William Barber

William Barber learned his trade the old way: at his father's elbow. Born in London on May 2, 1807, he was taught engraving by his father, John Barber, and spent his early career cutting dies and decorating silver tableware — the painstaking, miniature work of putting fine detail onto hard metal.

In September 1852 he emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, where he worked in the same line for about a decade. His skill eventually reached James B. Longacre — the man who had designed the Indian Head cent and the Liberty Head double eagle, and who was then Engraver of the Mint (the official who cuts the master dies a nation's coins are struck from). Around 1865 Longacre hired Barber as his assistant in Philadelphia.

When Longacre died in early 1869, the top job was open. On January 20, 1869, President Andrew Johnson appointed Barber the fifth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint. He would hold the post for ten years, until his death — and almost immediately he brought in his own son, Charles E. Barber, to work beside him. That choice would shape the rest of his career.

Here is the strange shape of Barber's legacy: his most important coin was meant to leave the country, and most of his most beautiful coins never left the Mint.

The coin that left was the Trade Dollar. After Congress authorized it in the Coinage Act of 1873, the Mint adopted Barber's design — a seated Liberty offering an olive branch, facing left toward the sea, with an eagle on the reverse. It was a deliberate piece of commercial diplomacy. American silver interests wanted to break into the markets of China and the Far East, where merchants trusted the big, heavy Mexican silver dollar. So Barber's coin was built to beat that rival on weight: 420 grains of .900-fine silver, slightly heavier than a standard U.S. silver dollar. Millions crossed the Pacific. Chinese merchants stamped them with small chopmarks — punches that vouched for the silver — and a chopmarked Trade Dollar is, in effect, a coin wearing the signatures of the men who trusted it.

The coins that didn't leave the Mint are the patterns — pattern meaning a trial coin, struck to test a design or an idea that may never go into production. The Mint kept ordering grand ones from Barber, and the country kept saying no:

• The $50 Half Union of 1877 — a gold piece worth fifty dollars, the largest U.S. coin ever seriously proposed, adapting Longacre's Liberty Head. Only a tiny number of trial pieces were struck; two gold examples survive, both in the Smithsonian. It remains one of the most famous patterns the Mint ever made.
• The goloid metric dollars (from 1878) — coins in "goloid," a patented gold-silver-copper alloy, with their metal recipe spelled out in grams right on the coin. The idea was to put America on a metric, internationally compatible money standard. The alloy had a fatal flaw: it looked just like ordinary 90% silver, so no one could tell real from fake without a chemistry set.
• The metric double eagle, or quintuple stella (1879) — a $20 gold pattern whose Liberty descends from Longacre's double eagle, ringed with its metric formula in grams and the unusual Latin motto DEO EST GLORIA ("To God is the glory"). Only about five are known, and it is one of the supreme rarities of the U.S. pattern series.

Barber's style was clean, careful, and conservative — a die-sinker's precision more than a sculptor's drama. Auction cataloguers have been candid about it: one Heritage lot flatly calls his goloid metric dollar a "rather bland design." That is a fair read of the man. His gift was technical control of the die, not the bold relief later associated with the great American coin sculptors.

His decade also had a human grain of conflict running through it. In 1876, Mint Director Henry Linderman hired a young English engraver, George T. Morgan, as an assistant — without consulting his own Chief Engraver, and with Morgan reporting straight to Linderman. The two Barbers, father and son, were cold to the newcomer; William wanted Charles to succeed him, and saw Morgan as a threat to that plan. Accounts say Barber told Morgan there was no office space for him, leaving Morgan to do much of his work from a rooming house until Linderman ordered room be made. In late 1877 Linderman set Barber and Morgan against each other in a design contest for a new silver dollar. Morgan's entry won — and became the Morgan dollar, the most collected U.S. silver dollar of all. The friction eased only when Linderman retired in 1878.