JULY 20
1793•Liberty Cap Half Cent
1888•Aaron White Hoard Auction Begins
The First U.S. Half Cents Are Delivered
On July 20, 1793, Chief Coiner Henry Voigt delivered 7,000 newly struck half cents to United States Mint Treasurer Tristram Dalton in Philadelphia. Dalton's surviving receipt records the transaction directly. The coins had been struck the previous day and represented the first federal half-cent delivery in American history. Worth just one two-hundredth of a dollar, the tiny denomination was created for an economy in which half a cent still had meaningful purchasing power. The 1793 Liberty Cap half cent would become a one-year design type, the beginning of a denomination that survived until 1857—and one of the most tangible relics of the struggling first year of regular federal coin production.
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A Receipt From the Birth of American Coinage
Few early United States coin milestones can be tied to a surviving primary document as neatly as July 20, 1793.
Mint Treasurer Tristram Dalton's receipt records that he received from Henry Voigt, Chief Coiner, seven thousand half cents.
The face value was only $35.
Yet historically those 7,000 pieces represented something far larger: the first delivery of the smallest denomination authorized for the new federal monetary system.
The first United States Mint was barely functioning as an institution. Its employees were still learning how to turn legislation, copper, dies, presses, and improvised machinery into a reliable national coinage.
The distinction between striking and delivery matters.
Modern research into surviving Mint records shows workers Thomas Flude and Daniel Gerard listed as “Coining ½ Cents” on Friday, July 19, 1793.
The following day, July 20, Voigt formally delivered 7,000 half cents to Dalton.
Thus July 19 is the production milestone, while July 20 is the documented first delivery.
The master calendar correctly uses the latter event.
As with other early Mint issues, the delivery record provides a firmer administrative date than simply saying the coins were “released” or “made” sometime in July.
Why Did America Need Half a Cent?
To a modern American, a half-cent coin sounds almost absurdly small.
Today even the one-cent coin has extremely limited purchasing power.
In the 1790s, the economic scale was completely different.
Wages were far lower, goods could be priced in tiny fractions of a dollar, and the young country suffered from chronic shortages of convenient small change.
A half cent could matter in ordinary transactions.
The denomination was not created as a curiosity for collectors. It was intended to help make the decimal monetary system practical at the lowest levels of commerce.
The half cent had roots in Thomas Jefferson's thinking about American money.
In his 1784 “Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States,” Jefferson argued for a decimal monetary system.
Dividing the dollar into tenths and hundredths—and allowing still smaller subdivisions—offered simplicity compared with the complicated pounds, shillings, pence, and foreign coin systems Americans inherited from colonial life.
The half cent ultimately became the smallest physical expression of that decimal idea.
Two hundred half cents equaled one dollar.
Congress formally established the United States Mint with the Coinage Act of April 2, 1792.
The law created a broad hierarchy of denominations in gold, silver, and copper.
At the bottom sat the half cent.
The act defined it as worth one two-hundredth of a dollar.
Along with the cent, it was intended to provide the small copper money needed for everyday transactions.
Creating the denomination on paper was easy.
Actually producing it would take more than a year.
The government established its Mint in Philadelphia, then the national capital.
The facility was primitive by later industrial standards.
Employees had to acquire and refine metal, prepare strips, punch planchets, make dies, construct and maintain machinery, and develop workable production routines almost from scratch.
Modern mints operate through highly standardized industrial systems.
The Mint of 1793 was closer to a specialized workshop struggling to become a national factory.
Every successful delivery represented an achievement.
The first regular federal coins struck for circulation were copper cents and half cents.
Gold and silver coinage faced additional delays, including statutory bonding requirements for Mint officers.
Copper therefore became the metal in which the new institution first learned the realities of large-scale coin production.
The famous 1793 Chain cent appeared first, followed by the Wreath cent.
By July, the Mint was ready to add the half cent.
Preparing the Planchets
Making a copper coin began long before a press struck the design.
The Mint needed suitable copper stock.
Metal had to be rolled into strips of appropriate thickness.
Round blanks were punched from the strips.
Those blanks had to be adjusted and prepared before striking.
By May 1793, more than 30,000 half-cent planchets had reportedly been prepared.
Yet actual coinage did not begin until July.
The delay illustrates how die preparation and machinery could bottleneck production even when metal was waiting.
The obverse of the first half cent shows Liberty facing left.
Her long hair flows behind her, and a pole topped by a liberty cap rises over her shoulder.
LIBERTY appears above and the date 1793 below.
