Liberty Seated Dime

History

Mint Director Robert Maskell Patterson set the design in motion, having decided to move the coinage away from John Reich's Capped Bust work and admiring the seated Britannia figure used on British coins. He commissioned the painters Thomas Sully and Titian Peale to render a Seated Liberty concept and assigned the engraving to Christian Gobrecht, who at the time was serving as draughtsman and die sinker and as assistant to Engraver William Kneass, whom he succeeded in 1840. Dimes carried the motif from 1837 through 1891, the longest run of any design on a United States silver coin. It was never a fixed design: obverse stars arrived in 1838, drapery was added at Liberty's elbow and bustline in 1840, arrowheads flanked the date from 1853 to 1855 to mark a reduced weight standard, and in 1860 the stars gave way to UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the obverse. The Barber dime took over in 1892.

Details

Credit for the type is usually given to Gobrecht, though the finished coinage passed through several hands: Sully supplied the obverse rendering within Patterson's program, John Hughes executed the 1840 drapery modification, and James B. Longacre carried out the 1860 revision that moved the legend to the obverse. The alloy is 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, the diameter 17.9 mm, and the edge reeded. Weight was cut in 1853 as part of the arrows change, dropping from a standard reported at 41.20 to 41.25 grains, or 2.67 grams, to one reported at 38.40 to 38.42 grains, or 2.49 grams, and the lighter standard remained in force after the arrows were removed in 1856. Production took place at Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco. The Stars Obverse sub-type alone accounts for 42,962,915 business strikes across 1838 to 1853 and 1856 to 1860, against fewer than 1,500 proofs, while the 1853 With Arrows Philadelphia issue exceeded 12 million pieces on its own.

Features

Liberty sits on a rock, her head turned back over her right shoulder, her left hand holding a pole topped by a Liberty cap and her right hand steadying a shield propped against the rock. From 1838 through 1859, and at San Francisco in 1860, thirteen stars ring the figure; dies from 1840 onward show drapery between the left arm and thigh and additional cloth over the bustline. Gobrecht's reverse places the denomination inside a wreath of berries, slightly heavier in the post-1838 form than on the earliest dies, with the country name shifting to the obverse in 1860 and leaving the wreath alone on the reverse. Among named varieties, the final year produced an 1891-O struck from a die with the mintmark punched over a horizontal O, a scarce piece even in circulated grades, and an 1891 doubled die obverse. The 1844 dime carries the long-standing nickname Orphan Annie, a story traceable to the 1947 first edition of the Red Book.

Notable facts

• The 1853 weight reduction responded to hoarding of silver coins once bullion value passed face value, and the arrowheads served as a public signal of which pieces to turn in for the new standard.
• Large quantities of pre-1853 heavy-standard silver were surrendered and recoined into the lighter half dimes, dimes, quarters and half dollars.
• The same 1947 Red Book edition recorded a mintage of 72,500 for the 1844 dime.
• Standard key dates for the series include 1844, 1845-O and 1846, along with several San Francisco issues.
• In worn grades the dimes of the 1840s survive roughly in proportion to their mintages, but in Uncirculated all of them are scarce and the New Orleans issues are, almost without exception, extreme rarities.
• No collector is known to have assembled a complete set of Liberty Seated dimes in Uncirculated condition, with the obstacles concentrated in the first decade of the series.
• A type collector faces little difficulty locating an example in Good through Extremely Fine, with About Uncirculated and Uncirculated pieces somewhat harder but not rare.