The 2012 Star-Spangled Banner Silver Dollar

In the late summer of 1814, the War of 1812 was going badly for the United States. British troops had just burned the Capitol and the White House. Next on the list was Baltimore — and the gateway to Baltimore's harbor was a star-shaped brick fort called Fort McHenry.

On the night of September 13, British warships bombarded the fort for some twenty-five hours. A 35-year-old lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched it all from a truce ship in the harbor, where he had gone to negotiate a prisoner's release. He could not tell who was winning in the dark. Then morning came, and the fort's enormous garrison flag — fifteen stars and fifteen stripes — was still there. Key scrawled the lines that became "The Star-Spangled Banner."

That poem became the official national anthem in 1931. And in 2010, Congress voted to mark its 200th anniversary with a coin. The Star-Spangled Banner Commemorative Coin Act — Public Law 111-232, signed by President Obama on August 16, 2010 — authorized a gold $5 piece and this silver dollar, struck in 2012 for a single year only.

The obverse — the heads side — does not show Key. It shows Liberty. She strides forward holding the historic fifteen-star, fifteen-stripe banner aloft, with Fort McHenry behind her. It is the flag as it actually was in 1814, before later states added their stars and the design settled at thirteen stripes. The image was designed by Joel Iskowitz and sculpted by U.S. Mint engraver Phebe Hemphill.

The reverse — the tails side — does something quieter and cleverer. Instead of staying in 1814, it leaps to the present: a modern American flag, waving. The idea is the thread between then and now — the same banner, two hundred years on. It carries the legally required inscriptions ONE DOLLAR, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The reverse was designed by William C. Burgard III and sculpted by Don Everhart.

One thing collectors mix up: Key's famous opening line, "O say can you see," in his own handwriting, appears on the program's gold $5 coin — not on this silver dollar. The dollar's reverse is the modern flag.

This is a modern commemorative, so there are no rare overdates or mint errors driving the market — every coin was sold straight from the Mint in protective packaging. What shapes value here is simple: how many were made, and in what finish.

The Mint could have struck up to 500,000 silver dollars. It came nowhere close. Just 169,981 proofs and 41,679 uncirculated pieces were sold — only about 211,000 of the half-million allowed. The uncirculated version is the scarcer of the two by a wide margin, with fewer than a quarter the proof's numbers, and that scarcity is the first thing a collector looks at.

For graded examples, the premium attaches to the very top of the scale. A coin sold by the Mint usually grades high to begin with, so the difference between a common grade and a flawless one — a "70" in the two big grading services' systems — is where condition pays. Population reports for the perfect grades are the figure worth checking before you buy.