The reverse places HALF CENT within a wreath, surrounded by UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
The edge carries the remarkable inscription TWO HUNDRED FOR A DOLLAR, followed by decorative leaves.
The edge inscription explained the denomination's relationship to the new decimal dollar directly.
The cap behind Liberty was not merely decorative.
The liberty cap had deep classical associations with freedom and became an important symbol during the revolutionary age.
American political imagery used caps and liberty poles long before the federal Mint opened.
Putting that symbol on the nation's smallest denomination connected even a humble copper coin with the political ideals of the republic.
A person spending half a cent was handling a miniature statement about liberty.
The designer question is less certain than older summaries sometimes suggest.
Joseph Wright has frequently been credited with early Liberty Cap imagery, and his role in the 1793 Liberty Cap cent is strongly supported.
Modern half-cent scholarship, however, makes a substantial case that Henry Voigt was responsible for the 1793 half-cent dies.
Other early Mint figures, including Robert Birch, have also appeared in attribution discussions.
Because the documentary evidence is incomplete, the safest historical treatment is to distinguish the half cent from Wright's more securely attributed cent work rather than assigning the design to him as settled fact.
Henry Voigt Was More Than a Chief Coiner
Henry Voigt was one of the most important practical figures in the Mint's earliest years.
As Chief Coiner, he oversaw the actual production of coins.
He also possessed mechanical and engraving abilities and is associated with some of the earliest federal designs.
On July 20, his name appears in the crucial role of transferring the first 7,000 half cents to Treasurer Dalton.
The transaction shows the internal chain of accountability: coins moved from production under the Chief Coiner to formal custody under the Treasurer.
Seven thousand coins sounds substantial until their denomination is considered.
At half a cent each, the entire first delivery was worth just $35.
That number vividly illustrates the labor involved in producing low-denomination copper money.
Thousands of individual pieces had to be prepared and struck to create a relatively small face value.
The government's reason for doing so was not profit alone.
Small change was infrastructure.
Without it, ordinary commerce became more difficult.
The first 7,000 were only the beginning.
Mint records show another 24,934 half cents delivered on July 26.
Together, the two securely documented July deliveries total 31,934 pieces.
For generations, standard references have listed a third delivery of 3,400 half cents on September 18, producing the familiar 1793 mintage of 35,334.
Recent primary-source research has complicated that traditional figure.
William R. Eckberg's detailed study of half-cent production returned to Tristram Dalton's original receipt book.
The September 18 entry, according to that primary record, specifies cents rather than half cents.
If Dalton's ledger is correct, the supposed final 3,400 half cents never existed as a half-cent delivery.
That would reduce actual 1793 half-cent production from the traditional 35,334 to 31,934—the sum of the July 20 and July 26 deliveries.
This is an important example of numismatic scholarship revising a number repeated for generations.
Why Both Mintage Figures Still Appear
The traditional 35,334 figure remains deeply embedded in catalogs, grading-service references, auction descriptions, and older literature.
Collectors will therefore continue encountering it.
The newer 31,934 interpretation rests on a strong argument: Dalton's contemporaneous receipt is a primary source.
It is possible that some other record was correct and Dalton's was wrong, but historians generally give great weight to documentation created at the time of the transaction.
Rather than pretending the issue is settled universally, a careful history should explain both figures and the evidence behind the disagreement.
Collectors study 1793 half cents by die marriage.
Two obverse dies and three reverse dies were combined in four recognized pairings, traditionally cataloged using Cohen numbers.
Minute differences in letters, leaves, spacing, die cracks, and other features allow specialists to identify which dies struck a particular coin.
This kind of die study can reconstruct production sequences that written Mint records do not fully explain.
For early federal copper specialists, the individual dies are almost historical documents themselves.
The 1793 half cent's Liberty faces left.
In 1794, the denomination was redesigned with Liberty facing right.
That makes the 1793 issue a one-year type.
Collectors building a complete U.S. type set therefore need a 1793 example if they want to represent the original Liberty Cap, Head Left half cent.
Combined with the low original production and heavy circulation, that type-set demand helps make surviving examples highly desirable.
Most 1793 half cents were not saved in pristine condition.
They entered commerce.
Copper is chemically reactive, and early planchets were often imperfect even before striking.
After decades of handling, burial, moisture, cleaning, corrosion, scratches, and other damage, many survivors have serious surface problems.
Finding an attractive, problem-free example is difficult.
High-grade specimens rank among the great prizes of early American copper collecting.
