Seated Liberty dollar
The Seated Liberty dollar was a dollar coin struck by the United States Mint from 1840 to 1873. It was the last silver coin of that denomination to be struck before passage of the Coinage Act of 1873, which temporarily ended production of the silver dollar for American commerce. The coin’s obverse is based on that of the Gobrecht dollar.
About Seated Liberty dollar in brief
The Seated Liberty dollar was a dollar coin struck by the United States Mint from 1840 to 1873. It was the last silver coin of that denomination to be struck before passage of the Coinage Act of 1873, which temporarily ended production of the silver dollar for American commerce. The coin’s obverse is based on that of the Gobrecht dollar, which had been minted experimentally from 1836 to 1839. In the late 1840s, the price of silver increased relative to gold because of an increase in supply of the latter caused by the California Gold Rush. In 1866, “In God We Trust” was added to the dollar following its introduction to United States coinage earlier in the decade. Seated liberty dollars were initially struck only at the Philadelphia Mint; in 1846, production began at the New Orleans facility. The Bureau of the Mint in the 1830s was undergoing a period of significant change, as new technologies were adopted. The Mint Act of 1792 made both gold and silver legal tender; specified weights of each was equal to a dollar. The US Mint struck gold andSilver coins only when depositors supplied metal, which was returned in the form of coin. The fluctuation of market prices for commodities meant that either precious metal would likely be overvalued in terms of the other, leading to hoarding and melting; in the decades after 1792, it was usually silver coins which met that fate. President Thomas Jefferson officially ordered all silver dollar mintage halted in 1806, though production had not occurred since 1804. Despite the approval to strike the coins, no silver dollars were minted until 1836.
The first steam machinery was introduced at the Mint; previously coins had been struck by muscle power. The Philadelphia Mint Director Robert M. Patterson engaged artists Titian Peale and Thomas Sully to create new designs for American coinage. In an August 1, 1835 letter, Sully proposed a design of Liberty on an obverse holding a boulder, topped by a pile of stones. He also asked that the natural eagle appear on the reverse of the coin appear in natural form, but was criticized for his choice of design. He then requested that the design appear on a boulder topped by the headgear given by the Romans to an emancipated slave. In August 1835, the design was approved by the US Mint, and the coin was struck in 1837. The mints at Dahlonega in Georgia, Charlotte in North Carolina, and at New Orleans in Louisiana would also strike silver coins, including the Seatedlibertydollar. The New Orleans mints only struck gold, catering to miners in the South who sought to deposit that metal, but in 1835 the Mint also struck silver coins including the mid-1835 mid-20th century SeatedLiberty dollar. In 1836, Mint Director Samuel Moore requested that President Andrew Jackson lift the restriction against dollar coin production; the president obliged in April of that year. The Mint adjusted the precious-metal content of US coins in 1834 and 1837 to achieve a balance whereby US coins remained in circulation alongside those of foreign nations.
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This page is based on the article Seated Liberty dollar published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
