James Barton Longacre

James Barton Longacre was born on a farm in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on August 11, 1794. His mother died when he was young, and after his father remarried, home turned bitter. At twelve he simply left — walking out for Philadelphia to make his own way.

He landed in a bookstore as an apprentice. The owner noticed the boy could draw and let him out of his contract early so he could learn engraving instead — the craft of cutting an image into a metal plate so it can be printed or struck. Longacre apprenticed at a busy Philadelphia firm, then opened his own shop in 1819. He had no formal art schooling. He taught himself by doing.

For two decades he was one of the country's best portrait engravers. His most ambitious project, the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (published 1834–1839), sent him traveling to sketch the famous faces of the young republic. The work was admired; the timing was ruinous. The financial Panic of 1837 wiped out the venture's finances and pushed him into bankruptcy. He clawed back through banknote engraving.

Then luck — and the right friends — intervened. When the Mint's Chief Engraver, Christian Gobrecht, died in 1844, Longacre had a powerful backer in South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun. On September 16, 1844, President John Tyler appointed him the fourth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint. He had never cut a coin die in his life. His enemies inside the Mint never let him forget it.

The Philadelphia Mint Longacre walked into was a small, territorial place run by two powerful men: Director Robert M. Patterson and Chief Coiner Franklin Peale. Peale ran a private medal business using Mint equipment, and a freshly appointed engraver who could do that work himself was a threat to the arrangement. Longacre, the historian Q. David Bowers wrote, "found that he had entered a hornet's nest of intrigue, politics, and infighting."

The trap sprang in 1849. Congress had just authorized two new gold coins — a tiny gold dollar and a huge twenty-dollar piece, the double eagle — and ordered Longacre to design both. By his own account, Peale obstructed him at every turn. A model was destroyed in the workshop. He was forced to work from an imperfect cast. He cut the dies — the hardened steel stamps that strike the coin's image — entirely by hand, and when they cracked during hardening, Peale rejected the replacements as "too deeply engraved" to strike properly.

It was, the evidence suggests, a setup. Patterson wrote to the Treasury Secretary demanding Longacre be fired for incompetence — he had already lined up a replacement. Longacre did the one thing his rivals didn't expect: in February 1850 he went over their heads, traveled to Washington, and laid the whole story before Treasury Secretary William M. Meredith in person. He kept his job. The double eagle went into mass production in March 1850 — and the surviving coins show none of the striking flaws Peale claimed. As one historian dryly noted, the coin "would be level in a stack."

Patterson retired in 1851. Peale was fired in 1854 for using the Mint for private gain. With his tormentors gone, Longacre finally had a free hand — and the run of designs that made his name poured out. He worked in a recognizable American grammar: a Liberty wearing a Native American feathered headdress, agricultural wreaths of corn, wheat, cotton and tobacco instead of the European laurel, plain shields and bold Roman numerals. Critics of his own era found it stiff. Collectors today find it unmistakably his.

He kept working to the end. He designed the Shield nickel at seventy-two. A Mint colleague, the assayer William DuBois, wrote of it that "it is truly pleasing to see a man pass the life of three score and ten and yet be able to produce the same artistic works as in earlier days." Longacre died suddenly at his Philadelphia home on January 1, 1869, still Chief Engraver, aged seventy-four.