Twenty-cent piece: a five-gram coin with a four-year run
The twenty-cent piece entered American coinage through a law approved on March 3, 1875. Congress specified a silver coin worth twenty cents and weighing five grams. Its legal value was therefore one fifth of a dollar, with a physical standard that the mints had to meet. Production lasted from 1875 through 1878, although the four dates conceal a change in purpose: ordinary circulation coinage ended after 1876, while the final two years supplied collector proofs. CoinWeek's series history attributes the coin's poor reception to confusion with the quarter.
The new denomination required legislation because the Coinage Act of 1873 had restricted what the Mint could issue. Section 15 named the available silver coins: the trade dollar, half dollar, quarter dollar and dime. Section 17 prohibited coins outside the denominations, standards and weights set out in that act. The twenty-cent piece was absent from that schedule. Its 1875 authorization expressly required conformity with the earlier act, adding a value while retaining the existing framework for producing federal coinage.
That framework gave the twenty-cent piece a silver standard as well as a weight. Section 13 prescribed 900 parts pure metal and 100 parts alloy in every thousand parts by weight, with copper as the alloy for silver coins. The 1873 law set the half dollar at 12.5 grams and assigned the quarter and dime one half and one fifth of that weight respectively. The five-gram denomination consequently joined coins whose metal content was already governed by precise statutory proportions.
The twenty-cent piece also had a specific payment limit. Section 2 of the 1875 law made it legal tender at its nominal value for no more than $5 in one payment. Manufacturing tolerances followed in Section 3: an individual coin could vary from the standard weight by no more than 1.5 grains. When 1,000 pieces were weighed together during the prescribed transfers from coiner to superintendent and superintendent to depositor, the permitted deviation was two hundredths of an ounce. Section 4 extended applicable coinage laws to the denomination, including provisions against counterfeiting and rules governing preparation and manufacture.
The imagery belonged to an established legal vocabulary. Section 18 of the 1873 act required an emblem of Liberty, the word LIBERTY and the year on one side. It prescribed an eagle and a designation of value on the reverse, with exceptions for specified smaller denominations. The authorization of 1875 supplied no separate portrait description for the twenty-cent piece. Its detailed instructions concerned denomination, weight, legal-tender limits and tolerances, while its reference to the earlier law connected it to existing coinage requirements.
The resulting design is described in George G. Evans's Illustrated History of the United States Mint, published in 1888. The catalogue identifies the obverse as the same type used on the dollar of 1840. On the reverse, an eagle with spread wings appears with three arrows and an olive branch. A star appears on either side, and the inscriptions name the United States and spell out TWENTY CENTS. Evans records a plain edge. The description distinguishes overlapping leaves near the olive branch's stem from the leaves at its end, which do not overlap.
CoinWeek's guides to the final two dates identify William Barber as the designer and give a diameter of 22 millimeters. They describe both the 1877 and 1878 issues as proof-only coins, with reported mintages of 510 and 600 respectively. Those figures distinguish continued manufacture for collectors from continued output for circulation. The 1877 guide notes that 160 pieces are believed to have been melted after going unsold, leaving 350 distributed. That distinction between production and distribution matters when comparing published totals. A coin made for a collector could also later acquire wear: the guide recounts dealer Jack Beymer's recollection of an 1877 example in Extremely Fine condition.
Congress stopped further minting on May 2, 1878. Chapter 79 prohibited the government from coining the twenty-cent piece and repealed conflicting laws. The operative text addressed manufacture from the passage of the act onward; it imposed no requirement that people surrender existing coins. The cessation of circulation strikes and the later legal prohibition were thus separate events. The dates 1877 and 1878 belong between them, representing the final collector production before the statutory closure.
A contemporary dealer guide shows how those dates were valued soon afterward. The January 1888 approximate price current prepared by Mason & Co. of Boston, printed in Evans's volume, lists an 1875 specimen at 40 cents in fine condition and 30 cents in good condition. For 1876, the corresponding prices are 60 cents and 50 cents. Pieces dated 1877 and 1878 each receive valuations of $5 and $4. These are published dealer estimates, rather than records of completed sales. Within a decade of the production ban, the two final dates already carried substantially higher listed premiums than the first two.
- United States Congress — Act of March 3, 1875, chapter 143, 18 Stat. 478–479 (GovInfo) — www.govinfo.gov
- United States Congress — Coinage Act of 1873 — www.govinfo.gov
- George G. Evans, editor — Illustrated History of the United States Mint (1888), coin catalogue and January 1888 Mason & Co. price current (Project Gutenberg) — www.gutenberg.org
- CoinWeek, Charles Morgan and Hubert Walker — 1877 Liberty Seated Twenty Cent Piece: A Collector’s Guide — coinweek.com
- CoinWeek, Charles Morgan and Hubert Walker — 1878 Twenty Cent Piece: A Collector’s Guide — coinweek.com
- CoinWeek Notes — Twenty-Cent Piece, 1875–1878: circulation history — coinweek.com
- United States Congress — Act of May 2, 1878, chapter 79, 20 Stat. 47 (GovInfo) — www.govinfo.gov