The 2012 Star-Spangled Banner $5 Gold Coin

The summer of 1814 was a low point for the young United States. British troops had marched into Washington and burned the Capitol and the President's house. Baltimore was next — and it was the prize, a busy port the British wanted to break.

On the night of September 13, 1814, British warships bombarded Fort McHenry, the harbor's guardian, for some 25 hours. Watching from a ship in the harbor was Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who had rowed out under a flag of truce to negotiate a prisoner's release and then been held until the attack was over. When the shelling stopped at dawn on September 14 and Key saw the fort's huge garrison flag still flying, he started writing on the back of a letter. The poem he finished — "Defence of Fort M'Henry" — was set to a popular tune and, over the following century, became "The Star-Spangled Banner." Congress made it the national anthem in 1931.

This coin exists to mark the 200th anniversary of that night. Congress authorized it in Public Law 111-232, which directed the Treasury to strike gold and silver coins for the bicentennial of the writing of the anthem. The $5 gold piece is the small, expensive half of that program — a war story compressed into a coin the size of a dime.

The two sides of this coin tell two halves of one story: the fight, and the words it produced.

The obverse — the heads side — carries the theme "The Battles at Sea During the War of 1812." It shows a naval scene: an American sailing ship under full canvas in the foreground, with a damaged British ship falling away behind it. It was designed by Donna Weaver, an artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program (a roster of outside artists the Mint draws on for designs), and sculpted by Mint sculptor-engraver Joseph Menna. (To "sculpt" a coin is to turn a flat drawing into the three-dimensional relief that the dies — the hardened steel stamps — actually strike into the metal.)

The reverse — the tails side — is the quieter, more surprising side. It reproduces the opening words of the anthem, "O say can you see," rendered in handwriting meant to evoke Francis Scott Key's own, set against a field of 15 stars and 15 stripes — the count the American flag carried in 1814. That design is by Richard Masters, also sculpted by Joseph Menna. Putting a man's handwriting on a coin is unusual; it makes the reverse feel less like a monument and more like the scrap of paper the words were first written on.

Here is the part that makes collectors pay attention: almost nobody bought this coin. The Mint was allowed to strike up to 100,000 of them. It ended up selling 7,006 in uncirculated finish and 18,299 in proof — together, just over a quarter of the ceiling.

That low take-up is the whole collecting story. Modern U.S. gold commemoratives are routinely scarce because they're sold at a premium over their gold value for a single year, then never made again — but even by that standard, the uncirculated 2012 Star-Spangled Banner is one of the lowest-mintage modern gold commemoratives the Mint has produced. The uncirculated coin (a regular business-quality strike, here sold to collectors rather than spent) is the harder of the two to find; the proof (struck on polished dies for mirror-like fields, the showcase finish) is more than twice as common but still a small number.

Two practical notes for a newcomer. First, much of any one coin's value tracks the gold price — there's roughly a quarter-ounce of gold in it, so it's never "just" a collectible. Second, condition matters at the top: these were sold individually in Mint packaging, so high-grade examples are common, and the premium concentrates in the rare flawless grades and in the scarcer uncirculated version. The surcharge — $35 from every coin — went to the Maryland War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission, which is part of why each coin cost well above its metal value when new.