George T. Morgan: the Englishman who drew America's Liberty

In 1876 the U.S. Mint did something it rarely did: it went shopping for talent overseas. The Director of the Mint, Henry Linderman, wanted fresh blood for the engraving department — and he didn't trust his own men to provide it. So he wrote to C.W. Fremantle, the deputy master of London's Royal Mint, asking for "a first-class die-sinker." Fremantle's recommendation was a thirty-year-old engraver who had, in his words, "made himself a considerable name" in England but had few chances to use it. His name was George Thomas Morgan.

Morgan was a Midlands craftsman, born in Bilston, England, on November 24, 1845. He trained at art school in Birmingham, won a scholarship to the National Art Training School in South Kensington — the institution that would become the Royal College of Art — and learned his trade cutting dies for the London medal house of John Pinches. A die is the hardened steel stamp that strikes a coin's image into blank metal; cutting one by hand, in mirror-image and sunk below the surface, is the whole art of the engraver. Morgan was good at it.

He sailed into Philadelphia on October 9, 1876, on a six-month trial. He arrived into an awkward situation. The Mint already had a Chief Engraver, William Barber, and Barber had a son, Charles, working alongside him — a family that expected to inherit the department. Linderman had effectively brought in an outsider to compete with them on their own ground. The tension that defined Morgan's American career was baked in from his first day.

The coin that made Morgan's name was forced into being by politics. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 ordered the Treasury to buy millions of dollars of silver every month and turn it into coins — a sop to silver-mining states and farmers who wanted more money in circulation. The country suddenly needed a new silver dollar, and fast. Morgan's design won.

For the obverse — the heads side — Morgan refused the usual route of inventing an idealized goddess. He wanted a real American face. After rejecting several candidates, his friend the painter Thomas Eakins pointed him to a young Philadelphia schoolteacher, Anna Willess Williams. She sat for five sessions in November 1876, reluctantly, and only on the condition that her name stay secret. Morgan declared her profile the most perfect he had seen in England or America. He crowned her with a Phrygian cap — the ancient symbol of a freed slave, and so of liberty itself — and tucked wheat and cotton into her hair for the farms of North and South. The reverse carries an eagle Morgan drew from studying live bald eagles.

Williams's secret didn't last. Her identity leaked soon after the dollar was struck on March 11, 1878, and the press dubbed her "the silver dollar girl." The fame, by all accounts, troubled her; she went on teaching for decades. The coin, struck from 1878 to 1904 and revived for one year in 1921, became the bedrock of American coin collecting — the single most chased U.S. silver dollar there is.

Morgan's signature was the human face. Where many nineteenth-century engravers gave Liberty a stiff, classical mask, Morgan modeled from life and gave her warmth — a real profile, softly lit, with detail in the hair and a calm, modern expression. You can see the same hand in his finest pattern coins, the trial pieces a mint strikes to test a design before it ever reaches your pocket. The 1879 Schoolgirl dollar — Liberty in a beaded hairband, hair flowing loose — is widely held to be one of the most beautiful designs the U.S. Mint never adopted.

His career was shadowed by the Barbers. The two camps worked in parallel for years, and sometimes head to head. The clearest example is the experimental $4 gold "Stella" of 1879: Charles Barber drew the Flowing Hair version of Liberty, Morgan drew the rival Coiled Hair version — two engravers, two heads, one coin. Yet when William Barber died in 1879, it was Charles Barber, not Morgan, who was appointed Chief Engraver in 1880. Morgan, the more celebrated designer, stayed an assistant.

He waited. It was only when Charles Barber died in February 1917 that Morgan — by then 71 — finally became the seventh Chief Engraver of the United States Mint. He held the post for the last eight years of his life, designed the reverses of the Columbian half dollar and the McKinley Birthplace Memorial gold dollar, and died in Germantown, Philadelphia, on January 4, 1925, still in office.