The Flying Eagle Cent: America's First Small Penny

By the 1850s, the American cent was a problem. It was a slab of pure copper the size of a half dollar — heavy, dark, and increasingly unloved. Worse, the price of copper had climbed so high that the Mint was losing money on every cent it struck. A coin is supposed to be worth a little more than the metal in it. This one was upside down.

The country also had a stranger problem in its pockets: foreign money. Spanish and Mexican silver coins had circulated freely in America since colonial days, and they were still legal tender. The government wanted them gone. It needed a new, cheap, distinctly American coin people would actually want to trade for them.

The answer came on February 21, 1857, when President Franklin Pierce signed the act that created a smaller cent. The law did three things at once. It shrank the penny to roughly the size we know today. It killed the old large cent and the half cent outright. And it gave Americans a two-year window to bring in their worn coppers and their Spanish silver and swap them for the bright new coins.

When the new cents were released in the spring of 1857, the response was almost a spectacle — collectors and historians describe long lines winding around the Philadelphia Mint as people queued to exchange their old money. The little eagle was an instant sensation. It was also, it turned out, a coin with a fatal flaw.

The man behind the design was James Barton Longacre, the Mint's chief engraver — the same artist who would soon give America the Indian Head cent, the Shield nickel, and the two-cent piece. He designed both sides of the Flying Eagle cent.

The obverse — the heads side — shows an eagle in full flight, wings stretched, soaring left across the coin. Longacre didn't invent it from scratch. He adapted an eagle that his predecessor, Christian Gobrecht, had used on the silver dollars of the 1830s (Gobrecht's bird, in turn, is traced to a sketch by the artist Titian Peale). It is one of the few circulating U.S. coins to carry a flying eagle rather than a portrait — a real bird in motion, not a heraldic emblem.

The reverse — the tails side — wraps the words ONE CENT inside an agricultural wreath of wheat, corn, cotton, and tobacco leaves. Longacre essentially recycled it: he'd already used the same wreath on his gold dollar and three-dollar gold pieces of 1854.

And there was the trouble. The eagle on one side sat directly opposite the dense wreath on the other. When the press struck the coin, the metal had to flow into the deepest parts of both designs at the same point — and the new alloy was hard. The Mint had chosen a tough mix of 88% copper and 12% nickel (a recipe credited to chemist James Curtis Booth), pale and durable, which is why people of the era nicknamed the new pennies "nicks" or "nickels." That hardness fought the high relief of the design. The eagle's head and tail, and the heart of the wreath, often came out soft and incomplete.

Here's what makes the Flying Eagle irresistible to collectors: a complete date-and-variety set is just five coins — 1856, 1857, 1858 Large Letters, 1858 Small Letters, and the 1858/7 overdate. That's it. The whole series fits on one small page of an album. The problem is the very first coin.

The 1856 is not really a regular coin at all. It's a pattern — a trial piece struck before Congress had even approved the new cent. The Mint made them to show off the design and, pointedly, handed them to congressmen, treasury officials, and influential men to win support for the new coinage. Mint records account for about 634 originals; the Mint later restruck more to satisfy hungry collectors, and estimates of the total surviving population run higher. A coin that began as a lobbying chip became one of the most famous and chased rarities in all of U.S. numismatics — a cent that routinely sells for the price of a car.

The 1857 and 1858 issues, by contrast, were made by the tens of millions, so in worn grades they remain genuinely affordable — a piece of 1850s America almost anyone can hold.

The varieties reward a close look. In 1858 the Mint used two sizes of lettering. On the Large Letters variety, the A and M in AMERICA nearly touch; on the Small Letters variety, there's a clear gap between them. (Study of the dies shows the Large Letters coins were struck first.) The third prize is the 1858/7 overdate — a die that was first dated 1857, then re-punched to 1858, leaving a ghost of the old 7 beneath the 8. On a worn coin it can be nearly invisible; on a sharp one it's unmistakable, and it commands a strong premium.

Why high grades are scarce comes back to that design flaw. Because the hard alloy and clashing high relief so often left the eagle's head and tail weak, a Flying Eagle cent that is both high grade and fully struck is a genuinely tough coin. Collectors learn to look past the number on the holder and ask a harder question: is the eagle's head sharp? Many aren't. That single detail separates an ordinary example from a memorable one — and it's the reason the series, despite its small size, is a connoisseur's set.

The flaw also explains why the coin barely lived. After just two years of full production, Longacre redesigned the cent around the problem. His Indian Head cent — with a portrait, not an opposed eagle-and-wreath — flowed into the dies far better and took over in 1859. The Flying Eagle was gone almost as fast as it had arrived.