James B. Longacre — the engraver they tried to fire for 25 years

James Barton Longacre was born on a Pennsylvania farm in 1794 and ran away from it at twelve. His mother had died young; he could not get along with his stepmother, so he walked to Philadelphia and apprenticed himself to a bookseller. That should have been the end of the story — a farm boy filing books in a city shop.

But he could draw. By 1813 his employer released him to learn engraving instead, and Longacre trained under George Murray, one of the best banknote engravers in the country. Banknote work is exacting: every line is cut by hand into metal, in reverse, with no margin for a slip. It taught him a portraitist's eye and a craftsman's patience.

He went out on his own in 1819 and made his name not on coins but on paper. He engraved portraits of the Founders for John Binns' famous broadside of the Declaration of Independence. In the 1830s he and the New York artist James Herring published the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans — volumes of engraved portraits of the men who had built the young republic. By 1844, Longacre was one of the most respected portrait engravers in the United States.

Then the U.S. Mint's chief engraver, Christian Gobrecht, died. Longacre wanted the job, and a powerful friend — Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina — helped him get it. President John Tyler appointed him the fourth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint in September 1844. He had almost no experience cutting coin dies. That gap, and the politics behind his hiring, would haunt him for years.

Longacre walked into a Mint that did not want him. Two men ran the place day to day: Director Robert Maskell Patterson and Chief Coiner Franklin Peale. Both resented the political muscle that had won Longacre his post — and Peale had a private reason. He ran a profitable medal business on the side, using Mint machinery and Mint labor. A working chief engraver with his own ideas threatened that racket.

So they tried to push him out. They questioned his competence, blocked his access to equipment, and at one point Patterson pressed to hand Longacre's design work to an outside engraver — a path that would have made the chief engraver's job pointless. Twice in 1849 and 1850, Patterson moved to have Longacre removed. Longacre fought back the only way he could: he went over their heads, to the Treasury Secretary, and made his case directly. He kept his job. Peale was eventually fired in 1854 once the scale of his private dealing became clear.

The crucible of all this was the gold double eagle — the new twenty-dollar coin authorized in 1849 to soak up California gold-rush bullion. Longacre had to produce three different obverses (the obverse is the "heads" side) before a single 1849-dated pattern could be struck. When he tried to finish the reverse, his plaster model and the electrotype made from it were both destroyed in the transfer process — a failure Longacre believed was Peale's sabotage. He had kept a backup of his plaster, and rebuilt the work by his own hand. The Library Company of Philadelphia, which holds the Longacre family papers, records that he completed the double eagle "to the detriment of his health."

That experience set the pattern for his style. Longacre worked alone, by hand, on coins of high relief — the design standing up boldly from the surface. It is what gives his work its richness, and it is also what got him in trouble again and again. Beautiful relief is hard to strike: the press can't always push metal into the deepest parts of the die, and dies crack under the strain. His gold dollar and Shield nickel both had to be redesigned for exactly this reason. The art kept colliding with the machine.

His other signature was American symbolism. He built a "cereal wreath" of wheat, corn, cotton, and tobacco — crops of North and South — for the reverses of his gold coins, and reused it for decades. Later engravers, from George Morgan to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, drew on the vocabulary Longacre helped establish.