The August 1866 edition of the American Journal of Numismatics referred to it as “the ugliest of all known coins,” which was actually a kinder assessment than that rendered by a reader in the following month’s issue who wrote, “The motto ‘In God we Trust’ is very opportune, for the inventor of this coin may rest assured that the devil will never forgive him.” For some, the stars and bars on the “Shield Nickel” evoked the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag, and the intricate design caused production problems as the hard metal damaged the dies used in the minting process. The approved design-with a Union shield surrounded by laurel wreaths on the front and a large numeral “5” surrounded by 13 stars and bands of rays on the back-hardly received praise itself. Several designs were proposed for the original nickel, including one with a bust of Abraham Lincoln that was rejected out of concern that it wouldn’t be particularly popular in the South. Not surprisingly, Wharton ultimately made plenty of coin from the new coin, so much so that in 1881 he donated money to establish the first business school in the United States-the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton’s friends in Congress not only agreed to the proposal on May 16, 1866, but even increased the weight of the new five-cent coin so that it required even more nickel. He had taken over a nickel mine outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1863, and refined the metal at his American Nickel Works in Camden, New Jersey. Of course, the businessman had just a bit of a vested interest in the issue considering that he held a virtual monopoly on the production of nickel in the United States. Wharton doggedly lobbied his many friends in Congress to begin striking a second five-cent coin made from nickel. As American industrialist Joseph Wharton argued, by using cheaper nickel and copper, the new five-cent coins could be bigger than the half-dismes. The small silver coins were difficult enough to keep track of in good times, let alone when they began to vanish from circulation. The silver “half-disme” (pronounced “half-dime” from an Old French word meaning a “tenth”) was the first coin produced by the federal government, and according to the United States Mint, the metal for the initial pieces struck in 1795 may have come directly from George and Martha Washington’s melted silverware. The following year, Congress began to debate whether to mint a nickel-based five-cent coin even though the United States already had a five-cent coin in circulation-in fact, it had been minting one for seven decades. Starting in 1859, the United States Mint used a nickel and copper blend to produce its one-cent pieces, and in 1865 Congress authorized the federal government to use a similar composition for its new three-cent coin. The paper money, however, proved difficult to manage, and Congress soon turned to a less expensive metal for minting its coins-nickel.Īmerica’s first “nickels” were actually pennies. So many coins were taken out of circulation that Congress responded by authorizing the production of fractional currency notes, some with denominations as low as three cents. In addition to eviscerating hundreds of thousands of lives, the Civil War devastated the monetary supply of the United States as fearful Americans hoarded gold and silver coins for the value of their metals.
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