The edge inscription is one of the denomination's most appealing physical features.
TWO HUNDRED FOR A DOLLAR makes the coin almost self-explanatory.
The phrase reflects a moment when the decimal dollar system was still new enough that Americans could benefit from seeing the conversion stated directly on the coin.
Modern U.S. coins rarely explain their mathematical relationship to the dollar.
The 1793 half cent did.
Copper Coins Had a Different Legal Position
Another subtlety of the 1792 monetary system is that copper cents and half cents did not initially possess the same unlimited legal-tender status Congress granted to full-weight gold and silver coins.
They were necessary transactional money but occupied a different statutory position.
This reflects an older distinction between precious-metal money and subsidiary base-metal coinage.
Yet in daily life, the humble copper pieces could be more useful than a gold eagle that represented a large sum few ordinary purchases required.
The summer of 1793 was becoming dangerous.
Philadelphia soon suffered a devastating yellow fever epidemic.
Thousands died and many residents fled the city.
The crisis disrupted federal government operations and the Mint.
Joseph Wright, the talented artist associated with the Mint's new Liberty Cap cent design, died during the epidemic in September.
The first half cents therefore emerged only weeks before one of the worst public-health disasters in the young nation's history.
The denomination introduced in 1793 continued, with interruptions and several design changes, until 1857.
Later types included the Draped Bust, Classic Head, and Braided Hair half cents.
By the mid-nineteenth century, inflation and changing commercial practices had reduced the usefulness of such a tiny denomination.
Congress abolished the half cent in the same legislation that ended the old large copper cent and introduced the small copper-nickel Flying Eagle cent.
The July 20, 1793 delivery therefore began a denomination with a life of more than six decades.
No regular federal coin has ever carried a face value lower than the half cent.
That alone gives the denomination a special place in American numismatics.
Its existence reminds modern collectors how dramatically purchasing power changes over time.
A monetary unit that once justified its own coin eventually became economically obsolete.
The history of the half cent is therefore also a history of prices, wages, commerce, and the changing value of money.
Ninety-five years after the first half-cent delivery, July 20 became significant again in American copper history.
On July 20, 1888, dealer Édouard Frossard auctioned a large selection from the extraordinary Aaron White Hoard.
The catalog advertised approximately 18,000 American and foreign copper coins and tokens selected from White's holdings.
The Newman Numismatic Portal independently records the Frossard sale as dated July 20, 1888.
Aaron White Saved Hard Money
Aaron White was a Connecticut lawyer and judge who accumulated coins on an enormous scale.
His hoarding was influenced by distrust of paper money and memories of financial instability.
He even issued a token warning people against keeping a paper dollar overnight.
Estimates of his holdings included tens of thousands of large cents and copper-nickel cents, thousands of two-cent pieces, hundreds of colonial coins, gold and silver dollars, and tens of thousands of foreign copper coins.
It was less a carefully curated cabinet than a vast monetary stockpile.
Large hoards can reshape numismatic markets by suddenly releasing quantities of coins thought to be scarce.
White's accumulation did exactly that for certain nineteenth-century copper issues.
Frossard sold much of the material privately before auctioning the remaining selection.
The July 20, 1888 sale therefore represents the dispersal phase of one of the great American coin hoards.
It is especially fitting as a secondary event on the anniversary of the first half-cent delivery: both stories revolve around enormous quantities of early American copper, separated by nearly a century.
On July 20, 1793, Henry Voigt handed Tristram Dalton 7,000 half cents worth a total of only $35.
The surviving receipt makes the event seem almost mundane.
It was not.
The transaction marked the first formal delivery of the smallest denomination the United States would ever coin.
Those copper pieces were products of a Mint still learning how to manufacture a national currency. They carried Liberty, a revolutionary cap and pole, the new decimal denomination, and an edge that explained exactly how 200 of them made a dollar.
They also left behind a historical puzzle.
For generations, collectors accepted a 1793 mintage of 35,334. Modern examination of Dalton's own records suggests only 31,934 may actually have been delivered as half cents.
That is the beauty of early Mint history: even after more than two centuries, the records can still change what we think we know.
But the first delivery is not in doubt.
Seven thousand half cents entered the Mint's accounts on July 20, 1793—and America's smallest coin denomination had officially begun.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
1888 — Aaron White Hoard Auction Begins — Auctioneer Edouard Frossard began dispersing thousands of coins from the enormous Aaron White hoard, one of the great 19th-century American coin accumulations.