncertain year people kept it. Bronze reversed the incentive. It could not be hoarded at a profit, so it would circulate freely when precious metal would not. The idea was not unique to the two-cent piece — the same legislation had already lightened the one-cent coin into a comparable bronze composition, and the Mint was, in effect, rebuilding the nation's small change out of a metal no one had a reason to hide. The two-cent piece carried that logic one denomination higher. Its design came from James Longacre, the Mint's long-serving engraver, who set a shield on the obverse, with the new motto on a scroll above it, and the plain words of the denomination in a wheat wreath on the reverse.

Two mottoes in one year

The coin's best-known quirk appeared in its very first year. The dies for the 1864 two-cent piece were made in two forms, differing in the size of the motto's lettering — the scarcer "Small Motto" and the common "Large Motto." The distinction is subtle, a matter of the shape and spacing of a few letters, but it gave the series its one enduring point of interest for collectors and a reason to look closely at a coin most people never looked at twice. The Small Motto came first, early in the year, before the Mint enlarged the lettering for the bulk of the run — so the scarcer variety is also, in a sense, the coin as it was first conceived, revised within months into the version almost everyone would actually handle.

A short, useful life

Having answered an emergency, the two-cent piece did not survive the emergency's end. As the war closed and normal coinage returned to circulation, its odd denomination lost its purpose. New small coins arrived to crowd it out — a three-cent piece in nickel in 1865, a five-cent nickel the year after — and against those more familiar denominations the two-cent piece, always an awkward size wedged between the cent and the nickel, had little to recommend it. The public had never warmed to a two-cent coin, and once it was no longer needed the denomination was allowed to fade.

Production fell steeply year by year until, by the early 1870s, the coin that had poured out by the tens of millions in its first seasons was being struck in only token quantities, and its final year was a proof-only issue for collectors rather than a coinage for commerce — a currency by then in name alone. The Coinage Act of 1873, which reorganized much of American money, swept the denomination away entirely. It had lasted ten years.

Why it matters

The two-cent piece is a small coin with a large footnote. Nothing about its size, its denomination, or its decade of service would earn it much attention; what earns it attention is that a motto now stamped on billions of coins and notes began here, on a wartime stopgap that the country discarded as soon as it could.

That is the coin's real lesson — that lasting things often start in unglamorous places. A minister's letter, a metal chosen because no one would hoard it, and a denomination invented to patch a shortage combined, briefly, into a coin that mattered far less than the four words it happened to carry first. The two-cent piece is gone. The sentence it introduced is everywhere.